Hey, that's a good soundbite, we should remember that. "If this thing passes, it's like requiring everyone to build handcuffs into the keyboard!"
Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
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Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Ever designed a bridge? Do you know how long it takes? Did you know you only get one chance to get it right during the implementation stage?
While your reaction is understandable, and it's easy to overstate software complexity, it is not entirely untenable to maintain that software is an unusually complicated beast, by most any useful metric.
"Useful metric" is where the standard falls down. What metric can we use that makes sense? Can one person understand the design of a bridge? I daresay yes. Can one person understand all of Windows to the same level? I daresay no. Is that a fair comparision? What is a fair comparision?
We lack a metric of complexity. So I'll submit this: By the rule of mediocrity, "on average, everybody is equally stupid", we must say that software is more complex then bridge-building, because we know how to build good bridges. It's been a while since I've heard of a bridge honest-to-goodness failing from something other then lack of designed maintenence. Software, on the other hand, is still problematic and we've been trying to figure out how to build it for years.
Self-flaggelating (or, if you are not a programmer, flaggelating others whom you don't really understand) is not really useful. Attributing bad software to extra stupidity on the part of the software authors is quite disingenuous. Odds are, if a lot of very smart people have been working on the problem and haven't come up with a solution yet that seems to work, it's because it's a hard problem, not because the smart people are extra stupid.
(It's also worth pointing out that the few software team structures that do seem to produce useful, reliable, etc. code also require truly massive expenditures on design, testing, testing, and more testing. Without proof, I'm willing to claim that the amount of money spent developing the software for, say, the Space Shuttle in this manner grossly exceeds the design+labor of any bridge you care to name. (Discount materials for the bridge, there's no clear equivalent in software.) And that's just Space Shuttle software... that doesn't help you email Granny.)
Re:Cartoon Shading, and Dreamcast vs. PS2.
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 2
LOL!
Re:Cartoon Shading, and Dreamcast vs. PS2.
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't know the details of the systems, but the cell shading may have been done more efficiently using the Dreamcast hardware (clock for clock), or it may have been done more easily (in programmer-hours). However, both the Dreamcast and the Gamecube are Turing complete... with enough power and patience, any effect is possible on either platform.
BTW, somebody get Taco a DC, now that they're dirt cheap. Clearly his Playstation mania has left him out of some great gaming experiences if he thinks nothing has been happening the past year or two in the video game industry. (Then again, I should thank people like him. DC stuff wouldn't be anywhere near as cheap if demand was as high as it should have been...)
I'll contradict most of the people who replied to you and agree... and raise you one more.
What really scares me is the number of people who don't know anything about anything. Specific ignorance is correctable, I see no reason to believe that generalized ignorance past a certain age is.
Can some one tell how bad the digital divide was before the digital age?
Only the poor were divided from their digits for stealing bread, or attempting to escape slavery. The rich were left with all digits intact. In the era of the computer, the digital divide strikes even harder: Without digits, it's much harder to type.
Support stem cell research that might lead to cloning fingers and toes so we can finally close the digital divide, now that the electronic age is here!
Remove copyright and people will still want software, right? So somebody will be making money writing software.
How?
Actually, what you get in your situation is a bare minimum of information produced, at the bare minimum price. "Software" seems to be a special case, as some kinds of software can be made by some people for things other then money; this doesn't constitute a proof that "accurate street-level maps", for instance, can be run this way.
I'm talking information, not merely software. Novels, music, poetry, movies, building blueprints, knowlege bases, instructions on how to build a bomb, demographics, maps. Wiping away copyright because some software seems to not need it seems incredibly short-sighted. I'm the first to say copyright is being abused in some quarters, but the problem is the abuse, not the copyright.
'The problem with copyright law is that is does so by artificially making the works a scarce resource, though they are not. (I'll have to admit that I can't come up with a better solution.)'
No other solution exists without invoking an all-knowing deity that determines the value of information in advance. If the supply is not controlled, and information freely propogates, then there is no demand in the economic sense, pushing the price down to zero. This effectively makes the producer eat the cost.
Short of invoking the aforementioned all-knowing deity and then having "the government" pay this price, you can't both give the information away and somehow pay for it.
