It certainly seems like the Federal Communications Commission might have some thing to say about this. Not that I hold out much hope that they'll stand up to it, but you never know....
If you are in the US of A, there is legal precedent that such forging of From: headers is damaging to the forged domain. You might want to look at The flowers.com case for more info.
Essentially they argued that they had to spend time dealing with complaints and calculated the cost of that lost time. They didn't even argue for damage to their reputation, which I think could have lead to an even bigger penalty.
Actually, the kuro5hin story points to a different article than the one slashdot pointed to today. The kuro5hin linked story says nothing about the actual exploit by the guy from Rice. It only talks about the paper that the exploit was based on.
Well, surprise surprise, the video clip works on windows when viewed through IE (it tanked Netscape).
As to the content of the video, it appears to have been highly edited (there are several abrupt cuts). The interviewer seems to not be too well informed about the issues surrounding the case.
At one point she asks why he did it, since it's hurting another company and he knew it was illegal. He has to correct her and point out that in Russia (where he did what he's accused of), it's not illegal to do what he did.
She then implies that he must have known it was illegal in the US, to which he points out again that he didn't do this in the US, and, more to the point, it's not entirely clear that it is illegal in the US.
Then she basically asks him whether he thinks the law is constitutional and whether he'll get off (implying that his innocence would be a loophole rather than true innocence). All he can say is he hopes he gets off.
I've left out some details, but all in all it was about what you would expect. The interviewer seems to assume he's a shady character, and even seems to get annoyed at one point that he has a hard time following her questions. Hopefully some real news station can get an interview that shows both sides of the issue better.
Not to argue with your essential point, but I assume when you say average, this refers to the mean (add em all up and divide by n). This is genreally considered a misleading way of representing salaries, because if the director/ceo gets a million dollars a year and his 9 other employees only get 1 dollar per year, it looks like the average salary is $100,000.
For a better represenation of a company's salaries, we want to know the median (what's the guy in the middle getting).
Right now, there is a descrepancy in the.edu domain. Once upon a time, community colleges could get a.edu, and I think something like 25% were able to do so before a restriction was put in place limiting edu to 4 year universities and colleges.
EDUCAUSE (the group taking over), has stated that they intend to open the space back up to smaller colleges like community and county.
Isn't it handy how humans apparently have no qualms sterilizing a whole species of "pest" insects, presumably leading to their extinctions, but when the cute Pandas that are so doped up on Bamboo can't gather enough sex drive to propogate the species we get all preachy about how we're destroying the environment.
Two points in response to replies.
First, part of my original point was that what the encoder is encoding is either not a copyrightable work or is in fact copyrighted by someone else. Thus your scrambling of my song's title isn't copyright protection because it's my copyright, not yours and you can't protect my copyright unless I say you can.
Second, in response to the person who said:
Go read the DMCA. The purpose of the encoding doesn't come into play only the intent to hide.
Maybe you can explain then what they really mean in ch.12 sec.1201 where it clearly states:
Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems
`(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
I wish I could believe that they were doing this out of some libertarian ideal, and maybe some part of the AOL/TW legal team holds these ideals, BUT...
The article makes it clear that AOL/TW has been repeatedly requested to identify anonymous users. This is undoubtedly a significant economic burden on AOL/TW, since they have to pay somebody to dig through their logs and tie information together for each request. Any precedent that allowed the courts to order such a procedure willy-nilly would cost AOL/TW a nice chunk of change.
My cynical side says that's the real reason. My practical side says when someones economic interests coincide with individual freedom, why knock it too much.
I'm sure I'll regret posting something that sounds like a defense of the RIAA, but the DMCA states that it is illegal to attempt to circumvent a copyright protecion mechanism. Inasmuch as Aimster's Pig Latin Encoder does not protect copyright, but just mangles filenames, it's not a copyright protection scheme. Thus, it is perfectly legal for the RIAA to begin using the encoder to request both the regular and pig-latinized versions of songs be removed from Napster.
