Just a correction. Encrypted data typically has a *very* random distribution, assuming the use of any good encryption algorithm.
As a matter of fact, it's so random that it's *too* perfectly distributed to occur naturally in a picture, and that's a good way to detect if encrypted data is being steganographically hidden.
You're just jealous because the voices in my head don't talk to you...:-)
Actually, I wanted to see what he thought WE, the employees, should do about it RIGHT NOW. Not "what we can get owed to us", not "what regulations could the government pass to carry us", but "what should ordinary guys who might lose their jobs this week because of economic downturns do?"
I've just been reading the FiveFingeredDiscount.com story and finding plenty of less-than-ethical solutions. I was just looking for the Katz viewpoint, that's all.
So what are you implying?
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That we in the tech sector should turn to personal greed? Load up on options? Prepare sabotage and threaten management with "if we're fired, so are your systems?"
C'mon, Jon, i've come to expect a certain "knee-jerk" response from you on these posts, and frankly I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't see it here. Actually, I'd like to see some answers. After the events of the past two weeks, I think that all of us are rethinking our job stability.
Please, you are continually blaming the owners of these machines for not being "competent". The machines are owned by a wide range of people, most of whom are your brother-in-law's cousin's co-worker who thinks that if Windows ME costs $100 then Win 2K must be three times better because it costs $299.
So I suffer the effects of his Code Red attacks because he's too busy playing Quake to read Microsoft's fix-of-the-week? Next time you see a random person who happens to own Win2K, ask him or her if he even knows what the phrase "Unchecked Buffer in Index Server ISAPI Extension Could Enable Web Server Compromise" means?
And your solution to us is to blame him, rather than solve the problem? I think the company that delivers the insecure system out-of-the-box is at fault. Don't blame the guy who just bought a Win2K CD at Best Buy and stuck it in his PC. He simply trusted Microsoft to provide him with an OS for his computer, and I think he's within reason to expect the software he paid for NOT to be full of holes.
As a matter of fact, one is attacking me as I write. Let me go see, yes, http://tsi-196.tsi-comm.com/ has the default IIS page up. This is a NOBODY, just some guy with a cable modem, money, and not enough brains to know what he's done. His box is so tied up I can't even NET SEND him a friendly "You've got worms!" messsage. And he's just one of many thousands. Even if every professional IIS admin were completely competent, Microsoft is shipping the same leaky IIS to every dot-com, Dick and Harry.
I just realized how these attacks could all have been prevented: fair market forces. If Microsoft had to sell IIS competetively, they'd have about a 2% market share. Code Red, Nimda, all the other worms would have much less of a foothold in an environment that IIS had to fairly compete in.
First, if it were a "pay per play" I'd be far more interested in seeing it work properly than I would be if I were just clicking a box that said "Install web server?"
Second, attacks would make it much less likely that anyone would pay for their product until it was far more secure.
The same would be true for the other virus-prone applications bundled with the Windows operating systems: I wouldn't consider Outlook Express if I had to pay for an e-mail client, especially with all the viruses that it retransmits. Internet explorer? There's not a chance I would purchase an ActiveX container for surfing the web, but since that big blue "e" is already sitting on the screen and doesn't take me a half hour to download, sure, I'll use it.
And now the D.O.J. has dropped their only chance to prevent the tragedy from repeating itself on XP.
That's all well and good, but you solved.001% of the problem.
Like everyone else, I found myself gettting hammered by Code Red infested servers when this whole thing came down last month. So I went and did a few directories on several of those machines using the newly installed back doors just to see what was going on. Know what I found? They were ALL default installations of Win2K, and most were installed sometime early in August (based on the dates of some of the directories I found. Many of those machines still served up the IIS default page when I checked.) It was evident that someone simply dropped in the CD, clicked on some install button, and called it done. And *I* suffered for it.
You cured ONE machine, and for that I thank you. As you say that a smart admin will prevent these problems, but that's not true enough. These machines are owned by cable-modem morons that don't understand that they've just become an admin. They dropped in a CD and checked a box that said "Make this computer a web server." Then they probably invited their friends over to see their awesome Quake playing machine.