You can feel this is reprehensible. I wouldn't have much trouble with that. You can also feel that lions eating meat is reprehensible. Neither opinion has the power to change the way things are, however.
'Regardless, I would suggest that the increasingly "extreme" view of copyright is what is likely driving the corresponding "extreme" anti-copyright advocates.'
Quite likely. Of the two, I'm certainly more sympathetic to the "ditch it" POV... However, I think that Utopia in IP would not result either. Hence my moderation.
'Information, however, is not naturally scarce (although the ability to create it may be).'
I finally figured out why that statement has bothered me for so long. It's this: "Information" in the abstract is not scarce. But guess what? "Physical goods" in the abstract are also not scarce!
Useful information, information you want, in other words, "information" in the concrete, is scarce and will remain so for the forseeable future. In some isolated catagories, there may be a glut of "information" (like mail clients), but in the concrete, there does not exist so much "music I like" in the world that it can be said to be a commodity. Unless all you are interested in is stuff in the past, your current desires will always not have enough information to be met.
Water isn't scarce in many places. There's as much of it as you could possibly want. But unless all you want is water, you should anticipate needing to pay somebody for your food, clothing, and shelter. Isolated examples of non-scarcity do not prove the general case of non-scarcity.
You might say I'm missing the point, because once information is created, it can be infinitely copied. And I say in return that you (the reader) would be missing the point. In the old economy, the cost of distribution may have been the primary constraining factor, but the cost of production is still non-zero. The digital economy may make the cost of production the defining factor, but it does little to affect that cost. (Useful information, virtually by definition, requires significant effort to create. If it did not, you would not come to me for the information, you'd simply (re-)create it yourself.)
Even if the physical goods could be distributed for free, you'd still need to pay for production and creation. Even if the costs of production could be reduced to zero, you'd still need to pay for creation... unless everything you wanted was already designed, a situation not likely to happen for a very long time.
I think when you see arguments like "information isn't a scarce resource", you're seeing a confounding of cost of distribution vs. cost of production. The reality is, information is still costly to produce and you can't just wave your hands around and wish it away. While there is historical proof that some software can be developed in the Open Source manner, some catagories of software don't fare so well. Nor is all "information" like software (a massive oversimplification), and for those categories, and for those categories, there is little to no evidence that "novels" or "blueprints" are in a "scarcity-free" world.
In the abstract, copyright recognizes this scarcity by granting the author certain limited rights. In the concrete, most of the problem lies in the absurd nature of those rights. I stand against the DMCA, I stand against the absurdly long copyright terms holders have nowadays, but in the abstract, copyright still works. In fact, the guiding principles of copyright are standing amazingly well against the "onslaught" of technology, even if many of the details aren't faring so well.
Until such time as you can effectively wave a magic wand (i.e., a super-human intelligence) and recieve the answer to any question you can ask ("How can I cure my hippocampus cancer without removing large chunks of my brain and without killing me with an allergic reaction, since I'm allergic to the dyes used in scanning technologies?" That's information that's decidedly scarce and isn't going to not be anytime soon!), information will continue to not be free, and economic models and ethical arguments predicated on those models will continue to not be grounded in reality, with all that that implies.
That said, one might make the case that software is a special case. However, I submit that if that were true, it's one of those things that would be obvious to all concerned. Personally, when I write software which didn't exist before, I find the effort to be non-zero, and one way or another, society needs to support my ability to do that, or I won't do it any more. As it turns out, I'm not getting paid directly. What that effectively boils down to is that I'm 'paying myself' to do it (If I didn't get money from some source, I would not write this software), but that still doesn't mean the effort was zero, and arguments that assume zero monetary cost -> zero effort -> zero scarcity to create are doomed to inaccuracy and failure. Overall, I'd say software is no more immune to the costs of production then any other kind of information.
Strip web services of all the hype... and frankly, the web server isn't even the most importent part. That's just the vector of communication. The importent stuff remains the databases and code.
To implement a simple web service, one doesn't even need a "web server" at all! Just instantiate the xml-rpc server in Python or Perl, or instantiate a SOAP server in Java. And apache can certainly hook into any of these things just as well as IIS can. As for the other things... well, UNIX types have been living without Microsoft's hold-your-hands-and-stick-handcuffs-on-them pre-rolled 'architectures' & components & and everything else.
