I really don't understand what people are unhappy about. Novell is offering to pay people to add certain features to Evolution and Gnome. In return for that payment, Novell wants to own the copyright of the resulting code (so they can also use it in their proprietary products), but they promise to also make sure the code is released under a free license (not unreasonable since they are making the offer to a community of free software developers). If you don't like those terms, feel free to not send your code to Novell and not collect any bounty. If other people do like those terms, that is their business.
Much as I've appreciated Real's Linux players over the years the reality is that Real has been mismanaged for a long time. Real has had Linux/Unix players for bog years. If they had invested the effort and energy to take those players and partner with an embedded Linux company (MontaVista, etc.) they could have been out in front with a low-cost media platform for portable devices *long* before anyone else... they could have at least been the player software behind most iPod "clones" if not having gotten lucky and have had one of their licensees outdo Apple.
But they focused on streaming for too long and their first major step into the portable world was with cell phone media players late in the game... and the rest will soon be history.
According to this the MA proposed super-DMCA bill has been referred to the committee on criminal justice and there is a public hearing scheduled on April 2. Doesn't sound dead to me (as one other poster claimed).
Does anyone know how people can get into that meeting and testify? I'd hope some quick grass-roots opposition could kill this.
The current CIO (no longer co- for the moment) of Ameritrade seems to have very positive view of Linux and open-source in general according to this article. The CIO who resigned recently was NOT the one bullish on open-source and Linux. Hmmm....
The forcing point is not about entertainment products themselves - whether they are songs, movies, e-books or whatever. Those things people can take or leave as they choose. The forcing point is about the computing and consumer electronics devices people use to view these entertainment products. If the SSSCA becomes law, it will illegal to manufacture, import, sell, etc. computing and consumer electronics devices that do not implement DRM measures. So, in the post-SSSCA world, if you want to...
listen to music,
watch movies,
access the Internet,
program a computer,
or do any of the other things you do with computing and consumer electronics devices you will only be able to do so with a device that implements DRM. That is the sense in which DRM will be "forced down our throats... whether we like it or not" - and that, to me, qualifies as draconian.
The new HPaq building a strategy around Linux would be a bold and inspiring move, and might mean that they could salvage something out of this train-wreck of a merger. But it will never happen. The Beast in Redmond wouldn't like it, and a struggling PC OEM simply can't risk making the Beast angry. No, the Beast wants HPaq to generate chaos and confusion around Tru64, HP-UX, Linux and the rest and what the Beast wants, the Beast gets.
Get your facts straight. DEC didn't lose the lawsuit with Intel, it was the other way around: Intel settled on terms favorable to DEC (buying Alpha facilities and the like for much more than DEC could have gotten otherwise). Compaq abandoned the Alpha because, like DEC before them, they could never figure out how successfully market it's technology. I guess the only consolation is that some of that tech lives on in the Athlon.
Not releasing the details just means he didn't really break the HDCP encryption. He just wanted some publicity and blaming the DMCA is trendy...
And the really great thing about the DMCA is that he can't do anything to refute my trolling because it would expose him to civil or criminal liability (remember the DMCA even outlaws acts of circumvention, and given past experience I'd guess that that provision can be streched to apply outside US border as well).
One thing that the article left out is that the CPUC actually has some power in this (their gesture is not entirely symbolic at this point). If the CPUC is unhappy they can refuse to approve the transfer of Northpoint's assets (see a copy of the CPUC's ruling at dslreports.com). This would, naturally, be a significant roadblock in the AT&T deal, which is the only thing that will let Northpoint's creditors even see pennies on the dollar. So, if the CPUC holds firm, some amount of justice will be done. Read the dslreports.com coverage of the negotiations between the ISPs and Northpoint to fund a more orderly transition. The reason it did not happen is that the bankers and other creditors of Northpoint got greedy. They wanted to take lots of the ISPs' money without giving any guarantees about the level or length of service they would provide for a transition.
If the Supreme Court ruled in the publishers' favor on "fair use" grounds (or ruled against them based on the DMCA). Since content owners of all stripes have been trying to destroy fair use using the DMCA I'd like to see their own sword turned on them (one way or another).
So, in other words, the spectrum given to the existing broadcast networks in order to encourage them to develop and deploy HDTV, was not just a multi-billion dollar giveaway to a special interest, it was a completely wasted multi-billion dollar giveaway (since this new tech shows how they could deploy HDTV without using additional spectrum).
