..., and some comments contain instructions on how to circumvent the End User License Agreement that is presented as part of the download for accessing the Specification.
I can't see what is the point with this.
If you use a non-Micros~1 OS, you have no other oppurtunity to open the archive than to give unzip a trial. Wich clearly means that you won't see the EULA, and with no intend!
After all, it can be brought down to the following points:
In formal jurisdiction, Micros~1 might be right at a first glance.
The DMCA might prove as unconstitutional.
M$ did (as usual) sloppy work: Instead of just adding a plain-text copy of their license, they only made it show up if someone actually run the windows executable. Which means, not everybody who can access the archive's contens is forced to see the EULA. so they can't argue (IANAL) that someone circumvented it.
No. Just imagine the concentration of economic power that happened in the past 40 years. How many car manufacturers for example existed in the fifties? How many corporations had power in more than one country? In every country? How many small shops vanished in the last twenty years and were replaced by a Wal-Mart or something like that? In my opinion, it doesn't matter if the technological change has brought new players like Micros~1 and AOL - the economic concentration just becomes more and more dense.
Sure, the people are more concerned about what they are going to loose today - nevertheless, corporatism is still rising. Perhaps whe might end up in a society as it was projected in the Shadowrun RPG, just the magic is missing.
The server where WIN-BUGFIX.EXE resides, www.skyinet.net seems to be unreachable all the day - seems to be a kind of "slashdot effect", although I'm pretty damned sure that this is not/. which caused this effect...
I agree that I won't ignore this license, too. I think there will be a better solution (i.e. clean-room reverse-engenering) sooner or later.
But:
I don't get why everyone is advocating tricks to get around clicking 'ok' on the license agreement. Does anyone really think that a judge would uphold that dodge in court? 'Oh, you didn't know the license was there, so you accidentally used winzip rather than just double clicking on the executable'. I don't see this going over well.
IMHO this is completely wrong. I don't have no windows on my machines any more for three years now. When I get such self-extracting stuff, I have to use the command-line unzip or try another decompression tool to extract it. Don't see everything from the windoze view.
Reading this, I'm going to ask myself when the first Americans will show up here in Europe, asking for political asylum.
Re:Maybe genuinely secure laptops make more sense.
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 1
Far more sensible for a laptop with classified information would be to use a filesystem that stores all data on the drivce with strong encryption, and requiring a revocable digital certificate to decrypt it.
This doesn't sound like a realistic solution to me - the certificates pass phrase might be cracked, at least by the guys really interested in such data. Or simply get the person who knows the phrase and make him tell it.
A keyboard which is able to check the users finger prints makes much more sense to me - so it could be assured that only this user is using the device and no one else.
(Subject translated from german: I wanna have it, too.)
Wow, that's great!
Here in Germany it is the same with SuSE - everyone without a clue (read: he who decides what to buy) associates Linux automatically with SuSE. Well, according to the latest poll by german "Linux Magazin", they have a market share of 75% (at least, among Linux Magazin's readers), but I don't like these commercial distributions - we are lucky that we finally are going to get rid of this proprietary stuff which ruled the last twenty years, GNU Victorious, so why shall we open up the next dependency on a commercial solution?
Nuclear power had a widespread use in spacecrafts in the last thirty years - not only in the outer space probes, like Pioneer 10 + 11, Voyager, Viking, Cassini, Galileo, but also in the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, carried onboard the LEM (one of these RTGs crashed into the atmosphere on Apollo 13). Most worse, the Soviets had used small natrium-cooled reactors in radar surveillance satellites during the sixties and seventies. Anyone remembers the Kosmos crashed in Canada in 1977? These vessels had a mechanism to separate the reactor just before the mission ended and send the reactor to a higher orbit, about 5000km, where it shoud stay for some thousand years - clearly not long enough to make the radiation vanish. In some cases, this mechanism didn't work, so there are two or three reactors remaining on lower orbits which maybe return to Earth in this century. After the propellants for the stabilization system had been finished, the reactors broke up and spread the radioactive natrium alongside their orbital path.
