For instance, if mailing lists are public accommodations, for instance, then they must be held up to the rigorous free speech standards of the First Amendment.
I'm sorry, but this is just silly. A public accommodation is not necessarily an instrument of the government. A restaurant owner cannot be held liable for the fact that a Mob boss ordered someone's execution over spaghetti bolognese. There is already a good deal of case law regarding the liability of electronic discussion forums, and it does not mean that owners or moderators are responsible for content.
It is not at all clear to me that the outcome of this case will have ramifications beyond what the ADA requires. I would certainly be interested in hearing from someone with a background in law.
49 minutes is pretty impressive. When I was an undergrad, our VAX 6110 running VMS 4.7 would typically take 30-40 minutes to boot. I guess that Cutler put more than a little bit of VMS into NT after all....
That's an FSF-specific issue. Linus doesn't insist on the same copyright sign-over. That, by the way, effectively locks Linus (and everyone else) into the GPL version 2, which most people believe is a good thing.
The FSF (or maybe its lawyers) believe that copyright assignment is necessary to put the FSF in a position to enforce its license in court, when the time comes. If FSF did not own the code, it might not have legal grounds to defend or enforce the license.
Perhaps this position isn't necessary, but until the GPL gets the acid test in a court of law we will not know for sure.
I don't know about you, but if Amazon is going to be keeping my credit card number on their disks for more than a few minutes, I want them to spend "thousands of hours" on the software which manages it.
I think I'm more interested in Richard Gabriel's comments than any other part of this article. He is something of a dark horse in this debate.
Gabriel argues that open source authors could retroactively revoke their open source licenses at any time, though it might take a court case to determine that. That may be. It is exactly what the University of Washington is attempting to do with PINE.
But if so, that principle applies to all kinds of software licenses, not just the GPL. If an author can retroactively revoke a source code license, Sun could pull the SCSL after receiving improvements for a few years and leave developers high and dry. Indeed, based on the history of the principals, Sun is a lot more likely to pull that trick than Linus or RMS are.
Gabriel goes on to ask, "What if Torvalds were a dictator?"
In fact, Linus is a dictator -- a benevolent dictator. He makes all of the final decisions (modulo Alan) about what goes into the kernel. Traditionally, the development community seems to be happier with a benevolent dictatorship than with a pseudo-democracy.
Between Gabriel's devils-advocacy and Joy's harping on talking about "stewardship" rather than "ownership" -- as though Sun were merely an altruistic third-party overseeing its own software products -- the whole thing makes me awfully queasy.
One last thing. Bill Joy suggests that licenses like BSD are business-friendly. Yet he does not even use his own BSD license at Sun. He must not have much faith in Sun's ability to make money from a BSD license.
Rural areas generally don't have cable service because the density doesn't pay off well enough for cable companies to put in the wire. Current DSL hardware has a limit of approximately 3 miles from the central office, which also rules it out for most rural customers.
That's less related to "current DSL hardware" than it is to current laws of physics. The signal attenuates too much over three miles of copper wire to permit high speed connections.
If the ISP's cost of equipment were a tenth of what they are, they could afford to stick a DSLAM into junction boxes in every one-horse town in the country. Until that happens, DSL is going to remain essentially a toy for city dwellers.
If you don't see the reason to switch, then you probably shouldn't. Save yourself a pile of dough!:-)
However, the trends are definitely in favor of widescreen images. DVD's explosion of popularity has really put widescreen movies in the home. With HDTV offering 16:9 aspect ratios and now widescreen TVs for more middle-of-the-road consumers, it's apparent that 4:3 is on the way out, not in. Even assuming that directors make films for the home video market first and foremost (an uncharitable assumption at best) they would still be designing for at least 16:9 at this point.
At any rate, since I enjoy watching "really, really old" movies (i.e. those made before 1980) I am very grateful for the recent trend towards higher fidelity in the home theater market.
You can now express your appreciation to your favorite techie by sending them an all-singing, all-dancing animated greeting card from Blue Mountain Arts.
Trouble is, most techies I know shoot those things on sight.
