What part of unauthorized could possibly apply here?
At least in most states in the US, there's technical ability and then there's legal authorization. I technically have the ability to open my neighbor's door and walk into their house. I do not have the legal authorization to do so. This is analogy is more apropos than most because my neighbor is handicapped and has a button which opens the door automatically if it is unlocked.
I have the technical ability to connect to most open access points. I may not have the legal authorization to do so. Just because the router is configured (by default, in most cases) to hand out addresses does not indicate that there's a legal authorization to use the network. Though it seems like about half of Slashdotters think that if you can do something, you should be authorized to--that simply isn't the way the law works.
If I want to use your open network to sniff out your credit card number, your Facebook account credentials,
These may fall under some state wiretapping laws. But your choice of wording is somewhat unfortunate. You probably aren't using the network, in these cases. You're just capturing data transmissions.
snoop your open network shares over your open network
I guess this depends on what you mean by 'snoop.' Capture files as they go across the wire? See above. Connect to the shares? That's likely a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Meanwhile, you're in your house thinking the law is somehow keeping you safe.
The law doesn't perform actions, so anyone who thinks that any law keeps them safe is being silly.
What happens is that people fear getting caught, and so they don't take the actions. If there's almost no chance that they'll be caught, sure, they might not care. But that's why there are often very high penalties for these types of crimes.
Regardless, there are ways of getting caught doing passive sniffing. The law is not unenforceable. If I see you in your car outside of my house with a laptop, you might be up to no good. I could call the police to have them investigate.
Ah, I think I was getting confused--the last release I remembered was the RTMP's specs in June. It's not part of the SWF spec per se, but it is required to build a fully compatible Flash player.
Unfortunately, due to Adobe's support of DRM in Flash Player, we'll never have a fully compatible open-source Flash player. Also, there are patent issues with some of the codecs that Adobe Flash supports. Realistically, there will never be a fully legal, third-party, open source Flash player.
You don't need a 64-bit address space to run much of anything. Very few applications really need it. So what's the point of going 64-bit at all? For the handful of people who will actually benefit from the capabilities?
At this point, you're talking about targeting the same (or lower) market share as Linux on the desktop holds.
But seriously, what's the difference between an audio stream and a subtitle stream that means that one should be part of the standard while the other shouldn't? Or do you think that all three of the main types of streams (including video) should be standardized in a way that the developer has to do more work, but gets more flexibility?
We're already fairly restricted in our video stream, and in a very undesirable way--that is, different sets of codecs are supported by different browsers, and there is no single codec supported by all browsers.
I actually don't know much about how the audio works, but there are lots of ways to do audio, too.
Since you can overlay on top of HTML5 video, there's really no reason that a developer couldn't roll his own subtitles. But it would be really nice if the video element had a way of doing it that was standard.
Last night when I saw the hideously distracting background image, I searched for a way to remove it. There was no text that said "remove" on the page or in the source. I changed the background image, and suddenly the text appeared. So I clicked the text, and it reverted to the hideously distracting background image.
The default image was only supposed to be there for a day, after which it would presumably only exist for users who decided to keep it. But for as long as that background image was there, you had to have an image--you couldn't have just the plain old Google page (unless you used https.)
Google does this ALL THE TIME with various apps. They make changes to the interface--usually good--that the user has no way of undoing. It's when the changes are bad or distracting that there is a problem. For example, they made a change to the mobile version of Reader a while back which made it incredibly easy to accidentally hit the "sign out" link. It was a horrible design choice, and there was no way for users to fix it themselves. No going back to the old interface.
That's the double-edged sword of web applications. Your users get automatic bug fixes, but they also get automatic upgrades to (possibly) inferior versions.
It wasn't even expecting you to access it via a link. The way it works (I'm making a few assumptions here, based upon the behavior of the iPad) is that the applet which logs you in to AT&T to sign up for data pre-fills your e-mail address based upon the ICC. To do that, presumably, it called this interface. If this is all true, then the interface was never meant to be accessed by a human at all. It's also difficult to practically secure.
The only sensible way of handling such things is to ask what a reasonable person would do. Reasonableness tests are littered throughout the law, and are good for cases where there's a general grey area.
Would a reasonable person consider the AT&T interface to be public? It was an interface meant to be used by an application, not by a person. A reasonable person would not likely consider that public.
