"As long as you do not conduct business in France/Australia/US/[insert name of country which is stepping close to the bounds of extraterritoriality here], this isn't a problem."
This is true only as long as your web pages can't be viewed there either. Otherwise, you can commit torts there and be sued there.
"If France sues the French subsidiary of Yahoo in an unreasonable way, Yahoo will simply pack up and leave."
They won't leave. They'll adapt. Foreign markets are usually to big to just abandon them.
It's not only the French subsidiary that can be sued. It's the mother company - actually any company - even if it is not located in France. So leaving just won't work unless you stop your business anywhere.
Don't think that it would not be possible the other way round, i.e. an Oz publisher sued in the US: The problem here is with international private law, especially in the context of torts and the WWW.
The international private laws of most countries (yes, international private law is actually national law, which says which cases can be brought to national courts any the law of which country is to be used), tend to be very inclusive, especially wrt torts: Usually, you can be sued wherever any damage occurs.
Normally, this does make very sense: As a victim, you don't want to sue someone abroad when the damage has occured here: This normally includes cases such as car accidents with foreigners or your foreign neighbour shooting your sheep.;-) However, the WWW is different: Being a broadcast medium, the damage caused by defamation, IP infringment, etc., can occur anywhere. So you can also be sued anywhere.
This result seems very stupid, of course: You can be sued in countries you've never known that existed. (It even gets worse with international criminal law, which is similarily inclusive: Go to a country you've never been there before and get arrested for something you've done 10 years before in a country where it was completly legal.)
What we really need is a international treaty that limits the jurisdiction to a managable set of countries: The country where the person comitting the tort has actually acted, the countries where the servers she controls are located and, maybe, for some torts such as libel directed at a single person, the country where this person lives (this is problematic, however, maybe you should only have jurisdiction there but not use the law of that country).
All code contributed to a project is at least implicitly coverd by a license, usually the same license(s) as the original project.
As the original author, you can relicense the code as often as you want to.
If there's code contributed by others, you aren't the only original author any longer. So you'll need the approval of these authors if you want to do or allow something that isn't allowed by their license[1].
[1] You can of course change to a compatible license. Also, this also applies if the contributions are covered by copyright, which might not be the case for small trivial changes.
"What this means is that google can now take my story, and resell it, denying me my rightful royalties. As a result, my family and I now starve to death."
By posting something to Usenet, you are giving it away for free. If you later discover that you'd like to sell it when everyone already has a free copy - bad luck. That's not special to DejaGoogle.
"Whenever someone asks Google to see a message, Google must redistribute the message."
This is actually true with every Usenet node. You could argue that such licenses are granted implicitly ba posting to Usenet.
Hoewever, Google wants more: They do also want the right to modify the message, to publish and even translate the message. They also want the right to distribute the message on other media and with yet-unknwon technology. This goes clearly too far.
Such bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour is typical for American law departments, though: Wanting to protect their company from lawsuits as much as possible, they tend to play havoc with their customers rights and feelings.
The different video standards (PAL, NTSC, SECAM, MESECAM) were not developed in order to prevent the worldwide use of videos. They are only there for historic reasons. OTOH regional codes were explicitly designed to prevent the free use of DVDs in other regions and come in addition to the problems already caused by different video standards - there are both NTSC and PAL/SECAM DVDs.
The movie industrie does not do anything to prevent the playback of PAL videos in NTSC regions and vice versa. In fact, most recent PAL VCR models (and PAL DVD players) will just play NTSC videos (or NTSC DVDs from the same region, which is the case for European PAL RC2 players and Japanese NTSC RC2 discs, for example) on any TV set but DVD players won't play DVDs from other regions.
This is called "region code enhancement" and actually old news: The DVD is labelled as RC0 but checks the region code later. So a codefree player or a player with automatic RC switching will not be able to play that disc.
Good player modifications will allow you to switch the player's region code manually and render RCE useless.
"The MBR is considered a legacy agent, mainly by the fact to get to it, you have to use software interrupts."
Huh? The MBR is just another sector on the harddisk. There's nothing special about it. As soon as you have your disk driver loaded, you do not need the BIOS (and before that, you will have to use BIOS INTs for all disk accesses).
I hope the EU won't impose restrictions over the voluntary sharing of personal information. People should
have the choice to allow worldwide distribution of their personal data.
If you had actually read the EU directive, you would know that it only relates to EU companies giving personal data to non-EU companies where the data is less "safe". The idea is that the EU regulations on privacy may not be circumvened by just sending the data abroad to abuse it.
Of course, if a user gives data directly to an US company, this is basically the user's own decision and only his/her problem.
Oops, stupid me. This won't happen anyway as in about 2 billion years the Andromeda galaxy will crash into our Milky Way. So in 4.5 billion years there will be nSun and no Earth...
So if, say, two radio broadcasters send at 90 MHz and 98 MHz, "the signals are added or subtracted from each other"? So there will be only one frequency (and radio programme) left?
When you send white light through a prisma, you don't get a full spectrum of frequencies but only red, green and blue?
Why don't red, blue and green combine to a single frequency and colour?
"...that the moon will crash into the earth in about 100 billion years..."
Which Earth?
Which Moon?
Sorry, but in about 4.5 billion the sun will become a red giant and destroy both Earth and the moon. So in 100 billion yeary, there will be nothing that crashes into nothing...
Re:yeah this is an april fools joke
on
TCP/IP Over HTTP
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· Score: 1
"... but HTTP uses UDP connections..."
No, it uses TCP. Furhter, there are no "UDP connections" because UDP is a connectionless protocol.
Still, it would certainly be possible to tunnel TCP over UDP just as it is possible to use IP as the transport for TCP.
Someone of the German computer magazine c't even experimented with TCP-over-DNS. (The background is that a company provided a toll-free 0800 number for IP access but with firewalls so that you could only access support web servers... and resolve arbitrary domain names. No, it wasn't an April issue.)
what I thought was funny about First Contact was that the vulcans were totally technical about their prime directive just like the federation.
AFAIR the prime directive came[1] only into effect when the federation had been founded and after there had been first hostile contact with the Klingons.
It's good to be able to browse pages and decide to save them to a file, and that means the browser has to be able to write to the file system. It's also good to be able to upload files, and to get to a certificate store (for SSL).
You could use a sandbox that allow the browser to access all web-browsing related data (e.g. SSL certificates etc.). You could also use some interfaces that allow the browser to escape the sandbox for certain operations like saving etc.
For example, the browser could only read its SSL certificates in its sandbox but another programme not running in the sandbox and does not trust the browser could accept SSL certificates or other data for saving only after the user chose to do so.
I believe that the best way for Freenet to garantue it's survival is to put it into use for as many "non-suspicious" purposes as possible, e.g.:
WWW (could easily use it, just use a new URL scheme and/or build proxies),
Usenet (could use gateways, i.e. newservers that don't use NNTP to exchange postings with other newsservers but Freenet), or
E-Mail (could switch to something like IM 2000, which could also utilize Freenet).
If Freenet is only used by those who require the freedom, then it is easy to claim that "Freenet is only used by criminals" and to "outlaw the use of technologies such as those utilized by Freenet" - with the obvious result that Freenet will not be available for legal - but "suspicious" - purposes.
Even if building it does work, comparing the binary output will not work: Different compilers will translate the code differently, even if you do not optimize the code.
You can, however, make it produce assembler code, verify that it is identical to the final binary and check that is it a valid translation of the source code (and only that).
"What makes you so sure that they received the complete source? Is the source even buildable?"
If it is not buildable, it isn't source code, but documentation.
Do you really think someone would trust an operating system the code of which is not buildable? This would cause much more suspision than not having the source code at all.
But can you trust your compiler?
Many compilers can only be built with themselves. Who says the _existing_ compiler/linker binaries don't have a backdoor that will put the very same backdoor in every programme you compile?
You do get the source code and all the stuff, but you might have to rely on an initial binary that could already have the backdoor...
Having the source is not enough, you also have to build it using a compiler you've bootstrapped yourself!
Slashdot Mirror
This is true only as long as your web pages can't be viewed there either. Otherwise, you can commit torts there and be sued there.
Don't think that it would not be possible the other way round, i.e. an Oz publisher sued in the US: The problem here is with international private law, especially in the context of torts and the WWW.
The international private laws of most countries (yes, international private law is actually national law, which says which cases can be brought to national courts any the law of which country is to be used), tend to be very inclusive, especially wrt torts: Usually, you can be sued wherever any damage occurs.
Normally, this does make very sense: As a victim, you don't want to sue someone abroad when the damage has occured here: This normally includes cases such as car accidents with foreigners or your foreign neighbour shooting your sheep. ;-)
However, the WWW is different: Being a broadcast medium, the damage caused by defamation, IP infringment, etc., can occur anywhere. So you can also be sued anywhere.
This result seems very stupid, of course: You can be sued in countries you've never known that existed. (It even gets worse with international criminal law, which is similarily inclusive: Go to a country you've never been there before and get arrested for something you've done 10 years before in a country where it was completly legal.)
