Put backdoors on current cryptography programs, and you will ensure that only the criminals have real crypto.
Yes, and that's exactly the point. The point of having anti-cryptography laws is not to prevent access to crypto. The point is to put people in jail if they use strong, non-backdoored crypto. Just as the Feds put Al Capone in jail for tax evasion when they couldn't bust him for racketeering, now they'll want to put people in jail for crypto use when they can't bust them for {terrorism|drug running|kiddie p0rn}. It will be "Give me the key or go to jail."
The maker of Windows and other software also has stepped up campaign donations, becoming the fifth-largest soft-money donor to the national Republican and Democratic parties in 1999-2000, and it has hired a slew of well-connected lobbying firms.
These letters contained this information.This is all out bribery at this point...and not even close to subtle.
Where did you get this information? That's not the way I read the article at all. I find it unbelievable that somebody would include this statement while making an astroturf letter. It would be about as subtle as putting "Copyright 2001 AstroTurfing, Inc., All Rights Reserved." at the bottom of the letter.
Conspiracy Theorist, it said quite plainly in the LA Times article that the relatives of the dead people crossed off the deceased names and wrote in their own.
In the third, with a reference like "/css/rubble.css", you'd like to think that, since the parent URL is in http://foo.ne.mediaone.net:8080, the client would go for "http://foo.ne.mediaone.net:8080/css/rubble.css", but no! It looks up "http://foo.ne.mediaone.net/css/rubble.css" (and spends a long time timing out because of the block).
This is untrue for all of the browsers I've used (and I test web software for a living, so that's quite a lot). I often run webservers at ports higher than 80, and the browser always pulls in CSS stylesheets and everything else properly when using relative URLs. You might want to put a proxy server on your computer (like Muffin) to see for yourself.
From the browser perspective, there is no real difference between requests for JPG and CSS. The RESPONSES (specifically, the Content-Type header)are different, though.
But what about the fate of all those blind people who now won't be able to read e-books because Adobe will have disabled the read-aloud feature at some publisher's request? Typically, publishers ask Adobe to disable that feature when they fear it might violate their contracts relating to an existing audio version of the same book. But when you think about it, in those circumstances it might actually make more sense for a blind person to pay $15 to buy the audio book -- a tape of a professional actor or the author of the work reading the book aloud -- rather than pay $8 for an e-book and $99 for circumvention software, in order to hear voice-simulation software articulating the words in a robotic monotone.
In other words, he knows what's good for blind people better than they do. How kind! **sound of a man being beaten to death with 1000000 white canes**
IANAL, but if TrollTech files for bankruptcy (or if someone sues them into bankruptcy), the judge may very well say that they can't release the source, because the source is one of their assets. So they get to say, "We'll release it", but when push comes to shove, they can say, "The judge made us not do it."
What I don't understand is why everyone keeps saying that this doesn't matter because all contracts written today assign all rights to the publisher. I'll agree that today's contract are written this way but this decision does matter. "Smart publishers have been securing digital rights to 'works for hire' for years now" because of this case! This has been in litigation for several years (since 1993, if I recall). Several years ago, it was not obvious to "smart" publishers like the NYT that digital works were something new. With 20-20 hindsight, it's easy for us to say that it should have been.
But why does this decision matter today? Because there's an awful lot of stuff that was written before the "smart publishers" wrote these newfangled contracts. And the "dumb publishers" like the NYT have been republishing this stuff and thinking that it was OK, but it was not OK and they were violating copyrights the whole time. And now they are on the hook, big time, for all of these violations. They'll have to yank a lot of stuff down from websites, and recall a lot of CDs, and renegotiate a lot of contracts. I would not call this insignificant.
What is considered widely available? Just that some private citizen can buy it? Or that some percentage of the publlic can afford? If "widely available" just means that a private citizen can buy it, could not authorities instruct the tech manufacturers to make it available to the public at ridiculous prices, so that authorities don't need a warrant, while keeping the tech out of the hands of almost all citizens?
Look, judges make these kinds of decisions all the time. That's why the're called judges. They're not going to think a FLIR gun that is sold to private citizens for the low, low price of $2 million is "widely available". A judge will probably think to himself, "if my next door neighbor can buy it on a Saturday for a couple hundred bucks, it's widely available". Yes, different judges will have different standards, and that's part of life.
Your point about Carnivore is interesting; I don't know how this ruling will affect those cases, but I think that people's expectations of privacy on the open Internet should be somewhat less than in their own home behind a closed door, so it won't be very relevant.
