Wow, I'm not sure I've ever seen a bill this bad. Reading the full text, I see that the legislation's primary function is defined in one paragraph:
Each public library must prohibit access to social networking websites on all computers made available to the public in the library. Each school must prohibit access to social networking websites on all computers made available to students in the school.
The bill goes on to define the key terminology it uses: administrative unit, computer, public library, school, and school board.
All well and good? Well, they never define what constitutes a "social networking website"! Which of these do you think would qualify: Slashdot? Reddit? Digg? Evite? Delicious? Blogger? We could debate this to death. (In fact, it probably is being debated at some Web 2.0 conference.) Without a clear definition of the most crucial term in the bill, how are schools supposed to know how to enforce it? How are the rest of us supposed to know what's allowed and what's not?
If a legislator took the effort to become knowledgable about the Internet, understand how it operates, and then proposed some carefully-crafted regulation, I wouldn't get so emotionally angry about it. Instead we get Ted Stevens' rant about tubes, and crap like this, because people don't take the time to understand what they're talking about. We should expect more out of our elected officials. They wield significant power, and it's ridiculous that they choose to use it without thinking.
It's a mistake to think of a successful company being the product of (1) a concept and (2) some capital. There really are three parts: the idea, the capital, and the execution. The execution is probably the most important factor on whether a company will succeed or fail. Eric Sink wrote it best (most provocatively?) when he claimed that ideas are worthless in an essay last year.
Look at Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software): he makes a bug tracker. Not a very novel idea. But he does it well, so his company is profitable and revenues are growing quickly. There are thousands of other companies out there doing the same thing. Proctor & Gamble doesn't sell anything particularly unique, they just do it well. And there are a hundred "low-cost" airlines out there, but JetBlue and Southwest are profitable because they've executed the idea correctly.
Venture capitalists are people with money and who choose not to execute on any ideas directly. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know many people that would truly want to put in the effort required to create a winning technology startup.
In the big scheme of the federal government, those people are high, but not unreasonably so. There are thousands of employees at their level.
It's strange that they're in the Department of Defense, though. You'd think that a significant security clearance would be required for that kind of job. On the other hand, having a worthless master's degree wouldn't necessarily disqualify them from the job.
Actually, the drummer for Rush (who this article is about) has played a marimba solo in each of the last few years. I'm not sure if it's a full minute, but it's damn cool, as you don't see any other rock drummer do that these days. In the most recent tour he also played a 50s-style swing song too... there's no way that the Limp Bizkit or Korn drummers could ever have that much versatility.
Mod me down for being a Rush geek, if you must...:)
They would probably recommend music by Trans-Siberian Orchestra... specifically the album "Beethoven's Last Night". TSO is a spinout of the metal band Savatage, and they play electrified versions of classical and Christmas music. Check it out!
I used to run a consulting business about 8 years ago; it was an LLC. I liked it, because it provided me the limited liability of a corporation... but without the hassle of the paperwork, nor the double taxation issues.
The Register article assumes that.NET's legitimacy rests on the availability of an open implementation to compete with Microsoft's. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of of.NET's perceived legitimacy will in the eyes of CIOs, IT managers, etc. These people will be swayed by its performance in its initial MS incarnation; reviews in manager-oriented publications; availability of software based on.NET; etc. They will not care whether there's a free implementation available.
Remember, SAMBA did not make Windows file sharing so widely-used!
SELECT DISTINCT c.name
FROM customers c, collections cl
WHERE c.id = cl.id
AND cl.debt > 0
This should work in any SQL server even if it doesn't support subselects. Have you found the subselect query to be faster/better? Or were you just trying to use an example subselect, not necessarily designing it to be "correct"?
A "BOF" is a "Birds of a Feather" session. It's an informal discussion where people who have a similar interest can talk for a while. It's used when the topic is not important enough to warrant a normal panel or seminar or whatever.
For example, at a programmer's conference, they may deem Java and C++ worthy of seminars. But since some people there will want to talk about C#, if they can't allocate enough resources for a full seminar, they may schedule a "BOF" to let those people get together and talk about it.
Ryan
I was not there, but would be happy to go again.
on
Protesting DMCA
·
· Score: 2
I live in Washington, and would have gone to the event if I didn't have class during that time. Had there been more time to prepare, I would have helped organize it, and even would have tried to speak to my professor about missing class, in order to come to the protest.
