Vigilante style justice does not always work out. For one, you open yourself up to illegal attacks from them, too.
You imply that if I don't attack a spammer, I'm immune from attacks by them. But right at this moment, I can see a dictionary attack being run against my mailserver (look, incoming messages for felix@, then fisher@, fischer@, finley@, ferrell@, floyd@, and so on...). My CPU load is up past 5.00... spiking to 6.02...
Just to make clear, this is not a company's machine. It's my own mailserver, at my home, running off an ADSL connection on a 233MHz machine that I haven't had the time or money to upgrade/replace. And these dictionary attacks don't quite knock it over (and hence rise to the level of DoS attack), but they come pretty close.
Since I haven't attacked any spammers, I should be safe from this kind of thing, right?
Spammers are not ethical people. They're not nice, and they're not reasonable. They have effectively been (D)DoSing all of us for years. We should have some kind of rights of self-defense.
I agree with you that the Lycos solution is a pretty bad one, and has a wide variety of flaws. But I disagree that attacking them qualifies as "attacking first", as you seem to characterize it. I'd consider it retaliation, or even an attempt at self-defense.
But if we build a space elevator to get stuff off the Moon, instead of a mass-driver or similar electromagnetic catapult, then how will our eventual Moon colony throw rocks at us in order to gain its independence? Someone needs to be considering the future ramifications, dammit!
What is really concerning is that the 'TakeOverXPBoxen' function accepts hostname or IP address strings.
What, not CIDR specifications? It'd be more efficient and elegant if you could do: TakeOverXPBoxen(216.23.94.0/24); it'd save you the trouble of writing a foreach loop (or its moral equivalent in VB).
Yeah, I noticed that while trying to fix a client's machine last week. Once I picked my jaw back up off the floor, I advised the client that, rather than trying to renew their McAfee subscription (which had just run out), they should just switch to Symantec/Norton's equivalent product.
"Okay, where do I find that?" A few quick browser clicks later, they had the appropriate download page loaded. Looked like they were very much about to take my advice by the time I left.
So, relying on IE was not only a bad move for MS, it's also a bad move for McAfee.
Your post is the best I've seen so far in this thread. I was so enchanted by it, I scrolled back up to see what your username was, so I could remember to give your words more weight the next time I saw them.
I can't for the life of me understand why you posted as an AC. These words are well worth signing your name to!
Okay, I'm taking "firewall" to mean something that filters packets based on characteristics of the packets themselves, most commonly: source or destination address or port; or packet header values such as TCP flags. Iptables would be one good example.
Sure, "personal firewalls" like Norton's or McAfee's may tend to filter based more on which process the packet originates with (or is destined for). But the functionality is pretty similar.
Either way, I don't see how having a firewall at the network's border will protect against the scenario I proposed. (Unless, of course, the firewall blocks port 25 or some such...) Essentially, my point is that there are many avenues of infection that travel across standard services (such as SMTP and HTTP), and a firewall will not block such attacks (short of stopping the service altogether).
Of course, regarding things like RPC or port-445 vulnerabilities in Windows, I agree those services should simply be turned off. But since MS doesn't make it particularly easy for the average end-user to do so, I can't fault them for running software firewalls to cover up the problem. And hey, they get egress filtering along with it, so I see it as a net gain.
"A properly configured border firewall, for example, will protect systems behind it. That says nothing of the duties of many of those "personal firewall" applications that are actually much more than firewalls (spam filters, scumware/spyware/adware scanner/filters, etc)."
I included the second sentence, because it leads me to believe that, by "border firewall", you honestly just meant a firewall, and not a virus scanner or similar device.
I'm at a loss to understand how a firewall will protect a system from its own user's stupidity in clicking on an email attachment. Heck, I'm imagining the following scenario, which I think isn't too far-fetched:
Foobar Co. has 50 employees, all using Windows systems. They have a very well configured (even "properly-configured") border firewall, the Windows boxes are all NAT/IPmasq'd, etc. I'm one of their employees. So is Andy Attachment-Clicker, who gets an email worm one day. Of course, he clicks it, and his machine is immediately infected. Then it starts probing all the other Foobar machines for vulnerabilites, a la Sasser. Within five seconds, all 50 of our machines are compromised.