Re:AOL is totally cool (some corrections)
on
AOL And The GPL
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· Score: 2
Here it is:
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Oh c'mon, that's not the best line. My favorite is this:
The foregoing suffices to establish what the Court's failure to cite any case remotely in point would lead one to suspect: No principle set forth in the Constitution, nor even any imagined by this Court in the past 200 years, prohibits what Colorado has done here.
"Open Answer" would certainly be a big, very expensive, change. These tests take years to develop and the testing companies are already overworked. In the second part of the article (in today's paper edition, not sure if it's online), they talked about how the testing companies are very busy with the current volume of work, which is only going to increase as more states see standardized testing as a panacea. The good news for me is that, since my wife is a sub-sub-contractor for the testing companies and writes test questions, I think it would be great for her income!
IANAL, but I think you are incorrect in your point #2: anybody else adding to or modifying the source would have to state that their mods are in the public domain .
If you put it in the public domain, anybody can do anything they want to it: incorporate it into a product, publish it in a book, read it on the street corner, etc. Effectively, they own it as much as you do. So nobody can sue anybody (and win!) for doing anything to it, because everybody owns it.
The main reason I don't click on banner ads isn't because they're annoying but rather because they almost never advertise anything there that interests me
I agree. However, as soon as a website tries to show stuff that interests people (targeted ads), a lot of people (you know who you are, and some of you are/. readers) complain about privacy violations. Attempts to gather personal data to deliver effective targeted ads are treated like inquisitions ("why do they have to know my income when I read the news?!?").
The original link WAS Microsoft's side. Did you see the "SOURCE: Microsoft Corp." at the bottom? Or perhaps did you notice that there were quotes from Microsoft officials but no quotes from Sun? And how likely is is that an indepenent journalist or Sun would include the following: "About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing
"
Kind of OT, but Gross Margin is the difference between Gross Receipts and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS - what it cost to buy the stuff; not a big factor in software). Net Profit is what is left after you pay your people.
Grocery stores have COGS of around 50% of their gross receipts, so their Gross Margin is about 50%. After they pay their people, rent, etc., their net profit is about 2-3%. Online grocers that compete on price are doomed to failure, because there just isn't a lot of profit in the business.
Microsoft apparently makes a Net Profit of 24% of their receipts. This is indeed very high.
IANABMA,BIWOI (I Am Not An MBA, but I'm Working On It).
More times than not the proxy has not got in the way of research. If I couldn't do it from school, then I'll do it from home
But not everybody has a computer at home. As the article mentions, the filtering software is furthering the digital divide. As any good liberal will tell you, the government is supposed to be fostering social mobility, not hindering it.
The new patents are for proprietary search technology in the areas of identifying and eliminating duplicate pages in an index, ranking results by degrees of relevancy, data structures for searching and indexing, and "spidering" techniques that crawl the World Wide Web and play a key role in building an index.
I would imagine that Lexis uses techniques like "eliminating duplicate pages in the index". So how can AltaVista have a patent on something that Lexis has been doing for years before AltaVista was ever heard of?
I don't think patenting is the best way to protect this work, but there isn't currently a better way.
I used to like AltaVista, until I found Google. AltaVista has done some good work. But I don't think that what AltaVista has done (at least in the snippet above) is novel and patentable.
>If AOL/TW play rotten tricks, they'll take
>action to prevent this further
If by "prevent this further" you mean "prevent more mergers", then I would do all sorts of dirty trick if I were AOL!
The odd thing is that they'll be able to justify these tricks by saying, "We're just trying to make it easier for people." And they are right, it will be easier for people to choose their source of content. They won't even have to choose, as a matter of fact.
Why should there be a compromise? Amazon did nothing wrong! Since Amazon is selling a lot of new books, they may want to compromise, but let us hope they do not.
By compromising, they are sending the message that they're doing something implicitly wrong.
You don't make friends with the customer by making him go out of his way (even a little bit, as in the compromise) to save a few dollars.
I downloaded the toolbar and found that it has the best About box of any program I've ever used. Sure, it's incredibly easy to use and works great, but I've used Google for a while, so I'd expect that. But a funny About box - now that's a pleasant surprise.
Um, no. AOL bought both of these companies. The stockholders/owners of Netscape and ICQ got paid a fair price for their businesses (if it wasn't fair, they wouldn't have taken the deal, would they?).