So I think there is plenty of stuff to clean up in orbit for the next generations...
The MPAA isn't going to like this concept. It would mean open source DVD players in France would be a "right" rather than an illegal reverse engineered hack that can turn children who program into criminals.
You got the wrong tense, you might use the present tense: According to Guideline 91/250/EWG of the European Union, dated back to May 14th 1991, in the EU, we have the irrevocablly right to reverse-engineer any program to maintain interoperability, even if the license says it's verboten. These EU guidelines give the framework for any national law in Europe, if a country misses to fullfill them in time, every citizen has the right to sue his/her government on it. So especially this one has been implemented into national law in all sixteen members long years ago. More interesting to this topic, a quite similar initiative is on the way in Germany - see slashdot: German Governmental Agency Says: Use Open Source
First, it's really an old story, I remember I read speculations about this maybe ten years ago.
Second, if dinosaurs really had warm blood doesn't change so much, because if a body grows ten times in length, its surface grows by hundred, but its volume and mass by thousand. So it is much easier for a large animal to prevent loosing energy to a colder envorinment then it is for a small one.
In the latest issue of the german publication Linux Magazin (this article is not available online), Till Jaeger mentioned that Sections 11 and 12 of the GPL, concerning warranty and liability, will be void according to german law. He explained that the "General Trading Conditions Act" (Gesetz zur Regelung des Rechts der Allgemeinen Geschäftsbedingungen, aka AGBG) makes it impossible in germany to completely withdraw the creators responsibility for a given product, even if the product is donated, like software downloaded for free. I.e. in the case of intend ("Vorsatz") or serious negligence ("grobe Fahrlässigkeit") the author of a program will be liable to a certain extend.
Worst of all I think, because of the complete denial of warranty and liability the GPL is sporting, the aformentioned sections 11 and 12 become void.
So what about a localized "German GPL" or a "Germany Clause" in the GPL to reduce the risk for the program's author to a maximum extend by not completely voiding these sections?
(BTW: Maybe this problem not only concerns germany but also some eastern european countries - concerning trade laws and consumer rights, they have often adopted german legislation in the past decade.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see what is the point with this.
If you use a non-Micros~1 OS, you have no other oppurtunity to open the archive than to give unzip a trial. Wich clearly means that you won't see the EULA, and with no intend!
After all, it can be brought down to the following points:
Which means, not everybody who can access the archive's contens is forced to see the EULA. so they can't argue (IANAL) that someone circumvented it.
No. Just imagine the concentration of economic power that happened in the past 40 years. How many car manufacturers for example existed in the fifties? How many corporations had power in more than one country? In every country? How many small shops vanished in the last twenty years and were replaced by a Wal-Mart or something like that? In my opinion, it doesn't matter if the technological change has brought new players like Micros~1 and AOL - the economic concentration just becomes more and more dense.
Sure, the people are more concerned about what they are going to loose today - nevertheless, corporatism is still rising. Perhaps whe might end up in a society as it was projected in the Shadowrun RPG, just the magic is missing.
The server where WIN-BUGFIX.EXE resides, www.skyinet.net seems to be unreachable all the day - seems to be a kind of "slashdot effect", although I'm pretty damned sure that this is not /. which caused this effect...
I agree that I won't ignore this license, too. I think there will be a better solution (i.e. clean-room reverse-engenering) sooner or later.
But:
I don't get why everyone is advocating tricks to get around clicking 'ok' on the license agreement. Does anyone really think that a judge would uphold that dodge in court? 'Oh, you didn't know the license was there, so you accidentally used winzip rather than just double clicking on the executable'. I don't see this going over well.
IMHO this is completely wrong. I don't have no windows on my machines any more for three years now. When I get such self-extracting stuff, I have to use the command-line unzip or try another decompression tool to extract it. Don't see everything from the windoze view.
Reading this, I'm going to ask myself when the first Americans will show up here in Europe, asking for political asylum.