If there is another protest in Washington anytime soon, I will do anything I can to attend, and help organize/promote it as well.
Why have a distribution when 99% of the stuff hasn't been modified?
Because Red Hat 6.1 won't install on my ABIT BE6 system at all.
I've only got one hard drive, plugged into my Ultra DMA/66 controller. I can pass the parameter "ide2=XXXX,YYYY,ZZ" and get the kernel to see my drive. When I had a second drive, plugged into the Ultra DMA/33 controller, I could even get it to install on the DMA/66 drive. But now that I've only got the one drive, Red Hat's installer won't find partitions on/dev/hde at all.
In other words, I can't install the distribution I want on my current computer system. If Red Hat fixes this in version 6.2, so be it. In the mean time, I'll try ABIT's.
Is that A.I. (artificial intelligence) or "Al" (the Vice-President's first name)? I know "Al" and "robot" fit together well, but what does "monkey" have to do with it all?:)
Sorry, this isn't new news. The Reverend Benjamin Hagen, ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, has been granting "Electronic Indulgences" for over two years now.
What database does slashdot use for its' engine? Well I guess I kind of let the cat out of the bag in the subject: mysql. Last time I checked it was a little less than full GPL. Dosn this put a little damper on being able to do many of the really interesting things in an free an open manner anyway?
You're correct: MySQL does not use a GPL license. But its license is "free enough" for me. According to the MySQL manual, "For normal internal use, MySQL generally costs nothing. You do not have to pay us if you do not want to. A license is required if: You sell the MySQL server directly or as a part of another product or service; You charge for installing and maintaining a MySQL server at some client site; You include MySQL in a distribution that is non redistributable and you charge for some part of that distribution."
This seems fair enough: they don't want you to profit directly from their code, without them earning a little something as well. Otherwise, they let you use it without charge, even to host commercial sites. That seems more than reasonable. Furthermore, access to the source code is freely available and distributable.
How exactly does one actually cheaply create a slashdot site. I have looked at various hosting places and they don't exactly do anything of this nature cheaply.
My personal website (Space-Dye.com) is hosted with Hurricane Electric, a hosting provider in San Jose, CA. Their servers are fast, their connection is fast (direct connection to MAE-West), and their technical support is excellent. They offer Perl, PHP and MySQL access to all accounts, which start at only $9.95 per month. I've set up a couple of database-driven applications on my website, and they seem to work great.
I really want to see an improved version of the Slashdot code released as well. Not because of any kind of Open Source ideology, but because slash is simply the premier discussion software available. No other programmers have implemented discussion software with article submission features, moderation, meta-moderation, karma, and polls. I want to use some of this code for my own sites and my own development. I want to see PHPSlash pick up some of the newer features of slash.
The open source availability of version 0.4 has been promised for many months now, but unfortunately that release appears to be getting dimmer and dimmer. This is frustrating considering the way the rest of the Slashdot community trumpets the ideals of Open Source software. The way requests for the source code are blown off is doubly frustrating.
OK, let me see if I understand the facts and law here correctly... please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this. This could be the basis of a comprehensive defense.
1. Given sufficient resources, the data stored on a DVD can be copied to hard drives or DVD-RAM discs. However, this raw data is in encrypted format, and it is useless without being decrypted.
2. Ignoring media incompatibilities (i.e. "stand-alone players can't play data stored on a hard drive"), these copies can be played using commercial DVD players (stand-alone players or computer software) because these commercial products include the appropriate decryption mechanisms.
3. No member of the DVD CCA has produced DVD player software for Linux. As such, the open source community began developing open source DVD player software for Linux. In order to play these DVDs, though, they needed to decrypt the data. This decryption portion of the overall project was known as DeCSS.
4. Following a traditional Unix/Linux programming habit, the DeCSS code is "modularized" -- it can be run without the DVD player running. A side effect of this modularization is that it becomes extremely easy to save the unencrypted movie data to your hard drive, rather than just show it on your monitor/speakers.
5. DeCSS developers used published information to learn the encryption algorithm used on DVDs. However, the encryption keys were considered "proprietary" by the CCA, and not published or previously disseminated to the public in their raw form.
6. Xing Technology Corporation was licensed by the DVD CCA to ship software to decrypt and play DVDs under Microsoft operating systems. Xing was under a non-disclosure agreement, barring them from sharing the encryption keys with third parties.
