What I think is the most important thing: it's the first time a commercial site went under attack of a distributed dos (the first commercial site i know about). Until now only 'minor' sites (like universities) have been under attack of distributed dos tools. It seems that this tools like tfn, stacheldraht etc are now more common than a few month ago. I'm worried, what might happen if in the next month these tools are widely used...
I like Jon Jatz' writings, too. I don't always agree with him, but he shows the things from a different viewpoint. Sometimes you only see the things the way you like, but you perhaps miss a different perspective. Sometimes you need somebody with a different background to show you the other side of the story. I like Jon Katz and I hope there'll be more stories written by him on Slashdot.
Hi, just my thoughts on returning such CD's (based on german laws) 1. You buy a CD, it's marked as a Audio-CD (Red-Book compatible), if not noted, it's implicit, that this CD will work in your Player You try it and notive a label on the CD itself, that it is copy-protected, you couldn't see this, before you bought this CD. This CD doesn't work with your Player => this CD isn't Red-Book compliant, so it isn't an Audio-CD. You had no chance noticing this before, though you can return this CD regardless what the Policy of your CD-Shop is. 2. You buy this copy-protected CD and you can play it, but you cannot copy it with your cd-recorder (the audio-type pioneer makes for example). Then you can return it. Because under german law, you can make copies of tapes, cd's, video etc if it's for personal use und you pay the fee to the gema (a kind of a record company association, that want's to be sure to get it's money). But because you pay your gema-fee with every audio-tape, with every video-tape and every cdr-audio you buy, you have the legal right to copy an cd you own or to make a sampler of your cd's for your car for example. I think in the US the same concept is called fair-use. So in my opinion, two rights (which you have according to german laws) are not taken into recognition: First: when you buy a product and it doesn't work for you (even if you see it at a first glance but even more, if it's kind of a shrinked license agreement which states, that this is a copy-protected disc, after you open the cover), you have the right to return it to the distributor (eg the CD-Store). If the owner of the store tells you, you cannot return it, he's wrong, because he has the obligation to get a product back, that doesn't work. And a term like 'Sie können dieses Produkt nur ungeöffnet zurückgeben' is not valid, because it puts obligations to the buyer which aren't valid and so worth nothing. You have allways the right to return something that doesn't work for you and you couldn't know that or weren't told, that it might not working with your equipment. Second: under german law, you have the right to make copies of videos, cd's etc for personal use. If there's a cd that you cannot copy, this is a violation of german law. For your CD in your car you have the right to make a 'Best-Of' Compilation, regardless what CD's you want to use. You paid the company for their music and now you have the right to listen to this music (a little bit like the DVD Case: you baught the DVD and now aren't able to use it on your computer....Why didn't anybody sue the Companies who provide programs to copy Audio-CD's ? That's even worse, than providing the facility to PLAY DVD's on a Linux-Box....(I'm not suggesting people to sue Firms like hawkeye etc, I only want to make it clear, that there's a difference between playing and copying...). So, that's all for now... Hope to see you later, Matthias
There's another article regarding the trademark application at Heise. There's a statement from Roy Boldt, who applied for the trademark. He said, they did it because there were rumors, another firm wanted to get this trademark to make money from it. They only wanted to prevent this. According to his lawyers the trademark 'Linux' isn't protected in germany, contradicting german linux federation LIVE.
Trademark laws for Linux belong to Linus Torvalds Cologne: The trademark rights for Linux not only in the USA, but also in Europe belong to Linus Torvalds (German label 2088936, EU markenanmeldung 000851246). This explained the chairman of the German Linux federation LIVE, Achim Cloer, on Wednesday after the news, that a Hamburg based system houses protected the word label ' Linux ' as a trademark at the German patent office. ' Linus Torvalds will not bear the violation of its rights and use all legal means against it' Cloer said. The patent lawyer of the Linux federation, Rainer Feldkamp, which at the same time represents the interests of Torvalds in Europe, explained , the announced trademark protection of the Hamburg based system houses was not durable considering the existing trademark rights of Torvalds. 'we will immediately contradict thisnew trademark application, unauthorized by Torvalds, at the German Patent and Trademark Office', announced Feldkamp. 'There's no reason to get upset'.
Translation done with babelfish and my bad english from school. Keef
Please stay calm first. At the moment it's a little bit difficult with Trademark in's Germany. There's for example a Trademark on Y2K and on Webspace. It's silly and obviously for money-grabbing. They even tried to auction the rights for Y2K on ebay.de. But in the last weeks, some people tried to register things like WWW or FvG(the initials of a german lawyer who is know to bring you to court if you don't follow trademark laws(for example the use of Triton referring to the Motherboard-Chipset or the Name Explorer (Microsoft signed a contract to use this name in Germany))). So it's probably, that someone's registering linux before somebody evil can do this, if it's at all possible to register it. At the moment the trademark isn't registered yet, there's only a request for it. Stay calm, Keef sorry for my english...