In Austin, there was a company called Nobell that provided a similar service at a similar price. After a while, they decided there was no residential market for it and started charging higher prices to businesses. Now they've been bought by T-Speed, which has a business oriented sales model as well.
That said, I wish them the best of luck. The more competition there is in the broadband market the better it is for everybody.
If you have a PGP/GPG key, I would strongly encourage you to tar up all your work on the project thus far, and digitally sign the tar file.
While digital sigs are realtively new territory, it gives you some proof that there was a significant body of work in place before your company requested similar work.
Then, as others have wisely suggested, go find a lawyer with expertise in this area. The rules in this arena are too tricky to navigate without a good guide.
....Here in the United States, many people who live in the deep south or in the inner cities speak their own corrupted and marred version of English. Often these modes of speech hardly pass as an actualy language.
I think you ain't never been learned no linguistics.;-)
These "modes of speech" (and those of inner cities, by which I suspect you mean African-American English) are legitimate dialects of the English language. You may think they sound funny or "corrupted", but those who speak these dialects communicate with each other just as effectively as those who speak the queen's English. Just like geeks with jargon sound like they're hardly using English, but in reality are communicating just as well within their group.
No, a better analogy would be if your front door was open but there was NO SIGN AT ALL (because, of course, open windows shares don't actually pop up a notice saying come on in). If a stranger comes in and does anything, he is guilty of breaking and entering.
The law (in the US) recognizes the threshold of your home as a sacred line. Even the police can't cross it unless they have a warrant, or you explicitly give permission to enter. Even if you're standing just inside the threshold with the door open talking to the cops.
All the new features (particularly statefulness) of NetFilter sound great. The only question I have is whether I can still run a firewall on an old 486 w/ 16M of RAM?
He points out that this is an advantage of ipchains (stateless) filtering, but then doesn't mention how big an impact IPtable will have on older hardware.
I can't speak to LZW, but the RSA patent is not a very defenseable patent. First, there was prior art back to the turn of the twentieth century. I don't have the citation on me right now, but some mathematician wrote a book about irreversible functions back in 1890 or so and even mentions that one possible use for such things would be cryptography.
Thus, by the time R, S, and A decided to patent it nearly a century later, I'd say it was either obvious (somebody having already conceived of it), or there was prior art.
This doesn't even get into the issue that patents are supposed to be issued on physical things, rather than abstract functions like a mathematical equation.
Without seeing the specific questions they asked, it's hard to know what to make of their numbers. What do they mean by "break down"? Is this hardware "break downs" only?
But, even if we did know exactly what questions were asked, the results can only be generalized to subscribers of PCWorld magazine, as that was population sampled. For all we know, PCWorld subscribers are different from the average PC User. I think we can certainly say that the average PCWorld subscriber is quite different from the average Slashdot reader.
The only thing that seems particularly meaningfull from the PCWorld survey is how well major resellers treat their customers. Dell seems to do well, while Gateway seems to suck.
My experience from years ago, was that sometimes Minesweeper cannot be won logically. The situation that comes readily to mind was when there were two bombs in a corner somewhere. what you would get is something like this (my apologies if this is hard to read)
Where the top left corner is actually the corner of the screen, X represents an uncovered square, and F means a flagged square
Now, if you know that you have two bombs left, it is completely ambiguous where the bombs are. They are obviously diagonal to each other, but whether there is one in the top left corner or not is ambiguous. As far as I can tell, when you find yourself in this situation, you have a 50/50 chance of winning.
Aside from the fact that this is sensationalist journalism as others have pointed out, did anybody wonder about this guy's father?
Early in the article, he's quoted as saying, "I knew he was drinking a lot and taking uppers to
stay awake. I didn't think it was much of a problem. I didn't see it"
So he knows his son is abusing drugs (alcohol is a drug, albeit legal). Then later in the article, he is quoted as saying, "He was always so clean, I never worried about him getting into serious drugs," said David Bunnell. "His mother's a drug and alcohol counselor. We never saw this coming."
