Not quite the same thing. There basicly saying "by reading this licence agreement your automaticly agreeing to it" because you have to go to the site to access it. Its the same consept as a shrink wrap agreement that says "by opening this box you agreed to this license" when theres no way to read the licence (or even know that one existed) without opening the box because the slip of paper its printed on is inside the sealed box.
You must be giving the choice to decline or there is no valid contract. Thats why these retarded agreements get chucked out of court every time there challenged.
Shrinkwrap licence agreement have very little legal grounds to stand on (hence the fact that they have been thrown out of court every time a the issue has come to a legal battle) they are generaly included as more of a scare tactic then anything else. You cannot be held to a contract to which you had no prior knowlage until you had inadverently agreed to it. In this case you can't be held to a contract that says "by opening this package you agreed to this licence" when the licence was inside the package and you didn't even know it existed until you had opened it. It is a basic statut of contract law you must be given a choice
Otherwise I would be perfectly within my rights to say "by reading the first three lines of this post you agreed to give me everything you own" even though you didn't know this part existed until after you had already read the first three lines
Not sure who's palm they greased for this but there treading on pretty thin ice. One of the few doctrens of U.S. copyright law that actualy works to protect a consumers rights is First Sale.
As long as I include the entire package that I origanaly payed for I have the right too sell it to who ever I wish and the manufacturur has nothing to say about it. Be it a book, a CD or a piece of software (whatever there licence agreements say, they've been chucked out of court to many times to count) it is a protected right for me to transfer my licence to whom ever I wish without consulting the copyright holder or providing them with a royalty. They have rights to the profits from First Sale and nothing more.
In a closed source system how long would it have taken for it to be found? And how long would it have taken the company to actualy own up to the fact that it existed?
We've all heard this speil before. The consept of "security through obscurity" is antiquated at best and down right ignorent at worst. In a closed source model a company dosn't even have to admit that the flaw exists let alone work to fix it any time soon. Microsoft is famous for this (ya ya...I know...microsoft bashing...don't take this the wrong way. I'm sitting at a Win2k box writing this so don't just chaulk it up to me being another microsoft hater). They have made an art form out of using the terms "Its a feature not a bug" and "We put it there for a reason, but, ummm, we can't tell you why because its a trade secret". Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize. How long did it take them to even admit that they were valnerable to something as small and stupid as an OOB attack let alone release a patch for it. Or to stop shipping there OS's and DUN patch to consumers (read consumer as people who shouldn't be expected to know what VPN is let alone know how to secure it) with VPN support left in a wide open insecure state.
Microsoft bashing aside most other companies are just as bad. PcAnywhere is shipped out with a default profile that allows unencrypted connectings from anyone, consumer firewalls and DoS protection utilities are a joke at best, etc.
The closed source software community has no accountability. You've all seen the line "This product comes with no warrenty express or implied not even the implied warrenty of merchentability or fitness for a puricular purpose" in shrink wrapped licence agreements. Come on...what that basicly says is "oh...we know we advertised this as a secure product but we don't actualy have to make it one...or even make it function at all if we don't want to"
We don't except this attidude with any other product that we buy why do we exept it with software? Software manufacturers don't have to produce a quality product because there is no liability if they don't. And the effect of this for security products is that manufacturers don't have to produce products that are actually secure, because no one can sue them if they make a bunch of false claims of security.
The thing that open source software provides is a small messure of accountability and a way to fix the problem even if the origanal producer dosn't give a rats ass about it. If you make something thats junk in an open source model someone somewhere is going to call you out on it and that someone has the code to back them up and if you don't respond in an intellegent manner to the problem (just don't care or use another line MS is famous for "oh...that will be fixed in service pack XXX which will be released on insert date made up of insanly bignum's here") the end user has the recourse of either a: fixing the problem themselves or b: making the problem widly known so that someone with a better understanding of the programming language, etc, can fix the problem for them.
The OSS model is *not* perfect, far from it, and anyone who ever claimed that it is should cut down on the hallucinagens, but even given its inharent problems its still a damn site better then the alternative of just being able to say "I didn't do it, can't prove a thing!!!"
And yes I know my spelling/grammer sucks tonight but as its 3:30 in the morning here and I'm just heading to bed so you can live with it just this once;)
Actualy I have found a case that came with a handle...but since its a solid steel 3 1/2 foot high full tower the consept of portability is kind of nagated
I don't remember the details, but to make the FTC happy right now, you would have had to have two different checkboxes for "you can use my info internally" and "you can share my information". Other people they didn't like because they didn't clearly specify who they might share the information with.
