I think we're comming at this from different worlds here. I have 4-5 cars, each of which is well over 10 years old. 3 of them I keep fairly well maintained and use regularly. One is restored from the 1950's and usually in storage, and the last is ugly but operational and waits for me to build another parade float. The expense of maintaining them is minimal, annyually it is probably equivalent to one or two payments on a single new car. I tend to put about 20,000 miles on my cars every year.
As for the 5% / several hundred feet line, I would venture that for around 90% of miles driven, there is no other vehicle within 500 feet.
I do agree that some folks however will probably buy it if they can be sold on some trivial use like the garage door you mention. I just don't think that is the kind of selling point that will get the system to critical mass.
1. In order to be of much use, a sustem like this would need to be ubiquitous. If only a small number of vehicles are equipped, the network will only be of use in very rare circumstances.
2. Such a system will add costs to the production of a vehicle while providing no return for the early adopter.
3. Even if every new car gets equipped with these, the average lifespan of a well maintained automobile is 20 or more years. Will the system be maintained and backwards compatible forever, or at least through around 2024?
4. How will this system account for the vehicle not so equipped? If people begin to rely on the data the NOW system gives them, and they have an accident involving an unequipped vehicle, who is liable?
Would a developer of an "installer EULA circumvention device" be able to put up a defense against the bottomless pockets of Microsoft Corporation?
Conventional wisdom would say no, but conventional wisdom watches too many movies. Anymore one lawyer with the right tools can stand against the tide of a large firm, and I tend to think there must be lawyers out there who, like me, would be willing to volunteer to help with such a defense.
Universal v. Reimerdes is a lowly Federal District Court Case fron New York (Not the law in my circuit.) Which a number of other courts have declined to follow, and has been heavily criticized. Consider
Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc.
and the Lexmark Case
Lexmark Intern., Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc.
While the case has not been overruled, it has been pretty much swept under the rug by more careful decisions.
(f) Reverse Engineering. - (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of
subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right
to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological
measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of
that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing
those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve
interoperability of an independently created computer program with
other programs, and that have not previously been readily available
to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such
acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement
under this title.
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b),
a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a
technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a
technological measure, in order to enable the identification and
analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling
interoperability of an independently created computer program with
other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such
interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute
infringement under this title.
(3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under
paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be
made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1)
or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means
solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an
independently created computer program with other programs, and to
the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under
this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
Again, within the terms of the orignal post, this provision seems tailor-made.
It is exactly the right word if the installer is encrypted
You're chaning the rules now. In the original post all that is suggested is copying files. Also can you provide a citation to a law that prohibits a person from decrypting content they already own?
at least in California and the rest of the United States.
Each state gets to set its own laws based on its own unique culture. If it is a California Law you're thinking of, I'd still like to read it.
I think you're missing my fundamental assumption. I have been in the past able to install the useful bits of software manually. No cats, no gimicks, just putting a copy of a particular file in the right directory.
If I buy a box full of software but have not agreed to a EULA, surely I still own something just as if I bought a book at the store. With a book I'm free to remove pages or copy them for reasonable personal use. With a software package I should be able to do the same.
Now take this one step further, I am free to take all of the pages out of a book an re-order them in what way seems best to me. I am not illegally copying. If I do the same to an electronic copy of software, ripping files or bits of files from the disk and placing them in a new order. How have I infringed?
TO assert otherwise would suggest that no retail software purchase would be a valid sale of goods. The courts are unlikely to simply toss the UCC when it comes to software.
To put it simply, I guess, my question is: If I buy a packaged software product, what do I own before I agree to the EULA?
I've purchased a shrinkwrapped software package. It includes an installation program which requires me to accept the EULA to run. Instead, I snoop around on the CD and find the files I need, or otherwise find a way to make use of the software without using the install/eula program(me). I in any way bound by the EULA indirectly, or is my use of the software then only bound by copyright?
If I am EULA free... anyone feel like writing a program that will install Windows from a CD?
Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following among small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as broad respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers who created the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)
This column actually notes the distinction between hackers and crackers, well, sort-of... Anyway it sure is refreshing!
Now if only we could come up with different words for good lawyers and bad lawyers. How about Clawyers?
I've seen quite a few of the posts so far under this article which describe getting a "trojan" in a certain amount of time without actively doing anything, or by just surfing the web.