Now, IANAF (I am not a father), but if I see my kid heavily using alcohol and uppers, I'm going to think that something is up. What the father really should have said is, "We never wanted to believe he would get into serious drugs. We didn't take the obvious warning signs seriously enough."
But, instead of admitting that he might be even a tiny bit responsible or negligent (remember his sone was also an employee) the father says, "I believe my son was a victim of the dot-com boom." YEAH, WORKING FOR YOUR DOT-COM, DAD.
My cynical side says this is natural selection at work.
I imagine that much of this was discussed back in June when Congress was still thinking about it, but we're all going to rehash it anyway, so I'll put in my two cents.
The "E-signatures" referred to in this bill are not synonymous with digital signatures. As the article itself states:
They can be obtained through secured processes, like secret passwords or digital fingerprints, as well as unsecured ones, such as faxed signatures or clicking an acceptance button on a Web page.
In other words, the law actually makes really stupid things legally binding. A signature in the real world sense is a mark of authenticity. Yes, this check is really mine, yes it's really me taking 20 dollars out of my bank account, etc. How can clicking an acceptance button compare to these things? Yes, I realize that real signatures can be faked, but there's a law to handle that. I have a hard time comparing falsely clicking a button to forging someone's signature.
Furthermore, this bill in no way applies to forged mail headers, and it isn't going to cut down on your spam. It doesn't require people to use E-signatures, it just makes them more legally binding.
See Also: HG Wells and Paul Otlet
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 1
There were even a few before Vannevar Bush (not to take anything away from Van).
H.G. Wells conceived a "world Brain" or "world Mind" back in the late thirties. The basic concepts are very similar to the Web.
And even earlier (like 1907/8) A Belgian named Paul Otlet had similar ideas and actually executed some of them in a paper fashion. See this entry at Michael Buckland's site, or a brief mention in Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
Slashdot Mirror
Point of order:
It was actually the Green candidate not being endorsed by the Green Party (He was the only guy willing to pay the filing fee).
The libertarian is the guy that turned himself blue in fear Y2K.
It certainly seems like the Federal Communications Commission might have some thing to say about this. Not that I hold out much hope that they'll stand up to it, but you never know....
If you are in the US of A, there is legal precedent that such forging of From: headers is damaging to the forged domain. You might want to look at The flowers.com case for more info.
Essentially they argued that they had to spend time dealing with complaints and calculated the cost of that lost time. They didn't even argue for damage to their reputation, which I think could have lead to an even bigger penalty.
While WEP being crap is not really breaking news, the Reuters story is not referring to the same thing as the eetimes story slashdot is talking about.
If you'd bothered to look at the paper you'd have seen that it was released three days after the Reuters story you pointed to.
Actually, the kuro5hin story points to a different article than the one slashdot pointed to today. The kuro5hin linked story says nothing about the actual exploit by the guy from Rice. It only talks about the paper that the exploit was based on.
Well, surprise surprise, the video clip works on windows when viewed through IE (it tanked Netscape).
As to the content of the video, it appears to have been highly edited (there are several abrupt cuts). The interviewer seems to not be too well informed about the issues surrounding the case.
At one point she asks why he did it, since it's hurting another company and he knew it was illegal. He has to correct her and point out that in Russia (where he did what he's accused of), it's not illegal to do what he did.
She then implies that he must have known it was illegal in the US, to which he points out again that he didn't do this in the US, and, more to the point, it's not entirely clear that it is illegal in the US.
Then she basically asks him whether he thinks the law is constitutional and whether he'll get off (implying that his innocence would be a loophole rather than true innocence). All he can say is he hopes he gets off.
I've left out some details, but all in all it was about what you would expect. The interviewer seems to assume he's a shady character, and even seems to get annoyed at one point that he has a hard time following her questions. Hopefully some real news station can get an interview that shows both sides of the issue better.