7. Standard practice is to encrypt the encryption keys, to prevent users from copying the keys from legal, licensed applications. However, Xing departed from standard practice when they shipped their DVD-playing software with the encryption keys in their raw format.
8. Users of Xing software entered into a "shrinkwrap license agreement" which prohibited "reverse engineering."
9. Certain users of Xing software found the raw encryption keys within the Xing product. They may or may not have breached their agreement with Xing when doing this.
10. Given this one key, it was extremely simple to find many other keys. These additional keys were found by examining the code on a DVD. DVDs do not require you to enter into a "shrinkwrap license agreement" before using the disc.
Given these facts, the DeCSS people seem to have generally acted ethically, and should be in pretty good standing legally. Potential legal issues therefore include:
A. Should "finding the raw encryption key" be considered "reverse engineering"?
B. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act says reverse engineering is legal for purposes of interoperability. Given the above facts (and the conclusion that DeCSS was therefore designed for interoperability), was it outside of Xing's authority to prohibit this type of reverse engineering? If this is inside Xing's authority, then (for example) Microsoft also has the ability to prohibit Corel from reverse engineering Word file formats to enable WordPerfect to read Word files.
C. Users of Xing software were not asked to agree to the license until after the transaction was completed. Is this even legal?
D. Assume that Doe #200 did not directly participate in the reverse engineering, was not an licensee of the Xing product in question, can he still be prohibited from posessing or distributing keys obtained via reverse engineering?
E. Is anyone other than Xing allowed to pursue this lawsuit? It seems that the only contract the DVD CCA had was with Xing, and the only contract the users had was also with Xing. Under this logic, the DVD CCA should be suing Xing, and Xing should be counter-suing the users of their product who performed the reverse engineering.
F. Are the encryption keys "trade secrets"? Are they "stolen"?
What do you all think? Have I forgotten anything? Will this summary of facts and legal questions be useful to anyone?
Remember the hacked version of Doom that we discussed last week, in the article "Kill -9 With a Doom Shotgun"? That sounds awfully similar, going around killing daemons and all...:)
I've got an application with a fairly small number of web pages, a number of which require very simple database access. I expect the database access to be fairly minor (it's just a couple of small sections of the website). We've decided to use Red Hat 6.0, Apache, PHP3 and MySQL.
Is it faster to put Apache and MySQL on separate Linux boxes, connected via 100Base-T? What sort of performance hit would we get if we put it all on one box? What about one box with double the RAM? Thanks in advance for your help.
The other day my friend showed me a really nifty piece of software called podfuk. It basically (so far as I can tell) combines vfs libraries from Midnight Commander and the CODA filesystem... so you can cd into tar files or ftp sites, and the actual work is done in userspace. It's a very, very elegant hack, and I think it is exemplary of the quality and flexibility of the software that we have. I don't even want to think of how you could do that on an NT or Mac machine.
Actually, Internet Explorer 5.0 introduced a new concept called "Web Folders" (I think). Web Folders allow you to view FTP sites just like any local (or LAN) resource. It's not fully integrated into the system -- it just pops up that type of a window when you enter a FTP URL. But it seems to work, reasonably well. (It seems exceptionally slow, but that may just be due to my connection speed.)
Aren't there some third-party applications available for Windows which allow you to view zipped archives just like you described for Linux? I think I've used one in the past, but I don't remember how well it worked.
What's the deal with car detailing, anyway? Why do ALL these high-tech companies offer car detailing to their employees? Very strange.
Seriously, though, I think the best perk would be an on-site (or very near-site) auto repair shop. It doesn't have to be free, or even discounted. It just needs to be convenient, so I can drop my car off in the morning, go to work, and pick it up in the evening. Routine maintenance (be it oil changes, A/C repair, brake service, etc.) would be much, MUCH simpler.
Or just give us company cars which won't break down. That would work too.:)
I had this letter published in my local newspaper two years ago, but it's just as relevant today. Thoughts, anyone?
(Quad-City Times, Davenport, IA, July 29, 1997, p. 6A) Censorship is no remedy
Re: "Internet is uncensored in Q-C libraries," July 21
This front-page story suggests that Internet censorship is a panacea that protects children from the millions of pornographic web sites and other ailments of the Internet. This incorrect view is based on a public moral panic, created by an alarmist media. Blocking tools may block indecent web sites, but they also blacklist websites based on ideology alone.