What we really need is a international treaty that limits the jurisdiction to a managable set of countries: The country where the person comitting the tort has actually acted, the countries where the servers she controls are located and, maybe, for some torts such as libel directed at a single person, the country where this person lives (this is problematic, however, maybe you should only have jurisdiction there but not use the law of that country).
cool with a stupid legal dep't
It's quite simple:
[1] You can of course change to a compatible license. Also, this also applies if the contributions are covered by copyright, which might not be the case for small trivial changes.
By posting something to Usenet, you are giving it away for free. If you later discover that you'd like to sell it when everyone already has a free copy - bad luck. That's not special to DejaGoogle.
This is actually true with every Usenet node. You could argue that such licenses are granted implicitly ba posting to Usenet.
Hoewever, Google wants more: They do also want the right to modify the message, to publish and even translate the message. They also want the right to distribute the message on other media and with yet-unknwon technology. This goes clearly too far.
Such bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour is typical for American law departments, though: Wanting to protect their company from lawsuits as much as possible, they tend to play havoc with their customers rights and feelings.
OTOH regional codes were explicitly designed to prevent the free use of DVDs in other regions and come in addition to the problems already caused by different video standards - there are both NTSC and PAL/SECAM DVDs.
In fact, most recent PAL VCR models (and PAL DVD players) will just play NTSC videos (or NTSC DVDs from the same region, which is the case for European PAL RC2 players and Japanese NTSC RC2 discs, for example) on any TV set but DVD players won't play DVDs from other regions.
This is called "region code enhancement" and actually old news: The DVD is labelled as RC0 but checks the region code later. So a codefree player or a player with automatic RC switching will not be able to play that disc.
Good player modifications will allow you to switch the player's region code manually and render RCE useless.
If you had actually read the EU directive, you would know that it only relates to EU companies giving personal data to non-EU companies where the data is less "safe".
The idea is that the EU regulations on privacy may not be circumvened by just sending the data abroad to abuse it.
Of course, if a user gives data directly to an US company, this is basically the user's own decision and only his/her problem.
Hm, that really looks like a plagiarized GNU false.
So if, say, two radio broadcasters send at 90 MHz and 98 MHz, "the signals are added or subtracted from each other"? So there will be only one frequency (and radio programme) left?
When you send white light through a prisma, you don't get a full spectrum of frequencies but only red, green and blue?
Why don't red, blue and green combine to a single frequency and colour?
Which Earth?
Which Moon?
Sorry, but in about 4.5 billion the sun will become a red giant and destroy both Earth and the moon.
So in 100 billion yeary, there will be nothing that crashes into nothing...
You can already do this with SECSH and PPP.
Still, it would certainly be possible to tunnel TCP over UDP just as it is possible to use IP as the transport for TCP.
Someone of the German computer magazine c't even experimented with TCP-over-DNS. (The background is that a company provided a toll-free 0800 number for IP access but with firewalls so that you could only access support web servers ... and resolve arbitrary domain names. No, it wasn't an April issue.)
AFAIR the prime directive came[1] only into effect when the federation had been founded and after there had been first hostile contact with the Klingons.
There a rumors that you do not even have to leave earth to run in to problems like these. (No, I'm not talking about a non-homo sapiens species).
You could use a sandbox that allow the browser to access all web-browsing related data (e.g. SSL certificates etc.). You could also use some interfaces that allow the browser to escape the sandbox for certain operations like saving etc.
For example, the browser could only read its SSL certificates in its sandbox but another programme not running in the sandbox and does not trust the browser could accept SSL certificates or other data for saving only after the user chose to do so.
What makes a "stream of numbers" so differnt from a "stream of letters" (e.g. a novel)?
Nearly everything can be digitized, so nearly everything that exists can theoretically represented as numbers.
Hm, why not have some apes type Shakespeare...
I believe that the best way for Freenet to garantue it's survival is to put it into use for as many "non-suspicious" purposes as possible, e.g.:
If Freenet is only used by those who require the freedom, then it is easy to claim that "Freenet is only used by criminals" and to "outlaw the use of technologies such as those utilized by Freenet" - with the obvious result that Freenet will not be available for legal - but "suspicious" - purposes.
Even if building it does work, comparing the binary output will not work: Different compilers will translate the code differently, even if you do not optimize the code.
You can, however, make it produce assembler code, verify that it is identical to the final binary and check that is it a valid translation of the source code (and only that).
If it is not buildable, it isn't source code, but documentation.
Do you really think someone would trust an operating system the code of which is not buildable? This would cause much more suspision than not having the source code at all.
But can you trust your compiler?
Many compilers can only be built with themselves. Who says the _existing_ compiler/linker binaries don't have a backdoor that will put the very same backdoor in every programme you compile?
You do get the source code and all the stuff, but you might have to rely on an initial binary that could already have the backdoor...
Having the source is not enough, you also have to build it using a compiler you've bootstrapped yourself!