Not to argue with your essential point, but I assume when you say average, this refers to the mean (add em all up and divide by n). This is genreally considered a misleading way of representing salaries, because if the director/ceo gets a million dollars a year and his 9 other employees only get 1 dollar per year, it looks like the average salary is $100,000.
For a better represenation of a company's salaries, we want to know the median (what's the guy in the middle getting).
Just another annoying statistics lesson.
How is this different from the info in this slashdot story from January. Even back then they knew it would run linux.
Maybe the Financial Times needs to start attending technology trade shows.
Right now, there is a descrepancy in the .edu domain. Once upon a time, community colleges could get a .edu, and I think something like 25% were able to do so before a restriction was put in place limiting edu to 4 year universities and colleges.
EDUCAUSE (the group taking over), has stated that they intend to open the space back up to smaller colleges like community and county.
Wow, you mean you actually read all of Ulysses in one sitting?
Man, your butt must have been really numb by the end.
Isn't it handy how humans apparently have no qualms sterilizing a whole species of "pest" insects, presumably leading to their extinctions, but when the cute Pandas that are so doped up on Bamboo can't gather enough sex drive to propogate the species we get all preachy about how we're destroying the environment.
Second, in response to the person who said: Maybe you can explain then what they really mean in ch.12 sec.1201 where it clearly states:
I wish I could believe that they were doing this out of some libertarian ideal, and maybe some part of the AOL/TW legal team holds these ideals, BUT...
The article makes it clear that AOL/TW has been repeatedly requested to identify anonymous users. This is undoubtedly a significant economic burden on AOL/TW, since they have to pay somebody to dig through their logs and tie information together for each request. Any precedent that allowed the courts to order such a procedure willy-nilly would cost AOL/TW a nice chunk of change.
My cynical side says that's the real reason. My practical side says when someones economic interests coincide with individual freedom, why knock it too much.
I'm sure I'll regret posting something that sounds like a defense of the RIAA, but the DMCA states that it is illegal to attempt to circumvent a copyright protecion mechanism. Inasmuch as Aimster's Pig Latin Encoder does not protect copyright, but just mangles filenames, it's not a copyright protection scheme. Thus, it is perfectly legal for the RIAA to begin using the encoder to request both the regular and pig-latinized versions of songs be removed from Napster.
In Austin, there was a company called Nobell that provided a similar service at a similar price. After a while, they decided there was no residential market for it and started charging higher prices to businesses. Now they've been bought by T-Speed, which has a business oriented sales model as well.
That said, I wish them the best of luck. The more competition there is in the broadband market the better it is for everybody.
If you have a PGP/GPG key, I would strongly encourage you to tar up all your work on the project thus far, and digitally sign the tar file. While digital sigs are realtively new territory, it gives you some proof that there was a significant body of work in place before your company requested similar work.
Then, as others have wisely suggested, go find a lawyer with expertise in this area. The rules in this arena are too tricky to navigate without a good guide.
I think you ain't never been learned no linguistics.
These "modes of speech" (and those of inner cities, by which I suspect you mean African-American English) are legitimate dialects of the English language. You may think they sound funny or "corrupted", but those who speak these dialects communicate with each other just as effectively as those who speak the queen's English. Just like geeks with jargon sound like they're hardly using English, but in reality are communicating just as well within their group.
No, a better analogy would be if your front door was open but there was NO SIGN AT ALL (because, of course, open windows shares don't actually pop up a notice saying come on in). If a stranger comes in and does anything, he is guilty of breaking and entering.
The law (in the US) recognizes the threshold of your home as a sacred line. Even the police can't cross it unless they have a warrant, or you explicitly give permission to enter. Even if you're standing just inside the threshold with the door open talking to the cops.
All the new features (particularly statefulness) of NetFilter sound great. The only question I have is whether I can still run a firewall on an old 486 w/ 16M of RAM? He points out that this is an advantage of ipchains (stateless) filtering, but then doesn't mention how big an impact IPtable will have on older hardware.
