The program appears to be written in VB (if it is indeed the same one as posted here)
Rewriting it in C++ (perhaps with some inline assembly optimizations) will probably yield a significant performance boost if it is number crunching that is in fact slowing it down so much.
They were selling software in US through their american retailer (regnow.com) and were, thus, automatically paying state taxes on those sales for purchases from customers located in Washington state (where Regnow is located). That's pretty much the definition of "doing business in US".
So the argument that US law doesn't apply here is moot and will be thrown out in the court fairly quickly
Yep. And that falls under 'directly inciting violence' provision established by the Supreme Court over the years. I don't think that Sklyarov's talk on the security (or lack thereof) of Adobe's e-book software can be classified as such, though.
Yes, but he gave a talk and explained out it works in the US.. that is illegal (currently) in the US.
So doesn't the First Amendment matter anymore? I mean, I know that EFF is currently challenging DMCA with the DeCSS case by arguing that code is speech which to some people (particularly judges) is a novel idea, but in this case he gave a TALK for god's sake! That's clearly speech isn't it? And I seem to remember that you cannot be put in jail in this country for saying anything unless it directly incites violence. Has that changed or something? Did I miss the repeal of the First Amendment?
Do not restrict runtime linkage and call it freedom.
But it already restricts runtime (i.e. dynamic) linkage? What is the difference here?
GPL is designed to prohibit the use of GPLed software in close-source non-free (in GPL's sense of the world 'free') programs, IMHO. If you can get away with doing that via some IPC/RPC tricks, it is a loophole and probably needs to be taken care of to remain consistent with that policy.
Ok. So they wanted to link with some GPLed code, but of course that was prohibited by the license. So what they did now was create another stub open-source program which links with the GPLed code and then used IPC shared memory mechanisms to pass the information to the actual close-source program that does everything. Am I reading this right?
So then if what they did is legal than the same can be done with any other GPL application. Simply write an open-source stub that would link with the GPLed code and then use IPC/RPC/etc to communicate with the main program that you don't want to open-source. It will certainly be much slower than direct linking, but if speed is not an issue then it will work just fine. It seems to me that if GPL does indeed allow this than it is a definite loophole that perhaps needs to be fixed in a new version of the license.
You really don't have to do that, since you've already have the code sitting on your machine. All you have to do is disassemble the executable and spend a couple of sleepless nights looking through the assembly listings....
You might want to read their conclusion first before making such statements:
Looking at the technical details of WPA, we do not think that it is as problematic as many people have expected. We think so, because WPA is tolerant with respect to hardware modifications....
In contrast to many critics of Windows Product Activation, we think that WPA does not prevent typical hardware modifications and, moreover, respects the user's right to privacy.
Ok. Generally, when you are encrypting with public-key encryption, you use the public key of the person you are sending the message to. Thus, they are the only one who are able to decrypt it (not even you, the sender, can decrypt it unless you also encrypt the message to yourself simultaneously). However, they have no way to verify that you are really the sender of that message, since you did not use any secrets known only to you (i.e. your private key) during the encryption process that would somehow link you to the message.
So, obviously, in order to do that, you would sign the message with your private key, so that the person can then use your public key to verify it.
A patent on this type of thing is ludicrous, and I hope there are plenty of people around to challenge it. Apathy is the enemy of freedom.
They have not patented the idea of MP3 streaming. They do hold a bunch of patents for the algorithms used in MP3 encoders and decoders, however, and, thus, can dictate the license conditions at which they are gonna let you use it.
A little bit of history:
MP3 (Audio MPEG Layer 3) was originally developed back in the early 90s (I believe it was 1992, but I'm not sure) by the Fraunhoeffer Institute in Germany, which they patented. At first, I believe they allowed everyone to write encoders/decoders based on the codec for free, but later decided to charge 50 cents per each unit sold (if you don't sell your end product, you don't pay anything)with a minimum fee of $15000 per year.
At some point, Fraunhoeffer let Thomson Multimedia handle the licensing of mp3 and that's where we are at today.
Algorithms/Designs (unlike ideas like "hey, i'm gonna patent that single-click online ad idea even though it's plainly obvious to everyone") have always been patentable and should remain so.
Hey, we live in a capitalist society (or at least we hope we do) where we get paid for our labor. If you spend 10 years developing a really cool and original sound compression algorithm, like Fraunhofer Institute's MPEG Audio Layer-3 (MP3), which becomes really popular, why shouldn't you patent it and make some profit for all the work that you had put into creating it? We all have to make a living...