The point is that the underlying principles were accurate, not the props or set pieces. Modern cryptography is based on the insolubility of problems like prime factorization. If someone were to discover a fast algorithm for solving an NP-complete problem, it would represent the end of privacy. "Too many secrets."
The atmosphere of the movie is definitely hokey. No question there. But it's very refreshing to watch a movie that grasps the basic problem and explores what would happen if someone actually did solve the prime factorization problem.
NEWSFLASH: Most teenagers in the US are sexually active WAY before the age of 18.
Very true. Usually with someone else who's also under 18. The kids in my high school (not I, alas) did an awful lot of screwing around with each other at 15, 16 and 17. Even 13 and 14, sometimes.
The point is that there's a pretty big difference between a 14-year-old hitting on a 13-year-old and a 34-year-old hitting on a 13-year-old. While I agree that age-of-consent laws can be pretty screwed up, most of the problems can be fixed with "sliding window" rules: e.g. if you're over 18 and she's under 18, but there's only two years' difference between your ages, then you're okay. Under no circumstances should it cover a twenty-year age gap, which represents an incredible imbalance of power.
Not that I support the truly sick pedophiles out there that prey on children, but I can't help but wonder what this modern-day witch-hunt has done to discourage good people with a lot to offer youth groups and their members from participating.
Your point would be better taken if the evidence in this case were a little more ambiguous. As it is, Naughton doesn't seem to have much room to claim that he didn't know what he was doing, or that the police snookered him into it. I find it hard to weep.
The only people who should ever have been inconvenienced by the export regulations are U.S-based crypto sellers. U.S and non-U.S citizens have access to strong crypto anyway.
U.S. citizens cannot contribute work to a cryptosystem that is distributed outside of the U.S. That is a good practical reason for objecting to crypto controls.
But besides that, crypto laws are an area where we clearly need to be concerned about our eroding rights. I don't think there's any doubt that Freeh and Reno would be just as glad to see the use of strong crypto outlawed. For them to head off a law that would have eliminated most export controls, simply by throwing a tiny concession to the computing industry, would be a significant strategic victory. That is why we should be concerned about the effect of this move.
Few details have been released. The only official words on the subject seem to be yesterday's White House briefing, which is more like press release cheerleading than hard policy. The briefing was conducted by:
Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg,
Attorney General Janet Reno,
Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre,
Undersecretary of Commerce Bill Reinsch,
and Chief Counselor for Privacy at OMB Peter Swire.
Reinsch's role in the briefing was mainly to answer procedural questions about Wassenaar and technical review. Swire spoke very briefly in support of the upcoming Cyberspace Electronic Security Act, and talked about how key escrow will make all our lives better.
That leaves Steinberg, Reno and Hamre -- noted opponents of private crypto, all three -- to express their support for the Administration's decision to relax export controls.
I smell a rat.
As others have noticed, the closest thing to a firm commitment that has been made is that a "license exception" can be made for products that pass a "one-time technical review." The details of the technical review are not forthcoming: Secretary Daley says, "That will be developed over the next number of weeks." Nor do we know under what circumstances a license exception will be granted. This has all the earmarks of being all talk and no action.
Maybe this is the most telling part of the briefing:
Q: Would you consider this a relaxing of restrictions on encryption?
Attorney General Reno: No.
I am not getting my hopes up. The right thing for us to do is to contact our Congresscritters and make sure they understand that it is still important to pass SAFE -- maybe more than ever.
Lest we forget, the webcam's owner lives in Florida, set up the system, evacuated, and then submitted the URL to Slashdot. We may presume that he wanted people to watch the storm's progress through his site, whether out of amusement, morbid curiosity, or boredom.
It seems sort of weird to flame Slashdot for callowness but not the person who performed the hack in the first place.
In U.S. intellectual property law there is this notion of "contributory infringement," which means that even if you are not actively and immediately responsible for a copyright infringement, you may share some of the responsibility if you helped it happen.
Contributory infringement is most often applied to, say, publishers who reprint a copyrighted work submitted by a third party with no rights to that work. But I believe that it has also been applied to people who knowingly provided resources (e.g. a postage meter, a CD burner or a Xerox machine) for the purpose of large-scale copyright infringement, even though they never actively took part in the copying.