I don't see how a firewall helps with this. And I thought the reviewer's stance in favor of keeping a personal firewall on each machine was overly paranoid, until I pondered it for about ten seconds. If everyone at Foobar had a decent software firewall[1] on their machine, Andy would still have infected himself (the stupid fool), but he would have gotten a warning when the worm tried to probe the rest of the LAN. Of course, Andy, being the nitwit he is, would have clicked "Allow (and don't bug me about this again)", but then everyone else in the company would see a message from their own firewall, warning about a probe coming from Andy's machine. Heh.
All that said, I don't actually run my home network like this. But nobody's on it but myself and my girlfriend (who is quite technically proficient; she used to work tech support).
1: Naturally, Microsoft's WinXP SP2 firewall is not included in this category.
From TFA, second-to-last paragraph: "The MPAA, recognizing the damage the advent of digital file-sharing did to the music industry, has waged an aggressive campaign against movie piracy. [emphasis mine]"
This is a damned bad sign. I know it's popular to bash on the media, but really, they're supposed to print objective fact rather than opinion. The fact that this article simply claims that P2P has damaged the music industry, rather than attributing it as an opinion of someone else's, says to me that we've already lost that particular part of this fight.
Really, they could (and should!) have said something like "The MPAA, agreeing with the music industry's claims that file-sharing has caused it massive damage, has waged an aggressive campaign against movie piracy." By phrasing it as they did, Reuters seems to be claiming that it's simply an established fact that P2P has hurt the RIAA.
Funny, I've got an ocean not even ten miles from my house. The Pacific. The Pacific Ocean. I suppose to keep those capitals, it should have a controlling entity, a plan for future development, or some other thing like that?
There's also the Eiffel Tower, the Rocky Mountains, the Amazon River... the concept here is that of *proper nouns*. The Internet fits in that category.
Does anyone other than me think that having a web site to combat net addiction is a little messed up? "Help, I've got net addiction, I need to spend less time online!" - "Oh, hey, there's this great web site that can help you with that, you want the URL?"
Isn't that sort of like having your Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a bar?
> How many laws on the books in 1904, compared to now? Were we freer then,
> or are we freer now?
Depends on who "we" are. Ask a black person, or a woman, how "free" she would have been in 1904. Even white males didn't have all the freedoms we now take for granted; until the founding of the ACLU in 1920, nobody was willing to bring legal challenges against Bill-of-Rights violations by the government, and so a variety of ridiculously unconstitutional laws stood unchallenged. (If you follow the link, note the cases from 1931, 1937, 1938, and 1941. Consider how "free" we were under the laws that were struck down by these cases.)
I'll happily agree that the boundaries of our freedom have shifted since 1904 (as has the US' population density). But whether they have, overall, expanded or decreased is very much open to debate.
>> intentionally and without authorization or with intent to injure or defraud
>> alters any computer...
>
>I think that's the problem right there. You can't prove intent to injure or defraud.
But note that the phrase about "intent to injure or defraud" is set off with an "or", not "and". Now, it's a bit unclear whether the US legal system would normally parse this as:
(intentionally && without authorization) || with intent to injure or defraud
or as:
intentionally && (without authorization || with intent to injure or defraud)
but either way, proving the first two (which seems pretty easy) should be sufficient to satisfy the conditions. If you put logical chains like that into bash or Perl, using those short-circuit operators, the final term would never even get evaluated.
I don't even use it for that. If someone's such a fanboy that s/he's made a site that only works in IE, I figure I probably don't really need to read the thing.
Instead, I use IE solely for the purpose of looking at my own sites. Any time I'm doing Web design, I make sure to check it out how it looks in the browser that most of the world is using. (Yes, of course I write gracefully degrading/cascading HTML and CSS. But just because it's functional doesn't mean it will look good.)
And since I know I haven't put any spyware on my own sites, I don't have to worry about IE's security.
> You find for me a method of birth control that doesn't fuck up my
> skin (allergic to spermicide), fuck up my body (hormones make me
> crazy), or fuck up my mind...
Condom without spermicide. Or, even better, condom with spermicide on the inside. HTH.
(This is intended as a helpful suggestion, BTW, not a snide comment. I know how annoying it is to have problems like this; my GF is allergic to latex.)
Maybe that might apply to Mitnick. But Mudge/L0pht, Lamo, and Jericho/Attrition.org all publicized their own works. The L0pht folks said, "Hey, world, here's some software." Should they still be secret after that? Attrition.org was a public web site, fercrissake.
And Raven Alder is 100-percent pure white-hat. She's interested in finding and publicizing vulns (and other security problems), rather than secretly exploiting them. Why in the world is that something that nobody should "have ever heard of"?
When you're a black hat, publicity means you screwed up. But when you're a white hat, it means you found something that nobody else did/could. That's the camp Raven's in.
I need to go out and actually buy some of Red Hat's stuff, some day when I'm not unemployed. The list of questions they're asking SCO is fabulous. They're really sticking it to SCO hard, just the way all of us want to see it done.
In effect, they're out there defending Linux like an aggressive pit-bull. While I don't use their distro any more, I wish I could do somehting to support them the way they're supporting the community.
This was billed as an "article", which strongly implies news, or analysis of some sort. Instead, all I saw was a page full of someone asking softball questions designed to give the company rep a chance to talk about how cool his product is and how you shouldn't trust their competitors, and then a page about how to use the product itself.
No analysis, no questioning (or support) of the claims made, nothing like that. Even the very real problems the reviewer briefly mentions (can only write data to a FAT32 partition, for example) are quickly handwaved away and ignored. Indeed, if it will only write to a FAT32 partition, then how do I know it will read my ext2, ext3 or ReiserFS partition? This "review" or "news piece" sure doesn't tell me.
This is not news, and not helpful. In fact, this story doesn't seem to matter, either.
Someone's already replied about how Postfix includes a command-line compatible binary named "sendmail" sepcifically for backward-compatibility. Qmail does the same thing. You can put Qmail's sendmail hook into/usr/bin (or/usr/lib, or wherever your particular system likes to keep sendmail(1)), or you can just tell your CGI and similar scripts to use/var/qmail/bin/sendmail. Either way, it all works just fine.
So, you mean that if I go to a sci-fi convention, I won't be able to recognize Patrick Stewart or Carrie-Anne Moss if they show up? After all, I've only seen them in 2D photographs (generally shown to me at 30+ fps, either on TV or movies, but also quite a few still photos on Web sites and other promotional materials...)
Somehow, I doubt that all sci-fi fans have some kind of super-duper innate expert ability to recognize faces. But we recognize these stars anyway, when we run into them, simply from having seen their 2D representations.
In paragraph 14 of the article, just before the heading "Other Options": "But the spec should not come out until a product is done, says Steve Crawford, PKWare's chief marketing officer."
I'd already been kind of wondering what was up with PKWare not documenting stuff. Now I'm starting to think they're just messed up. Specs should be released first (IMNSHO); then everyone who needs to support the spec can write to it.
We'd scream bloody murder if Microsoft released a new version of IE that implemented some bizarre new HTML or HTTP standard, even if they said they'd publish a spec for it a few months later. And the same goes for Mozilla. We very rightly insist that browser makers build their software to support the already-published specs from the W3C and IETF.
Similar comments apply to Apache and HTTP, CGI, and various other standards; to Sendmail/Postfix/Qmail/etc. and SMTP; to Linux and the POSIX standard... this is what standards and specs are for
Free clue to PKWare's Steve Crawford: you're just a marketing director. Let your CTO worry about specs; you're just making your company look worse.
Probably the best rendition of the side story is its retelling by Frederik Pohl (who actually bought and published "The Coldest Place"), in his introduction to N-Space.
I seem to recall that the FSF can only sue a GPL violator if the violation is on a program that the FSF has the copyright on. The general rule, then , would seem to be that only a copyright holder can sue for copyright violations.