Every program ever written under linux would be a derivative work of the kernel, which is GPL.
You are wrong because Linux kernel is NOT licensed under the strict GPL. Linus specifically gives the following exceptions in his COPYING document:
"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernelservices by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
First of all, libc is under LGPL, so that part of your point is moot.
Second of all, you are partially right in that you can right close-source linux kernel drivers and modules that LINK with the GPLed Linux kernel.
HOWEVER, the only reason you are allowed to do that is because Linus speicifically gives permission for people to do that in his license (he can do that, since he holds the copyright to the Linux kernel and, thus, can license it under any license he chooses to - whether it is strict GPL or modified derivative of it)
"Either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language" is the kicker
I highly doubt that this can be held up in court. If RMS is arguing in the DVD/CCA case that computer code in a specific programming language is indeed speech that expresses the unique thoughts of that coder, then he can't just turn around and say that code that's translated into another language is still the same thing as the original.
Of course, the judges seem to very skeptical on whether code is speech in the first place, but that's a different story...
Seriously, why? All that it says is if you want to use code that's licensed under GPL, you better GPL your application too.
However, nothing stops you from looking at the source of GPL software, figuring out the algorithms that are being used and using them in your own non-GPL software later on (assuming, that you actually rewrite it in your own way and don't just copy the source). For instance, there are a lot of very cool algorithms in the Linux kernel, such as the copy-on-write trick (when you fork a process, its pages do not get physically duplicated, but the pages tables are modified to point to the original process' pages, until you actually start modifying them) or their very efficient and cool slab allocator (OO-type memory allocator which actually was first developed by Sun back in 1994) and many other cool tricks.
There is absolutely NOTHING that prevents Microsoft employees from looking at that code (other than their internal strict policies not to do that - I have a friend who interned their for the summer and he tells me that they are prohibited from visiting open-source projects that do something similar to what they are working on), figuring out how the algorithm works and how it's implemented in the Linux kernel and then taking that IDEA and implementing it in Windows. As long as they are not copying the code, it should be perfectly legal, right?
However, you cannot do the same thing with Windows, since you don't have access to the code and thus can't see whether they are using any cool algorithms that you can also put to good use in your own OS.
The problem I have with this argument is where to draw the line. If you say that C or Assembly program is speech, then what about machine code (yet another language form)/binaries? What about engineering plans or architectural blue prints? What about the commmand you type when you use grep to search for something? It uses regex, which is also language... These are all valid expressions in their own languages but I have great difficulty referring to them as "speech".
I understand the argument that since programming languages are designed for humans not machines, it must be speech. i.e. a machine doesn't need your program to be written in C - it only understands 0s and 1s. We write in C/Perl/Lisp/(your favorite language) because that code can be efficiently translated into the language that a machine can understand and execute and at the same time be readable to us (well, in case of Perl, that may not necessarily be the case).
HOWEVER, the primary purpose of a program written in a programming languages is so that eventually it would be translated to machine code and executed on some processor and perform some task.
(at least that's what happens 99% of the time). If you buy this argument, then ANY TYPE of automated instructions to machines (something as simple as moving a mouse, perhaps) have to be considered speech as well, and I'm not sure that there are a lot of judges willing to stretch the First Ammendment that far (to call almost everything that we produce in life as speech)
At any rate, I do believe that DMCA is evil and must be overturned, but I just don't think that using this argument that any computer code is speech is going to get us very far...
The problem with open-source codecs is that almost all good compression algorithms have been patented already, so unless someone comes up with a truly revolutionary way of compressing audio or video AND releases it into public-domain, we won't have any good open-source codecs for another 15-20 years or so (whenever all these patents start to expire and are released into public-domain)
Re:Tourists in space- serious thoughts
on
Tito In Space
·
· Score: 2
We've built an enormous, expensive platform to conduct rather vaguely defined research that could have been accomplished much more easily in any number of ways- because the goal, really, that NASA set themselves was to build a station, regardless of what use it was.
Unfortunately, it seems like you are correct. Whenever anyone points out the great "benefits" of having a space station, it almost solely results in an argument for "great scientific/medical experiments and discoveries in zero gravity". However, I have not seen anyone yet show any concrete scientific/medical result of having humans aboard a space station for the past ~20 years or so.
Sure, we've learned a great deal more about living in space but that doesn't help much (at the moment) to us who plan to remain on our planet for the foreseable future. The only benefit of having a space station that I can see is research in future space exploration (yeah, we'll have to learn how to survive in space for long period of time eventually), but at the moment we aren't even close to having the technology to have these long interplanetary voyages where this research would be extremely helpful.