That's why IIS is not a winning recommendation, but the people who need to know this wouldn't know the Gartner group from a garter snake.
Consider this scenario: Micro$oft agrees to hide crypto backdoors in their latest "Outlook XP" or "Outlook.NET". For the sake of argument, let's pretend they might agree to do this in exchange for something of value. How about something like the DOJ agreeing to drop the breakup of the company in their civil suit... Micro$oft even gets another selling point out of the deal: they get to promote "OUTLOOK -- now with ENCRYPTED E-MAIL! It's SAFE, and SIMPLE, and your grandma could use it without even knowing it!" Woo-hoo, that's where I want to go today!
Soon the vast majority of the world "standardizes" on Micro$oft e-mail. (For proof that this could happen, I submit every single document sent by SirCam.) So J. Random Lusers everywhere start using "encrypted" Outlook. Including criminals and terrorists, who still aren't typically among the brightest bulbs on the planet.
Sure, as time passes really smart people like Schneier, Biham, et al., take the algorithm apart, and eventually find where it leaks some key bits. There's a brief hoopla that you might even hear on NPR some evening during the drive home, but for the average luser, they'll have forgotten to download the Outlook patch before they even pull into their garage. Questioning Micro$oft really doesn't happen in public, (despite how important those of us who read Slashdot think we are.)
As an extra added bonus, the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA can leverage the fact of encryption as a "red flag" indicating the message might be more interesting than an unencrypted one. They just set Echelon to search specifically for these Outlook encrypted messages. As long as they've been saving your leaked key bits, they've got your messages.
Micro$oft got to be their current size by not underestimating the power of inertia: they bank on the fact that if they keep shoveling it out the door, people keep buying it. If they want to provide leaky encryption, it'll be in the hands of millions of people world wide, and probably by tomorrow. And those people are already lining up to pay for the privilege.
Just remember to let Windows perform an "automatic upgrade" of your system tonight.
Disclaimer: this posting is the ficticious product of an overactive imagination that's two hours past needing sleep...
I was watching a show one time (I forget what it was called, some business show, I think) that had a story about Danni Ashe (sp?). She said that she started her popular site on a Linux box in her bedroom and did the administration herself. I thought that was pretty cool...
Dude, you forgot the links! If you ever wanted to get modded up as informative, this was the posting to include the relevant links:-)
I've been giving a half-a-thought to building some kind of recharger cradle hookup that would let me use either a lantern or flashlight battery to recharge a PDA battery. There is also a nifty hand-crank generator out for powering a radio, too, and it looks like a minute of cranking gives enough juice for 45 minutes of radio. But everything adds weight and/or bulk, and they just can't beat two AAA batteries (that double up in a mini-maglite, too.)
Also, while I'm not fond of landfilling anything, I'm also concerned about the manufacturing of rechargables. Most rechargable technologies rely on toxic metals (much more so than alkaline batteries,) and I just don't know if the battery manufacturers do it cleanly. I can only assume that recycling Cd batteries keeps them safe.
The Handspring is great in the field -- astronomy resources, and eTexts from Project Gutenberg are terrific to have in camp. And 5MB of eTexts weighs about the same as 0MB of eTexts, too!
And I carry EVERYTHING non-100% paper out with me.:-)
The only reason I preferred the Handspring to the Palm was that it took AAA batteries. I have yet to encounter a recharger while camping (and no, I can't plug it into a "current" bush.)
So now there's another useless chunk o silicon out there. Big deal.
John
This is just so wrong that it's bound to succeed.
on
Parrot: For Real
·
· Score: 3, Funny
A language with the readability of Perl and the maintainability of Python. I hope they threw in the "significant filename" convention from Java while they were at it.
I see where you're going, but the answer is still "probably not."
If the LEGO(tm) name is on it, people who purchase it are going to expect it to be LEGO. Since installing it prevents it from running other "standard" LEGO programs written in their brick code from running, it would confuse people who are incapable of understanding it but who are able to recognize the LEGO name. Even if L*gOS is "non-destructive", won't hurt their brick, approved for use by children under 3, all that stuff, it still won't "act" like a normal RCX, so it won't "act" LEGO enough for them.