Now at one time I thought I understood the terminology of the trade. A trojan was, like the Trojan Horse, something the user needed to actively install before bad things could happen. Has the vernacular shifted on this term? If so, how is the trojan different than the worm or the virus? Is this word, like "hacker" now more used as a term for any malicious program that sneaks in without being expected?
You do realize that attorney-client conversations are privileged and can't normally be used in court, right? At least not in any Western country I'm aware of. The fact that it got "intercepted" does not change this in the slightest.
Actually interception can and does change things. If for example I have a conversation with a client in the local coffee shop and someone overhears my client admit to stealing the hope diamond, confidentiality does not protect him from the use of that confession.
The same has begun to apply even to things like cellular telephones. At least one court in the New York City area has ruled that there exists not even a reasonable expectation of privacy over such lines of communication. Much less any protection because you happened to be talking to your lawyer.
You are correct though that communications made in private to your lawyer cannot be brought up against you. So as long as the location or chanel of communication is safe, so too are your secrets.
This post is not intended as legal advice and should not be relied on as such.
Is for folks in Law Firms. An option like this can permit a lawyer to communicate over the internet with a client in a secure way (because getting my client to go through the process of encrypting stuff with GPG is unlikely at best)... but where intercepted be useless as evidence in court.
In answer to your questions: 1. My first memories of television include "The Day After." Anything that might assuage my permanent fear of getting vaporized can be justified to me. 2. We're already IN Afghanistand and Iraq. We can't just up and leave. The issue of whether we should have gone in the first place should color future discussion, but not dissuade us from cleaning up the mess as best we can. 3. Buy US made goods. 4. By "simplifying" the tax code. Every time we do this it usually results in higher taxes to our large middle class. 5. See number 4? 6. Really cheap stealth spy sattelites?? (Editor's note, this post begins to loose credibility around point number 3. It gets worse from there. I really do have a persistent twitch that goes off whenever they test the civil defense sirens though. That movie was scarring!)
I read this article, and all I can think is, "Gosh, that target ICBM must be expensive."
Bliss is having no idea how much my federal government spent on the rest of the program leading up to this test. Just let me worry about this ICBM lying on the bottom of the ocean.
Maybe next time, use Google and look for "Free PCB Design Software"...
Next time? Did you read the part of my post about not doing this anymore? This was back in the mid 1990s. How useable were Protel, Orcad, Eagle, or PCB Express demos in 1995?
The last time I had to design a circuit board, the boss told me to find a way to do it for free. We found some demo software on the internet that would print out samples of the board overlaid with a grid. (To remove grid, buy the software.) We then had to print to plastic and scrape the grid off with an exacto-knife. While I no longer do this kind of work, I am pleased to see future generations will never have to worry about irrational demands from the boss. (right?)
But make sure you have a good lawyer. The law of REAL real property is built upon years of tradition and government law. These laws regulate who owns what, how they get it, how they can sell it, and what they can do with it (within the laws of reality.) The value of real real property is determined by how much interest other people have in living there. All real property is is a set of legally protected rights in something other people might want.
The law of VIRTUAL real property can parallel this quite well, but by Contract. If your purchase contract for a virtual island includes provisions for real wold maintenance of service, in-game physics, limits on how many other virtual islands the maintainers can add, and so on... You wind up with the same result: A set of (contractually) protected rights in something that other people want.
As of this post, the Wikipedia page has been "locked to deal with vandalism." In the time between reading the article and scrolling through about 40 posts it was edited at least 3 times.
You're absolutely right about the value, it is incredibly small. However, it is still measurable, and therefore still recoverable. The important part is not the 4/100 of a cent one gets in return, rather it is the fact that payment for the occupation, if constitutionally required as a taking, gives me notice that something is going on.
Regarding the phone: Space does not equate to quality of use. This principle was articulated in the Pennsylvania Coal case where the government prohibited mining a portion of the coal, but not all of it. Here the court noted that quality of use was reduced, but the property was not taken. No taking, no payment.
Where a government does not fully remove your use of a piece of property, it need not compensate you for a taking, such as with reduced quality on your connection. With software on a disk, there is a physical bit of space associated with it, something you can actually circle with a pen and show to a jury.
If all of these questions have been answered, how about citing me a case?
There are a couple of legal questions I would like to pose to/. about this.