Current blocking software blocks web sites from the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, to Nizkor (a Holocaust remembrance page), to Pathfinder (Time-Warner's news and entertainment site), to the National Organization for Women. These web sites are blocked purely because they contradict the conservative ideology of the software developers. In fact, developers of the popular CyberSitter software are so paranoid that their software blocks access to Peacefire ( http://www.peacefire.org), an anti-censorship alliance tha thas publicly criticized the extent of CyberSitter's filters.
Because of the overreach of filtering software, the American Library Association ( http://www.ala.org) adopted a resolution on July 2. It stated that "the use of filtering software by libraries to block access to constitutionally protected speech violates the Library Bill of Rights (a 1948 ALA document affirming that libraries are forums for the free exchange of information and ideas)." The policies of the public libraries in the area fully comply with the ALA's resolution. In light of these facts, local libraries should be praised, not criticized, for their choice to implement full Internet access.
Your message just got me thinking... Red Hat's scheduled to go public fairly soon. (Anyone know when?) What happens if a "hostile" group of investors purchases enough shares of Red Hat to control its strategic business decisions? Anti-trust issues aside, could Microsoft purchase a large chunk of Red Hat and "integrate" its product line with Windows?
I've also got a GPL-related legal question here. Let's say I release "Ryan's Kewl Installer 1.0" under the GPL, but I continue to hold the copyright for the program. A year later, I write an update for it, based on the original source. My update is released as a commercial, closed-source program.
Normally, in this situation, the copyright holder could sue the person/company infringing on the license. But in this case, I am both the copyright holder AND the person infringing on the GPL. Would the rest of the open-source community be able to take any action against me?
Ryan
Could not patch the kernel source on RH 6.0
on
Linux 2.2.10
·
· Score: 1
I tried to patch Red Hat's kernel 2.2.5 source (to 2.2.6), but it did not work correctly. Something they did (in their 15 revisions, i.e. the fact that it's version 2.2.5-15) appears to clash with the 2.2.6 patch. How do I do a 'diff' to see what they changed? Has anyone had success getting around this when patching? Is it safe to just do a new install of pristine 2.2.10 source, and go from there?
If need be, I can try again and post a list of errors.
Slashdot Mirror
The bill goes on to define the key terminology it uses: administrative unit, computer, public library, school, and school board.
All well and good? Well, they never define what constitutes a "social networking website"! Which of these do you think would qualify: Slashdot? Reddit? Digg? Evite? Delicious? Blogger? We could debate this to death. (In fact, it probably is being debated at some Web 2.0 conference.) Without a clear definition of the most crucial term in the bill, how are schools supposed to know how to enforce it? How are the rest of us supposed to know what's allowed and what's not?
If a legislator took the effort to become knowledgable about the Internet, understand how it operates, and then proposed some carefully-crafted regulation, I wouldn't get so emotionally angry about it. Instead we get Ted Stevens' rant about tubes, and crap like this, because people don't take the time to understand what they're talking about. We should expect more out of our elected officials. They wield significant power, and it's ridiculous that they choose to use it without thinking.
Ryan
It's a mistake to think of a successful company being the product of (1) a concept and (2) some capital. There really are three parts: the idea, the capital, and the execution. The execution is probably the most important factor on whether a company will succeed or fail. Eric Sink wrote it best (most provocatively?) when he claimed that ideas are worthless in an essay last year.
Look at Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software): he makes a bug tracker. Not a very novel idea. But he does it well, so his company is profitable and revenues are growing quickly. There are thousands of other companies out there doing the same thing. Proctor & Gamble doesn't sell anything particularly unique, they just do it well. And there are a hundred "low-cost" airlines out there, but JetBlue and Southwest are profitable because they've executed the idea correctly.
Venture capitalists are people with money and who choose not to execute on any ideas directly. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know many people that would truly want to put in the effort required to create a winning technology startup.
I'm working with systems like this right now. You might have better luck if you search for "workflow" instead of "batch." Googling for "open source" workflow management also brings back a bunch of promising hits. And if you're Java-centric, there's a great page which summarizes all the open source workflow engines available for Java.
Mr. Abell is not "Assistant Secretary of Defense" as the article claims. His actual title is Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness which puts him three levels below Rumsfeld.
Likewise, Ms. Walker's actual title is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Material and Facilities) (PDF), but even that's misleading because it's only for Reserve Affairs. In other words, she's 4-5 levels below Rumsfeld, as this PDF indicates.