Far more sensible for a laptop with classified information would be to use a filesystem that stores all data on the drivce with strong encryption, and requiring a revocable digital certificate to decrypt it.
This doesn't sound like a realistic solution to me - the certificates pass phrase might be cracked, at least by the guys really interested in such data. Or simply get the person who knows the phrase and make him tell it.
A keyboard which is able to check the users finger prints makes much more sense to me - so it could be assured that only this user is using the device and no one else.
(Subject translated from german: I wanna have it, too.)
Wow, that's great!
Here in Germany it is the same with SuSE - everyone without a clue (read: he who decides what to buy) associates Linux automatically with SuSE. Well, according to the latest poll by german "Linux Magazin", they have a market share of 75% (at least, among Linux Magazin's readers), but I don't like these commercial distributions - we are lucky that we finally are going to get rid of this proprietary stuff which ruled the last twenty years, GNU Victorious, so why shall we open up the next dependency on a commercial solution?
Nuclear power had a widespread use in spacecrafts in the last thirty years - not only in the outer space probes, like Pioneer 10 + 11, Voyager, Viking, Cassini, Galileo, but also in the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, carried onboard the LEM (one of these RTGs crashed into the atmosphere on Apollo 13).
Most worse, the Soviets had used small natrium-cooled reactors in radar surveillance satellites during the sixties and seventies. Anyone remembers the Kosmos crashed in Canada in 1977? These vessels had a mechanism to separate the reactor just before the mission ended and send the reactor to a higher orbit, about 5000km, where it shoud stay for some thousand years - clearly not long enough to make the radiation vanish. In some cases, this mechanism didn't work, so there are two or three reactors remaining on lower orbits which maybe return to Earth in this century.
After the propellants for the stabilization system had been finished, the reactors broke up and spread the radioactive natrium alongside their orbital path.
So I think there is plenty of stuff to clean up in orbit for the next generations...
The MPAA isn't going to like this concept. It would mean open source DVD players in France would be a "right" rather than an illegal reverse engineered hack that can turn children who program into criminals.
You got the wrong tense, you might use the present tense: According to Guideline 91/250/EWG of the European Union, dated back to May 14th 1991, in the EU, we have the irrevocablly right to reverse-engineer any program to maintain interoperability, even if the license says it's verboten.
These EU guidelines give the framework for any national law in Europe, if a country misses to fullfill them in time, every citizen has the right to sue his/her government on it. So especially this one has been implemented into national law in all sixteen members long years ago.
More interesting to this topic, a quite similar initiative is on the way in Germany - see slashdot: German Governmental Agency Says: Use Open Source
First, it's really an old story, I remember I read speculations about this maybe ten years ago.
Second, if dinosaurs really had warm blood doesn't change so much, because if a body grows ten times in length, its surface grows by hundred, but its volume and mass by thousand. So it is much easier for a large animal to prevent loosing energy to a colder envorinment then it is for a small one.
In the latest issue of the german publication Linux Magazin (this article is not available online), Till Jaeger mentioned that Sections 11 and 12 of the GPL, concerning warranty and liability, will be void according to german law.
He explained that the "General Trading Conditions Act" (Gesetz zur Regelung des Rechts der Allgemeinen Geschäftsbedingungen, aka AGBG) makes it impossible in germany to completely withdraw the creators responsibility for a given product, even if the product is donated, like software downloaded for free. I.e. in the case of intend ("Vorsatz") or serious negligence ("grobe Fahrlässigkeit") the author of a program will be liable to a certain extend.
Worst of all I think, because of the complete denial of warranty and liability the GPL is sporting, the aformentioned sections 11 and 12 become void.
So what about a localized "German GPL" or a "Germany Clause" in the GPL to reduce the risk for the program's author to a maximum extend by not completely voiding these sections?
(BTW: Maybe this problem not only concerns germany but also some eastern european countries - concerning trade laws and consumer rights, they have often adopted german legislation in the past decade.)