I know that all of SCO's statements have been, shall we say, disingenuous, but Stowell's comment today, if quoted accurately, is the clearest lie I have yet seen issued from an officer of that company:
"If we want to continue to distribute Linux to our existing customers, we can do that because we own the copyrights on that Unix software."
I assume no such thing. The point is to respond to the fears generated by the caterwauling of SCO and their media apologist, Laura Didio. These sources throw around the word 'indemnification' as if it were some sort of well-defined standard practice.
My suspicion is that Microsoft's and SUN's indemnity clauses are worthless. HP has no incentive to offer anything of greater value.
I know what the word means, but I don't know what SUN, HP, and Microsoft are really offering when they claim to indemnify customers. Indemnify against what? Any legal/settlement costs for any frivilous lawsuit that may arise from the customer's use of the product? I doubt it.
So what exactly are they offering? Can somebody post the fine print?
Any publicity is good publicity. This old saw applies equally well to Linux.
As a result of the SCO attack, people who never before gave Linux a second thought, indeed who never before heard of Linux, will give it serious consideration.
SCO motion addresses only 3 of 7 counts
on
SCO Volleys to Red Hat
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I have not yet seen SCO's motion [can somebody dig it up?], but according to the press accounts, SCO is challenging counts 1 and 2 (for declaratory judgement) on the grounds that no actual controversy exists, and are challenging count 3 (false advertising violating the Lanham act) on the grounds that the Lanham act is superseded by the First Amendment. Even if these grounds, which seem thin to me, were upheld, four counts would remain.
The seven counts laid out in the full text of Red Hat's complaint are:
Declaratory judgement under the copyright act.
Declaratory judgement under the trade secrets act.
This article conflates the notions of "space exploration" and "manned space exploration." The first of the final points to ponder should be split in two; either half is more significant than the rest put together.
Why explore space and why send humans into space?
While I don't have a firm opinion about whether or not sending humans into space is the most effective approach to space exploration, I wish to point out that human payloads are expensive. The risk to human life is a tiny (and insignificant, IMO) part of the cost of manned space travel. Could the engineering effort and payload weight of life-support, return-to-earth, and contingency systems be used more effectively?
I have often wished I could uninstall plugins more easily. In 'doze I know of no good way to do it other than uninstalling the product (Flash, Acrobat, Quicktime, whatever...). I have done this on more than one occasion.
Adobe Acrobat is an example. IMO, the plugin version is far worse than the standalone version. You don't have proper access to all the controls, file management, printing, and full-screen mode. At least I don't know how to access them. I have the same problem with many of the media players.
Flash is a bane. With Mozilla I can block image and pop-up ads but the Flash plugin is an open wound for infection with annoying ads. Flash is not alone - just the other the tell-tale cup-o-java appeared in an ad. Fortunately Java is so slow that I was able to ax it before it started.
So for the most part I'll be happy to see the world revert back to launching stand-alone helper applications. I want to use my browser for browsing, not playing video games.
I recommend two books that detail the wartime and postwar efforts to build the bomb. Teller's roles, both in the technology and the politics, are covered. So are the roles of many other players, including Germans and Russians.
The making of the atomic bomb and Dark Sun - The making of the hydrogen bomb, by Richard Rhodes.
Rhodes won a Pulitzer for the first volume and I daresay it is the better. Both are not without fault (in particular the second was not universally acclaimed in the physics community), but I found them intriguing.
This list is way too aggressive for my taste. I want to see bona fide bounce messages.
One filter that I found effective was to scan for a line containing "^From:" and my email address but not my name. Most legitimate bounce messages return at least the From header of the original message. Since all the mail clients I use include my name in the From line (and all viruses and spammers that have impersonated me to date don't) this is pretty effective.
Last year, my wife received a spate of "you sent this virus" messages. Worse, a number of her associates received "this person tried to send you a virus" message, referring to her.
I followed up with several of the administrators running the virus filters. In all cases, the administrators had quarantined the messages without headers so it was impossible to tell what machine really sent the message. I would have liked to know this information so as to have some hope of tracing the owner of the infected machine.
I understand why users are unaware of headers. Microsoft's products go out of their way to hide them. In Outlook Express, to get headers you have to find the relevant show headers pull-down and even then the headers appear in a too-small non-resizable window. You have to clip the contents and paste into a real window before the headers can be read/forwarded.
The "From:" field of email means no more than the snail-mail return address that you scribble on an envelope. The header, like the snail-mail postmark, tells the origin.
What is the excuse for vendors of email software (filtering or end-user) perpetrating unawareness of this basic property of email?
affiliated (&schwa.'fIlIeItId), ppl. a. [f. AFFILIATE v. + -ED.] Adopted as a child or fixed in paternity. Usually fig. United in a dependent relation, as the branches of a society to the central organization.
1795 in Monthly Rev. XVI. 528 Soliciting the provincial affiliated societies to separate from the republicans. 1850 ALISON Hist. Europe VII. xlii. Sect.35. 117 Surrounding France with a girdle, not of affiliated republics, but of dependent dynasties. 1863 MRS. JAMESON Leg. Monast. Ord. 138 And numbered, within a century after its foundation, 3000 affiliated monasteries.
Logic and truth have almost no role in the court of public perception. Elections are won, wars are waged, fortunes are made and lost, not due to logic and truth, but due to demagoguery.
The full text of the subpoena contains several provisions whereby Canopy may apply to withold documents. These provisions include the protection of privelege, litigation strategy, and trade secrets. I expect Canopy's lawyers to avail themselves of these provisions.
We have no idea who perpetrated the attack, or indeed if there really was an attack. All we have is SCO's assertion combined with second-order hearsay from Eric Raymond. As with any anonymous attack or accidental disaster, any number of loonies or self-interested parties may step forward to claim credit. And the loonies may or may not accurately identify themselves.
Mr. McBride uses the rather strong language "no doubt" to describe this evidence. With equal hyperbole he coins the phrase "affiliated with" to describe the relationship between the alleged hacker and the open-source community. The OED defines 'affiliated' as meaning "United in a dependent relation, as the branches of a society to the central organization."
I would be hard pressed to describe the open source communication as an organiztion at all, let alone one with affiliates.
As far as I know, John Ashcroft has not yet been able to completely eliminate the distinction between these two distict components of the administration of justice.
Most of the arguments that I've seen here are the sort that Mr. Lamo can make in court. If the court finds that his actions were justified, it has the opportunity to acquit, or to give some other form of discharge.
In my neighbourhood, I would like the police to arrest people they find in jewellery stores late at night, or in my home while I'm on vacation, or on my computer without permission. If the prosecutor or the judge decides that no charge should be made, or that the charge should be dropped, fine.
While I feel some sympathy for this self-appointed security checker, I can't immediately fault the police. Especially without access to the facts of the case, which will be exposed in the judicial process.
One might argue that Mr. Lamo is being punished by having to go to court. I think not. He must have been well aware that his actions were provocative and that this was a likely outcome. Now he will have the opportunity to justify his actions.
It might be more apt to consider what the response might be if you walked up and down the street trying the doors on houses belonging to people who don't know you from Adam, without regard to whether they were home or not.
AFAIK, unauthorized entry is illegal in most jurisdictions, especially if you defeat some sort of locking mechanism (no matter how trivial).
"Criminal intent" means intent to commit the act that is illegal, not "intent to do harm."
As an OT example, I'm aware of a case in Manitoba of a person who was convicted of 'dangerous driving' for speeding in excess of 200 km/h. Although the judge accepted that the driver had no intent to drive dangerously, he did accept expert testimony that 200 km/h was dangerous, and that the driver intended to drive 200 km/h.
Microsoft's position is that a market dominated by huge corporate entities, supported by huge government and military contracts and legislation like the DMCA and patent acts, is more free (i.e. better) than one in which governments are direct players.
I have all the email I've ever received stored chronologically in flat files. I use full-text search and navigation tools to locate what I need. I use much the same technique for organizing the papers in my office.
In general you can spend effort imposing some organizational schema on your data, hoping that your organization will enable you to find information later. Or you can leave the data as it lies, and spend the effort at retrieval time, once you know what you're looking for.
Current tools, particularly those in Windows, aren't particulary amenable for this purpose, but they're getting better. For example, you can download a seearch engine and index your hard drive much like the web.
Even primitive tools like grep work pretty well for a few hundred megabytes of mail.
PDF is not as sharable as you think. More and more pdf files contain (usually Windows) system-dependent Postscript stuff that prevents them from displaying or printing properly on different systems.
Also, many PDF files are encrypted (badly, but enough to bring the DMCA down on you if you defeat the encryption).
Yesterday I opened a document with Acrobat 5 and a warning was displayed: You are using an old version of Acrobat; this document may not display properly. It displayed OK, but you get the idea.
That said,.pdf is much more portable than.doc. Just don't forget that it is a proprietary closed format, and that Adobe seems not averse to playing the MicroSoft game.
I manage my relatives' computer systems with a combination of VNC and ssh.
The problem with VNC is that it grabs the console in Windows, so if the user happens to be on the computer, he or she is interrupted. On the other hand, he or she can see what you are doing so it is good for tutorials.
ssh is wonderful for background copying, checking things out, and so on. Unfortunately a lot of Windows apps (in particular installation wizards) want to grab the console so even if you start them through ssh they are useless unless you sign on with VNC to point and click.
Whenever I set up a machine that I'm to manage, I install VNC as a service, and also cywin/sshd as a service, and I have enough hooks to be able to do most anything. I wouldn't be without either.
One word of warning: Windows XP "fast user switching" and VNC don't get along. If more than one user is on, you see a black screen on VNC. Solution: use ssh to invoke "shutdown -r -force".
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget VM. (I don't know if they flog CMS any more.)
I know that all of SCO's statements have been, shall we say, disingenuous, but Stowell's comment today, if quoted accurately, is the clearest lie I have yet seen issued from an officer of that company:
"If we want to continue to distribute Linux to our existing customers, we can do that because we own the copyrights on that Unix software."
cf. Infoworld
I assume no such thing. The point is to respond to the fears generated by the caterwauling of SCO and their media apologist, Laura Didio. These sources throw around the word 'indemnification' as if it were some sort of well-defined standard practice.
My suspicion is that Microsoft's and SUN's indemnity clauses are worthless. HP has no incentive to offer anything of greater value.
I know what the word means, but I don't know what SUN, HP, and Microsoft are really offering when they claim to indemnify customers. Indemnify against what? Any legal/settlement costs for any frivilous lawsuit that may arise from the customer's use of the product? I doubt it.
So what exactly are they offering? Can somebody post the fine print?
Any publicity is good publicity. This old saw applies equally well to Linux.
As a result of the SCO attack, people who never before gave Linux a second thought, indeed who never before heard of Linux, will give it serious consideration.
This article conflates the notions of "space exploration" and "manned space exploration." The first of the final points to ponder should be split in two; either half is more significant than the rest put together.
Why explore space and why send humans into space?
While I don't have a firm opinion about whether or not sending humans into space is the most effective approach to space exploration, I wish to point out that human payloads are expensive. The risk to human life is a tiny (and insignificant, IMO) part of the cost of manned space travel. Could the engineering effort and payload weight of life-support, return-to-earth, and contingency systems be used more effectively?
Exactly what I needed. Seems to work perfectly. Thank-you!
I have often wished I could uninstall plugins more easily. In 'doze I know of no good way to do it other than uninstalling the product (Flash, Acrobat, Quicktime, whatever ...). I have done this on more than one occasion.