As the article says, Reduced to the technological basics, it's just XML over HTTP. Are we seriously saying that Apache has some sort of problem serving XML over HTTP? I think the author has bought into the "Web Services!" hype and seriously over-estimates the problems in creating them. Web services are not cool because of technology. They're cool because we're finally finding formats that we can all practically agree on for remote procedure calls.... shorn of the hype, web services are purely social innovations. Microsoft had to hook tech to it to attract the attention of people who are driven by flash, but the tech is almost incidental.
If we were wiser 5 years ago, there's no technological impediment to creating web services then... but there's no known way to shortcut the aquisition of wisdom.
If we can't trust our law enforcement officials, who can we trust? (Certainly not the common Joe.) This does cause an intriguing kind of infinite regress of monitoring.
On the other hand, an ignorant law enforcement system can be manipulated. (Gripping hand, usually those with money and power end up more successfully manipulating it then geeks.)
I think (hope?) you're defending against a false belief. The point that I've yet to see mentioned in any postings is that an increasing number of companies are filing lawsuits for the sole purpose of "unmasking" an anonymous spokesperson, then dropping the suit as soon as they accomplish that, often with the intent of following up on the issue themselves. For instance, your company might have chosen to do internal discipline without regards to the law.
Your example is bad for this purpose, because a real, honest-to-goodness crime is being committed; your company never considered merely unmasking the suspect and internally disciplining them. But there are other cases that have occurred. Suppose someone was merely badmouthing the company, in such a way that they clearly worked inside the company. Companies have been bringing frivolous slander lawsuits against "John Doe"s, finding out who "John Doe" is, then dropping the suit and pursuing internal discipline against the now-unmasked employee. These disciplines are often on the wrong side of legal.
Nobody with any sense is supporting the idea that anonymity is some sort of ultimate goal; instead, people like me recognize that this abuse of the law system is dangerous, and insist that the courts establish that some crime was committed before issuing the unmasking order. Normal procedure up to this point was to unmask before establishing the existence of a crime, and it is this fact that people have been abusing. If a crime is committed, unmask away! But if the statements ticking off the company aren't truly illegal, then they have no particular right to unmask these people, and it is this anonymous speech we support: legal anonymous speech.
Thus, as far as people like me are concerned, your company acted perfectly ethically (as well as legally). You established the existence of a crime (and a rather serious one at that; insider trading seems harmless (due to its abstractness) in some ways but it truly is a victim-crime), then pushed a bit (legally) to discover who was doing it. As far as I'm concerned, if you had to go to court to get that information, more power to you!
I run a weblog tracking this sort of stuff and this story isn't actually interesting enough for me to run; this kind of decision is actually fairly common at this point. The judicial system has "seen the light" of this argument and basically agrees, unless you get unlucky and get a bad judge.
There's one other major difference, which is importent and can't be overlooked: Said "Russian hacker" was actually selling software cracking an existing standard, Felton was doing neither.
(I still don't agree with Dmitry's imprisonment, but you can help "The Cause" by trying to hide from the facts, and you can do a great deal of damage from it.)
Obviously,IIS is *vastly* more popular then apache
on
Code Red III
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They quote a columnist for Microsoft's TechNET who makes the false claim that IIS is more popular than apache, and attributes the widespread exploits to that (false) popularity!
More popular with whom? If there's anything these worms have shown us, it's that there's a HELL of a lot more IIS installations then anybody would really have guessed, due to the ease of installing it without even realizing it with Windows 2000.
IIS and Apache may be roughly comparable for "real" websites, but in terms of sheer number of installations, I'd now bet that IIS is creaming apache.
Before you get too huffy, note this is a bad thing, as it has provided a fertile breeding ground for these worms, while providing little-to-no benefit in return.
"More lusers with vulnerable web servers then ever before - Microsoft Windows 2000."
Network traffic seems high - is this why?
on
Code Redux
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· Score: 1
I'm on an @home cable network, and for the last couple of days my little activity light has been blinking at an astonishingly high rate. Today I finally sniffed the network to see what it was, and it's an amazing rash of ARP requests... about 20 per second. Normal seems to be more like.5-1 per second.
(The cable modem of course only allows me to see broadcast traffic and traffic meant for my network, and I don't normally see this much traffic.)
Think this new Code Red is the reason why? Makes sense...
There was a time when a car alarm going off caused everyone to turn and look, but now they're so commonplace that nobody turns to look at a car when the alarm is going off. If this new noise is going to be used in phones and alarms everywhere, it shouldn't be long before people become desensitized to it as well.
Of course, that's the obvious comment (no offense). But consider: What if you're wrong? Imagine being in Times Square a few years from now, watching the crowd look around like lemmings... *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the Pepsi add *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the CBS add *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the ticker *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the Pepsi add. Repeat as desired.
A scene that fits right into the Matrix.
Anyhow, the humorous image merely underscores my point: While it's virtually doomed to failure in the way you describe, it would be even worse if it actually worked. This thing is violation of Jerf's Law: Never try to do something where the worst case scenario is success.
None of those things affects the content of the page, except running Junkbuster, which I think OK when used locally, but dangerous when used in conjunction with some globally maintained list. (RE: Previous slashdot story on MAPS RBL, which is a similar argument.)
And yes, it's about redistribution. Millions of people will see the "Microsoft" version of the page. In every way that matters, Microsoft is re-distributing the page. That it happens to perform the computations locally on every system cannot be allowed to be an escape hatch, or all protections, logical and otherwise, completely break down. ("[Large cable-modem ISP] does not censor sites... it's just that every time someone requests a competitor's site, we make sure the cable modem rejects the IP address." That's censorship.)
It's almost exactly like running a scam where you bilk people out of $10 at a time, and manage to aquire a couple million that way. You will not be charged under the $10 law, you'll be hit under the full fraud law. It's a general principle, both legal and common sense: Doing lots of little things can't allow you to escape from the consequences of the totality just because each thing was little. Election fraud, bodily injury, hell, even the cigarette companies only kill one cirgarette at a time. This isn't exactly an out-of-the blue kind of thing.
You are aware that the user can turn this off aren't you?
So what? They shouldn't be allowed to make these changes in the first place.
Do you have the same problem with Alexa?
Yes, and a wide variety of other similar services. I don't understand the line of thought that thinks that I must automatically agree with everything else in the world, just because I don't mention it.
It is up to the browser to interpret how it is supposed to look. I can specify that your colors or fonts not be used, I can change the size of the page, I can even view it on a non-traditional device such as a PDA. My browser has been able to fundamentally alter any page you create for a long time now.
Look != information. There may be multiple ways to render a page, but the information content is the same: The same text, the same pictures, the same links, and most germanely, the same lack of links to things I didn't intend to link. Even in what ways the stuff did change, it's well understood that different browsers affect presentation.
But show me the (old) browser that changed the essential meaning of the NoAmazon site I talked about. There is a clear difference. If there were no difference, we would not be debating.
This is not altering your copyrighted information. It is allowing the user, if he chooses, to get more information on words that appear in your document.
If the document is not being modified in any way, then exactly how is the user getting this extra information?... Give up? By the extra links added into my content. Therefore, there are changes in my document.
It's one thing to provide a neutral service, like adding Google into my navigation bar. No problem. But when you cross into the web page, you are now fooling with my content, not the browser's content.
Metaphors suck and prove nothing. Is your maid mass-manufactured and running on a deterministic program? Arranging HTML and making it look pretty == performing menial tasks around the house? What kind of metaphor is that?
You can argue anything you like with a metaphor. No metaphor changes the fact that there is a massive qualitative difference between one person doing one thing to a work and a third party uninvolved in your transaction (artifical and totally non-legal creation of a 'maid' notwithstanding) making large-scale changes that fundamentally alter the meaning of the work.
Nintendo vs. Galoob and most of the rest refers to home use; I don't think it applies because we're talking large scale systematic modification of content and meaning. I can't imagine a court buying an argument that having Mario jump higher affects Nintendo's free speech; adding links to some sites most assuredly does affect their speech.
Feist publications does not apply. That case is about whether or not a list of phone numbers was copyrightable. There is no debate on whether an entirely original web page is copyrightable.
There is no "fair-use" precedent for industrial-scale modification. For instance, you cannot print an annotated edition of a complete work currently in copyright without permission of the copyright owner. None of your referenced cases directly apply to the problem at hand.
So it seems to me that you're saying that I am not allowed to use a highliter in my textbooks.
No, YOU are allowed to use your highlighter. However, Microsoft cannot arbitrarily add highlighting to large numbers of books as Microsoft pleases.
I am now free to modify that document as I see fit (barring redistribution, of course), which includes having software look at the text of the page and auto-link other pages.
YOU are not modifying pages. Microsoft is modifying large numbers of pages at a time.
There's a huge and qualitative difference between you personally modifying your personal copy of a page and a systematic pattern of modification done by a third party. No use of the page (as you say, barring re-distribution) will affect revenue; you can add links to other pages to your hearts content and at worst, only you will be affected. However, when Microsoft modifies the webpages of millions of users to add links to Microsoft-approved retailers, non-Microsoft approved retailers will lose customers and suffer real harm.
There is a massive difference in scale between the two operations and there is no comparision between your personal use and the eminently non-personal use of millions of modifications at a time.
I can go down to Borders, pick up a copy of Finnegan's Wake, go home and proceed to wipe my ass with every page (front and back) of it.
Such actions do not change the contents of the expression of Finnegan's Wake, obvious sick jokes aside, and that's personal use. You'll find that as soon as multiple people become involved, though, that the legalities change.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, that's a good soundbite, we should remember that. "If this thing passes, it's like requiring everyone to build handcuffs into the keyboard!"
While your reaction is understandable, and it's easy to overstate software complexity, it is not entirely untenable to maintain that software is an unusually complicated beast, by most any useful metric.
"Useful metric" is where the standard falls down. What metric can we use that makes sense? Can one person understand the design of a bridge? I daresay yes. Can one person understand all of Windows to the same level? I daresay no. Is that a fair comparision? What is a fair comparision?
We lack a metric of complexity. So I'll submit this: By the rule of mediocrity, "on average, everybody is equally stupid", we must say that software is more complex then bridge-building, because we know how to build good bridges. It's been a while since I've heard of a bridge honest-to-goodness failing from something other then lack of designed maintenence. Software, on the other hand, is still problematic and we've been trying to figure out how to build it for years.
Self-flaggelating (or, if you are not a programmer, flaggelating others whom you don't really understand) is not really useful. Attributing bad software to extra stupidity on the part of the software authors is quite disingenuous. Odds are, if a lot of very smart people have been working on the problem and haven't come up with a solution yet that seems to work, it's because it's a hard problem, not because the smart people are extra stupid.
(It's also worth pointing out that the few software team structures that do seem to produce useful, reliable, etc. code also require truly massive expenditures on design, testing, testing, and more testing. Without proof, I'm willing to claim that the amount of money spent developing the software for, say, the Space Shuttle in this manner grossly exceeds the design+labor of any bridge you care to name. (Discount materials for the bridge, there's no clear equivalent in software.) And that's just Space Shuttle software... that doesn't help you email Granny.)
LOL!
BTW, somebody get Taco a DC, now that they're dirt cheap. Clearly his Playstation mania has left him out of some great gaming experiences if he thinks nothing has been happening the past year or two in the video game industry. (Then again, I should thank people like him. DC stuff wouldn't be anywhere near as cheap if demand was as high as it should have been...)
What really scares me is the number of people who don't know anything about anything. Specific ignorance is correctable, I see no reason to believe that generalized ignorance past a certain age is.
Only the poor were divided from their digits for stealing bread, or attempting to escape slavery. The rich were left with all digits intact. In the era of the computer, the digital divide strikes even harder: Without digits, it's much harder to type.
Support stem cell research that might lead to cloning fingers and toes so we can finally close the digital divide, now that the electronic age is here!
Why do you need Javascript to read your email?
How?
Actually, what you get in your situation is a bare minimum of information produced, at the bare minimum price. "Software" seems to be a special case, as some kinds of software can be made by some people for things other then money; this doesn't constitute a proof that "accurate street-level maps", for instance, can be run this way.