1. Normally, when your government takes or uses your property in a way that prevents you from enjoying it, you get paid. If my government is installing software on my machine, that effectively occupies a portion of my hard drive and prevents me from storing data there. Thus, property is taken, should I get paid? If so when?
2. If I remove the software, am I destroying government property?
3. If the United States were to try to adopt a similar provision, under what authority would they do so?
4. If the computer with the spyware installed gets moved to another country, can the Australian authorities still use it?
This could have potential. Remember that story a while back about having a remote control to shut of televisions in public? I can't count how many times I've wanted to shut off a cellphone in public.
I think you're confusing "had to" and "was asked to." Police can ask you for your ID, they can ask you if you mind letting them search your car, heck they can even ask you if you are carrying drugs.
They cannot generally require any of this without reasonable suspicion, or in the case of a search probable cause.
Then again maybe constitutional protections have been abandoned in your state. Around here the fist thing we do when we get pulled over is get out of our car and go talk to the police officer.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we're comming at this from different worlds here. I have 4-5 cars, each of which is well over 10 years old. 3 of them I keep fairly well maintained and use regularly. One is restored from the 1950's and usually in storage, and the last is ugly but operational and waits for me to build another parade float. The expense of maintaining them is minimal, annyually it is probably equivalent to one or two payments on a single new car. I tend to put about 20,000 miles on my cars every year.
As for the 5% / several hundred feet line, I would venture that for around 90% of miles driven, there is no other vehicle within 500 feet.
I do agree that some folks however will probably buy it if they can be sold on some trivial use like the garage door you mention. I just don't think that is the kind of selling point that will get the system to critical mass.
I can see problems with this idea:
1. In order to be of much use, a sustem like this would need to be ubiquitous. If only a small number of vehicles are equipped, the network will only be of use in very rare circumstances.
2. Such a system will add costs to the production of a vehicle while providing no return for the early adopter.
3. Even if every new car gets equipped with these, the average lifespan of a well maintained automobile is 20 or more years. Will the system be maintained and backwards compatible forever, or at least through around 2024?
4. How will this system account for the vehicle not so equipped? If people begin to rely on the data the NOW system gives them, and they have an accident involving an unequipped vehicle, who is liable?
Would a developer of an "installer EULA circumvention device" be able to put up a defense against the bottomless pockets of Microsoft Corporation?
Conventional wisdom would say no, but conventional wisdom watches too many movies. Anymore one lawyer with the right tools can stand against the tide of a large firm, and I tend to think there must be lawyers out there who, like me, would be willing to volunteer to help with such a defense.
Universal v. Reimerdes is a lowly Federal District Court Case fron New York (Not the law in my circuit.) Which a number of other courts have declined to follow, and has been heavily criticized. Consider
Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc.
and the Lexmark Case
Lexmark Intern., Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc.
While the case has not been overruled, it has been pretty much swept under the rug by more careful decisions.
From 11 USC 1201:
(f) Reverse Engineering. - (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of
subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right
to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological
measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of
that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing
those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve
interoperability of an independently created computer program with
other programs, and that have not previously been readily available
to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such
acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement
under this title.
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b),
a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a
technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a
technological measure, in order to enable the identification and
analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling
interoperability of an independently created computer program with
other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such
interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute
infringement under this title.
(3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under
paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be
made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1)
or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means
solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an
independently created computer program with other programs, and to
the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under
this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
Again, within the terms of the orignal post, this provision seems tailor-made.
It is exactly the right word if the installer is encrypted
You're chaning the rules now. In the original post all that is suggested is copying files. Also can you provide a citation to a law that prohibits a person from decrypting content they already own?
at least in California and the rest of the United States.
Each state gets to set its own laws based on its own unique culture. If it is a California Law you're thinking of, I'd still like to read it.
I think you're missing my fundamental assumption. I have been in the past able to install the useful bits of software manually. No cats, no gimicks, just putting a copy of a particular file in the right directory.
If I buy a box full of software but have not agreed to a EULA, surely I still own something just as if I bought a book at the store. With a book I'm free to remove pages or copy them for reasonable personal use. With a software package I should be able to do the same.
Now take this one step further, I am free to take all of the pages out of a book an re-order them in what way seems best to me. I am not illegally copying. If I do the same to an electronic copy of software, ripping files or bits of files from the disk and placing them in a new order. How have I infringed?