So there really wasn't any rush to building this expensive station NOW, instead of waiting a few decades when space travel technology can be more efficient and cheaper to use. But I guess starting early has its benefits too...
As one of my CS professors likes to say - Software Kills People. Therefore, you should treat all the bugs in your software accordingly.
An OS that crashes on a PC at home may not be that big of a deal to you, but if that OS is installed on a machine that's powering a space station and the lives of the crew depend on it, then you'll probably be a little more concerned about the bugs in that environment.
Despite the popular belief, it is possible to write software that is completely free of bugs (just look at the space shuttle launching code). It is a lot more difficult to do that, sure, but nevertheless quite doable.
Probably someone like Karpov would have beaten Deeper Blue hands down, since he was nearly as good as Kasparov but the machine wasn't built specifically to defeat him.
15 years ago, when Kasparov was just starting out, perhaps. Now, Karpov doesn't stand a chance against Kasparov. According to the FIDE world chess ratings, he is only 12th on the list!
Actually, it's not the first time. In the early 90s, a Japanese reporter paid to go to Mir for a couple of weeks. Tito, assuming he'll get to go up, will only be the 2nd civilian to do this.
I don't believe that this problem affects either the Linux or FreeBSD kernels because they generate their ISNs from/dev/random which is considered to be quite secure (at least, as secure as you can get without an external hardware device to collect truly random information), therefore, these numbers are almost impossible to predict.
According, to his attack summary he identifies a problem with kernels that increment the ISN value for each connection based on some predictable value. However, interestingly enough, he does not identify any systems that exhibit this vulnerability. Nor does he provide a whole lot of detail into how this vulnerability is any different than the ones that have been identified starting all the way back in 1996.
In general, I think it is all part of a much larger problem that almost no OSes (except for Linux and FreeBSD) provide a kernel driver, such as/dev/random, to generate relatively unpredictable data. That kind of service is enormously helpful in all kinds of application, starting from the most obvious one - cryptography and TCP ISN selections to shuffling decks of cards in online casino games.
is that there is not enough electricity around to power even a fraction of the cars in this country, even assuming that all the electricity from the power plants in U.S. will go exclusively to fuel these cars.
And since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people who like living next door to a nuclear reactor (one of the cheapest and most efficient sources of power we can build with current technology - not to mention safest, despite Chernobyl and Three Mile island), there isn't much chance of electric cars taking off in the near future.
He may have lost this one championship match but being the champion for 15 years allows for a few mistakes.
The problem is that this wasn't just a "few mistakes". He wasn't able to get a clear advantage in ANY of the 15 games that they played togher, lost 2 of them and nearly a lost a few more. Kramnik didn't just win, he dominated the board in almost every game. I don't think that this was just a random fluke. Kasparov clearly is losing/lost his edge and getting it back at his age would be incredibly difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
The program appears to be written in VB (if it is indeed the same one as posted here)
Rewriting it in C++ (perhaps with some inline assembly optimizations) will probably yield a significant performance boost if it is number crunching that is in fact slowing it down so much.
They were selling software in US through their american retailer (regnow.com) and were, thus, automatically paying state taxes on those sales for purchases from customers located in Washington state (where Regnow is located). That's pretty much the definition of "doing business in US".
So the argument that US law doesn't apply here is moot and will be thrown out in the court fairly quickly
GPL is designed to prohibit the use of GPLed software in close-source non-free (in GPL's sense of the world 'free') programs, IMHO. If you can get away with doing that via some IPC/RPC tricks, it is a loophole and probably needs to be taken care of to remain consistent with that policy.
Ok. So they wanted to link with some GPLed code, but of course that was prohibited by the license. So what they did now was create another stub open-source program which links with the GPLed code and then used IPC shared memory mechanisms to pass the information to the actual close-source program that does everything. Am I reading this right?
So then if what they did is legal than the same can be done with any other GPL application. Simply write an open-source stub that would link with the GPLed code and then use IPC/RPC/etc to communicate with the main program that you don't want to open-source. It will certainly be much slower than direct linking, but if speed is not an issue then it will work just fine. It seems to me that if GPL does indeed allow this than it is a definite loophole that perhaps needs to be fixed in a new version of the license.
You really don't have to do that, since you've already have the code sitting on your machine. All you have to do is disassemble the executable and spend a couple of sleepless nights looking through the assembly listings....
Ok. Generally, when you are encrypting with public-key encryption, you use the public key of the person you are sending the message to. Thus, they are the only one who are able to decrypt it (not even you, the sender, can decrypt it unless you also encrypt the message to yourself simultaneously). However, they have no way to verify that you are really the sender of that message, since you did not use any secrets known only to you (i.e. your private key) during the encryption process that would somehow link you to the message.
So, obviously, in order to do that, you would sign the message with your private key, so that the person can then use your public key to verify it.
A patent on this type of thing is ludicrous, and I hope there are plenty of people around to challenge it. Apathy is the enemy of freedom.
They have not patented the idea of MP3 streaming. They do hold a bunch of patents for the algorithms used in MP3 encoders and decoders, however, and, thus, can dictate the license conditions at which they are gonna let you use it.
A little bit of history:
MP3 (Audio MPEG Layer 3) was originally developed back in the early 90s (I believe it was 1992, but I'm not sure) by the Fraunhoeffer Institute in Germany, which they patented. At first, I believe they allowed everyone to write encoders/decoders based on the codec for free, but later decided to charge 50 cents per each unit sold (if you don't sell your end product, you don't pay anything)with a minimum fee of $15000 per year.
At some point, Fraunhoeffer let Thomson Multimedia handle the licensing of mp3 and that's where we are at today.
Algorithms/Designs (unlike ideas like "hey, i'm gonna patent that single-click online ad idea even though it's plainly obvious to everyone") have always been patentable and should remain so.
Hey, we live in a capitalist society (or at least we hope we do) where we get paid for our labor. If you spend 10 years developing a really cool and original sound compression algorithm, like Fraunhofer Institute's MPEG Audio Layer-3 (MP3), which becomes really popular, why shouldn't you patent it and make some profit for all the work that you had put into creating it? We all have to make a living...
You are wrong because Linux kernel is NOT licensed under the strict GPL. Linus specifically gives the following exceptions in his COPYING document:
First of all, libc is under LGPL, so that part of your point is moot.
Second of all, you are partially right in that you can right close-source linux kernel drivers and modules that LINK with the GPLed Linux kernel.
HOWEVER, the only reason you are allowed to do that is because Linus speicifically gives permission for people to do that in his license (he can do that, since he holds the copyright to the Linux kernel and, thus, can license it under any license he chooses to - whether it is strict GPL or modified derivative of it)
"Either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language" is the kicker
I highly doubt that this can be held up in court. If RMS is arguing in the DVD/CCA case that computer code in a specific programming language is indeed speech that expresses the unique thoughts of that coder, then he can't just turn around and say that code that's translated into another language is still the same thing as the original.
Of course, the judges seem to very skeptical on whether code is speech in the first place, but that's a different story...
Seriously, why? All that it says is if you want to use code that's licensed under GPL, you better GPL your application too.
However, nothing stops you from looking at the source of GPL software, figuring out the algorithms that are being used and using them in your own non-GPL software later on (assuming, that you actually rewrite it in your own way and don't just copy the source). For instance, there are a lot of very cool algorithms in the Linux kernel, such as the copy-on-write trick (when you fork a process, its pages do not get physically duplicated, but the pages tables are modified to point to the original process' pages, until you actually start modifying them) or their very efficient and cool slab allocator (OO-type memory allocator which actually was first developed by Sun back in 1994) and many other cool tricks.
There is absolutely NOTHING that prevents Microsoft employees from looking at that code (other than their internal strict policies not to do that - I have a friend who interned their for the summer and he tells me that they are prohibited from visiting open-source projects that do something similar to what they are working on), figuring out how the algorithm works and how it's implemented in the Linux kernel and then taking that IDEA and implementing it in Windows. As long as they are not copying the code, it should be perfectly legal, right? However, you cannot do the same thing with Windows, since you don't have access to the code and thus can't see whether they are using any cool algorithms that you can also put to good use in your own OS.
The problem I have with this argument is where to draw the line. If you say that C or Assembly program is speech, then what about machine code (yet another language form)/binaries? What about engineering plans or architectural blue prints? What about the commmand you type when you use grep to search for something? It uses regex, which is also language... These are all valid expressions in their own languages but I have great difficulty referring to them as "speech".
I understand the argument that since programming languages are designed for humans not machines, it must be speech. i.e. a machine doesn't need your program to be written in C - it only understands 0s and 1s. We write in C/Perl/Lisp/(your favorite language) because that code can be efficiently translated into the language that a machine can understand and execute and at the same time be readable to us (well, in case of Perl, that may not necessarily be the case).