Actually fair use is what is required to reconcile
copyright law with the First Amendment. Having a
copyright on something includes the right to forbit others to speak it. Without the limitations on copyright that have been codified as fair use, copyright law and the First Amendment could not be reconciled.
On cnn.com (AOL Time Warner):
Appeals court upholds most of Napster injunction, CNN reports.
To be fair, my quick and dirty read of the injunction is that the appeals court agreed with the district court on almost everything and is just asking that the injunction be modified to apply some procedural polish (so CNN's report is
more accurate), but I think it is interesting
that reporting of the "same" story seems to
differ depending on which pies the parent
company of the reporting organization has their
fingers in.
In the US, if you couldn't do your banking with
lynx on a text console I think the bank could be sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. As I recall, the only browsers that blind people can reasonably use are text-based browsers (through some form of text-to-speech conversion). AOL had some trouble over this within the last year or two (they settled by agreeing to spend money on developing interfaces for the blind, IIRC) and a bank is a "public accommodation" that should be subject to the ADA. If there are similar laws in Canada, pointing this out might do the trick.
Quoting from Salon's article:
One SDMI participant predicted: "They are going to try to keep it quiet -- the official word will be that the testing company is still analyzing the results. They will try to skate out of this without releasing the information that it's all broken."
Quoting from Inside's article:
'When a publication makes such a completely wrong, unfounded, anonymous slander, I think it deserves a very strong answer,'' Chariglione told Inside, referring to a report appearing on Salon.com Thursday citing anonymous sources that claimed each of the six technologies offered up for hacking by the SDMI had been compromised. ''It's simply not true, because we, ourselves, don't have that information. We have about 450 files, with 450 descriptions of methods -- you know, our testing managing committee started working on this Wednesday morning, and it's simply impossible to say whether this is true or this is false. Nobody knows! And when I say nobody, I mean nobody, because it's 450 music files that have yet to be tested.''
The way the job market is (I was on an H1 in Denver), I doubled my salary in 1.5 years. Everytime a review came along, I threatened to quit and forced concessions out of my employer.
I was under the impression that the trap that gets most H1B employees is the green-card application. Employers eagerly sponsor those applications because then, if the employee quits, their green-card application is screwed up (even if the employee is moving to a better job), and, especially given the insane bureaucracy that is the INS, their chances of staying in the US are pretty much blown. As I understand it, this gives many employees on H1B visas a strong incentive to keep quiet about low salaries, poor working conditions and the like.
Is this true, and, if so, how did you deal with it? Obviously you weren't afraid to antagonize your employer, but did you just not apply for a green card, were you confident you'd never have to carry out your threat to quit, or did you do something else?
I'd say it is much better than the alternative:
people born in America who are not recognized as
citizens because their births where not "good enough" according to whatever rules Congress dreamed up last week. In the past, America has had a horrible record on their treatment of the children of immigrants (Japanese-Americans in World War II, for example). If we could have denied or revoked their citizenship, we would have. I, for one, am glad that we couldn't.
I'm amazed at the number of people who didn't
seem to read the article before commenting on it
(but I probably shouldn't be).
First, the article is very clear that most H1B's
expect their stay to be permanent: get an H1B, start working in the US, get a green card...
The reasons that so many of them have to leave are (which would have been very difficult for them to anticipate in 1994):
(a) The INS cannot process their green card applications fast enough.
(b) There are caps on the number of green cards that can be awarded in a given year and there are further caps on what percentage of that number can be awarded to citizens of a particular country, and, as I recall, these caps are frequently treated as a political football.
I'm also surprised that no one has commented on the detail in the article that I found most startling: The couple in the article has a child, that, as far as I can tell (and, to be fair, the article was not clear here), was born while they were living in the US. Unless there has been a Constitutional amendment after the 14th that I don't know about, that child is automatically an American citizen. I really don't see what business the INS has deporting the parents of an American citizen. I thought one of the principles of immigration law was to keep families together.
IIRC, the 90% figure refers to the combined market share of AIM and ICQ. The interesting proposed
conditions I read about said that AOL had to
open up its IM at the earlier of two times:
1) Six months after the AOL/TW merger closes.
2) Whenever AOL deploys technology that allows AIM and ICQ to interoperate.(Under the theory that once you make your own services interoperate, extending that to rival services is not as big a deal, I guess).
The update is dated at 9/13 at 05:16 PM. Since
it is only 2:03 PM Eastern time on 9/13 as I write this (and I thought Slashdot was edited/dated entirely in the US) I wanted to know what the time zone on the update was.
Sigma Designs (makers of the Hollywood+ DVD
decoder cards) has released a driver for their
NetStream 2000 card for Linux
here. These drivers apparently include source code according to their
FAQ. Of course, this is not a big deal because the "interesting" parts of a DVD player are implemented in hardware. Someone is also working on a DVD player application built around this driver, though it is not clear how far along that project is.
After October 28, 2000 it will be illegal to
circumvent an access control according to the DMCA. According to the MPAA's legal theory,
this means descrambling any scrambled copyrighted
work if you don't have the consent of the copyright holder of that work. So to safely distribute DeCSS: make up your own form of scrambling. Distribute DeCSS and your own associated copyrighted content (say an essay about how you feel about the case) scrambled with your form scrambler. Distribute the descrambling tool separately and explicitly inform anyone who downloads the tool that they are permitted to use the tool to descramble your work for their personal use unless they are an employee, lawyer, consultant, etc. of the MPAA or one of its member companies or they communicate the results of the descrambling to any of those people. When the MPAA sues you distributing DeCSS either:
1) The only evidence they have is your claim to be distributing DeCSS (because they didn't descramble your scrambling) or
2) You can countersue them for circumventing your "access control". Quote extensively from the MPAA briefs and Judge Kaplan's opinion to establish your access control rights.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL so this is probably not airtight, and I wouldn't even dream of doing
this unless you have plenty of money to cover
your legal bills.
This is exactly the conclusion Bruce Schneier reached while writing Secrets & Lies. His eventual response (in full here) was that security is not about preventing all attacks (which is a hopeless and impossible goal), but rather about managing the risk of an attack. Just because you can't prevent every possible attack on your computer doesn't mean it isn't worth some effort to lower the risk of an attack (or to lower the probability that an attack will cause damage).
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand what people are unhappy about. Novell is offering to pay people to add certain features to Evolution and Gnome. In return for that payment, Novell wants to own the copyright of the resulting code (so they can also use it in their proprietary products), but they promise to also make sure the code is released under a free license (not unreasonable since they are making the offer to a community of free software developers). If you don't like those terms, feel free to not send your code to Novell and not collect any bounty. If other people do like those terms, that is their business.
Much as I've appreciated Real's Linux players over the years the reality is that Real has been mismanaged for a long time. Real has had Linux/Unix players for bog years. If they had invested the effort and energy to take those players and partner with an embedded Linux company (MontaVista, etc.) they could have been out in front with a low-cost media platform for portable devices *long* before anyone else... they could have at least been the player software behind most iPod "clones" if not having gotten lucky and have had one of their licensees outdo Apple.
But they focused on streaming for too long and their first major step into the portable world was with cell phone media players late in the game... and the rest will soon be history.
According to this the MA proposed super-DMCA bill has been referred to the committee on criminal justice and there is a public hearing scheduled on April 2. Doesn't sound dead to me (as one other poster claimed).
Does anyone know how people can get into that meeting and testify? I'd hope some quick grass-roots opposition could kill this.
cnn.com did link to DeCSS at one point. When people noticed, and pointed out how hypocritical this was the link was taken down, of course.
The current CIO (no longer co- for the moment) of Ameritrade seems to have very positive view of Linux and open-source in general according to this article. The CIO who resigned recently was NOT the one bullish on open-source and Linux. Hmmm....
The forcing point is not about entertainment products themselves - whether they are songs, movies, e-books or whatever. Those things people can take or leave as they choose. The forcing point is about the computing and consumer electronics devices people use to view these entertainment products. If the SSSCA becomes law, it will illegal to manufacture, import, sell, etc. computing and consumer electronics devices that do not implement DRM measures. So, in the post-SSSCA world, if you want to...
... whether we like it or not" - and that, to me, qualifies as draconian.
listen to music,
watch movies,
access the Internet,
program a computer,
or do any of the other things you do with computing and consumer electronics devices you will only be able to do so with a device that implements DRM. That is the sense in which DRM will be "forced down our throats
The new HPaq building a strategy around Linux would be a bold and inspiring move, and might mean that they could salvage something out of this train-wreck of a merger. But it will never happen. The Beast in Redmond wouldn't like it, and a struggling PC OEM simply can't risk making the Beast angry. No, the Beast wants HPaq to generate chaos and confusion around Tru64, HP-UX, Linux and the rest and what the Beast wants, the Beast gets.