Depending on the context of the original web site, there may be a strong argument to make that the teenager in this case was a contributory infringer. For example, if the links on his web site said "Here are good places to get free MP3s of the latest N'Sync tunes!" then it's pretty clear that he was directing people to the MP3s with the expectation that they would download the pirated material, i.e. he's deliberately helping the copying happen. But say that his site was a technical exposition of the MP3 standard, with links to technical specs, ripping libraries, compression algorithms, and also happened to include links to sites which happened to include some illegally-ripped songs. In such a case it's much harder to demonstrate infringement.
Last point: I do not much agree with traditional intellectual property theory and do not in general care for the notion of copyright. Within that framework, however, this does not seem like a really outrageous case.
I agree that "fair vs. unfair" seems like the wrong distinction to make for meta-moderation. If I understand what Rob's trying to achieve, "appropriate vs. inappropriate" or "accurate vs. inaccurate" would be a better distinction.
It's still difficult to know how to respond. For example, one of the posts I was asked to meta was a totally pointless, homophobic racist rant. The moderation that I was asked to comment on was "-1; Offtopic." That was weird: do I say it was "fair" because it was a negative moderation point, or "unfair" because "Flamebait" was more accurate than "Offtopic"?
Is the purpose of M2 to comment just on whether a piece should have gotten positive or negative moderation? In that case "fair/unfair" may be okay.
I do like it, and it's a very clever solution to a tricky problem. But if the metamoderators don't fully understand what they're being asked to do then it may be very bad.
But Star Wars made him very rich indeed, and out of sheer courtesy he should not be speaking ill of the films that ensured he'd never have to work again.
I don't know the state of Sir Alec Guinness's personal finances, but it seems unlikely that Star Wars made the difference between working and retirement. Let's not forget that at the time he'd already had an illustrious career of 30-some years on film and stage, and by 1977 he'd already begun to slow down, performing only once every few years. I would expect that he was already prepared to slip into a comfortable retirement when Lucas came along.
The quiet period is over; Sir Alec Guinness speaking harshly of the writing in Star Wars is not going to materially affect the franchise at this point. Let the man have his say.
But we have to understand that Sun was and is never a part of the opensource community. Unlike RedHat, Suse, or Slackware that growed up along with (after the appearance of) Linux, Sun had been a commercialized enterprises _before_ anyone ever heard of Linux at all !
But this is not quite true, and that is the great irony.
When Sun Microsystems was founded, one of their first employees (and their first CTO, I believe) was Bill Joy, hired away from Berkeley where he had been hacking on 4BSD for many years. One of Sun's important early strategic decisions was to adopt BSD Unix for their operating system rather than writing a new one from the ground up.
Obviously they did not apply open-source principles to SunOS after making this decision, but they owed part of their early start to the relatively open-source nature of BSD.
(I understand that this is not entirely accurate, since pre-4.4 releases of BSD still required an AT&T source license, so Sun still had to license it from AT&T. But even in these ancient days, BSD was moving strongly toward a free software model.)
Putting all of your valuable information in one place makes a more tempting target for crackers than spreading it all around. This is a basic principle of information security -- big centralized servers with terabytes of data are more interesting targets than hundreds or even dozens of smaller servers.
It is clear to me that the author of this article was addressing this general problem with centralization and how it affects huge centralized mail services like Hotmail and the push toward "servlets". It is troublesome that many readers are so quick to dismiss the inherent problems of overcentralization.
As for OpenBSD's security, 2.5 years without a security alert speaks for itself I think.
That means that for the last 2.5 years, not enough sites have been running OpenBSD for it to be worth trying to crack.
There is no doubt that the OpenBSD team have done a better job on out-of-the-box security than any other free system out there, but that does not mean that the system is uncrackable. They would be the first to tell you that. As the system's popularity grows and it becomes a richer target, you will start to see OpenBSD security alerts.
This incident demonstrates that Microsoft has figured out to a T how the open source process works, and are entirely prepared to use it to their own advantage.
This guy had it exactly right:
"Microsoft tends to do two things at once. Not only is the first part to work the standards issue, to try to make their own technology the accepted standard, but the second issue is opening up their protocol to gain eyeball shares," said Joe Ferlazzo, an analyst with Technology Business Research.