Would http://slashdot.org/ be considered public by a reasonable person? Probably.
Geeks work in a world with hard-and-fast rules, and they like to think that they live in such a world, too. They don't. The law is very, very grey.
This is problematic. If a copyright holder can only sue for damages, there's zero incentive for people to pay for goods. They can take the chance and pirate it. If they're caught, then they just pay the regular fee. Since the piracy detection rate is lower than 100% (significantly lower, I'd wager), an individual will end up paying less overall. Even if the detection rate is at 100% for some people, they're still only paying what they would have had to in the store, anyway.
Now if you're suggesting that there should be criminal penalties for copying a music file, that's another matter. The problem here is that piracy is rampant enough that it's almost impossible to enforce criminally. Imagine the case backlogs.
No, there's a difference between what is owed and what was lost when talking about copyright. Remember, one infringement can cost $150,000. That's nowhere near the cost of one song--it's there to discourage infringement.
They are almost certainly just using some sort of IDS (or "network virus scanner", which amounts to the same thing in the security appliance world.) Unfortunately, these are usually fairly prone to false positives. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Macs that were caught were falses.
Skype, for some reason, really throws our IDS for a loop. Whenever a machine that has just been reimaged triggers our IDS, invariably the user had started Skype just before the alert was triggered. But other software causes problems, too. We've even had people copying infected files in plaintext trigger various SMB-related signatures, even though the machines themselves were not compromised.
Lots of universities use IDS, but I don't think so many go to those lengths (requiring a reformat.)
Really? Is it that easy to get ahold of your ISP? Around here, I'm lucky if I can get someone on the phone after 30 minutes on hold, and that's without hundreds of people calling about deactivations.
With the exception of Adobe Reader, these are not really problems at all. These are feature upgrades. While it would be nice to get those extra features (and nice to know when you are getting them), it's almost completely irrelevant to the fragmentation "problem."
Application compatibility is the issue, because developers who write an app want it to be able to run on a wide variety of platforms with minimal testing.
I don't think that an Android device with a modified API should be allowed to be called an Android device. That said, I've never heard of any apps for which this was a problem.
The camera thing...well that's an issue with iPhone OS, too. But most importantly, you can restrict your device to certain features in the marketplace, so this shouldn't be an issue.
The stories just say that fragmentation is killing Android, but they provide no evidence. They are making the claims, here. I have found no evidence that there's a fragmentation problem. There are apps that don't work for all devices, but iPhone OS has that issue, too, and it's only going to get worse.
Actually, the Android market lets you limit by features, too. But as devices running iPhone OS become more fragmented, we'll see any problems from such fragmentation begin to affect Apple, too.
That said, I think the fragmentation issue is highly overstated.
That's going to happen to Apple soon enough. There are already multiple processor speeds and RAM amounts. The next version is expected to be a different resolution, as well as having new hardware (front-facing camera.) The new iPhone OS will not fully support all iPhone devices, limiting the usefulness of some apps on these devices. There's also no word yet whether or not (or how) the API gracefully degrades on phones which do not support such features.
I suspect that with both phones, you will be able to target the lowest common denominator. This is something I see in the Android market already, though some developers who can't figure out a way to generalize their code just release versions specific to each device.
"Go back" is, if not implemented per application, at least overrideable per application. It usually works pretty well, but some apps (Pandora, for example) don't work intuitively IMO.
Unfortunately, so much can affect the actual mileage that such ratings are even still somewhat meaningless. They're really best for comparing cars, not for gauging actual mileage. Changing the estimates only clouds the issue in the way that you describe--making it difficult or impossible to compare current cars to cars prior to the change.
There's another issue, though. Companies are looking forward and seeing a day where cdroms are used less. Dell (Alienware) for example, has an 11-inch gaming netbook which doesn't have a cdrom. As much as I'd like to be able to buy games which don't have any sort of DRM, CD-check, online activation, etc. that's just not going to happen. It's part of the reason that I don't buy many games anymore.
I hate online activation. It just seems much more reasonable than some of the other schemes. Just like a CD check (now) seems more reasonable given on-line activation and a limited number of activations.
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What part of unauthorized could possibly apply here?
At least in most states in the US, there's technical ability and then there's legal authorization. I technically have the ability to open my neighbor's door and walk into their house. I do not have the legal authorization to do so. This is analogy is more apropos than most because my neighbor is handicapped and has a button which opens the door automatically if it is unlocked.