Get your facts straight. DEC didn't lose the lawsuit with Intel, it was the other way around: Intel settled on terms favorable to DEC (buying Alpha facilities and the like for much more than DEC could have gotten otherwise). Compaq abandoned the Alpha because, like DEC before them, they could never figure out how successfully market it's technology. I guess the only consolation is that some of that tech lives on in the Athlon.
Not releasing the details just means he didn't really break the HDCP encryption. He just wanted some publicity and blaming the DMCA is trendy...
And the really great thing about the DMCA is that he can't do anything to refute my trolling because it would expose him to civil or criminal liability (remember the DMCA even outlaws acts of circumvention, and given past experience I'd guess that that provision can be streched to apply outside US border as well).
One thing that the article left out is that the CPUC actually has some power in this (their gesture is not entirely symbolic at this point). If the CPUC is unhappy they can refuse to approve the transfer of Northpoint's assets (see a copy of the CPUC's ruling at dslreports.com). This would, naturally, be a significant roadblock in the AT&T deal, which is the only thing that will let Northpoint's creditors even see pennies on the dollar. So, if the CPUC holds firm, some amount of justice will be done. Read the dslreports.com coverage of the negotiations between the ISPs and Northpoint to fund a more orderly transition. The reason it did not happen is that the bankers and other creditors of Northpoint got greedy. They wanted to take lots of the ISPs' money without giving any guarantees about the level or length of service they would provide for a transition.
If the Supreme Court ruled in the publishers' favor on "fair use" grounds (or ruled against them based on the DMCA). Since content owners of all stripes have been trying to destroy fair use using the DMCA I'd like to see their own sword turned on them (one way or another).
So, in other words, the spectrum given to the existing broadcast networks in order to encourage them to develop and deploy HDTV, was not just a multi-billion dollar giveaway to a special interest, it was a completely wasted multi-billion dollar giveaway (since this new tech shows how they could deploy HDTV without using additional spectrum).
Actually fair use is what is required to reconcile copyright law with the First Amendment. Having a copyright on something includes the right to forbit others to speak it. Without the limitations on copyright that have been codified as fair use, copyright law and the First Amendment could not be reconciled.
On news.com (CNET): Breaking News: Appeals court wants Napster injunction modified.
On cnn.com (AOL Time Warner): Appeals court upholds most of Napster injunction, CNN reports.
To be fair, my quick and dirty read of the injunction is that the appeals court agreed with the district court on almost everything and is just asking that the injunction be modified to apply some procedural polish (so CNN's report is more accurate), but I think it is interesting that reporting of the "same" story seems to differ depending on which pies the parent company of the reporting organization has their fingers in.
In the US, if you couldn't do your banking with lynx on a text console I think the bank could be sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. As I recall, the only browsers that blind people can reasonably use are text-based browsers (through some form of text-to-speech conversion). AOL had some trouble over this within the last year or two (they settled by agreeing to spend money on developing interfaces for the blind, IIRC) and a bank is a "public accommodation" that should be subject to the ADA. If there are similar laws in Canada, pointing this out might do the trick.
Quoting from Salon's article:
One SDMI participant predicted: "They are going to try to keep it quiet -- the official word will be that the testing company is still analyzing the results. They will try to skate out of this without releasing the information that it's all broken."
Quoting from Inside's article:
'When a publication makes such a completely wrong, unfounded, anonymous slander, I think it deserves a very strong answer,'' Chariglione told Inside, referring to a report appearing on Salon.com Thursday citing anonymous sources that claimed each of the six technologies offered up for hacking by the SDMI had been compromised. ''It's simply not true, because we, ourselves, don't have that information. We have about 450 files, with 450 descriptions of methods -- you know, our testing managing committee started working on this Wednesday morning, and it's simply impossible to say whether this is true or this is false. Nobody knows! And when I say nobody, I mean nobody, because it's 450 music files that have yet to be tested.''
The way the job market is (I was on an H1 in Denver), I doubled my salary in 1.5 years. Everytime a review came along, I threatened to quit and forced concessions out of my employer.