Microsoft knows exactly what's important here: not source code, but file formats and protocols. If Microsoft publishes their IM protocol, it guarantees that hackers will write free clients for Linux (to say nothing of other maligned or forgotten platforms such as MacOS or Amiga). Free clients for Linux means that every customer of a certain $5.6 billion operating system company will be a MS Instant Messaging user.
Very shrewd.
The free software community can respond to this in one of several ways:
Pressure AOL to publish the AOL and ICQ protocols. It's the only way for them to preserve their market share.
Design a free instant messaging protocol. In fact, "design" is hardly even necessary. If the talk protocols could be updated to accommodate things like dynamic IP addresses (maybe via a "talk proxy" server operated by each ISP) they'd make a fine replacement. But it would be a real struggle to pry away more than a few of Microsoft's and AOL's eyeballs.
IMHO, given how rapidly things are moving, persuading AOL to loosen up is the only realistic response. There just isn't time to write a free IM protocol from scratch that would mount a serious challenge to Microsoft. But I would be very glad to see any progress on either front.
Punched up my E*Trade account this morning to submit a new conditional offer, entered an offer for 300 shares. Around 12:20 received a notice that I had been allocated 100 shares. Okay, so some is better than none. Watched the stock open and start bouncing around.
Then, about an hour later, got a call from an E*Trade rep to confirm my buy order! I had an outstanding buy offer of 100 shares at an opening price of $14, and did I want to confirm or cancel the order?
Well, gosh, by this time the stock price was around 44 in my quote window, and my Account Positions screen claimed that I already owned 100 shares. I said (a little nervously) that I thought I had already confirmed the order, and could he please double-check for me? So he checked on his monitor and confirmed that 100 shares were in my account and I was all set. Then he apologized and explained that the SEC was making them reconfirm all of that morning's conditional offers. He was using a list of buyers that had been printed before the stock went on the market, so some people on the list had already confirmed their orders online.
The interesting thing was that even though the stock was open and on the market, they were still confirming conditional offers that were made at the opening price of $14. As far as I know, that guy's still calling people.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, if mailing lists are public accommodations, for instance, then they must be held up to the rigorous free speech standards of the First Amendment.
I'm sorry, but this is just silly. A public accommodation is not necessarily an instrument of the government. A restaurant owner cannot be held liable for the fact that a Mob boss ordered someone's execution over spaghetti bolognese. There is already a good deal of case law regarding the liability of electronic discussion forums, and it does not mean that owners or moderators are responsible for content.
It is not at all clear to me that the outcome of this case will have ramifications beyond what the ADA requires. I would certainly be interested in hearing from someone with a background in law.
49 minutes is pretty impressive. When I was an undergrad, our VAX 6110 running VMS 4.7 would typically take 30-40 minutes to boot. I guess that Cutler put more than a little bit of VMS into NT after all....
The FSF (or maybe its lawyers) believe that copyright assignment is necessary to put the FSF in a position to enforce its license in court, when the time comes. If FSF did not own the code, it might not have legal grounds to defend or enforce the license.
Perhaps this position isn't necessary, but until the GPL gets the acid test in a court of law we will not know for sure.
I don't know about you, but if Amazon is going to be keeping my credit card number on their disks for more than a few minutes, I want them to spend "thousands of hours" on the software which manages it.
I think I'm more interested in Richard Gabriel's comments than any other part of this article. He is something of a dark horse in this debate.
Gabriel argues that open source authors could retroactively revoke their open source licenses at any time, though it might take a court case to determine that. That may be. It is exactly what the University of Washington is attempting to do with PINE.
But if so, that principle applies to all kinds of software licenses, not just the GPL. If an author can retroactively revoke a source code license, Sun could pull the SCSL after receiving improvements for a few years and leave developers high and dry. Indeed, based on the history of the principals, Sun is a lot more likely to pull that trick than Linus or RMS are.
Gabriel goes on to ask, "What if Torvalds were a dictator?"