In the big scheme of the federal government, those people are high, but not unreasonably so. There are thousands of employees at their level.
It's strange that they're in the Department of Defense, though. You'd think that a significant security clearance would be required for that kind of job. On the other hand, having a worthless master's degree wouldn't necessarily disqualify them from the job.
Ryan
Actually, the drummer for Rush (who this article is about) has played a marimba solo in each of the last few years. I'm not sure if it's a full minute, but it's damn cool, as you don't see any other rock drummer do that these days. In the most recent tour he also played a 50s-style swing song too... there's no way that the Limp Bizkit or Korn drummers could ever have that much versatility.
:)
Mod me down for being a Rush geek, if you must...
Ryan
They would probably recommend music by Trans-Siberian Orchestra... specifically the album "Beethoven's Last Night". TSO is a spinout of the metal band Savatage, and they play electrified versions of classical and Christmas music. Check it out!
Ryan
You can find everything you need on Google:
;-)
* Croatia: http://www.maptown.com/croatiamaps.html
* Czech Republic: http://www.maptown.com/czechrepublicmaps.html
Come on here, use some common sense before posting to Slashdot!
Ryan
LLCs do not get taxed twice.
I used to run a consulting business about 8 years ago; it was an LLC. I liked it, because it provided me the limited liability of a corporation... but without the hassle of the paperwork, nor the double taxation issues.
Ryan
The Register article assumes that .NET's legitimacy rests on the availability of an open implementation to compete with Microsoft's. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of of .NET's perceived legitimacy will in the eyes of CIOs, IT managers, etc. These people will be swayed by its performance in its initial MS incarnation; reviews in manager-oriented publications; availability of software based on .NET; etc. They will not care whether there's a free implementation available.
Remember, SAMBA did not make Windows file sharing so widely-used!
Ryan
Why not do this?
SELECT DISTINCT c.name
FROM customers c, collections cl
WHERE c.id = cl.id
AND cl.debt > 0
This should work in any SQL server even if it doesn't support subselects. Have you found the subselect query to be faster/better? Or were you just trying to use an example subselect, not necessarily designing it to be "correct"?
A "BOF" is a "Birds of a Feather" session. It's an informal discussion where people who have a similar interest can talk for a while. It's used when the topic is not important enough to warrant a normal panel or seminar or whatever.
For example, at a programmer's conference, they may deem Java and C++ worthy of seminars. But since some people there will want to talk about C#, if they can't allocate enough resources for a full seminar, they may schedule a "BOF" to let those people get together and talk about it.
Ryan
I live in Washington, and would have gone to the event if I didn't have class during that time. Had there been more time to prepare, I would have helped organize it, and even would have tried to speak to my professor about missing class, in order to come to the protest.
If there is another protest in Washington anytime soon, I will do anything I can to attend, and help organize/promote it as well.
Ryan
Because Red Hat 6.1 won't install on my ABIT BE6 system at all.
I've only got one hard drive, plugged into my Ultra DMA/66 controller. I can pass the parameter "ide2=XXXX,YYYY,ZZ" and get the kernel to see my drive. When I had a second drive, plugged into the Ultra DMA/33 controller, I could even get it to install on the DMA/66 drive. But now that I've only got the one drive, Red Hat's installer won't find partitions on /dev/hde at all.
In other words, I can't install the distribution I want on my current computer system. If Red Hat fixes this in version 6.2, so be it. In the mean time, I'll try ABIT's.
Ryan
Is that A.I. (artificial intelligence) or "Al" (the Vice-President's first name)? I know "Al" and "robot" fit together well, but what does "monkey" have to do with it all? :)
Ryan
You can get your very own free Electronic Indulgence, at http://icodex.nethosting.com/indulge/.
Ryan
You're correct: MySQL does not use a GPL license. But its license is "free enough" for me. According to the MySQL manual, "For normal internal use, MySQL generally costs nothing. You do not have to pay us if you do not want to. A license is required if: You sell the MySQL server directly or as a part of another product or service; You charge for installing and maintaining a MySQL server at some client site; You include MySQL in a distribution that is non redistributable and you charge for some part of that distribution."
This seems fair enough: they don't want you to profit directly from their code, without them earning a little something as well. Otherwise, they let you use it without charge, even to host commercial sites. That seems more than reasonable. Furthermore, access to the source code is freely available and distributable.
How exactly does one actually cheaply create a slashdot site. I have looked at various hosting places and they don't exactly do anything of this nature cheaply.