This reminds me a little bit of something I read today. There was a campaign by beer brewers in the 50ies in Germany, because they feared, that sitting too much in front of the tv could affect their sales. Today they have ads on TV and sponsor sport events on TV, because they know, that a lot of people drink beer in front of the TV. Maybe that is, what it's all about: we have a problem, but don't know where it comes from, so just get something and blame it on this. No more thinking about it, it's not me, who's responsible for it and so on....that's one way to 'solve' the problem.... Keef
It's really funny. Nearly everybody seems to be bashing Redhat. Here in Germany it's SuSE, not Red Hat. Don't know why, perhaps every distribution that dominates a market (SuSE in Germany, Red Hat in the US) is suspected to do something evil. Red Hat and SuSE both want to earn money, but both give the Open Source Community something back(e.g. the SuSE X-Server or Red Hat and Gnome). Both sides gain something. Here in Germany I tell friends who want to try Linux to start with SuSE (better ISDN Support and the german language), but personally I don't like it so much and use Debian.
I'm not a Debian Developer, but I often read the Developer-Mailinglist. Corel developers posted to this list, explaining what they want to do and asked for feedback to their ideas. As I understood it, they want to work closely together with the Debain community (so not changing the package format) and want to include their work in the debian distribution. They want to get an standardized API that install-programs could use. So you can choose between GUI install, text-based install, what you want (their can be a KDE/qt,a GNOME/qtk based GUI install or something svgalib based and of course you can use apt or dselect). It sounds very good to me and I think Debian really can profit from this.
I attended some meetings with german companies and cooperations with foreign firm (uk, us, canada), who are testing digital powerline in germany. At the moment they are testing it under real life conditions and get speed at about 1 Mbit/s at the max. Under controlled enviroment they achieve about 2 MBit/s and they're talking about 10 Mbit/s. I don't think they'll get 2 Mbit/s or even 1 Mbit/s for the average user (here in germany about 200 househoulds share a connection to an electric transformator and so share the maximum connection speed. Perhaps you'll get about 256kbit/s at the moment (because at the beginning not so many people use this technology)). I don't think that at the moment gigabit-speed is realistic because you don't have a controlled enviroment. Every household has extended it's powerline (just thinking about the wires in my student flat....) . I like to have a high speed internet access in my room (with the digital powerline, adsl...who cares), but while listening to the marketing people at some firms (for example the Bewag, the Berlin Electric Company who is testing the digital powerline) I get a strange feeling. They aren't talking about high speed internet access or an alternativ to access the plain old telephone network. They're talking about new services like securing your home or your car (they want to use devices in the street lights to stay in contact with your car and detect unauthorized movement of it....imagine: someone call's you: your car is stollen, but we already got the thief.....). It sounds a little bit like big brother is watching you to me...
Bye, Keef (enjoying his 10 Mbit/s Connection over a Laser Link)
The hardware isn't the only problem. We're using 2 Cisco 4700 in our university backbone and our traffic to the outer world increased a lot (2.5 times more than 2 weeks ago because of a better connection) and so did our internal traffic. What happened ? Our network crashed every other day, no clue where the problem was (we suspected hardware failures). No we found the solution: a software bug in the cisco's (they're running at about 60% the speed they claim they could handle...). So, tech-specs are good, but you have to test them in a real world enviroment (ok, we're only a university;-) )
I agree with you that this is the right Audience, because here at/. a lot of people know how you feel, if you are an outsider. I never had this feeling at my school, perhaps I had luck. I live in Germany and it was not a problem being a 'geek' (I don't know a german word that has the same meaning). Perhaps I was lucky, because I heard of people having such problems in german schools, too, but I don't think the problem here is as big as in the US, not yet. Perhaps this is a opportunity to change the situation in the US and other countries. Here at/. there are a lot of bright and successfull people who felt as outsiders at school. Get together and do something. There are lobbys for nearly everything in America, why not a lobby for geeks (or simply people who are different, don't wear 'in'-clothes...) I always had the impression, that the US is very puritanical, but watching the Clinton trial I thought this has changed a little bit. Perhaps this is the time to change the view of 'outsiders' in highschools.
Slashdot Mirror
What I think is the most important thing: it's the first time a commercial site went under attack of a distributed dos (the first commercial site i know about).