So, who the hell is this anti-piracy group? And what gives them the right to sue on behalf of George Lucas, Eminem, and Rockstar Games?
If the Anti Pirat Gruppen had used their (admittedly quite reasonable-sounding) tools simply to report the violations back to Lucas/Eminem/Rockstar et al., and then let them sue, I'd have little problem with this.
As it is, though, I can't help but wonder what Anti Pirat Gruppen is planning to do with the money. This sounds sort of like if I saw a burglar breaking into my neighbor's window, and I said, "Hey, buddy... tell you what, how about you climb back out that window now, and pay me $100, and I won't call the cops on you."
I wonder if Lucas and the others have heard about this... and what they're planning to do to Anti Pirat Gruppen as a result.
It was a hand-me-down from my girlfriend, who'd graduated to something more powerful. I spent the first few days re-organizing things to match my own mental categories, instead of hers. That forced me to really look at how I organize stuff, and at the whole concept of organization in general... a concept I've always been fairly poor at.
The "Expense Book" I immediately threw out... but things like the Date Book, To-Do List, and Memo Pad, I wind up using constantly. Typing stuff into memos, in particular, is much easier for me since I've got the foldable Palm keyboard. Like many geeks, I type much faster than I write, so the keyboard is a godsend; all I need is about 12-by-6 inches of space to set it up in, and I can enter text nearly as fast as I can on the standard 101/104-key board.
I've also got it loaded with about a dozen hacks to tweak its behavior to "just what I want" (like us OSS types are used to...). TealScript and TealEcho to make entering Graffiti easier, and to make it understand my graffiti instead of Palm Corp.'s; McPhling for easy context-switches; FontHack123 to get a smaller screen font on there and so pack more info into the same space; etc., etc.
Honestly, my life has gotten fantastically more organized since I got my Palm, and its use has become a standard operating procedure for me. I'm not about to give it up. And, with only a IIIx, it's not a "status symbol" either-- not in San Francisco it ain't!
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You imply that if I don't attack a spammer, I'm immune from attacks by them. But right at this moment, I can see a dictionary attack being run against my mailserver (look, incoming messages for felix@, then fisher@, fischer@, finley@, ferrell@, floyd@, and so on...). My CPU load is up past 5.00... spiking to 6.02...
Just to make clear, this is not a company's machine. It's my own mailserver, at my home, running off an ADSL connection on a 233MHz machine that I haven't had the time or money to upgrade/replace. And these dictionary attacks don't quite knock it over (and hence rise to the level of DoS attack), but they come pretty close.
Since I haven't attacked any spammers, I should be safe from this kind of thing, right?
Spammers are not ethical people. They're not nice, and they're not reasonable. They have effectively been (D)DoSing all of us for years. We should have some kind of rights of self-defense.
I agree with you that the Lycos solution is a pretty bad one, and has a wide variety of flaws. But I disagree that attacking them qualifies as "attacking first", as you seem to characterize it. I'd consider it retaliation, or even an attempt at self-defense.
But if we build a space elevator to get stuff off the Moon, instead of a mass-driver or similar electromagnetic catapult, then how will our eventual Moon colony throw rocks at us in order to gain its independence? Someone needs to be considering the future ramifications, dammit!
What is really concerning is that the 'TakeOverXPBoxen' function accepts hostname or IP address strings.
What, not CIDR specifications? It'd be more efficient and elegant if you could do: TakeOverXPBoxen(216.23.94.0/24); it'd save you the trouble of writing a foreach loop (or its moral equivalent in VB).
Yeah, I noticed that while trying to fix a client's machine last week. Once I picked my jaw back up off the floor, I advised the client that, rather than trying to renew their McAfee subscription (which had just run out), they should just switch to Symantec/Norton's equivalent product.
"Okay, where do I find that?" A few quick browser clicks later, they had the appropriate download page loaded. Looked like they were very much about to take my advice by the time I left.
So, relying on IE was not only a bad move for MS, it's also a bad move for McAfee.