I'm talking information, not merely software. Novels, music, poetry, movies, building blueprints, knowlege bases, instructions on how to build a bomb, demographics, maps. Wiping away copyright because some software seems to not need it seems incredibly short-sighted. I'm the first to say copyright is being abused in some quarters, but the problem is the abuse, not the copyright.
No other solution exists without invoking an all-knowing deity that determines the value of information in advance. If the supply is not controlled, and information freely propogates, then there is no demand in the economic sense, pushing the price down to zero. This effectively makes the producer eat the cost.
Short of invoking the aforementioned all-knowing deity and then having "the government" pay this price, you can't both give the information away and somehow pay for it.
You can feel this is reprehensible. I wouldn't have much trouble with that. You can also feel that lions eating meat is reprehensible. Neither opinion has the power to change the way things are, however.
Quite likely. Of the two, I'm certainly more sympathetic to the "ditch it" POV... However, I think that Utopia in IP would not result either. Hence my moderation.
I finally figured out why that statement has bothered me for so long. It's this: "Information" in the abstract is not scarce. But guess what? "Physical goods" in the abstract are also not scarce!
Useful information, information you want, in other words, "information" in the concrete, is scarce and will remain so for the forseeable future. In some isolated catagories, there may be a glut of "information" (like mail clients), but in the concrete, there does not exist so much "music I like" in the world that it can be said to be a commodity. Unless all you are interested in is stuff in the past, your current desires will always not have enough information to be met.
Water isn't scarce in many places. There's as much of it as you could possibly want. But unless all you want is water, you should anticipate needing to pay somebody for your food, clothing, and shelter. Isolated examples of non-scarcity do not prove the general case of non-scarcity.
You might say I'm missing the point, because once information is created, it can be infinitely copied. And I say in return that you (the reader) would be missing the point. In the old economy, the cost of distribution may have been the primary constraining factor, but the cost of production is still non-zero. The digital economy may make the cost of production the defining factor, but it does little to affect that cost. (Useful information, virtually by definition, requires significant effort to create. If it did not, you would not come to me for the information, you'd simply (re-)create it yourself.)
Even if the physical goods could be distributed for free, you'd still need to pay for production and creation. Even if the costs of production could be reduced to zero, you'd still need to pay for creation... unless everything you wanted was already designed, a situation not likely to happen for a very long time.
I think when you see arguments like "information isn't a scarce resource", you're seeing a confounding of cost of distribution vs. cost of production. The reality is, information is still costly to produce and you can't just wave your hands around and wish it away. While there is historical proof that some software can be developed in the Open Source manner, some catagories of software don't fare so well. Nor is all "information" like software (a massive oversimplification), and for those categories, and for those categories, there is little to no evidence that "novels" or "blueprints" are in a "scarcity-free" world.
In the abstract, copyright recognizes this scarcity by granting the author certain limited rights. In the concrete, most of the problem lies in the absurd nature of those rights. I stand against the DMCA, I stand against the absurdly long copyright terms holders have nowadays, but in the abstract, copyright still works. In fact, the guiding principles of copyright are standing amazingly well against the "onslaught" of technology, even if many of the details aren't faring so well.
Until such time as you can effectively wave a magic wand (i.e., a super-human intelligence) and recieve the answer to any question you can ask ("How can I cure my hippocampus cancer without removing large chunks of my brain and without killing me with an allergic reaction, since I'm allergic to the dyes used in scanning technologies?" That's information that's decidedly scarce and isn't going to not be anytime soon!), information will continue to not be free, and economic models and ethical arguments predicated on those models will continue to not be grounded in reality, with all that that implies.
That said, one might make the case that software is a special case. However, I submit that if that were true, it's one of those things that would be obvious to all concerned. Personally, when I write software which didn't exist before, I find the effort to be non-zero, and one way or another, society needs to support my ability to do that, or I won't do it any more. As it turns out, I'm not getting paid directly. What that effectively boils down to is that I'm 'paying myself' to do it (If I didn't get money from some source, I would not write this software), but that still doesn't mean the effort was zero, and arguments that assume zero monetary cost -> zero effort -> zero scarcity to create are doomed to inaccuracy and failure. Overall, I'd say software is no more immune to the costs of production then any other kind of information.