The business world is not the world of statecraft. Yes, there are similarities, and I grant you it is an interesting analogy. But there are more differences. AOL/TW can't fire artillery at AT&T, though that would be interesting to see. Microsoft is not going to round up millions of Unix sysadmins and put them in concentration camps. Nobody's going to war over this one. AOL/TW and MSFT are just two companies out to make as many dollars as they can. In the corporate world, you do that by making customers happy and growing as much as you can.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I know the answer to this one: Hire a lobbyist! Seriously, I suggest that we amend this to:
What are the best free ways for people to communicate with their politicians to inform them of their views and opinions on proposed legislation?
Please state the source of your information.
Conspiracy Theorist, it said quite plainly in the LA Times article that the relatives of the dead people crossed off the deceased names and wrote in their own.
Excellent idea. I say we call them Micros~1, Micros~2, and Micros~3.
From the browser perspective, there is no real difference between requests for JPG and CSS. The RESPONSES (specifically, the Content-Type header)are different, though.
IANAL, but if TrollTech files for bankruptcy (or if someone sues them into bankruptcy), the judge may very well say that they can't release the source, because the source is one of their assets. So they get to say, "We'll release it", but when push comes to shove, they can say, "The judge made us not do it."
But why does this decision matter today? Because there's an awful lot of stuff that was written before the "smart publishers" wrote these newfangled contracts. And the "dumb publishers" like the NYT have been republishing this stuff and thinking that it was OK, but it was not OK and they were violating copyrights the whole time. And now they are on the hook, big time, for all of these violations. They'll have to yank a lot of stuff down from websites, and recall a lot of CDs, and renegotiate a lot of contracts. I would not call this insignificant.
Your point about Carnivore is interesting; I don't know how this ruling will affect those cases, but I think that people's expectations of privacy on the open Internet should be somewhat less than in their own home behind a closed door, so it won't be very relevant.
Which of these three did AOL do?
The foregoing suffices to establish what the Court's failure to cite any case remotely in point would lead one to suspect: No principle set forth in the Constitution, nor even any imagined by this Court in the past 200 years, prohibits what Colorado has done here.
"Open Answer" would certainly be a big, very expensive, change. These tests take years to develop and the testing companies are already overworked. In the second part of the article (in today's paper edition, not sure if it's online), they talked about how the testing companies are very busy with the current volume of work, which is only going to increase as more states see standardized testing as a panacea. The good news for me is that, since my wife is a sub-sub-contractor for the testing companies and writes test questions, I think it would be great for her income!
If you put it in the public domain, anybody can do anything they want to it: incorporate it into a product, publish it in a book, read it on the street corner, etc. Effectively, they own it as much as you do. So nobody can sue anybody (and win!) for doing anything to it, because everybody owns it.
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Sun's take is linked from http://www.sun.com/2001-0123/audiocast/. Sorry, a direct link didn't work (silly session id in the URL).
The original link WAS Microsoft's side. Did you see the "SOURCE: Microsoft Corp." at the bottom? Or perhaps did you notice that there were quotes from Microsoft officials but no quotes from Sun? And how likely is is that an indepenent journalist or Sun would include the following: "About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing "
Grocery stores have COGS of around 50% of their gross receipts, so their Gross Margin is about 50%. After they pay their people, rent, etc., their net profit is about 2-3%. Online grocers that compete on price are doomed to failure, because there just isn't a lot of profit in the business.
Microsoft apparently makes a Net Profit of 24% of their receipts. This is indeed very high.
IANABMA,BIWOI (I Am Not An MBA, but I'm Working On It).
>action to prevent this further
If by "prevent this further" you mean "prevent more mergers", then I would do all sorts of dirty trick if I were AOL!
The odd thing is that they'll be able to justify these tricks by saying, "We're just trying to make it easier for people." And they are right, it will be easier for people to choose their source of content. They won't even have to choose, as a matter of fact.
By compromising, they are sending the message that they're doing something implicitly wrong.
You don't make friends with the customer by making him go out of his way (even a little bit, as in the compromise) to save a few dollars.
I downloaded the toolbar and found that it has the best About box of any program I've ever used. Sure, it's incredibly easy to use and works great, but I've used Google for a while, so I'd expect that. But a funny About box - now that's a pleasant surprise.
The business world is not the world of statecraft. Yes, there are similarities, and I grant you it is an interesting analogy. But there are more differences. AOL/TW can't fire artillery at AT&T, though that would be interesting to see. Microsoft is not going to round up millions of Unix sysadmins and put them in concentration camps. Nobody's going to war over this one. AOL/TW and MSFT are just two companies out to make as many dollars as they can. In the corporate world, you do that by making customers happy and growing as much as you can.