So why is this a problem? Dosn't seem so absurd to me. If some company I do buisness with wants to sell my informion I should have the right the choose whether they are allowed to or not. I mean, a feature like that takes 5 minutes out of an administrators time to implement on the site and in the tracking database and personaly it would raise my respect for the company 10 fold and probably make me a repeat customer.
Web sites have an incentive to figure out what the best privacy options are, and offer those to their customers.
No they don't, they have the incentive to get the best bottem line while still maintaining customer trust. This usualy results in posting a privacy policy (with a lot of fine print) that is designed to give the customer a sense of security while still giving the company the freedom to find as many customers for the information they gather as possable. Profit is what drives the industry not morals
What websites track is your habits, and what pages and ads you have seen. The information is used for advertising. Does anyone really care that there might be incorrect data in what ads Slashdot thinks I might want to see?
Not realy, but is it so hard to allow me to override what they think I might want to see so I can tell them what I want to see? Or for that matter to allow me to tell them that I don't want any ads at all? The people that would bother to use such a feature are the people that will very rarly to never look at an ad anyway, so it wouldn't even have a real effect on there bottem line
What if they actually reported what's really going on? "Government Study Finds Young Companies Still Ironing Out the Details".
I think this could be better represented as "Government Study Finds Young Companies Still Ironing Out the Details of how they can get more information and more ways to sell it"
Now I'm not realy saying I agree entirly with a federal body sticking its nose in. U.S. federals tend to have heavy, sweeping solutions to problems that would better be served with a little finess (i.e. they use a crowbar when a fine dentists pick would have been the proper tool) but in this case I think it may be the lesser of the two evils. Companies in recent years havn't been working to come up with better privacy, its not a concern for them. Why actualy increase consumer privacy when you can post a nice privacy policy with lots of fancy words, make the consumer believe your working to protect them, and use your time in the more profitable venture of exploiting there information?
Your thinking too two dementionaly. You have to take into account speed and bandwidth (not the same thing). (God...I feel like I'm back in the days of explaining to a client why a P66 is faster then a 486DX2-66);)
Think of it this way. I have two water pipes both with the exact same amount of pressure moving the water inside them (speed), but the difference is one pipe is and inch wide and one is a foot wide (bandwidth) now at the same pressure (speed) which do you think is going to move more volume of water (data)?
Although in this case the difference is many orders of magnitude more pronounced so perhaps an example of a pipe one inch wide versus one mile wide would have been more in order. Remember, photons can not interact with anything exept themselves, so it is possable to run multiple data streams in the same physical space. A piece of fiber the thickness of a hair can have several hundred signals on different wavelengths all riding in the same physical space at the same time with zero crosstalk and zero signal loss.
Thats not even touching on the fact that the usable freqencies withing a stream of light contain much more usable freqency then in an electronic medium where your range is constrained by EMI problems and signal loss over distance
So now we have an increased usable frequency range and the ability to run multiple signals over the same stream with no EMI conserns. This results in optical technologies being several orders of magnitude faster then equivalent electronic technologies. To be honest I can't quite figure out why this thread is even taking place. I mean, come on, you all except without question that fiber provides a fatter, faster pipe then CAT5, so why is this such a strange new consept that requires debate
I have to agree with you here. Perl is a great programming language to get started on. It gives almost instant gratification (its amazing what you can do with just a very limited knowlage of the language. Especaly in the CGI programming arena) and coupling it with HTML gives the visual feedback that kids need to keep interest. There's also the "hey billy! go to http://insertaddress.com and check out what I just made" thing as an added bonus.
The nice thing about starting a kid out in programing by doing simple CGI's in perl is that to do something realy usfull and cool you don't need to know much of the language. For example the first program I ever wrote in perl was a script to read in a flat text file, pipe delimited database of names, e-mail addresses, etc. and display them on a webpage. At the time I had never programmed in any language (exept HTML if thats loosly considered a programming language) but all I needed to know to implement that was how to read in a file, split up the fields and use print to insert them into the page. Just a few lines of code, a simple format, no high level consepts to work out, but it gave instant gratification and feedback. That small script was what gave me the confidence and the drive to actualy sit down and start learning how to do more complex tasks.
The thing is a kid isn't going to find anything interesting about printing out "Hello World!" a million times or even learning how to do more complex tasks at a command line (and as for basic that language should be allowed to rot and die off in a corner somewhere...we were all forced to learn it in school and we hated it so why punish our kids the same way). They need some kind of visual feedback and the ability to show off there hard work that can get them worked up and encurage them to keep at it. The combination of HTML and perl is a perfect starting point that provides a lot of growing room.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite the same thing. There basicly saying "by reading this licence agreement your automaticly agreeing to it" because you have to go to the site to access it. Its the same consept as a shrink wrap agreement that says "by opening this box you agreed to this license" when theres no way to read the licence (or even know that one existed) without opening the box because the slip of paper its printed on is inside the sealed box.