To implement a simple web service, one doesn't even need a "web server" at all! Just instantiate the xml-rpc server in Python or Perl, or instantiate a SOAP server in Java. And apache can certainly hook into any of these things just as well as IIS can. As for the other things... well, UNIX types have been living without Microsoft's hold-your-hands-and-stick-handcuffs-on-them pre-rolled 'architectures' & components & and everything else.
As the article says, Reduced to the technological basics, it's just XML over HTTP. Are we seriously saying that Apache has some sort of problem serving XML over HTTP? I think the author has bought into the "Web Services!" hype and seriously over-estimates the problems in creating them. Web services are not cool because of technology. They're cool because we're finally finding formats that we can all practically agree on for remote procedure calls.... shorn of the hype, web services are purely social innovations. Microsoft had to hook tech to it to attract the attention of people who are driven by flash, but the tech is almost incidental.
If we were wiser 5 years ago, there's no technological impediment to creating web services then... but there's no known way to shortcut the aquisition of wisdom.
On the other hand, an ignorant law enforcement system can be manipulated. (Gripping hand, usually those with money and power end up more successfully manipulating it then geeks.)
Your example is bad for this purpose, because a real, honest-to-goodness crime is being committed; your company never considered merely unmasking the suspect and internally disciplining them. But there are other cases that have occurred. Suppose someone was merely badmouthing the company, in such a way that they clearly worked inside the company. Companies have been bringing frivolous slander lawsuits against "John Doe"s, finding out who "John Doe" is, then dropping the suit and pursuing internal discipline against the now-unmasked employee. These disciplines are often on the wrong side of legal.
Nobody with any sense is supporting the idea that anonymity is some sort of ultimate goal; instead, people like me recognize that this abuse of the law system is dangerous, and insist that the courts establish that some crime was committed before issuing the unmasking order. Normal procedure up to this point was to unmask before establishing the existence of a crime, and it is this fact that people have been abusing. If a crime is committed, unmask away! But if the statements ticking off the company aren't truly illegal, then they have no particular right to unmask these people, and it is this anonymous speech we support: legal anonymous speech.
Thus, as far as people like me are concerned, your company acted perfectly ethically (as well as legally). You established the existence of a crime (and a rather serious one at that; insider trading seems harmless (due to its abstractness) in some ways but it truly is a victim-crime), then pushed a bit (legally) to discover who was doing it. As far as I'm concerned, if you had to go to court to get that information, more power to you!
I run a weblog tracking this sort of stuff and this story isn't actually interesting enough for me to run; this kind of decision is actually fairly common at this point. The judicial system has "seen the light" of this argument and basically agrees, unless you get unlucky and get a bad judge.
I ask you a question in return: When did I say he was selling software in the US?
(I still don't agree with Dmitry's imprisonment, but you can help "The Cause" by trying to hide from the facts, and you can do a great deal of damage from it.)
More popular with whom? If there's anything these worms have shown us, it's that there's a HELL of a lot more IIS installations then anybody would really have guessed, due to the ease of installing it without even realizing it with Windows 2000.
IIS and Apache may be roughly comparable for "real" websites, but in terms of sheer number of installations, I'd now bet that IIS is creaming apache.
Before you get too huffy, note this is a bad thing, as it has provided a fertile breeding ground for these worms, while providing little-to-no benefit in return.
"More lusers with vulnerable web servers then ever before - Microsoft Windows 2000."
I'm on an @home cable network, and for the last couple of days my little activity light has been blinking at an astonishingly high rate. Today I finally sniffed the network to see what it was, and it's an amazing rash of ARP requests... about 20 per second. Normal seems to be more like .5-1 per second.
(The cable modem of course only allows me to see broadcast traffic and traffic meant for my network, and I don't normally see this much traffic.)
Think this new Code Red is the reason why? Makes sense...
Made it myself. Other great examples include summoning the devil and playing russian roulette. (-1, Offtopic, yes, yes, I know.)
Of course, that's the obvious comment (no offense). But consider: What if you're wrong? Imagine being in Times Square a few years from now, watching the crowd look around like lemmings... *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the Pepsi add *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the CBS add *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the ticker *chussh chussh* everyone looks at the Pepsi add. Repeat as desired.