Your post is the best I've seen so far in this thread. I was so enchanted by it, I scrolled back up to see what your username was, so I could remember to give your words more weight the next time I saw them.
I can't for the life of me understand why you posted as an AC. These words are well worth signing your name to!
Anyway, my hat's off to you, whoever you are.
Okay, I'm taking "firewall" to mean something that filters packets based on characteristics of the packets themselves, most commonly: source or destination address or port; or packet header values such as TCP flags. Iptables would be one good example.
Sure, "personal firewalls" like Norton's or McAfee's may tend to filter based more on which process the packet originates with (or is destined for). But the functionality is pretty similar.
Either way, I don't see how having a firewall at the network's border will protect against the scenario I proposed. (Unless, of course, the firewall blocks port 25 or some such...) Essentially, my point is that there are many avenues of infection that travel across standard services (such as SMTP and HTTP), and a firewall will not block such attacks (short of stopping the service altogether).
Of course, regarding things like RPC or port-445 vulnerabilities in Windows, I agree those services should simply be turned off. But since MS doesn't make it particularly easy for the average end-user to do so, I can't fault them for running software firewalls to cover up the problem. And hey, they get egress filtering along with it, so I see it as a net gain.
"A properly configured border firewall, for example, will protect systems behind it. That says nothing of the duties of many of those "personal firewall" applications that are actually much more than firewalls (spam filters, scumware/spyware/adware scanner/filters, etc)."
I included the second sentence, because it leads me to believe that, by "border firewall", you honestly just meant a firewall, and not a virus scanner or similar device.
I'm at a loss to understand how a firewall will protect a system from its own user's stupidity in clicking on an email attachment. Heck, I'm imagining the following scenario, which I think isn't too far-fetched:
Foobar Co. has 50 employees, all using Windows systems. They have a very well configured (even "properly-configured") border firewall, the Windows boxes are all NAT/IPmasq'd, etc. I'm one of their employees. So is Andy Attachment-Clicker, who gets an email worm one day. Of course, he clicks it, and his machine is immediately infected. Then it starts probing all the other Foobar machines for vulnerabilites, a la Sasser. Within five seconds, all 50 of our machines are compromised.
I don't see how a firewall helps with this. And I thought the reviewer's stance in favor of keeping a personal firewall on each machine was overly paranoid, until I pondered it for about ten seconds. If everyone at Foobar had a decent software firewall[1] on their machine, Andy would still have infected himself (the stupid fool), but he would have gotten a warning when the worm tried to probe the rest of the LAN. Of course, Andy, being the nitwit he is, would have clicked "Allow (and don't bug me about this again)", but then everyone else in the company would see a message from their own firewall, warning about a probe coming from Andy's machine. Heh.
All that said, I don't actually run my home network like this. But nobody's on it but myself and my girlfriend (who is quite technically proficient; she used to work tech support).
1: Naturally, Microsoft's WinXP SP2 firewall is not included in this category.
From TFA, second-to-last paragraph: "The MPAA, recognizing the damage the advent of digital file-sharing did to the music industry, has waged an aggressive campaign against movie piracy. [emphasis mine]"
This is a damned bad sign. I know it's popular to bash on the media, but really, they're supposed to print objective fact rather than opinion. The fact that this article simply claims that P2P has damaged the music industry, rather than attributing it as an opinion of someone else's, says to me that we've already lost that particular part of this fight.
Really, they could (and should!) have said something like "The MPAA, agreeing with the music industry's claims that file-sharing has caused it massive damage, has waged an aggressive campaign against movie piracy." By phrasing it as they did, Reuters seems to be claiming that it's simply an established fact that P2P has hurt the RIAA.
And it's probably too late to fix that.
Funny, I've got an ocean not even ten miles from my house. The Pacific. The Pacific Ocean. I suppose to keep those capitals, it should have a controlling entity, a plan for future development, or some other thing like that?
There's also the Eiffel Tower, the Rocky Mountains, the Amazon River... the concept here is that of *proper nouns*. The Internet fits in that category.