If it were my decision, I wouldn't sell my name like that.
I'm not leaving the building I'm in. I'm just in shell-shock right now, and figuring the one place I don't want to be is Kabul, Afghanistan, in about 12 hours.
Whatever rocks George is missing in his head, I just know he's going to make up for it by proving the US has the biggest guns. It wouldn't surprise me if he pulls out the green glowing weapons and lets the entire Taliban go ask Allah if they were right.
John
Re:...so are they changing the corporate name to..
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
It'll be SPELLED Hewlett-Packard-Compaq, but it'll be pronounced "HEW-lett PACK-ard" (the Compaq will be silent.) After that, it'll be spelled like it sounds.
"It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think the most likely reason of all
May have been that his cube was two sizes too small."
I came up with that after about my third cube move to a new building, when they moved us from 10'x10' to 10'x8' cubes (back in the pre-A.C. days.)
But these new cubes are ridiculous. Over the course of years, I tend to accumulate more stuff, not less. I just have to pack it tighter and stack it higher now. 'Course, if I had any brains at all, I'd get a KVM switch instead of having six monitors staring at me all day.
Hey, anybody wanna trade me a 21" flat screen monitor for one 10" flat screen, one 15" and four 17" monitors? It's a heckuva deal, 93" of monitors in exchange for a lousy 21"... that's a 4X return on investment! How can you refuse?
Sorry, Tom, but the point barneyfoo was so poorly trying to make is that Microsoft will indeed have full real effective control over these tags for 95% of all users.
Despite your optimistically high opinions of the population, 80% of them are not able to change screensavers without help desk assistance. More than 50% don't even know that screen savers can be changed. A giant screaming banner at the top of every modified page saying "DANGER: THESE LINKS ARE ADDED BY MICROSOFT, AN EVIL CORPORATE MERCHANDISING MACHINE! BY CLICKING ON THEM YOU WILL EXPOSE YOURSELF TO MICROSOFT SELECTED ADVERTISING! CLICK HERE TO CHANGE THESE LINKS" will go unclicked by that same 50%.
Any time you have a default setting, count on it being used, and used heavily. Believe me, Microsoft does.
I certainly don't want to be as offensive as barneyfoo, but you really need to leave acadamia and get out into the real world. Take a summer intern job on a help desk. Answer a few phone calls from people who are not stupid, but uninformed to a degree you cannot ever imagine until you've experienced it first hand. Go home that night shaking your head in disbelief at the questions you're asked. Then answer that phone every day for the next three months.
AOL exists for a reason. Most people simply cannot ever expand beyond what they're spoon fed. That's why Microsoft will "own" these links.
Wow, gosh, I've just spent the last 15 years of my life in retail Point Of Sale just to find out that I'm wrong because of a 2600 article? Are you telling me that the nice guys in the booth at RISCON (well, it's Retail Systems 2001 this year, but it used to be called RISCON) were trying to sell me equipment and lying to me about how it worked? You mean there isn't more than one way to implement a technological solution? And I can't simultaneously implement a 2.4GHz direct sequence radio network with a fluorescent light transmitter? (Actually, I probably couldn't implement NCR's RF shelf tags because they use a proprietary protocol on 2.4GHz, and I think they'd interfere with our existing 802.11 network.)
Yes, it'd be foolish to refit all our fluorsecents when we already have an 802.11 network in place. But if we didn't already have an RF network, or plan to have one, it might be an avenue worth exploring.
Do you work for Microsoft, by chance? You sure sound like their sales force. Keep up the "only my way" mentality and I think you have a bright future in store for you!
you'll probably have to explicitly cast all references to k to (char *)k. Sorry about that, Micro$oft VC++ 6.0 lets you be really sloppy with conversions, so I take advantage of that to make it smaller.
Unless, of course, you can turn that off on your compiler, but I've found no way to do it with gcc.