You must be giving the choice to decline or there is no valid contract. Thats why these retarded agreements get chucked out of court every time there challenged.
--
Shrinkwrap licence agreement have very little legal grounds to stand on (hence the fact that they have been thrown out of court every time a the issue has come to a legal battle) they are generaly included as more of a scare tactic then anything else. You cannot be held to a contract to which you had no prior knowlage until you had inadverently agreed to it. In this case you can't be held to a contract that says "by opening this package you agreed to this licence" when the licence was inside the package and you didn't even know it existed until you had opened it. It is a basic statut of contract law you must be given a choice
Otherwise I would be perfectly within my rights to say "by reading the first three lines of this post you agreed to give me everything you own" even though you didn't know this part existed until after you had already read the first three lines
--
Not sure who's palm they greased for this but there treading on pretty thin ice. One of the few doctrens of U.S. copyright law that actualy works to protect a consumers rights is First Sale.
As long as I include the entire package that I origanaly payed for I have the right too sell it to who ever I wish and the manufacturur has nothing to say about it. Be it a book, a CD or a piece of software (whatever there licence agreements say, they've been chucked out of court to many times to count) it is a protected right for me to transfer my licence to whom ever I wish without consulting the copyright holder or providing them with a royalty. They have rights to the profits from First Sale and nothing more.
--
In a closed source system how long would it have taken for it to be found? And how long would it have taken the company to actualy own up to the fact that it existed?
We've all heard this speil before. The consept of "security through obscurity" is antiquated at best and down right ignorent at worst. In a closed source model a company dosn't even have to admit that the flaw exists let alone work to fix it any time soon. Microsoft is famous for this (ya ya...I know...microsoft bashing...don't take this the wrong way. I'm sitting at a Win2k box writing this so don't just chaulk it up to me being another microsoft hater). They have made an art form out of using the terms "Its a feature not a bug" and "We put it there for a reason, but, ummm, we can't tell you why because its a trade secret". Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize. How long did it take them to even admit that they were valnerable to something as small and stupid as an OOB attack let alone release a patch for it. Or to stop shipping there OS's and DUN patch to consumers (read consumer as people who shouldn't be expected to know what VPN is let alone know how to secure it) with VPN support left in a wide open insecure state.
Microsoft bashing aside most other companies are just as bad. PcAnywhere is shipped out with a default profile that allows unencrypted connectings from anyone, consumer firewalls and DoS protection utilities are a joke at best, etc.
The closed source software community has no accountability. You've all seen the line "This product comes with no warrenty express or implied not even the implied warrenty of merchentability or fitness for a puricular purpose" in shrink wrapped licence agreements. Come on...what that basicly says is "oh...we know we advertised this as a secure product but we don't actualy have to make it one...or even make it function at all if we don't want to"
We don't except this attidude with any other product that we buy why do we exept it with software? Software manufacturers don't have to produce a quality product because there is no liability if they don't. And the effect of this for security products is that manufacturers don't have to produce products that are actually secure, because no one can sue them if they make a bunch of false claims of security.
The thing that open source software provides is a small messure of accountability and a way to fix the problem even if the origanal producer dosn't give a rats ass about it. If you make something thats junk in an open source model someone somewhere is going to call you out on it and that someone has the code to back them up and if you don't respond in an intellegent manner to the problem (just don't care or use another line MS is famous for "oh...that will be fixed in service pack XXX which will be released on insert date made up of insanly bignum's here") the end user has the recourse of either a: fixing the problem themselves or b: making the problem widly known so that someone with a better understanding of the programming language, etc, can fix the problem for them.
The OSS model is *not* perfect, far from it, and anyone who ever claimed that it is should cut down on the hallucinagens, but even given its inharent problems its still a damn site better then the alternative of just being able to say "I didn't do it, can't prove a thing!!!"
And yes I know my spelling/grammer sucks tonight but as its 3:30 in the morning here and I'm just heading to bed so you can live with it just this once ;)
--
Actualy I have found a case that came with a handle...but since its a solid steel 3 1/2 foot high full tower the consept of portability is kind of nagated
--
I don't remember the details, but to make the FTC happy right now, you would have had to have two different checkboxes for "you can use my info internally" and "you can share my information". Other people they didn't like because they didn't clearly specify who they might share the information with.