HOWEVER, the primary purpose of a program written in a programming languages is so that eventually it would be translated to machine code and executed on some processor and perform some task. (at least that's what happens 99% of the time). If you buy this argument, then ANY TYPE of automated instructions to machines (something as simple as moving a mouse, perhaps) have to be considered speech as well, and I'm not sure that there are a lot of judges willing to stretch the First Ammendment that far (to call almost everything that we produce in life as speech)
At any rate, I do believe that DMCA is evil and must be overturned, but I just don't think that using this argument that any computer code is speech is going to get us very far...
The problem with open-source codecs is that almost all good compression algorithms have been patented already, so unless someone comes up with a truly revolutionary way of compressing audio or video AND releases it into public-domain, we won't have any good open-source codecs for another 15-20 years or so (whenever all these patents start to expire and are released into public-domain)
We've built an enormous, expensive platform to conduct rather vaguely defined research that could have been accomplished much more easily in any number of ways- because the goal, really, that NASA set themselves was to build a station, regardless of what use it was.
Unfortunately, it seems like you are correct. Whenever anyone points out the great "benefits" of having a space station, it almost solely results in an argument for "great scientific/medical experiments and discoveries in zero gravity". However, I have not seen anyone yet show any concrete scientific/medical result of having humans aboard a space station for the past ~20 years or so.
Sure, we've learned a great deal more about living in space but that doesn't help much (at the moment) to us who plan to remain on our planet for the foreseable future. The only benefit of having a space station that I can see is research in future space exploration (yeah, we'll have to learn how to survive in space for long period of time eventually), but at the moment we aren't even close to having the technology to have these long interplanetary voyages where this research would be extremely helpful.
So there really wasn't any rush to building this expensive station NOW, instead of waiting a few decades when space travel technology can be more efficient and cheaper to use. But I guess starting early has its benefits too...
As one of my CS professors likes to say - Software Kills People. Therefore, you should treat all the bugs in your software accordingly.
An OS that crashes on a PC at home may not be that big of a deal to you, but if that OS is installed on a machine that's powering a space station and the lives of the crew depend on it, then you'll probably be a little more concerned about the bugs in that environment.
Despite the popular belief, it is possible to write software that is completely free of bugs (just look at the space shuttle launching code). It is a lot more difficult to do that, sure, but nevertheless quite doable.
Probably someone like Karpov would have beaten Deeper Blue hands down, since he was nearly as good as Kasparov but the machine wasn't built specifically to defeat him.
15 years ago, when Kasparov was just starting out, perhaps. Now, Karpov doesn't stand a chance against Kasparov. According to the FIDE world chess ratings, he is only 12th on the list!
Actually, it's not the first time. In the early 90s, a Japanese reporter paid to go to Mir for a couple of weeks. Tito, assuming he'll get to go up, will only be the 2nd civilian to do this.
I don't believe that this problem affects either the Linux or FreeBSD kernels because they generate their ISNs from /dev/random which is considered to be quite secure (at least, as secure as you can get without an external hardware device to collect truly random information), therefore, these numbers are almost impossible to predict.
/dev/random, to generate relatively unpredictable data. That kind of service is enormously helpful in all kinds of application, starting from the most obvious one - cryptography and TCP ISN selections to shuffling decks of cards in online casino games.
According, to his attack summary he identifies a problem with kernels that increment the ISN value for each connection based on some predictable value. However, interestingly enough, he does not identify any systems that exhibit this vulnerability. Nor does he provide a whole lot of detail into how this vulnerability is any different than the ones that have been identified starting all the way back in 1996.
In general, I think it is all part of a much larger problem that almost no OSes (except for Linux and FreeBSD) provide a kernel driver, such as
is that there is not enough electricity around to power even a fraction of the cars in this country, even assuming that all the electricity from the power plants in U.S. will go exclusively to fuel these cars.
And since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people who like living next door to a nuclear reactor (one of the cheapest and most efficient sources of power we can build with current technology - not to mention safest, despite Chernobyl and Three Mile island), there isn't much chance of electric cars taking off in the near future.
He may have lost this one championship match but being the champion for 15 years allows for a few mistakes.
The problem is that this wasn't just a "few mistakes". He wasn't able to get a clear advantage in ANY of the 15 games that they played togher, lost 2 of them and nearly a lost a few more. Kramnik didn't just win, he dominated the board in almost every game. I don't think that this was just a random fluke. Kasparov clearly is losing/lost his edge and getting it back at his age would be incredibly difficult.