Adobe Acrobat is an example. IMO, the plugin version is far worse than the standalone version. You don't have proper access to all the controls, file management, printing, and full-screen mode. At least I don't know how to access them. I have the same problem with many of the media players.
Flash is a bane. With Mozilla I can block image and pop-up ads but the Flash plugin is an open wound for infection with annoying ads. Flash is not alone - just the other the tell-tale cup-o-java appeared in an ad. Fortunately Java is so slow that I was able to ax it before it started.
So for the most part I'll be happy to see the world revert back to launching stand-alone helper applications. I want to use my browser for browsing, not playing video games.
I recommend two books that detail the wartime and postwar efforts to build the bomb. Teller's roles, both in the technology and the politics, are covered. So are the roles of many other players, including Germans and Russians.
The making of the atomic bomb and Dark Sun - The making of the hydrogen bomb, by Richard Rhodes.
Rhodes won a Pulitzer for the first volume and I daresay it is the better. Both are not without fault (in particular the second was not universally acclaimed in the physics community), but I found them intriguing.
This list is way too aggressive for my taste. I want to see bona fide bounce messages.
One filter that I found effective was to scan for a line containing "^From:" and my email address but not my name. Most legitimate bounce messages return at least the From header of the original message. Since all the mail clients I use include my name in the From line (and all viruses and spammers that have impersonated me to date don't) this is pretty effective.
Last year, my wife received a spate of "you sent this virus" messages. Worse, a number of her associates received "this person tried to send you a virus" message, referring to her.
I followed up with several of the administrators running the virus filters. In all cases, the administrators had quarantined the messages without headers so it was impossible to tell what machine really sent the message. I would have liked to know this information so as to have some hope of tracing the owner of the infected machine.
I understand why users are unaware of headers. Microsoft's products go out of their way to hide them. In Outlook Express, to get headers you have to find the relevant show headers pull-down and even then the headers appear in a too-small non-resizable window. You have to clip the contents and paste into a real window before the headers can be read/forwarded.
The "From:" field of email means no more than the snail-mail return address that you scribble on an envelope. The header, like the snail-mail postmark, tells the origin.
What is the excuse for vendors of email software (filtering or end-user) perpetrating unawareness of this basic property of email?
affiliated (&schwa.'fIlIeItId), ppl. a. [f. AFFILIATE v. + -ED.] Adopted as a
child or fixed in paternity. Usually fig. United in a dependent relation,
as the branches of a society to the central organization.
1795 in Monthly Rev. XVI. 528 Soliciting the provincial affiliated societies
to separate from the republicans. 1850 ALISON Hist. Europe VII. xlii. Sect.35.
117 Surrounding France with a girdle, not of affiliated republics, but of
dependent dynasties. 1863 MRS. JAMESON Leg. Monast. Ord. 138 And numbered,
within a century after its foundation, 3000 affiliated monasteries.
Here here.
Although Joy was a pioneer in the technical development of BSD, SUN, under his leadership, was a pioneer of closed-source BSD and Unix derivatves.
Logic and truth have almost no role in the court of public perception. Elections are won, wars are waged, fortunes are made and lost, not due to logic and truth, but due to demagoguery.
At this particular skill, Mr. McBride is adept.
The full text of the subpoena contains several provisions whereby Canopy may apply to withold documents. These provisions include the protection of privelege, litigation strategy, and trade secrets. I expect Canopy's lawyers to avail themselves of these provisions.
We have no idea who perpetrated the attack, or indeed if there really was an attack. All we have is SCO's assertion combined with second-order hearsay from Eric Raymond. As with any anonymous attack or accidental disaster, any number of loonies or self-interested parties may step forward to claim credit. And the loonies may or may not accurately identify themselves.
Mr. McBride uses the rather strong language "no doubt" to describe this evidence. With equal hyperbole he coins the phrase "affiliated with" to describe the relationship between the alleged hacker and the open-source community. The OED defines 'affiliated' as meaning "United in a dependent relation, as the branches of a society to the central organization."