Until now only 'minor' sites (like universities) have been under attack of distributed dos tools. It seems that this tools like tfn, stacheldraht etc are now more common than a few month ago.
I'm worried, what might happen if in the next month these tools are widely used...
Keef
I like Jon Jatz' writings, too. I don't always agree with him, but he shows the things from a different viewpoint. Sometimes you only see the things the way you like, but you perhaps miss a different perspective. Sometimes you need somebody with a different background to show you the other side of the story.
I like Jon Katz and I hope there'll be more stories written by him on Slashdot.
Hi, just my thoughts on returning such CD's (based on german laws)
1. You buy a CD, it's marked as a Audio-CD (Red-Book compatible), if not noted, it's implicit, that this CD will work in your Player
You try it and notive a label on the CD itself, that it is copy-protected, you couldn't see this, before you bought this CD. This CD doesn't work with your Player => this CD isn't Red-Book compliant, so it isn't an Audio-CD. You had no chance noticing this before, though you can return this CD regardless what the Policy of your CD-Shop is.
2. You buy this copy-protected CD and you can play it, but you cannot copy it with your cd-recorder (the audio-type pioneer makes for example). Then you can return it. Because under german law, you can make copies of tapes, cd's, video etc if it's for personal use und you pay the fee to the gema (a kind of a record company association, that want's to be sure to get it's money). But because you pay your gema-fee with every audio-tape, with every video-tape and every cdr-audio you buy, you have the legal right to copy an cd you own or to make a sampler of your cd's for your car for example. I think in the US the same concept is called fair-use.
So in my opinion, two rights (which you have according to german laws) are not taken into recognition:
First: when you buy a product and it doesn't work for you (even if you see it at a first glance but even more, if it's kind of a shrinked license agreement which states, that this is a copy-protected disc, after you open the cover), you have the right to return it to the distributor (eg the CD-Store). If the owner of the store tells you, you cannot return it, he's wrong, because he has the obligation to get a product back, that doesn't work. And a term like 'Sie können dieses Produkt nur ungeöffnet zurückgeben' is not valid, because it puts obligations to the buyer which aren't valid and so worth nothing. You have allways the right to return something that doesn't work for you and you couldn't know that or weren't told, that it might not working with your equipment.
Second: under german law, you have the right to make copies of videos, cd's etc for personal use. If there's a cd that you cannot copy, this is a violation of german law. For your CD in your car you have the right to make a 'Best-Of' Compilation, regardless what CD's you want to use. You paid the company for their music and now you have the right to listen to this music (a little bit like the DVD Case: you baught the DVD and now aren't able to use it on your computer....Why didn't anybody sue the Companies who provide programs to copy Audio-CD's ? That's even worse, than providing the facility to PLAY DVD's on a Linux-Box....(I'm not suggesting people to sue Firms like hawkeye etc, I only want to make it clear, that there's a difference between playing and copying...).
So, that's all for now...
Hope to see you later,
Matthias
There's another article regarding the trademark application at Heise.
There's a statement from Roy Boldt, who applied for the trademark. He said, they did it because there were rumors, another firm wanted to get this trademark to make money from it. They only wanted to prevent this. According to his lawyers the trademark 'Linux' isn't protected in germany, contradicting german linux federation LIVE.
So enough bad english for today,
Keef
Trademark laws for Linux belong to Linus Torvalds
Cologne: The trademark rights for Linux not only in the USA, but also in Europe belong to Linus Torvalds (German label 2088936, EU markenanmeldung 000851246).
This explained the chairman of the German Linux federation LIVE, Achim Cloer, on Wednesday after the news, that a Hamburg based system houses protected the word label ' Linux ' as a trademark at the German patent office. ' Linus Torvalds will not bear the violation of its rights and use all legal means against it' Cloer said.
The patent lawyer of the Linux federation, Rainer Feldkamp, which at the same time represents the interests of Torvalds in Europe, explained , the announced trademark protection of the Hamburg based system houses was not durable considering the existing trademark rights of Torvalds. 'we will immediately contradict thisnew trademark application, unauthorized by Torvalds, at the German Patent and Trademark Office', announced Feldkamp. 'There's no reason to get upset'.
Translation done with babelfish and my bad english from school.
Keef
Please stay calm first.
At the moment it's a little bit difficult with Trademark in's Germany. There's for example a Trademark on Y2K and on Webspace.
It's silly and obviously for money-grabbing. They even tried to auction the rights for Y2K on ebay.de. But in the last weeks, some people tried to register things like WWW or FvG(the initials of a german lawyer who is know to bring you to court if you don't follow trademark laws(for example the use of Triton referring to the Motherboard-Chipset or the Name Explorer (Microsoft signed a contract to use this name in Germany))).