Its wireless == its sniffable. There is nothing you can do about it.
Sure, it's kind of cool that they used the off-the-shelf Logitech receiver against itself, but a custom reciever would perform the interception passively.
Hardly anything to panic about. Your cordless phone probably leaks more personal info about you anyway.
We were discussing it over lunch. CP/IP (Carrier Pigeon/Internet Protocol) would probably benefit greatly by transitioning to IPN. It parallels space-borne communications almost exactly:
Messages will be scheduled. The pigeon fanciers may not want to ship messages at oh-dark-thirty.
Resources are very scarce. No-one owns an infinite number of birds.
Bandwidth is limited to the paper you can tie to a pigeon's leg. Of course, technological advances might have future sysadmins sending lots of microfiche tied to its leg.
Bundle transmission may be interrupted by a shotgun, hawk, or a pigeonne fatale.
You need encryption to protect against pigeon impostors sending bogus messages. Or at least a child-proof cap on the message capsule.
Every hacker on the net will want to get a pigeon packet ping going.
The only thing we didn't discuss was money. Perhaps a roll of Starbucks gift certificates tied to the other leg would work?
John
Re:Lower quality in Scientific American!!!
on
Nostrildamus
·
· Score: 3
I was wondering if it was just my perception or if the magazine really had hit the black-diamond downhill run.
The new editor seems to have decided that Scientific Americans are as dumb and brash as the worldwide stereotypes suggest, and that he can't go wrong by lowering it further. (P.T. Barnum would suggest that he's right.)
John Rennie has also decided to preach from his new pulpit, and while I don't disagree much with his politics, they have absolutely no place in a magazine that's supposed to be presenting science, not politics. The previous editor had been a touch more subtle in making his political viewpoints known, but I had been finding that distasteful for the last few years. Now, instead of simply an editorial on nuclear power or an article on the uses of placental blood, the feature articles themselves are on the ethics of using medical waste, or treaty rights arguments over the use of Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear storage facility. Wake up, guys, Oprah and Larry King have already covered those topics. Let the Law Review cover them. Stick to the science, please.
What do you suppose happened? Is geek-chic such an "in" thing that carrying an unread Scientific American in your briefcase is now a fashion accessory? Perhaps these weenies got puzzled when they bothered to crack one open and found polysyllabic words in a column marked "Mathematical Recreations"?
Damn, and I just hit the switch on their new perennial no-spam-just-bill-my-Visa after tiring of 15 years of "OHMYGOD, your subscription will expire in 11 months! Resubscribe now to avoid the loss of just eight more issues!"
This case is about violating the terms of Gracenote's license. It's not about the provenance of the code or the data (although there may be valid arguments that could be used to show the license is overbroad.)
Their concern is probably based on Section 6 of their license, which reads (in part):
6.Negative Covenants and Restrictions...
d.Your Licensed Application shall not have or
enable a function that permits transmission
of TOC or the combination of TOC together with
Data to anyone other than Gracenote.
b.You will use the Gracenote CDDB Client and the Gracenote CDDB Database as the exclusive source for CD identification and Data when your Licensed Application accesses such information by reading a CD's TOC or disc identification number and retrieves Data or related data via the Internet.
"Either party may terminate this Agreement upon 90 days notice for any reason."
But this is where it gets interesting. They have Section 13, which reads in whole
"13.Survival of Provisions. These sections shall survive termination of this Agreement: 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, and Schedule A."
So, once you cancel this contract you're still bound by it? I can understand their restricting exclusive use to their server of their approved apps, but I don't understand how any of these provisions apply to someone who terminated their license.
John
IANALBIPOOSD (I Am Not A Lawyer But I Play One On Slash Dot)
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of fact, it's so random that it's *too* perfectly distributed to occur naturally in a picture, and that's a good way to detect if encrypted data is being steganographically hidden.
Actually, I wanted to see what he thought WE, the employees, should do about it RIGHT NOW. Not "what we can get owed to us", not "what regulations could the government pass to carry us", but "what should ordinary guys who might lose their jobs this week because of economic downturns do?"