I have the technical ability to connect to most open access points. I may not have the legal authorization to do so. Just because the router is configured (by default, in most cases) to hand out addresses does not indicate that there's a legal authorization to use the network. Though it seems like about half of Slashdotters think that if you can do something, you should be authorized to--that simply isn't the way the law works.
If I want to use your open network to sniff out your credit card number, your Facebook account credentials,
These may fall under some state wiretapping laws. But your choice of wording is somewhat unfortunate. You probably aren't using the network, in these cases. You're just capturing data transmissions.
snoop your open network shares over your open network
I guess this depends on what you mean by 'snoop.' Capture files as they go across the wire? See above. Connect to the shares? That's likely a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Meanwhile, you're in your house thinking the law is somehow keeping you safe.
The law doesn't perform actions, so anyone who thinks that any law keeps them safe is being silly.
What happens is that people fear getting caught, and so they don't take the actions. If there's almost no chance that they'll be caught, sure, they might not care. But that's why there are often very high penalties for these types of crimes.
Regardless, there are ways of getting caught doing passive sniffing. The law is not unenforceable. If I see you in your car outside of my house with a laptop, you might be up to no good. I could call the police to have them investigate.
Ah, I think I was getting confused--the last release I remembered was the RTMP's specs in June. It's not part of the SWF spec per se, but it is required to build a fully compatible Flash player.
Unfortunately, due to Adobe's support of DRM in Flash Player, we'll never have a fully compatible open-source Flash player. Also, there are patent issues with some of the codecs that Adobe Flash supports. Realistically, there will never be a fully legal, third-party, open source Flash player.
While the Open Screen project has been around for 2 years, it's only been one year (this month) since the restrictions on SWF were removed.
You don't need a 64-bit address space to run much of anything. Very few applications really need it. So what's the point of going 64-bit at all? For the handful of people who will actually benefit from the capabilities?
At this point, you're talking about targeting the same (or lower) market share as Linux on the desktop holds.
But seriously, what's the difference between an audio stream and a subtitle stream that means that one should be part of the standard while the other shouldn't? Or do you think that all three of the main types of streams (including video) should be standardized in a way that the developer has to do more work, but gets more flexibility?
We're already fairly restricted in our video stream, and in a very undesirable way--that is, different sets of codecs are supported by different browsers, and there is no single codec supported by all browsers.
I actually don't know much about how the audio works, but there are lots of ways to do audio, too.
Since you can overlay on top of HTML5 video, there's really no reason that a developer couldn't roll his own subtitles. But it would be really nice if the video element had a way of doing it that was standard.
Last night when I saw the hideously distracting background image, I searched for a way to remove it. There was no text that said "remove" on the page or in the source. I changed the background image, and suddenly the text appeared. So I clicked the text, and it reverted to the hideously distracting background image.
The default image was only supposed to be there for a day, after which it would presumably only exist for users who decided to keep it. But for as long as that background image was there, you had to have an image--you couldn't have just the plain old Google page (unless you used https.)
Google does this ALL THE TIME with various apps. They make changes to the interface--usually good--that the user has no way of undoing. It's when the changes are bad or distracting that there is a problem. For example, they made a change to the mobile version of Reader a while back which made it incredibly easy to accidentally hit the "sign out" link. It was a horrible design choice, and there was no way for users to fix it themselves. No going back to the old interface.
That's the double-edged sword of web applications. Your users get automatic bug fixes, but they also get automatic upgrades to (possibly) inferior versions.
It wasn't even expecting you to access it via a link. The way it works (I'm making a few assumptions here, based upon the behavior of the iPad) is that the applet which logs you in to AT&T to sign up for data pre-fills your e-mail address based upon the ICC. To do that, presumably, it called this interface. If this is all true, then the interface was never meant to be accessed by a human at all. It's also difficult to practically secure.
The only sensible way of handling such things is to ask what a reasonable person would do. Reasonableness tests are littered throughout the law, and are good for cases where there's a general grey area.
Would a reasonable person consider the AT&T interface to be public? It was an interface meant to be used by an application, not by a person. A reasonable person would not likely consider that public.
Would http://slashdot.org/ be considered public by a reasonable person? Probably.