My personal website (Space-Dye.com) is hosted with Hurricane Electric, a hosting provider in San Jose, CA. Their servers are fast, their connection is fast (direct connection to MAE-West), and their technical support is excellent. They offer Perl, PHP and MySQL access to all accounts, which start at only $9.95 per month. I've set up a couple of database-driven applications on my website, and they seem to work great.
Ryan
I really want to see an improved version of the Slashdot code released as well. Not because of any kind of Open Source ideology, but because slash is simply the premier discussion software available. No other programmers have implemented discussion software with article submission features, moderation, meta-moderation, karma, and polls. I want to use some of this code for my own sites and my own development. I want to see PHPSlash pick up some of the newer features of slash.
The open source availability of version 0.4 has been promised for many months now, but unfortunately that release appears to be getting dimmer and dimmer. This is frustrating considering the way the rest of the Slashdot community trumpets the ideals of Open Source software. The way requests for the source code are blown off is doubly frustrating.
Ryan
OK, let me see if I understand the facts and law here correctly... please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this. This could be the basis of a comprehensive defense.
1. Given sufficient resources, the data stored on a DVD can be copied to hard drives or DVD-RAM discs. However, this raw data is in encrypted format, and it is useless without being decrypted.
2. Ignoring media incompatibilities (i.e. "stand-alone players can't play data stored on a hard drive"), these copies can be played using commercial DVD players (stand-alone players or computer software) because these commercial products include the appropriate decryption mechanisms.
3. No member of the DVD CCA has produced DVD player software for Linux. As such, the open source community began developing open source DVD player software for Linux. In order to play these DVDs, though, they needed to decrypt the data. This decryption portion of the overall project was known as DeCSS.
4. Following a traditional Unix/Linux programming habit, the DeCSS code is "modularized" -- it can be run without the DVD player running. A side effect of this modularization is that it becomes extremely easy to save the unencrypted movie data to your hard drive, rather than just show it on your monitor/speakers.
5. DeCSS developers used published information to learn the encryption algorithm used on DVDs. However, the encryption keys were considered "proprietary" by the CCA, and not published or previously disseminated to the public in their raw form.
6. Xing Technology Corporation was licensed by the DVD CCA to ship software to decrypt and play DVDs under Microsoft operating systems. Xing was under a non-disclosure agreement, barring them from sharing the encryption keys with third parties.
7. Standard practice is to encrypt the encryption keys, to prevent users from copying the keys from legal, licensed applications. However, Xing departed from standard practice when they shipped their DVD-playing software with the encryption keys in their raw format.
8. Users of Xing software entered into a "shrinkwrap license agreement" which prohibited "reverse engineering."
9. Certain users of Xing software found the raw encryption keys within the Xing product. They may or may not have breached their agreement with Xing when doing this.
10. Given this one key, it was extremely simple to find many other keys. These additional keys were found by examining the code on a DVD. DVDs do not require you to enter into a "shrinkwrap license agreement" before using the disc.
Given these facts, the DeCSS people seem to have generally acted ethically, and should be in pretty good standing legally. Potential legal issues therefore include:
A. Should "finding the raw encryption key" be considered "reverse engineering"?
B. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act says reverse engineering is legal for purposes of interoperability. Given the above facts (and the conclusion that DeCSS was therefore designed for interoperability), was it outside of Xing's authority to prohibit this type of reverse engineering? If this is inside Xing's authority, then (for example) Microsoft also has the ability to prohibit Corel from reverse engineering Word file formats to enable WordPerfect to read Word files.
C. Users of Xing software were not asked to agree to the license until after the transaction was completed. Is this even legal?
D. Assume that Doe #200 did not directly participate in the reverse engineering, was not an licensee of the Xing product in question, can he still be prohibited from posessing or distributing keys obtained via reverse engineering?
E. Is anyone other than Xing allowed to pursue this lawsuit? It seems that the only contract the DVD CCA had was with Xing, and the only contract the users had was also with Xing. Under this logic, the DVD CCA should be suing Xing, and Xing should be counter-suing the users of their product who performed the reverse engineering.
F. Are the encryption keys "trade secrets"? Are they "stolen"?
What do you all think? Have I forgotten anything? Will this summary of facts and legal questions be useful to anyone?