So why is this a problem? Dosn't seem so absurd to me. If some company I do buisness with wants to sell my informion I should have the right the choose whether they are allowed to or not. I mean, a feature like that takes 5 minutes out of an administrators time to implement on the site and in the tracking database and personaly it would raise my respect for the company 10 fold and probably make me a repeat customer.
Web sites have an incentive to figure out what the best privacy options are, and offer those to their customers.
No they don't, they have the incentive to get the best bottem line while still maintaining customer trust. This usualy results in posting a privacy policy (with a lot of fine print) that is designed to give the customer a sense of security while still giving the company the freedom to find as many customers for the information they gather as possable. Profit is what drives the industry not morals
What websites track is your habits, and what pages and ads you have seen. The information is used for advertising. Does anyone really care that there might be incorrect data in what ads Slashdot thinks I might want to see?
Not realy, but is it so hard to allow me to override what they think I might want to see so I can tell them what I want to see? Or for that matter to allow me to tell them that I don't want any ads at all? The people that would bother to use such a feature are the people that will very rarly to never look at an ad anyway, so it wouldn't even have a real effect on there bottem line
What if they actually reported what's really going on? "Government Study Finds Young Companies Still Ironing Out the Details".
I think this could be better represented as "Government Study Finds Young Companies Still Ironing Out the Details of how they can get more information and more ways to sell it"
Now I'm not realy saying I agree entirly with a federal body sticking its nose in. U.S. federals tend to have heavy, sweeping solutions to problems that would better be served with a little finess (i.e. they use a crowbar when a fine dentists pick would have been the proper tool) but in this case I think it may be the lesser of the two evils. Companies in recent years havn't been working to come up with better privacy, its not a concern for them. Why actualy increase consumer privacy when you can post a nice privacy policy with lots of fancy words, make the consumer believe your working to protect them, and use your time in the more profitable venture of exploiting there information?
--
Your thinking too two dementionaly. You have to take into account speed and bandwidth (not the same thing). (God...I feel like I'm back in the days of explaining to a client why a P66 is faster then a 486DX2-66) ;)
Think of it this way. I have two water pipes both with the exact same amount of pressure moving the water inside them (speed), but the difference is one pipe is and inch wide and one is a foot wide (bandwidth) now at the same pressure (speed) which do you think is going to move more volume of water (data)?
Although in this case the difference is many orders of magnitude more pronounced so perhaps an example of a pipe one inch wide versus one mile wide would have been more in order. Remember, photons can not interact with anything exept themselves, so it is possable to run multiple data streams in the same physical space. A piece of fiber the thickness of a hair can have several hundred signals on different wavelengths all riding in the same physical space at the same time with zero crosstalk and zero signal loss.
Thats not even touching on the fact that the usable freqencies withing a stream of light contain much more usable freqency then in an electronic medium where your range is constrained by EMI problems and signal loss over distance
So now we have an increased usable frequency range and the ability to run multiple signals over the same stream with no EMI conserns. This results in optical technologies being several orders of magnitude faster then equivalent electronic technologies. To be honest I can't quite figure out why this thread is even taking place. I mean, come on, you all except without question that fiber provides a fatter, faster pipe then CAT5, so why is this such a strange new consept that requires debate
--
I have to agree with you here. Perl is a great programming language to get started on. It gives almost instant gratification (its amazing what you can do with just a very limited knowlage of the language. Especaly in the CGI programming arena) and coupling it with HTML gives the visual feedback that kids need to keep interest. There's also the "hey billy! go to http://insertaddress.com and check out what I just made" thing as an added bonus.
The nice thing about starting a kid out in programing by doing simple CGI's in perl is that to do something realy usfull and cool you don't need to know much of the language. For example the first program I ever wrote in perl was a script to read in a flat text file, pipe delimited database of names, e-mail addresses, etc. and display them on a webpage. At the time I had never programmed in any language (exept HTML if thats loosly considered a programming language) but all I needed to know to implement that was how to read in a file, split up the fields and use print to insert them into the page. Just a few lines of code, a simple format, no high level consepts to work out, but it gave instant gratification and feedback. That small script was what gave me the confidence and the drive to actualy sit down and start learning how to do more complex tasks.
The thing is a kid isn't going to find anything interesting about printing out "Hello World!" a million times or even learning how to do more complex tasks at a command line (and as for basic that language should be allowed to rot and die off in a corner somewhere...we were all forced to learn it in school and we hated it so why punish our kids the same way). They need some kind of visual feedback and the ability to show off there hard work that can get them worked up and encurage them to keep at it. The combination of HTML and perl is a perfect starting point that provides a lot of growing room.
--