So it's probably, that someone's registering linux before somebody evil can do this, if it's at all possible to register it. At the moment the trademark isn't registered yet, there's only a request for it.
Stay calm,
Keef
sorry for my english...
This reminds me a little bit of something I read today.
There was a campaign by beer brewers in the 50ies in Germany, because they feared, that sitting too much in front of the tv could affect their sales.
Today they have ads on TV and sponsor sport events on TV, because they know, that a lot of people drink beer in front of the TV.
Maybe that is, what it's all about: we have a problem, but don't know where it comes from, so just get something and blame it on this. No more thinking about it, it's not me, who's responsible for it and so on....that's one way to 'solve' the problem....
Keef
It's really funny. Nearly everybody seems to be bashing Redhat.
Here in Germany it's SuSE, not Red Hat.
Don't know why, perhaps every distribution that dominates a market (SuSE in Germany, Red Hat in the US) is suspected to do something evil.
Red Hat and SuSE both want to earn money, but both give the Open Source Community something back(e.g. the SuSE X-Server or Red Hat and Gnome). Both sides gain something.
Here in Germany I tell friends who want to try Linux to start with SuSE (better ISDN Support and the german language), but personally I don't like it so much and use Debian.
Just my opinion,
KeefR
I'm not a Debian Developer, but I often read the Developer-Mailinglist. Corel developers posted to this list, explaining what they want to do and asked for feedback to their ideas. As I understood it, they want to work closely together with the Debain community (so not changing the package format) and want to include their work in the debian distribution. ,a GNOME/qtk based GUI install or something svgalib based and of course you can use apt or dselect). It sounds very good to me and I think Debian really can profit from this.
They want to get an standardized API that install-programs could use. So you can choose between GUI install, text-based install, what you want (their can be a KDE/qt
Just my impression,
Keed
I attended some meetings with german companies and cooperations with foreign firm (uk, us, canada), who are testing digital powerline in germany.
At the moment they are testing it under real life conditions and get speed at about 1 Mbit/s at the max. Under controlled enviroment they achieve about 2 MBit/s and they're talking about 10 Mbit/s. I don't think they'll get 2 Mbit/s or even 1 Mbit/s for the average user (here in germany about 200 househoulds share a connection to an electric transformator and so share the maximum connection speed. Perhaps you'll get about 256kbit/s at the moment (because at the beginning not so many people use this technology)).
I don't think that at the moment gigabit-speed is realistic because you don't have a controlled enviroment. Every household has extended it's powerline (just thinking about the wires in my student flat....) .
I like to have a high speed internet access in my room (with the digital powerline, adsl...who cares), but while listening to the marketing people at some firms (for example the Bewag, the Berlin Electric Company who is testing the digital powerline) I get a strange feeling. They aren't talking about high speed internet access or an alternativ to access the plain old telephone network. They're talking about new services like securing your home or your car (they want to use devices in the street lights to stay in contact with your car and detect unauthorized movement of it....imagine: someone call's you: your car is stollen, but we already got the thief.....). It sounds a little bit like big brother is watching you to me...
Bye,
Keef (enjoying his 10 Mbit/s Connection over a Laser Link)
The hardware isn't the only problem. We're using 2 Cisco 4700 in our university backbone and our traffic to the outer world increased a lot (2.5 times more than 2 weeks ago because of a better connection) and so did our internal traffic. What happened ? Our network crashed every other day, no clue where the problem was (we suspected hardware failures). No we found the solution: a software bug in the cisco's (they're running at about 60% the speed they claim they could handle...). ;-) )
So, tech-specs are good, but you have to test them in a real world enviroment (ok, we're only a university
OC-48 and OC-192 sounds nice, but I'd be happy, if
OC-3 Modules for the Cabletron SSR-8000 are available 8-(
I agree with you that this is the right Audience, because here at /. a lot of people know how you feel, if you are an outsider. /. there are a lot of bright and successfull people who felt as outsiders at school. Get together and do something. There are lobbys for nearly everything in America, why not a lobby for geeks (or simply people who are different, don't wear 'in'-clothes...)
I never had this feeling at my school, perhaps I had luck. I live in Germany and it was not a problem being a 'geek' (I don't know a german word that has the same meaning). Perhaps I was lucky, because I heard of people having such problems in german schools, too, but I don't think the problem here is as big as in the US, not yet.
Perhaps this is a opportunity to change the situation in the US and other countries. Here at
I always had the impression, that the US is very puritanical, but watching the Clinton trial I thought this has changed a little bit. Perhaps this is the time to change the view of 'outsiders' in highschools.
Sorry for my english 8-)