Does anyone other than me think that having a web site to combat net addiction is a little messed up? "Help, I've got net addiction, I need to spend less time online!" - "Oh, hey, there's this great web site that can help you with that, you want the URL?"
Isn't that sort of like having your Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a bar?
Maybe he just wanted to play with his own idea on his own, rather than sell it to someone else.
> How many laws on the books in 1904, compared to now? Were we freer then,
> or are we freer now?
Depends on who "we" are. Ask a black person, or a woman, how "free" she would have been in 1904. Even white males didn't have all the freedoms we now take for granted; until the founding of the ACLU in 1920, nobody was willing to bring legal challenges against Bill-of-Rights violations by the government, and so a variety of ridiculously unconstitutional laws stood unchallenged. (If you follow the link, note the cases from 1931, 1937, 1938, and 1941. Consider how "free" we were under the laws that were struck down by these cases.)
I'll happily agree that the boundaries of our freedom have shifted since 1904 (as has the US' population density). But whether they have, overall, expanded or decreased is very much open to debate.
>> intentionally and without authorization or with intent to injure or defraud
>> alters any computer...
>
>I think that's the problem right there. You can't prove intent to injure or defraud.
But note that the phrase about "intent to injure or defraud" is set off with an "or", not "and". Now, it's a bit unclear whether the US legal system would normally parse this as:
(intentionally && without authorization) || with intent to injure or defraud
or as:
intentionally && (without authorization || with intent to injure or defraud)
but either way, proving the first two (which seems pretty easy) should be sufficient to satisfy the conditions. If you put logical chains like that into bash or Perl, using those short-circuit operators, the final term would never even get evaluated.
I don't even use it for that. If someone's such a fanboy that s/he's made a site that only works in IE, I figure I probably don't really need to read the thing.
Instead, I use IE solely for the purpose of looking at my own sites. Any time I'm doing Web design, I make sure to check it out how it looks in the browser that most of the world is using. (Yes, of course I write gracefully degrading/cascading HTML and CSS. But just because it's functional doesn't mean it will look good.)
And since I know I haven't put any spyware on my own sites, I don't have to worry about IE's security.
> skin (allergic to spermicide), fuck up my body (hormones make me
> crazy), or fuck up my mind...
Condom without spermicide. Or, even better, condom with spermicide on the inside. HTH.
(This is intended as a helpful suggestion, BTW, not a snide comment. I know how annoying it is to have problems like this; my GF is allergic to latex.)
Maybe that might apply to Mitnick. But Mudge/L0pht, Lamo, and Jericho/Attrition.org all publicized their own works. The L0pht folks said, "Hey, world, here's some software." Should they still be secret after that? Attrition.org was a public web site, fercrissake.
And Raven Alder is 100-percent pure white-hat. She's interested in finding and publicizing vulns (and other security problems), rather than secretly exploiting them. Why in the world is that something that nobody should "have ever heard of"?
When you're a black hat, publicity means you screwed up. But when you're a white hat, it means you found something that nobody else did/could. That's the camp Raven's in.
I need to go out and actually buy some of Red Hat's stuff, some day when I'm not unemployed. The list of questions they're asking SCO is fabulous. They're really sticking it to SCO hard, just the way all of us want to see it done.
In effect, they're out there defending Linux like an aggressive pit-bull. While I don't use their distro any more, I wish I could do somehting to support them the way they're supporting the community.
This was billed as an "article", which strongly implies news, or analysis of some sort. Instead, all I saw was a page full of someone asking softball questions designed to give the company rep a chance to talk about how cool his product is and how you shouldn't trust their competitors, and then a page about how to use the product itself.
No analysis, no questioning (or support) of the claims made, nothing like that. Even the very real problems the reviewer briefly mentions (can only write data to a FAT32 partition, for example) are quickly handwaved away and ignored. Indeed, if it will only write to a FAT32 partition, then how do I know it will read my ext2, ext3 or ReiserFS partition? This "review" or "news piece" sure doesn't tell me.
This is not news, and not helpful. In fact, this story doesn't seem to matter, either.