Geeks work in a world with hard-and-fast rules, and they like to think that they live in such a world, too. They don't. The law is very, very grey.
This is problematic. If a copyright holder can only sue for damages, there's zero incentive for people to pay for goods. They can take the chance and pirate it. If they're caught, then they just pay the regular fee. Since the piracy detection rate is lower than 100% (significantly lower, I'd wager), an individual will end up paying less overall. Even if the detection rate is at 100% for some people, they're still only paying what they would have had to in the store, anyway.
Now if you're suggesting that there should be criminal penalties for copying a music file, that's another matter. The problem here is that piracy is rampant enough that it's almost impossible to enforce criminally. Imagine the case backlogs.
No, there's a difference between what is owed and what was lost when talking about copyright. Remember, one infringement can cost $150,000. That's nowhere near the cost of one song--it's there to discourage infringement.
They are almost certainly just using some sort of IDS (or "network virus scanner", which amounts to the same thing in the security appliance world.) Unfortunately, these are usually fairly prone to false positives. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Macs that were caught were falses.
Skype, for some reason, really throws our IDS for a loop. Whenever a machine that has just been reimaged triggers our IDS, invariably the user had started Skype just before the alert was triggered. But other software causes problems, too. We've even had people copying infected files in plaintext trigger various SMB-related signatures, even though the machines themselves were not compromised.
Lots of universities use IDS, but I don't think so many go to those lengths (requiring a reformat.)
Really? Is it that easy to get ahold of your ISP? Around here, I'm lucky if I can get someone on the phone after 30 minutes on hold, and that's without hundreds of people calling about deactivations.
Probably. And the Casino can ask you to leave at any time.
So you bought a feature-incomplete phone, and now you're complaining about it?
yeah, but remember all those people who bought iphones on the first day and then "got screwed" when the price dropped?
With the exception of Adobe Reader, these are not really problems at all. These are feature upgrades. While it would be nice to get those extra features (and nice to know when you are getting them), it's almost completely irrelevant to the fragmentation "problem."
Application compatibility is the issue, because developers who write an app want it to be able to run on a wide variety of platforms with minimal testing.
I don't think that an Android device with a modified API should be allowed to be called an Android device. That said, I've never heard of any apps for which this was a problem.
The camera thing...well that's an issue with iPhone OS, too. But most importantly, you can restrict your device to certain features in the marketplace, so this shouldn't be an issue.
The stories just say that fragmentation is killing Android, but they provide no evidence. They are making the claims, here. I have found no evidence that there's a fragmentation problem. There are apps that don't work for all devices, but iPhone OS has that issue, too, and it's only going to get worse.
There's support and then there are upgrades. There's really no requirement, explicit or otherwise, for Sprint to offer a 2.1 upgrade for the HTC Hero.
Actually, the Android market lets you limit by features, too. But as devices running iPhone OS become more fragmented, we'll see any problems from such fragmentation begin to affect Apple, too.
That said, I think the fragmentation issue is highly overstated.
That's going to happen to Apple soon enough. There are already multiple processor speeds and RAM amounts. The next version is expected to be a different resolution, as well as having new hardware (front-facing camera.) The new iPhone OS will not fully support all iPhone devices, limiting the usefulness of some apps on these devices. There's also no word yet whether or not (or how) the API gracefully degrades on phones which do not support such features.
I suspect that with both phones, you will be able to target the lowest common denominator. This is something I see in the Android market already, though some developers who can't figure out a way to generalize their code just release versions specific to each device.
"Go back" is, if not implemented per application, at least overrideable per application. It usually works pretty well, but some apps (Pandora, for example) don't work intuitively IMO.
Unfortunately, so much can affect the actual mileage that such ratings are even still somewhat meaningless. They're really best for comparing cars, not for gauging actual mileage. Changing the estimates only clouds the issue in the way that you describe--making it difficult or impossible to compare current cars to cars prior to the change.
There's another issue, though. Companies are looking forward and seeing a day where cdroms are used less. Dell (Alienware) for example, has an 11-inch gaming netbook which doesn't have a cdrom. As much as I'd like to be able to buy games which don't have any sort of DRM, CD-check, online activation, etc. that's just not going to happen. It's part of the reason that I don't buy many games anymore.
I hate online activation. It just seems much more reasonable than some of the other schemes. Just like a CD check (now) seems more reasonable given on-line activation and a limited number of activations.