A scene that fits right into the Matrix.
Anyhow, the humorous image merely underscores my point: While it's virtually doomed to failure in the way you describe, it would be even worse if it actually worked. This thing is violation of Jerf's Law: Never try to do something where the worst case scenario is success.
And yes, it's about redistribution. Millions of people will see the "Microsoft" version of the page. In every way that matters, Microsoft is re-distributing the page. That it happens to perform the computations locally on every system cannot be allowed to be an escape hatch, or all protections, logical and otherwise, completely break down. ("[Large cable-modem ISP] does not censor sites... it's just that every time someone requests a competitor's site, we make sure the cable modem rejects the IP address." That's censorship.)
It's almost exactly like running a scam where you bilk people out of $10 at a time, and manage to aquire a couple million that way. You will not be charged under the $10 law, you'll be hit under the full fraud law. It's a general principle, both legal and common sense: Doing lots of little things can't allow you to escape from the consequences of the totality just because each thing was little. Election fraud, bodily injury, hell, even the cigarette companies only kill one cirgarette at a time. This isn't exactly an out-of-the blue kind of thing.
So what? They shouldn't be allowed to make these changes in the first place.
Do you have the same problem with Alexa?
Yes, and a wide variety of other similar services. I don't understand the line of thought that thinks that I must automatically agree with everything else in the world, just because I don't mention it.
It is up to the browser to interpret how it is supposed to look. I can specify that your colors or fonts not be used, I can change the size of the page, I can even view it on a non-traditional device such as a PDA. My browser has been able to fundamentally alter any page you create for a long time now.
Look != information. There may be multiple ways to render a page, but the information content is the same: The same text, the same pictures, the same links, and most germanely, the same lack of links to things I didn't intend to link. Even in what ways the stuff did change, it's well understood that different browsers affect presentation.
But show me the (old) browser that changed the essential meaning of the NoAmazon site I talked about. There is a clear difference. If there were no difference, we would not be debating.
This is not altering your copyrighted information. It is allowing the user, if he chooses, to get more information on words that appear in your document.
If the document is not being modified in any way, then exactly how is the user getting this extra information? ... Give up? By the extra links added into my content. Therefore, there are changes in my document.
It's one thing to provide a neutral service, like adding Google into my navigation bar. No problem. But when you cross into the web page, you are now fooling with my content, not the browser's content.
You can argue anything you like with a metaphor. No metaphor changes the fact that there is a massive qualitative difference between one person doing one thing to a work and a third party uninvolved in your transaction (artifical and totally non-legal creation of a 'maid' notwithstanding) making large-scale changes that fundamentally alter the meaning of the work.
Feist publications does not apply. That case is about whether or not a list of phone numbers was copyrightable. There is no debate on whether an entirely original web page is copyrightable.
There is no "fair-use" precedent for industrial-scale modification. For instance, you cannot print an annotated edition of a complete work currently in copyright without permission of the copyright owner. None of your referenced cases directly apply to the problem at hand.
No, YOU are allowed to use your highlighter. However, Microsoft cannot arbitrarily add highlighting to large numbers of books as Microsoft pleases.
I am now free to modify that document as I see fit (barring redistribution, of course), which includes having software look at the text of the page and auto-link other pages.
YOU are not modifying pages. Microsoft is modifying large numbers of pages at a time.
There's a huge and qualitative difference between you personally modifying your personal copy of a page and a systematic pattern of modification done by a third party. No use of the page (as you say, barring re-distribution) will affect revenue; you can add links to other pages to your hearts content and at worst, only you will be affected. However, when Microsoft modifies the webpages of millions of users to add links to Microsoft-approved retailers, non-Microsoft approved retailers will lose customers and suffer real harm.
There is a massive difference in scale between the two operations and there is no comparision between your personal use and the eminently non-personal use of millions of modifications at a time.
I can go down to Borders, pick up a copy of Finnegan's Wake, go home and proceed to wipe my ass with every page (front and back) of it.
Such actions do not change the contents of the expression of Finnegan's Wake, obvious sick jokes aside, and that's personal use. You'll find that as soon as multiple people become involved, though, that the legalities change.