In fact, Linus is a dictator -- a benevolent dictator. He makes all of the final decisions (modulo Alan) about what goes into the kernel. Traditionally, the development community seems to be happier with a benevolent dictatorship than with a pseudo-democracy.
Between Gabriel's devils-advocacy and Joy's harping on talking about "stewardship" rather than "ownership" -- as though Sun were merely an altruistic third-party overseeing its own software products -- the whole thing makes me awfully queasy.
One last thing. Bill Joy suggests that licenses like BSD are business-friendly. Yet he does not even use his own BSD license at Sun. He must not have much faith in Sun's ability to make money from a BSD license.
Rural areas generally don't have cable service because the density doesn't pay off well enough for cable companies to put in the wire. Current DSL hardware has a limit of approximately 3 miles from the central office, which also rules it out for most rural customers.
That's less related to "current DSL hardware" than it is to current laws of physics. The signal attenuates too much over three miles of copper wire to permit high speed connections.
If the ISP's cost of equipment were a tenth of what they are, they could afford to stick a DSLAM into junction boxes in every one-horse town in the country. Until that happens, DSL is going to remain essentially a toy for city dwellers.
Misery is a book about writing a book.
That it was ultimately turned into a movie was a convenient coincidence.
If you don't see the reason to switch, then you probably shouldn't. Save yourself a pile of dough! :-)
However, the trends are definitely in favor of widescreen images. DVD's explosion of popularity has really put widescreen movies in the home. With HDTV offering 16:9 aspect ratios and now widescreen TVs for more middle-of-the-road consumers, it's apparent that 4:3 is on the way out, not in. Even assuming that directors make films for the home video market first and foremost (an uncharitable assumption at best) they would still be designing for at least 16:9 at this point.
At any rate, since I enjoy watching "really, really old" movies (i.e. those made before 1980) I am very grateful for the recent trend towards higher fidelity in the home theater market.
You can now express your appreciation to your favorite techie by sending them an all-singing, all-dancing animated greeting card from Blue Mountain Arts.
Trouble is, most techies I know shoot those things on sight.
For all we know, the NSA could be sitting on a proof that "P != NP" and none of us would know any better!
That is possible, but it would be much more interesting if it turned out to be a proof that P = NP.The point is that the underlying principles were accurate, not the props or set pieces. Modern cryptography is based on the insolubility of problems like prime factorization. If someone were to discover a fast algorithm for solving an NP-complete problem, it would represent the end of privacy. "Too many secrets."
The atmosphere of the movie is definitely hokey. No question there. But it's very refreshing to watch a movie that grasps the basic problem and explores what would happen if someone actually did solve the prime factorization problem.
NEWSFLASH: Most teenagers in the US are sexually active WAY before the age of 18.
Very true. Usually with someone else who's also under 18. The kids in my high school (not I, alas) did an awful lot of screwing around with each other at 15, 16 and 17. Even 13 and 14, sometimes.
The point is that there's a pretty big difference between a 14-year-old hitting on a 13-year-old and a 34-year-old hitting on a 13-year-old. While I agree that age-of-consent laws can be pretty screwed up, most of the problems can be fixed with "sliding window" rules: e.g. if you're over 18 and she's under 18, but there's only two years' difference between your ages, then you're okay. Under no circumstances should it cover a twenty-year age gap, which represents an incredible imbalance of power.
Not that I support the truly sick pedophiles out there that prey on children, but I can't help but wonder what this modern-day witch-hunt has done to discourage good people with a lot to offer youth groups and their members from participating.
Your point would be better taken if the evidence in this case were a little more ambiguous. As it is, Naughton doesn't seem to have much room to claim that he didn't know what he was doing, or that the police snookered him into it. I find it hard to weep.
The only people who should ever have been inconvenienced by the export regulations are U.S-based crypto sellers. U.S and non-U.S citizens have access to strong crypto anyway.
U.S. citizens cannot contribute work to a cryptosystem that is distributed outside of the U.S. That is a good practical reason for objecting to crypto controls.
But besides that, crypto laws are an area where we clearly need to be concerned about our eroding rights. I don't think there's any doubt that Freeh and Reno would be just as glad to see the use of strong crypto outlawed. For them to head off a law that would have eliminated most export controls, simply by throwing a tiny concession to the computing industry, would be a significant strategic victory. That is why we should be concerned about the effect of this move.
What we know so far:
Few details have been released. The only official words on the subject seem to be yesterday's White House briefing, which is more like press release cheerleading than hard policy. The briefing was conducted by:
Reinsch's role in the briefing was mainly to answer procedural questions about Wassenaar and technical review. Swire spoke very briefly in support of the upcoming Cyberspace Electronic Security Act, and talked about how key escrow will make all our lives better.
That leaves Steinberg, Reno and Hamre -- noted opponents of private crypto, all three -- to express their support for the Administration's decision to relax export controls.
I smell a rat.
As others have noticed, the closest thing to a firm commitment that has been made is that a "license exception" can be made for products that pass a "one-time technical review." The details of the technical review are not forthcoming: Secretary Daley says, "That will be developed over the next number of weeks." Nor do we know under what circumstances a license exception will be granted. This has all the earmarks of being all talk and no action.
Maybe this is the most telling part of the briefing:
I am not getting my hopes up. The right thing for us to do is to contact our Congresscritters and make sure they understand that it is still important to pass SAFE -- maybe more than ever.
... the guy who set it up in the first place.
Lest we forget, the webcam's owner lives in Florida, set up the system, evacuated, and then submitted the URL to Slashdot. We may presume that he wanted people to watch the storm's progress through his site, whether out of amusement, morbid curiosity, or boredom.
It seems sort of weird to flame Slashdot for callowness but not the person who performed the hack in the first place.
In U.S. intellectual property law there is this notion of "contributory infringement," which means that even if you are not actively and immediately responsible for a copyright infringement, you may share some of the responsibility if you helped it happen.
Contributory infringement is most often applied to, say, publishers who reprint a copyrighted work submitted by a third party with no rights to that work. But I believe that it has also been applied to people who knowingly provided resources (e.g. a postage meter, a CD burner or a Xerox machine) for the purpose of large-scale copyright infringement, even though they never actively took part in the copying.
Depending on the context of the original web site, there may be a strong argument to make that the teenager in this case was a contributory infringer. For example, if the links on his web site said "Here are good places to get free MP3s of the latest N'Sync tunes!" then it's pretty clear that he was directing people to the MP3s with the expectation that they would download the pirated material, i.e. he's deliberately helping the copying happen. But say that his site was a technical exposition of the MP3 standard, with links to technical specs, ripping libraries, compression algorithms, and also happened to include links to sites which happened to include some illegally-ripped songs. In such a case it's much harder to demonstrate infringement.
Last point: I do not much agree with traditional intellectual property theory and do not in general care for the notion of copyright. Within that framework, however, this does not seem like a really outrageous case.
I came across the most wonderful comment once in the source code for either Mosaic or Lynx. Slightly paraphrased:
"I put this goto here to make marca happy. marc loves gotos."
It just made my day. Sadly, I haven't been able to find it again since then.
I agree that "fair vs. unfair" seems like the wrong distinction to make for meta-moderation. If I understand what Rob's trying to achieve, "appropriate vs. inappropriate" or "accurate vs. inaccurate" would be a better distinction.
It's still difficult to know how to respond. For example, one of the posts I was asked to meta was a totally pointless, homophobic racist rant. The moderation that I was asked to comment on was "-1; Offtopic." That was weird: do I say it was "fair" because it was a negative moderation point, or "unfair" because "Flamebait" was more accurate than "Offtopic"?
Is the purpose of M2 to comment just on whether a piece should have gotten positive or negative moderation? In that case "fair/unfair" may be okay.
I do like it, and it's a very clever solution to a tricky problem. But if the metamoderators don't fully understand what they're being asked to do then it may be very bad.
But Star Wars made him very rich indeed, and out of sheer courtesy he should not be speaking ill of the films that ensured he'd never have to work again.
I don't know the state of Sir Alec Guinness's personal finances, but it seems unlikely that Star Wars made the difference between working and retirement. Let's not forget that at the time he'd already had an illustrious career of 30-some years on film and stage, and by 1977 he'd already begun to slow down, performing only once every few years. I would expect that he was already prepared to slip into a comfortable retirement when Lucas came along.
The quiet period is over; Sir Alec Guinness speaking harshly of the writing in Star Wars is not going to materially affect the franchise at this point. Let the man have his say.
But we have to understand that Sun was and is never a part of the opensource community. Unlike RedHat, Suse, or Slackware that growed up along with (after the appearance of) Linux, Sun had been a commercialized enterprises _before_ anyone ever heard of Linux at all !
But this is not quite true, and that is the great irony.
When Sun Microsystems was founded, one of their first employees (and their first CTO, I believe) was Bill Joy, hired away from Berkeley where he had been hacking on 4BSD for many years. One of Sun's important early strategic decisions was to adopt BSD Unix for their operating system rather than writing a new one from the ground up.
Obviously they did not apply open-source principles to SunOS after making this decision, but they owed part of their early start to the relatively open-source nature of BSD.
(I understand that this is not entirely accurate, since pre-4.4 releases of BSD still required an AT&T source license, so Sun still had to license it from AT&T. But even in these ancient days, BSD was moving strongly toward a free software model.)
Putting all of your valuable information in one place makes a more tempting target for crackers than spreading it all around. This is a basic principle of information security -- big centralized servers with terabytes of data are more interesting targets than hundreds or even dozens of smaller servers.
Security hackers know this very well. It is one of the chief arguments that Abelson et al. have used to rebut the notion of key escrow. See The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow and Trusted Third-Party Encryption.
It is clear to me that the author of this article was addressing this general problem with centralization and how it affects huge centralized mail services like Hotmail and the push toward "servlets". It is troublesome that many readers are so quick to dismiss the inherent problems of overcentralization.
As for OpenBSD's security, 2.5 years without a security alert speaks for itself I think.
That means that for the last 2.5 years, not enough sites have been running OpenBSD for it to be worth trying to crack.
There is no doubt that the OpenBSD team have done a better job on out-of-the-box security than any other free system out there, but that does not mean that the system is uncrackable. They would be the first to tell you that. As the system's popularity grows and it becomes a richer target, you will start to see OpenBSD security alerts.
that guy would need to buy some big-ass pants if he had ass for nuts like you said.
I just can't stop reading this sentence. It is pure poetry.
Thank you.
This incident demonstrates that Microsoft has figured out to a T how the open source process works, and are entirely prepared to use it to their own advantage.
This guy had it exactly right:
Microsoft knows exactly what's important here: not source code, but file formats and protocols. If Microsoft publishes their IM protocol, it guarantees that hackers will write free clients for Linux (to say nothing of other maligned or forgotten platforms such as MacOS or Amiga). Free clients for Linux means that every customer of a certain $5.6 billion operating system company will be a MS Instant Messaging user.
Very shrewd.
The free software community can respond to this in one of several ways:
IMHO, given how rapidly things are moving, persuading AOL to loosen up is the only realistic response. There just isn't time to write a free IM protocol from scratch that would mount a serious challenge to Microsoft. But I would be very glad to see any progress on either front.
Had an interesting experience:
Punched up my E*Trade account this morning to submit a new conditional offer, entered an offer for 300 shares. Around 12:20 received a notice that I had been allocated 100 shares. Okay, so some is better than none. Watched the stock open and start bouncing around.
Then, about an hour later, got a call from an E*Trade rep to confirm my buy order! I had an outstanding buy offer of 100 shares at an opening price of $14, and did I want to confirm or cancel the order?
Well, gosh, by this time the stock price was around 44 in my quote window, and my Account Positions screen claimed that I already owned 100 shares. I said (a little nervously) that I thought I had already confirmed the order, and could he please double-check for me? So he checked on his monitor and confirmed that 100 shares were in my account and I was all set. Then he apologized and explained that the SEC was making them reconfirm all of that morning's conditional offers. He was using a list of buyers that had been printed before the stock went on the market, so some people on the list had already confirmed their orders online.
The interesting thing was that even though the stock was open and on the market, they were still confirming conditional offers that were made at the opening price of $14. As far as I know, that guy's still calling people.