I've just been reading the FiveFingeredDiscount.com story and finding plenty of less-than-ethical solutions. I was just looking for the Katz viewpoint, that's all.
C'mon, Jon, i've come to expect a certain "knee-jerk" response from you on these posts, and frankly I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't see it here. Actually, I'd like to see some answers. After the events of the past two weeks, I think that all of us are rethinking our job stability.
If one lobbyist is good, then two must be better. Right? Hey, it works for the tobacco companies...
So I suffer the effects of his Code Red attacks because he's too busy playing Quake to read Microsoft's fix-of-the-week? Next time you see a random person who happens to own Win2K, ask him or her if he even knows what the phrase "Unchecked Buffer in Index Server ISAPI Extension Could Enable Web Server Compromise" means?
And your solution to us is to blame him, rather than solve the problem? I think the company that delivers the insecure system out-of-the-box is at fault. Don't blame the guy who just bought a Win2K CD at Best Buy and stuck it in his PC. He simply trusted Microsoft to provide him with an OS for his computer, and I think he's within reason to expect the software he paid for NOT to be full of holes.
As a matter of fact, one is attacking me as I write. Let me go see, yes, http://tsi-196.tsi-comm.com/ has the default IIS page up. This is a NOBODY, just some guy with a cable modem, money, and not enough brains to know what he's done. His box is so tied up I can't even NET SEND him a friendly "You've got worms!" messsage. And he's just one of many thousands. Even if every professional IIS admin were completely competent, Microsoft is shipping the same leaky IIS to every dot-com, Dick and Harry.
Quit attacking the victims.
First, if it were a "pay per play" I'd be far more interested in seeing it work properly than I would be if I were just clicking a box that said "Install web server?"
Second, attacks would make it much less likely that anyone would pay for their product until it was far more secure.
The same would be true for the other virus-prone applications bundled with the Windows operating systems: I wouldn't consider Outlook Express if I had to pay for an e-mail client, especially with all the viruses that it retransmits. Internet explorer? There's not a chance I would purchase an ActiveX container for surfing the web, but since that big blue "e" is already sitting on the screen and doesn't take me a half hour to download, sure, I'll use it.
And now the D.O.J. has dropped their only chance to prevent the tragedy from repeating itself on XP.
Like everyone else, I found myself gettting hammered by Code Red infested servers when this whole thing came down last month. So I went and did a few directories on several of those machines using the newly installed back doors just to see what was going on. Know what I found? They were ALL default installations of Win2K, and most were installed sometime early in August (based on the dates of some of the directories I found. Many of those machines still served up the IIS default page when I checked.) It was evident that someone simply dropped in the CD, clicked on some install button, and called it done. And *I* suffered for it.
You cured ONE machine, and for that I thank you. As you say that a smart admin will prevent these problems, but that's not true enough. These machines are owned by cable-modem morons that don't understand that they've just become an admin. They dropped in a CD and checked a box that said "Make this computer a web server." Then they probably invited their friends over to see their awesome Quake playing machine.
That's why IIS is not a winning recommendation, but the people who need to know this wouldn't know the Gartner group from a garter snake.
Consider this scenario: Micro$oft agrees to hide crypto backdoors in their latest "Outlook XP" or "Outlook.NET". For the sake of argument, let's pretend they might agree to do this in exchange for something of value. How about something like the DOJ agreeing to drop the breakup of the company in their civil suit... Micro$oft even gets another selling point out of the deal: they get to promote "OUTLOOK -- now with ENCRYPTED E-MAIL! It's SAFE, and SIMPLE, and your grandma could use it without even knowing it!" Woo-hoo, that's where I want to go today!
Soon the vast majority of the world "standardizes" on Micro$oft e-mail. (For proof that this could happen, I submit every single document sent by SirCam.) So J. Random Lusers everywhere start using "encrypted" Outlook. Including criminals and terrorists, who still aren't typically among the brightest bulbs on the planet.
Sure, as time passes really smart people like Schneier, Biham, et al., take the algorithm apart, and eventually find where it leaks some key bits. There's a brief hoopla that you might even hear on NPR some evening during the drive home, but for the average luser, they'll have forgotten to download the Outlook patch before they even pull into their garage. Questioning Micro$oft really doesn't happen in public, (despite how important those of us who read Slashdot think we are.)
As an extra added bonus, the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA can leverage the fact of encryption as a "red flag" indicating the message might be more interesting than an unencrypted one. They just set Echelon to search specifically for these Outlook encrypted messages. As long as they've been saving your leaked key bits, they've got your messages.
Micro$oft got to be their current size by not underestimating the power of inertia: they bank on the fact that if they keep shoveling it out the door, people keep buying it. If they want to provide leaky encryption, it'll be in the hands of millions of people world wide, and probably by tomorrow. And those people are already lining up to pay for the privilege.
Just remember to let Windows perform an "automatic upgrade" of your system tonight.
Disclaimer: this posting is the ficticious product of an overactive imagination that's two hours past needing sleep...
Dude, you forgot the links! If you ever wanted to get modded up as informative, this was the posting to include the relevant links :-)
Also, while I'm not fond of landfilling anything, I'm also concerned about the manufacturing of rechargables. Most rechargable technologies rely on toxic metals (much more so than alkaline batteries,) and I just don't know if the battery manufacturers do it cleanly. I can only assume that recycling Cd batteries keeps them safe.
The Handspring is great in the field -- astronomy resources, and eTexts from Project Gutenberg are terrific to have in camp. And 5MB of eTexts weighs about the same as 0MB of eTexts, too!
And I carry EVERYTHING non-100% paper out with me. :-)
John
The only reason I preferred the Handspring to the Palm was that it took AAA batteries. I have yet to encounter a recharger while camping (and no, I can't plug it into a "current" bush.)
So now there's another useless chunk o silicon out there. Big deal.
John
Yikes. I think I just described C#.
John
If the LEGO(tm) name is on it, people who purchase it are going to expect it to be LEGO. Since installing it prevents it from running other "standard" LEGO programs written in their brick code from running, it would confuse people who are incapable of understanding it but who are able to recognize the LEGO name. Even if L*gOS is "non-destructive", won't hurt their brick, approved for use by children under 3, all that stuff, it still won't "act" like a normal RCX, so it won't "act" LEGO enough for them.
If it were my decision, I wouldn't sell my name like that.
John
Whatever rocks George is missing in his head, I just know he's going to make up for it by proving the US has the biggest guns. It wouldn't surprise me if he pulls out the green glowing weapons and lets the entire Taliban go ask Allah if they were right.
John
John
I came up with that after about my third cube move to a new building, when they moved us from 10'x10' to 10'x8' cubes (back in the pre-A.C. days.)
But these new cubes are ridiculous. Over the course of years, I tend to accumulate more stuff, not less. I just have to pack it tighter and stack it higher now. 'Course, if I had any brains at all, I'd get a KVM switch instead of having six monitors staring at me all day.
Hey, anybody wanna trade me a 21" flat screen monitor for one 10" flat screen, one 15" and four 17" monitors? It's a heckuva deal, 93" of monitors in exchange for a lousy 21"... that's a 4X return on investment! How can you refuse?
John
Despite your optimistically high opinions of the population, 80% of them are not able to change screensavers without help desk assistance. More than 50% don't even know that screen savers can be changed. A giant screaming banner at the top of every modified page saying "DANGER: THESE LINKS ARE ADDED BY MICROSOFT, AN EVIL CORPORATE MERCHANDISING MACHINE! BY CLICKING ON THEM YOU WILL EXPOSE YOURSELF TO MICROSOFT SELECTED ADVERTISING! CLICK HERE TO CHANGE THESE LINKS" will go unclicked by that same 50%.
Any time you have a default setting, count on it being used, and used heavily. Believe me, Microsoft does.
I certainly don't want to be as offensive as barneyfoo, but you really need to leave acadamia and get out into the real world. Take a summer intern job on a help desk. Answer a few phone calls from people who are not stupid, but uninformed to a degree you cannot ever imagine until you've experienced it first hand. Go home that night shaking your head in disbelief at the questions you're asked. Then answer that phone every day for the next three months.
AOL exists for a reason. Most people simply cannot ever expand beyond what they're spoon fed. That's why Microsoft will "own" these links.
John
John
Yes, it'd be foolish to refit all our fluorsecents when we already have an 802.11 network in place. But if we didn't already have an RF network, or plan to have one, it might be an avenue worth exploring.
Do you work for Microsoft, by chance? You sure sound like their sales force. Keep up the "only my way" mentality and I think you have a bright future in store for you!
John
But it's still cool.
John
Unless, of course, you can turn that off on your compiler, but I've found no way to do it with gcc.
John
Sure, it's kind of cool that they used the off-the-shelf Logitech receiver against itself, but a custom reciever would perform the interception passively.
Hardly anything to panic about. Your cordless phone probably leaks more personal info about you anyway.
John
P.S. Did anyone else think Bluetooth?
- Messages will be scheduled. The pigeon fanciers may not want to ship messages at oh-dark-thirty.
- Resources are very scarce. No-one owns an infinite number of birds.
- Bandwidth is limited to the paper you can tie to a pigeon's leg. Of course, technological advances might have future sysadmins sending lots of microfiche tied to its leg.
- Bundle transmission may be interrupted by a shotgun, hawk, or a pigeonne fatale.
- You need encryption to protect against pigeon impostors sending bogus messages. Or at least a child-proof cap on the message capsule.
- Every hacker on the net will want to get a pigeon packet ping going.
The only thing we didn't discuss was money. Perhaps a roll of Starbucks gift certificates tied to the other leg would work?John
The new editor seems to have decided that Scientific Americans are as dumb and brash as the worldwide stereotypes suggest, and that he can't go wrong by lowering it further. (P.T. Barnum would suggest that he's right.)
John Rennie has also decided to preach from his new pulpit, and while I don't disagree much with his politics, they have absolutely no place in a magazine that's supposed to be presenting science, not politics. The previous editor had been a touch more subtle in making his political viewpoints known, but I had been finding that distasteful for the last few years. Now, instead of simply an editorial on nuclear power or an article on the uses of placental blood, the feature articles themselves are on the ethics of using medical waste, or treaty rights arguments over the use of Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear storage facility. Wake up, guys, Oprah and Larry King have already covered those topics. Let the Law Review cover them. Stick to the science, please.
What do you suppose happened? Is geek-chic such an "in" thing that carrying an unread Scientific American in your briefcase is now a fashion accessory? Perhaps these weenies got puzzled when they bothered to crack one open and found polysyllabic words in a column marked "Mathematical Recreations"?
Damn, and I just hit the switch on their new perennial no-spam-just-bill-my-Visa after tiring of 15 years of "OHMYGOD, your subscription will expire in 11 months! Resubscribe now to avoid the loss of just eight more issues!"
John, disgusted too.
Their concern is probably based on Section 6 of their license, which reads (in part):
6.Negative Covenants and Restrictions ...
d.Your Licensed Application shall not have or
enable a function that permits transmission
of TOC or the combination of TOC together with
Data to anyone other than Gracenote.
which seems to tie closely to Section 3.b
b.You will use the Gracenote CDDB Client and the Gracenote CDDB Database as the exclusive source for CD identification and Data when your Licensed Application accesses such information by reading a CD's TOC or disc identification number and retrieves Data or related data via the Internet.
Section 11.d says,
"Either party may terminate this Agreement upon 90 days notice for any reason."
But this is where it gets interesting. They have Section 13, which reads in whole
"13.Survival of Provisions. These sections shall survive termination of this Agreement: 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, and Schedule A."
So, once you cancel this contract you're still bound by it? I can understand their restricting exclusive use to their server of their approved apps, but I don't understand how any of these provisions apply to someone who terminated their license.
John
IANALBIPOOSD (I Am Not A Lawyer But I Play One On Slash Dot)