Someone's already replied about how Postfix includes a command-line compatible binary named "sendmail" sepcifically for backward-compatibility. Qmail does the same thing. You can put Qmail's sendmail hook into /usr/bin (or /usr/lib, or wherever your particular system likes to keep sendmail(1)), or you can just tell your CGI and similar scripts to use /var/qmail/bin/sendmail. Either way, it all works just fine.
So, you mean that if I go to a sci-fi convention, I won't be able to recognize Patrick Stewart or Carrie-Anne Moss if they show up? After all, I've only seen them in 2D photographs (generally shown to me at 30+ fps, either on TV or movies, but also quite a few still photos on Web sites and other promotional materials...)
Somehow, I doubt that all sci-fi fans have some kind of super-duper innate expert ability to recognize faces. But we recognize these stars anyway, when we run into them, simply from having seen their 2D representations.
In paragraph 14 of the article, just before the heading "Other Options": "But the spec should not come out until a product is done, says Steve Crawford, PKWare's chief marketing officer."
I'd already been kind of wondering what was up with PKWare not documenting stuff. Now I'm starting to think they're just messed up. Specs should be released first (IMNSHO); then everyone who needs to support the spec can write to it.
We'd scream bloody murder if Microsoft released a new version of IE that implemented some bizarre new HTML or HTTP standard, even if they said they'd publish a spec for it a few months later. And the same goes for Mozilla. We very rightly insist that browser makers build their software to support the already-published specs from the W3C and IETF.
Similar comments apply to Apache and HTTP, CGI, and various other standards; to Sendmail/Postfix/Qmail/etc. and SMTP; to Linux and the POSIX standard... this is what standards and specs are for
Free clue to PKWare's Steve Crawford: you're just a marketing director. Let your CTO worry about specs; you're just making your company look worse.
Wow. What a great way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
</sarcasm>
Probably the best rendition of the side story is its retelling by Frederik Pohl (who actually bought and published "The Coldest Place"), in his introduction to N-Space.
I seem to recall that the FSF can only sue a GPL violator if the violation is on a program that the FSF has the copyright on. The general rule, then , would seem to be that only a copyright holder can sue for copyright violations.
So, who the hell is this anti-piracy group? And what gives them the right to sue on behalf of George Lucas, Eminem, and Rockstar Games?
If the Anti Pirat Gruppen had used their (admittedly quite reasonable-sounding) tools simply to report the violations back to Lucas/Eminem/Rockstar et al., and then let them sue, I'd have little problem with this.
As it is, though, I can't help but wonder what Anti Pirat Gruppen is planning to do with the money. This sounds sort of like if I saw a burglar breaking into my neighbor's window, and I said, "Hey, buddy... tell you what, how about you climb back out that window now, and pay me $100, and I won't call the cops on you."
I wonder if Lucas and the others have heard about this... and what they're planning to do to Anti Pirat Gruppen as a result.
It was a hand-me-down from my girlfriend, who'd graduated to something more powerful. I spent the first few days re-organizing things to match my own mental categories, instead of hers. That forced me to really look at how I organize stuff, and at the whole concept of organization in general... a concept I've always been fairly poor at.
The "Expense Book" I immediately threw out... but things like the Date Book, To-Do List, and Memo Pad, I wind up using constantly. Typing stuff into memos, in particular, is much easier for me since I've got the foldable Palm keyboard. Like many geeks, I type much faster than I write, so the keyboard is a godsend; all I need is about 12-by-6 inches of space to set it up in, and I can enter text nearly as fast as I can on the standard 101/104-key board.
I've also got it loaded with about a dozen hacks to tweak its behavior to "just what I want" (like us OSS types are used to...). TealScript and TealEcho to make entering Graffiti easier, and to make it understand my graffiti instead of Palm Corp.'s; McPhling for easy context-switches; FontHack123 to get a smaller screen font on there and so pack more info into the same space; etc., etc.
Honestly, my life has gotten fantastically more organized since I got my Palm, and its use has become a standard operating procedure for me. I'm not about to give it up. And, with only a IIIx, it's not a "status symbol" either-- not in San Francisco it ain't!