I can't speak to LZW, but the RSA patent is not a very defenseable patent. First, there was prior art back to the turn of the twentieth century. I don't have the citation on me right now, but some mathematician wrote a book about irreversible functions back in 1890 or so and even mentions that one possible use for such things would be cryptography.
Thus, by the time R, S, and A decided to patent it nearly a century later, I'd say it was either obvious (somebody having already conceived of it), or there was prior art.
This doesn't even get into the issue that patents are supposed to be issued on physical things, rather than abstract functions like a mathematical equation.
Without seeing the specific questions they asked, it's hard to know what to make of their numbers. What do they mean by "break down"? Is this hardware "break downs" only?
But, even if we did know exactly what questions were asked, the results can only be generalized to subscribers of PCWorld magazine, as that was population sampled. For all we know, PCWorld subscribers are different from the average PC User. I think we can certainly say that the average PCWorld subscriber is quite different from the average Slashdot reader.
The only thing that seems particularly meaningfull from the PCWorld survey is how well major resellers treat their customers. Dell seems to do well, while Gateway seems to suck.
My experience from years ago, was that sometimes Minesweeper cannot be won logically. The situation that comes readily to mind was when there were two bombs in a corner somewhere. what you would get is something like this (my apologies if this is hard to read)
Where the top left corner is actually the corner of the screen, X represents an uncovered square, and F means a flagged square
-----------
|X|X|1|0|0|
-----------
|X|X|2|1|0|
-----------
|1|2|F|1|0|
-----------
|0|1|1|1|0|
-----------
|0|0|0|0|0|
Now, if you know that you have two bombs left, it is completely ambiguous where the bombs are. They are obviously diagonal to each other, but whether there is one in the top left corner or not is ambiguous.
As far as I can tell, when you find yourself in this situation, you have a 50/50 chance of winning.
Aside from the fact that this is sensationalist journalism as others have pointed out, did anybody wonder about this guy's father?
Early in the article, he's quoted as saying, "I knew he was drinking a lot and taking uppers to stay awake. I didn't think it was much of a problem. I didn't see it"
So he knows his son is abusing drugs (alcohol is a drug, albeit legal). Then later in the article, he is quoted as saying, "He was always so clean, I never worried about him getting into serious drugs," said David Bunnell. "His mother's a drug and alcohol counselor. We never saw this coming."
Now, IANAF (I am not a father), but if I see my kid heavily using alcohol and uppers, I'm going to think that something is up. What the father really should have said is, "We never wanted to believe he would get into serious drugs. We didn't take the obvious warning signs seriously enough."
But, instead of admitting that he might be even a tiny bit responsible or negligent (remember his sone was also an employee) the father says, "I believe my son was a victim of the dot-com boom." YEAH, WORKING FOR YOUR DOT-COM, DAD.
My cynical side says this is natural selection at work.
The "E-signatures" referred to in this bill are not synonymous with digital signatures. As the article itself states:
In other words, the law actually makes really stupid things legally binding. A signature in the real world sense is a mark of authenticity. Yes, this check is really mine, yes it's really me taking 20 dollars out of my bank account, etc. How can clicking an acceptance button compare to these things? Yes, I realize that real signatures can be faked, but there's a law to handle that. I have a hard time comparing falsely clicking a button to forging someone's signature.
Furthermore, this bill in no way applies to forged mail headers, and it isn't going to cut down on your spam. It doesn't require people to use E-signatures, it just makes them more legally binding.
There were even a few before Vannevar Bush (not to take anything away from Van).
H.G. Wells conceived a "world Brain" or "world Mind" back in the late thirties. The basic concepts are very similar to the Web.
And even earlier (like 1907/8) A Belgian named Paul Otlet had similar ideas and actually executed some of them in a paper fashion. See this entry at Michael Buckland's site, or a brief mention in Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto