All of the computers have automatic updates turned off, but Microsoft still installed their software without permission and crashed the systems.
Bullshit. You are either lying or the system is not configured how you think it is.
If this was true, you'd be reading about it all over the web - so where is the screaming? Besides which, my machines are all configured to either download and notify me, or just notify me without downloading. None of them automatically installed anything without my say so, including WGA.
The OS is running in the environment provided for it by the rootkit, just as a guest OS runs within VMWare or similar. In exactly the same way that the guest OS doesn't know it's being hosted by VMWare, in this case the rooted OS would have no idea it wasn't on the raw hardware.
There are plenty of valid reasons to criticise Windows or praise Linux/BSD, but this isn't one of them.
(of course, they could always be "old fashioned" and add some ground-breaking innovative features and functionality that create a new market so they wouldn't have to rely on marketing tricks).
Such as? Innovation is hard, that's why so few companies do it very much. What ground-breaking innovative features and functionality would you add to Office?
It's fine to work for 8 to 14 hours a day, but not permitted to perform an entertaining, pleasurable activity for more than 3 to 5 hours?
I appreciate that some people have a genuine problem with addiction, but I have to question society's priorities sometimes. People do literally work themselves to death, too.
Realistically speaking, though, how many apps does the average home user run that get anywhere near taking advantage of even a single core chip of the last three or four years? The only things that do are (big name) games, and as they almost all go fullscreen the OS gets the hell out of the way anyway.
Besides which, Windows even now allows the user to set the priority of an app on a per-app basis, or generally favour background or foreground tasks. Even if the OS started to be more of a hog, I expect that any app that needed the power would just up its own priority. But really, with modern processors, the only things that come close that home users care about are games and video editing. Word processing, email and surfing the web don't even begin to scratch the surface.
I'm not arguing for the inclusion of unnecessary bloat in an OS, just pointing out that if it can sensibly use the spare cycles, it might as well.
If there was an XP2004 and an XP2006 released, you wouldn't see the bitching.
You don't think you'd see scathing articles and comments here and at the register and similar sites decrying the release of "XP Service Packs as new OSes"? I've seen that criticism levelled at Vista, for heaven's sake.
Perhaps there'd be less bitching, but make no mistake - plenty of people would find *something* to bitch about. Fair enough, there's plenty of it - people just seem to pick the strangest of things to bitch about, given some of the other targets. (Eg moaning about Aero's hardware requirements, which is optional, when many people (myself included) have been completely unable to get wireless networking working)
We're getting seriously off-topic here, but no, it most certainly would not be cool.
Sometimes the right thing is not the popular thing. One thing that the law is supposed to do, for example, is to protect innocent minorities from the tyranny of the majority. What if a majority of people in a country believed that suspected terrorists should lose all rights, including the right to a trial? What if it was decided that some ethnic minority should lose rights, or even be forcefully deported?
I've heard these and other similarly personally objectionable ideas being put forward and seriously discussed; would you really want to risk such things becoming law because enough people voted for them?
While what you say is true, iirc the BPI recently announced that they were prepared to make official their turning of a blind eye to format shifting. That's not much of a concession given the utter futility of attempting to prosecute over something that almost all music owners do, but still...
Well, I can't comment on US rules, but I work with protectively-marked ("classified") information in the UK, and essentially anything that's protected under the GPMS (Government Protective Marking Scheme) doesn't get sent over the Internet. Documents marked at RESTRICTED (the lowest level of protective marking) can be emailed, etc if encrypted (with the key/password being sent by another channel). Above that, forget it. If it needs to be transported, it goes physically.
If you have a guaranteed secure network connecting the two locations then that's different, but if not, then it goes on paper or some electronic medium. In fact, for the most sensitive stuff, it generally doesn't go anywhere - if you need to see it, most likely you go to it instead.
Looking at how Microsoft plans to cripple OpenGL in Vista
And how is that then? I know that they're not going to ship an accelerated library themselves, but nothing prevents your card manufacturer from shipping their own, exactly as they do now.
*No-one* who cares about performance uses the OGL library that ships with Windows. If anything, it makes no sense for MS to expend any effort on it - any card capable of running OpenGL already has a far superior version supplied with it.
Sure, it may have a better privilege system (Thanks UNIX!)
You do realise that NT has always supported a much richer privilege system than Unix, right?
Now, it's true that a lot of third party developers ignored it and force you to run as admin for no good reason, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
So, let me get this straight - the company was caught using unlicensed fonts, Adobe software and MS software, and we're supposed to feel sorry for them?
You want to use software, you abide by the terms of the licence. You don't want to abide by the terms of the licence, you don't use the software and seek out an alternative with a more agreeable licence. End of story.
I am saying that things that physically exist should have more value than purely intangible things
So, a chair that it took me 30 minutes, a few bits of wood, a few nails and an hour or so to make is worth more than a theory that is the culmination of thirty years or more of work?
You may not like current IP laws, but that doesn't mean that the effort expended in creating something non-tangible is worthless.
Out of spite I'd have pulled up stakes of everything in the EU, save for a distribution warehouse.
To what end? That's still a business presence in the EU, you'd still be doing business on EU soil, and so would still be liable.
In fact, at this point, I suspect it's too late anyway. The case has been heard, the court has decided, and MS lost. You can't generally (legally) escape punishment by doing a runner.
There is no "EU government". Further, the EU annual budget dwarves a paltry $2.5m/day; while more money is always good, there's no need to create spurious conspiracy theories.
The EU is merely taking the sort of corrective measures the US DoJ should have taken a long, long time ago. I fail to see how a company that's been convicted of a crime can go unpunished for so long.
The only bit you missed out is the part where his name and photo are splashed all over the papers as he's "an evil paedophile who was caught emailing THOUSANDS of DISGUSTINGLY EXPLICIT images of children".
Even if he's later acquitted, the news most likely won't make it to the front page. Even if it does, there will always be people who believe that "there's no smoke without fire", or that he was guilty but "got away with it", etc.
I also like the way the GP says that it's impossible, barring hash collisions. So, it's impossible except when it happens..?
I piss off the wrong person. This person has access to material of this kind, and a zombie botnet. He arranges for this botnet to spam me with pictures of kiddy porn. The emails are caught by this system and flagged, and suddenly I'm the subject of an investigation. The way that sort of thing works here in the UK, I'm likely to be splashed all over the papers before my innocence is proved (which won't make nearly as large headlines, of course). Even if I am cleared, my reputation may well be shot to hell; people over here aren't too picky when it comes to this sort of thing. A few years ago a tabloid paper raised hell about paedophiles having been released into the community after serving their sentence. Some of the resulting protests saw a paediatrician being hounded from her home - people saw "paed" and thought "paedo". Rationality often takes a back seat where kids are concerned; this could be a very cheap and easy way to utterly ruin someone.
Hypothetical scenario 2:
I go on holiday with my family. I take photographs. I email some of these photographs to my friends and parents. Some of them contain shots of my 6 year old daughter in her swimming costume. An overzealous automated process tags this as a false positive, and suddenly we're all under investigation.
To be honest, scenario 2 doesn't worry me so much; it should be obvious to even the most rabid "think of the children" zealot that the photos are perfectly innocent. It's the first one that gives me grave cause for concern. It would potentially take some effort to prove ones innocence, during which time you're very likely to have been utterly pilloried in the press. If you have kids yourself, they may even have been taken into care for the duration, and are likely to have been teased or bullied about it at school.
I appreciate that measures do need to be taken to fight against child porn, but given the highly sensitive nature of the subject, I have conerns about implementing any sort of automated system.
Tell me, what would you do if trolls started posting links to kiddy porn here on slashdot? Would you stop reading it? Or would you continue, justifying it to yourself that it's only a few arseholes trying to shock people and that that's not even a secondary purpose of the site, let alone the primary purpose?
Note that I'd never even heard of the site until now; I'm just curious as you are clearly so worked up about it.
They're going to combine to form some sort of mega-legal-robo-proctologist, and they're not going to stop until they get to the back of the SWGEMU team's teeth.
Oh dear God indeed - my mind's eye! That's an image I *really* didn't need!
It's got to be something like that. Also, my company uses a transparent proxy, so assuming they weren't sending no-cache headers, etc, I may simply have been retrieving it out of the cache. That assumes that someone else where I work had already seen it, of course, and while I'm not the oly slashdotter there, the systems guys all bypass the cache (amongst other little, self-awarded perks)
Slashdot Mirror
All of the computers have automatic updates turned off, but Microsoft still installed their software without permission and crashed the systems.
Bullshit. You are either lying or the system is not configured how you think it is.
If this was true, you'd be reading about it all over the web - so where is the screaming? Besides which, my machines are all configured to either download and notify me, or just notify me without downloading. None of them automatically installed anything without my say so, including WGA.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
The OS is running in the environment provided for it by the rootkit, just as a guest OS runs within VMWare or similar. In exactly the same way that the guest OS doesn't know it's being hosted by VMWare, in this case the rooted OS would have no idea it wasn't on the raw hardware.
There are plenty of valid reasons to criticise Windows or praise Linux/BSD, but this isn't one of them.
(of course, they could always be "old fashioned" and add some ground-breaking innovative features and functionality that create a new market so they wouldn't have to rely on marketing tricks).
Such as? Innovation is hard, that's why so few companies do it very much. What ground-breaking innovative features and functionality would you add to Office?
Customers always pay.
If a seller's costs suddenly go up by 2%, you can bet their prices go up by at least that, and possibly as much as 5%.
It's fine to work for 8 to 14 hours a day, but not permitted to perform an entertaining, pleasurable activity for more than 3 to 5 hours?
I appreciate that some people have a genuine problem with addiction, but I have to question society's priorities sometimes. People do literally work themselves to death, too.
Realistically speaking, though, how many apps does the average home user run that get anywhere near taking advantage of even a single core chip of the last three or four years? The only things that do are (big name) games, and as they almost all go fullscreen the OS gets the hell out of the way anyway.
Besides which, Windows even now allows the user to set the priority of an app on a per-app basis, or generally favour background or foreground tasks. Even if the OS started to be more of a hog, I expect that any app that needed the power would just up its own priority. But really, with modern processors, the only things that come close that home users care about are games and video editing. Word processing, email and surfing the web don't even begin to scratch the surface.
I'm not arguing for the inclusion of unnecessary bloat in an OS, just pointing out that if it can sensibly use the spare cycles, it might as well.
If there was an XP2004 and an XP2006 released, you wouldn't see the bitching.
You don't think you'd see scathing articles and comments here and at the register and similar sites decrying the release of "XP Service Packs as new OSes"? I've seen that criticism levelled at Vista, for heaven's sake.
Perhaps there'd be less bitching, but make no mistake - plenty of people would find *something* to bitch about. Fair enough, there's plenty of it - people just seem to pick the strangest of things to bitch about, given some of the other targets. (Eg moaning about Aero's hardware requirements, which is optional, when many people (myself included) have been completely unable to get wireless networking working)
Copyright holders are scumbags? That's an incredibly sweeping statement that tars every single FOSS developer with the same brush.
I know that's not what you meant, but it's what you *said*.
We're getting seriously off-topic here, but no, it most certainly would not be cool.
Sometimes the right thing is not the popular thing. One thing that the law is supposed to do, for example, is to protect innocent minorities from the tyranny of the majority. What if a majority of people in a country believed that suspected terrorists should lose all rights, including the right to a trial? What if it was decided that some ethnic minority should lose rights, or even be forcefully deported?
I've heard these and other similarly personally objectionable ideas being put forward and seriously discussed; would you really want to risk such things becoming law because enough people voted for them?
While what you say is true, iirc the BPI recently announced that they were prepared to make official their turning of a blind eye to format shifting. That's not much of a concession given the utter futility of attempting to prosecute over something that almost all music owners do, but still...
For more details, see for example this BBC news report
Yes - hence his qualification of "that you're not entitled to copy". As you say, the EULA gives you that entitlement.
Well, I can't comment on US rules, but I work with protectively-marked ("classified") information in the UK, and essentially anything that's protected under the GPMS (Government Protective Marking Scheme) doesn't get sent over the Internet. Documents marked at RESTRICTED (the lowest level of protective marking) can be emailed, etc if encrypted (with the key/password being sent by another channel). Above that, forget it. If it needs to be transported, it goes physically.
If you have a guaranteed secure network connecting the two locations then that's different, but if not, then it goes on paper or some electronic medium. In fact, for the most sensitive stuff, it generally doesn't go anywhere - if you need to see it, most likely you go to it instead.
Looking at how Microsoft plans to cripple OpenGL in Vista
And how is that then? I know that they're not going to ship an accelerated library themselves, but nothing prevents your card manufacturer from shipping their own, exactly as they do now.
*No-one* who cares about performance uses the OGL library that ships with Windows. If anything, it makes no sense for MS to expend any effort on it - any card capable of running OpenGL already has a far superior version supplied with it.
Sure, it may have a better privilege system (Thanks UNIX!)
You do realise that NT has always supported a much richer privilege system than Unix, right?
Now, it's true that a lot of third party developers ignored it and force you to run as admin for no good reason, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
So, let me get this straight - the company was caught using unlicensed fonts, Adobe software and MS software, and we're supposed to feel sorry for them?
You want to use software, you abide by the terms of the licence. You don't want to abide by the terms of the licence, you don't use the software and seek out an alternative with a more agreeable licence. End of story.
I am saying that things that physically exist should have more value than purely intangible things
So, a chair that it took me 30 minutes, a few bits of wood, a few nails and an hour or so to make is worth more than a theory that is the culmination of thirty years or more of work?
You may not like current IP laws, but that doesn't mean that the effort expended in creating something non-tangible is worthless.
Out of spite I'd have pulled up stakes of everything in the EU, save for a distribution warehouse.
To what end? That's still a business presence in the EU, you'd still be doing business on EU soil, and so would still be liable.
In fact, at this point, I suspect it's too late anyway. The case has been heard, the court has decided, and MS lost. You can't generally (legally) escape punishment by doing a runner.
There is no "EU government". Further, the EU annual budget dwarves a paltry $2.5m/day; while more money is always good, there's no need to create spurious conspiracy theories.
The EU is merely taking the sort of corrective measures the US DoJ should have taken a long, long time ago. I fail to see how a company that's been convicted of a crime can go unpunished for so long.
Personally, I prefered System Shock 2, if only for the creepiness factor. It's the only game that's consistently scared the willies out of me.
With one difference - Starbucks and McDonalds are huge corporations with lots of money and large legal teams.
The only bit you missed out is the part where his name and photo are splashed all over the papers as he's "an evil paedophile who was caught emailing THOUSANDS of DISGUSTINGLY EXPLICIT images of children".
Even if he's later acquitted, the news most likely won't make it to the front page. Even if it does, there will always be people who believe that "there's no smoke without fire", or that he was guilty but "got away with it", etc.
I also like the way the GP says that it's impossible, barring hash collisions. So, it's impossible except when it happens..?
Hypothetical scenario 1:
I piss off the wrong person. This person has access to material of this kind, and a zombie botnet. He arranges for this botnet to spam me with pictures of kiddy porn. The emails are caught by this system and flagged, and suddenly I'm the subject of an investigation. The way that sort of thing works here in the UK, I'm likely to be splashed all over the papers before my innocence is proved (which won't make nearly as large headlines, of course). Even if I am cleared, my reputation may well be shot to hell; people over here aren't too picky when it comes to this sort of thing. A few years ago a tabloid paper raised hell about paedophiles having been released into the community after serving their sentence. Some of the resulting protests saw a paediatrician being hounded from her home - people saw "paed" and thought "paedo". Rationality often takes a back seat where kids are concerned; this could be a very cheap and easy way to utterly ruin someone.
Hypothetical scenario 2:
I go on holiday with my family. I take photographs. I email some of these photographs to my friends and parents. Some of them contain shots of my 6 year old daughter in her swimming costume. An overzealous automated process tags this as a false positive, and suddenly we're all under investigation.
To be honest, scenario 2 doesn't worry me so much; it should be obvious to even the most rabid "think of the children" zealot that the photos are perfectly innocent. It's the first one that gives me grave cause for concern. It would potentially take some effort to prove ones innocence, during which time you're very likely to have been utterly pilloried in the press. If you have kids yourself, they may even have been taken into care for the duration, and are likely to have been teased or bullied about it at school.
I appreciate that measures do need to be taken to fight against child porn, but given the highly sensitive nature of the subject, I have conerns about implementing any sort of automated system.
Tell me, what would you do if trolls started posting links to kiddy porn here on slashdot? Would you stop reading it? Or would you continue, justifying it to yourself that it's only a few arseholes trying to shock people and that that's not even a secondary purpose of the site, let alone the primary purpose?
Note that I'd never even heard of the site until now; I'm just curious as you are clearly so worked up about it.
Oh dear God indeed - my mind's eye! That's an image I *really* didn't need!
It's got to be something like that. Also, my company uses a transparent proxy, so assuming they weren't sending no-cache headers, etc, I may simply have been retrieving it out of the cache. That assumes that someone else where I work had already seen it, of course, and while I'm not the oly slashdotter there, the systems guys all bypass the cache (amongst other little, self-awarded perks)