I was under the impression that the trap that gets most H1B employees is the green-card application. Employers eagerly sponsor those applications because then, if the employee quits, their green-card application is screwed up (even if the employee is moving to a better job), and, especially given the insane bureaucracy that is the INS, their chances of staying in the US are pretty much blown. As I understand it, this gives many employees on H1B visas a strong incentive to keep quiet about low salaries, poor working conditions and the like.
Is this true, and, if so, how did you deal with it? Obviously you weren't afraid to antagonize your employer, but did you just not apply for a green card, were you confident you'd never have to carry out your threat to quit, or did you do something else?
I'd say it is much better than the alternative: people born in America who are not recognized as citizens because their births where not "good enough" according to whatever rules Congress dreamed up last week. In the past, America has had a horrible record on their treatment of the children of immigrants (Japanese-Americans in World War II, for example). If we could have denied or revoked their citizenship, we would have. I, for one, am glad that we couldn't.
I'm amazed at the number of people who didn't seem to read the article before commenting on it (but I probably shouldn't be).
First, the article is very clear that most H1B's expect their stay to be permanent: get an H1B, start working in the US, get a green card...
The reasons that so many of them have to leave are (which would have been very difficult for them to anticipate in 1994):
(a) The INS cannot process their green card applications fast enough.
(b) There are caps on the number of green cards that can be awarded in a given year and there are further caps on what percentage of that number can be awarded to citizens of a particular country, and, as I recall, these caps are frequently treated as a political football.
I'm also surprised that no one has commented on the detail in the article that I found most startling: The couple in the article has a child, that, as far as I can tell (and, to be fair, the article was not clear here), was born while they were living in the US. Unless there has been a Constitutional amendment after the 14th that I don't know about, that child is automatically an American citizen. I really don't see what business the INS has deporting the parents of an American citizen. I thought one of the principles of immigration law was to keep families together.
IIRC, the 90% figure refers to the combined market share of AIM and ICQ. The interesting proposed conditions I read about said that AOL had to open up its IM at the earlier of two times:
1) Six months after the AOL/TW merger closes.
2) Whenever AOL deploys technology that allows AIM and ICQ to interoperate.(Under the theory that once you make your own services interoperate, extending that to rival services is not as big a deal, I guess).
The update is dated at 9/13 at 05:16 PM. Since it is only 2:03 PM Eastern time on 9/13 as I write this (and I thought Slashdot was edited/dated entirely in the US) I wanted to know what the time zone on the update was.
Look a little higher on the page you link to. IA developers are Information Appliance developers
Sigma Designs (makers of the Hollywood+ DVD decoder cards) has released a driver for their NetStream 2000 card for Linux here. These drivers apparently include source code according to their FAQ. Of course, this is not a big deal because the "interesting" parts of a DVD player are implemented in hardware. Someone is also working on a DVD player application built around this driver, though it is not clear how far along that project is.
After October 28, 2000 it will be illegal to circumvent an access control according to the DMCA. According to the MPAA's legal theory, this means descrambling any scrambled copyrighted work if you don't have the consent of the copyright holder of that work. So to safely distribute DeCSS: make up your own form of scrambling. Distribute DeCSS and your own associated copyrighted content (say an essay about how you feel about the case) scrambled with your form scrambler. Distribute the descrambling tool separately and explicitly inform anyone who downloads the tool that they are permitted to use the tool to descramble your work for their personal use unless they are an employee, lawyer, consultant, etc. of the MPAA or one of its member companies or they communicate the results of the descrambling to any of those people. When the MPAA sues you distributing DeCSS either:
1) The only evidence they have is your claim to be distributing DeCSS (because they didn't descramble your scrambling) or
2) You can countersue them for circumventing your "access control". Quote extensively from the MPAA briefs and Judge Kaplan's opinion to establish your access control rights.
DISCLAIMER: IANAL so this is probably not airtight, and I wouldn't even dream of doing this unless you have plenty of money to cover your legal bills.
This is exactly the conclusion Bruce Schneier reached while writing Secrets & Lies. His eventual response (in full here) was that security is not about preventing all attacks (which is a hopeless and impossible goal), but rather about managing the risk of an attack. Just because you can't prevent every possible attack on your computer doesn't mean it isn't worth some effort to lower the risk of an attack (or to lower the probability that an attack will cause damage).