I would be hard pressed to describe the open source communication as an organiztion at all, let alone one with affiliates.
Darl has written us an open letter: .
My only comment is that Eric Raymond's attribution of the DoS attacks to "a member of the open source community" is hearsay, even if "the open source community" were well-defined enough to have members.
As far as I know, John Ashcroft has not yet been able to completely eliminate the distinction between these two distict components of the administration of justice.
Most of the arguments that I've seen here are the sort that Mr. Lamo can make in court. If the court finds that his actions were justified, it has the opportunity to acquit, or to give some other form of discharge.
In my neighbourhood, I would like the police to arrest people they find in jewellery stores late at night, or in my home while I'm on vacation, or on my computer without permission. If the prosecutor or the judge decides that no charge should be made, or that the charge should be dropped, fine.
While I feel some sympathy for this self-appointed security checker, I can't immediately fault the police. Especially without access to the facts of the case, which will be exposed in the judicial process.
One might argue that Mr. Lamo is being punished by having to go to court. I think not. He must have been well aware that his actions were provocative and that this was a likely outcome. Now he will have the opportunity to justify his actions.
It might be more apt to consider what the response might be if you walked up and down the street trying the doors on houses belonging to people who don't know you from Adam, without regard to whether they were home or not.
AFAIK, unauthorized entry is illegal in most jurisdictions, especially if you defeat some sort of locking mechanism (no matter how trivial).
"Criminal intent" means intent to commit the act that is illegal, not "intent to do harm."
As an OT example, I'm aware of a case in Manitoba of a person who was convicted of 'dangerous driving' for speeding in excess of 200 km/h. Although the judge accepted that the driver had no intent to drive dangerously, he did accept expert testimony that 200 km/h was dangerous, and that the driver intended to drive 200 km/h.
Microsoft's position is that a market dominated by huge corporate entities, supported by huge government and military contracts and legislation like the DMCA and patent acts, is more free (i.e. better) than one in which governments are direct players.
I have all the email I've ever received stored chronologically in flat files. I use full-text search and navigation tools to locate what I need.
I use much the same technique for organizing the papers in my office.
In general you can spend effort imposing some organizational schema on your data, hoping that your organization will enable you to find information later. Or you can leave the data as it lies, and spend the effort at retrieval time, once you know what you're looking for.
Current tools, particularly those in Windows, aren't particulary amenable for this purpose, but they're getting better. For example, you can download a seearch engine and index your hard drive much like the web.
Even primitive tools like grep work pretty well for a few hundred megabytes of mail.
PDF is not as sharable as you think. More and more pdf files contain (usually Windows) system-dependent Postscript stuff that prevents them from displaying or printing properly on different systems.
.pdf is much more portable than .doc. Just don't forget that it is a proprietary closed format, and that Adobe seems not averse to playing the MicroSoft game.
Also, many PDF files are encrypted (badly, but enough to bring the DMCA down on you if you defeat the encryption).
Yesterday I opened a document with Acrobat 5 and a warning was displayed: You are using an old version of Acrobat; this document may not display properly. It displayed OK, but you get the idea.
That said,
I manage my relatives' computer systems with a combination of VNC and ssh.
The problem with VNC is that it grabs the console in Windows, so if the user happens to be on the computer, he or she is interrupted. On the other hand, he or she can see what you are doing so it is good for tutorials.
ssh is wonderful for background copying, checking things out, and so on. Unfortunately a lot of Windows apps (in particular installation wizards) want to grab the console so even if you start them through ssh they are useless unless you sign on with VNC to point and click.
Whenever I set up a machine that I'm to manage, I install VNC as a service, and also cywin/sshd as a service, and I have enough hooks to be able to do most anything. I wouldn't be without either.
One word of warning: Windows XP "fast user switching" and VNC don't get along. If more than one user is on, you see a black screen on VNC. Solution: use ssh to invoke "shutdown -r -force".