Ryan
Remember the hacked version of Doom that we discussed last week, in the article "Kill -9 With a Doom Shotgun"? That sounds awfully similar, going around killing daemons and all... :)
Ryan
Is it faster to put Apache and MySQL on separate Linux boxes, connected via 100Base-T? What sort of performance hit would we get if we put it all on one box? What about one box with double the RAM? Thanks in advance for your help.
Ryan
The other day my friend showed me a really nifty piece of software called podfuk. It basically (so far as I can tell) combines vfs libraries from Midnight Commander and the CODA filesystem... so you can cd into tar files or ftp sites, and the actual work is done in userspace. It's a very, very elegant hack, and I think it is exemplary of the quality and flexibility of the software that we have. I don't even want to think of how you could do that on an NT or Mac machine.
Actually, Internet Explorer 5.0 introduced a new concept called "Web Folders" (I think). Web Folders allow you to view FTP sites just like any local (or LAN) resource. It's not fully integrated into the system -- it just pops up that type of a window when you enter a FTP URL. But it seems to work, reasonably well. (It seems exceptionally slow, but that may just be due to my connection speed.)
Aren't there some third-party applications available for Windows which allow you to view zipped archives just like you described for Linux? I think I've used one in the past, but I don't remember how well it worked.
Ryan
Another Linux enthusiast...
What's the deal with car detailing, anyway? Why do ALL these high-tech companies offer car detailing to their employees? Very strange.
:)
Seriously, though, I think the best perk would be an on-site (or very near-site) auto repair shop. It doesn't have to be free, or even discounted. It just needs to be convenient, so I can drop my car off in the morning, go to work, and pick it up in the evening. Routine maintenance (be it oil changes, A/C repair, brake service, etc.) would be much, MUCH simpler.
Or just give us company cars which won't break down. That would work too.
Ryan
I had this letter published in my local newspaper two years ago, but it's just as relevant today. Thoughts, anyone?
(Quad-City Times, Davenport, IA, July 29, 1997, p. 6A)
Censorship is no remedy
Re: "Internet is uncensored in Q-C libraries," July 21
This front-page story suggests that Internet censorship is a panacea that protects children from the millions of pornographic web sites and other ailments of the Internet. This incorrect view is based on a public moral panic, created by an alarmist media. Blocking tools may block indecent web sites, but they also blacklist websites based on ideology alone.
Current blocking software blocks web sites from the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, to Nizkor (a Holocaust remembrance page), to Pathfinder (Time-Warner's news and entertainment site), to the National Organization for Women. These web sites are blocked purely because they contradict the conservative ideology of the software developers. In fact, developers of the popular CyberSitter software are so paranoid that their software blocks access to Peacefire ( http://www.peacefire.org), an anti-censorship alliance tha thas publicly criticized the extent of CyberSitter's filters.
Because of the overreach of filtering software, the American Library Association ( http://www.ala.org) adopted a resolution on July 2. It stated that "the use of filtering software by libraries to block access to constitutionally protected speech violates the Library Bill of Rights (a 1948 ALA document affirming that libraries are forums for the free exchange of information and ideas)." The policies of the public libraries in the area fully comply with the ALA's resolution. In light of these facts, local libraries should be praised, not criticized, for their choice to implement full Internet access.
Ryan A. Park
Your message just got me thinking... Red Hat's scheduled to go public fairly soon. (Anyone know when?) What happens if a "hostile" group of investors purchases enough shares of Red Hat to control its strategic business decisions? Anti-trust issues aside, could Microsoft purchase a large chunk of Red Hat and "integrate" its product line with Windows?
I've also got a GPL-related legal question here. Let's say I release "Ryan's Kewl Installer 1.0" under the GPL, but I continue to hold the copyright for the program. A year later, I write an update for it, based on the original source. My update is released as a commercial, closed-source program.
Normally, in this situation, the copyright holder could sue the person/company infringing on the license. But in this case, I am both the copyright holder AND the person infringing on the GPL. Would the rest of the open-source community be able to take any action against me?
Ryan
I tried to patch Red Hat's kernel 2.2.5 source (to 2.2.6), but it did not work correctly. Something they did (in their 15 revisions, i.e. the fact that it's version 2.2.5-15) appears to clash with the 2.2.6 patch. How do I do a 'diff' to see what they changed? Has anyone had success getting around this when patching? Is it safe to just do a new install of pristine 2.2.10 source, and go from there?
If need be, I can try again and post a list of errors.
Thanks for your help.
Ryan