TO assert otherwise would suggest that no retail software purchase would be a valid sale of goods. The courts are unlikely to simply toss the UCC when it comes to software.
To put it simply, I guess, my question is: If I buy a packaged software product, what do I own before I agree to the EULA?
I've purchased a shrinkwrapped software package. It includes an installation program which requires me to accept the EULA to run. Instead, I snoop around on the CD and find the files I need, or otherwise find a way to make use of the software without using the install/eula program(me). I in any way bound by the EULA indirectly, or is my use of the software then only bound by copyright?
If I am EULA free... anyone feel like writing a program that will install Windows from a CD?
Is starting to have an effect! From the article:
Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following among small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as broad respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers who created the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)
This column actually notes the distinction between hackers and crackers, well, sort-of... Anyway it sure is refreshing!
Now if only we could come up with different words for good lawyers and bad lawyers. How about Clawyers?
I've seen quite a few of the posts so far under this article which describe getting a "trojan" in a certain amount of time without actively doing anything, or by just surfing the web.
Now at one time I thought I understood the terminology of the trade. A trojan was, like the Trojan Horse, something the user needed to actively install before bad things could happen. Has the vernacular shifted on this term? If so, how is the trojan different than the worm or the virus? Is this word, like "hacker" now more used as a term for any malicious program that sneaks in without being expected?
Is there any reason another group can't offer the service of redirecting a person to an IP address based on a set of words?
If not, surely this will come to pass if ICANN gets to problematic with their own limitations.
You do realize that attorney-client conversations are privileged and can't normally be used in court, right? At least not in any Western country I'm aware of. The fact that it got "intercepted" does not change this in the slightest.
Actually interception can and does change things. If for example I have a conversation with a client in the local coffee shop and someone overhears my client admit to stealing the hope diamond, confidentiality does not protect him from the use of that confession.
The same has begun to apply even to things like cellular telephones. At least one court in the New York City area has ruled that there exists not even a reasonable expectation of privacy over such lines of communication. Much less any protection because you happened to be talking to your lawyer.
You are correct though that communications made in private to your lawyer cannot be brought up against you. So as long as the location or chanel of communication is safe, so too are your secrets.
This post is not intended as legal advice and should not be relied on as such.
Is for folks in Law Firms. An option like this can permit a lawyer to communicate over the internet with a client in a secure way (because getting my client to go through the process of encrypting stuff with GPG is unlikely at best) ... but where intercepted be useless as evidence in court.
I gotta have it.
In answer to your questions:
1. My first memories of television include "The Day After." Anything that might assuage my permanent fear of getting vaporized can be justified to me.
2. We're already IN Afghanistand and Iraq. We can't just up and leave. The issue of whether we should have gone in the first place should color future discussion, but not dissuade us from cleaning up the mess as best we can.
3. Buy US made goods.
4. By "simplifying" the tax code. Every time we do this it usually results in higher taxes to our large middle class.
5. See number 4?
6. Really cheap stealth spy sattelites?? (Editor's note, this post begins to loose credibility around point number 3. It gets worse from there. I really do have a persistent twitch that goes off whenever they test the civil defense sirens though. That movie was scarring!)
I read this article, and all I can think is, "Gosh, that target ICBM must be expensive."
Bliss is having no idea how much my federal government spent on the rest of the program leading up to this test. Just let me worry about this ICBM lying on the bottom of the ocean.
Maybe next time, use Google and look for "Free PCB Design Software"...
Next time? Did you read the part of my post about not doing this anymore? This was back in the mid 1990s. How useable were Protel, Orcad, Eagle, or PCB Express demos in 1995?
The last time I had to design a circuit board, the boss told me to find a way to do it for free. We found some demo software on the internet that would print out samples of the board overlaid with a grid. (To remove grid, buy the software.) We then had to print to plastic and scrape the grid off with an exacto-knife.
While I no longer do this kind of work, I am pleased to see future generations will never have to worry about irrational demands from the boss. (right?)
But make sure you have a good lawyer. The law of REAL real property is built upon years of tradition and government law. These laws regulate who owns what, how they get it, how they can sell it, and what they can do with it (within the laws of reality.) The value of real real property is determined by how much interest other people have in living there. All real property is is a set of legally protected rights in something other people might want.
The law of VIRTUAL real property can parallel this quite well, but by Contract. If your purchase contract for a virtual island includes provisions for real wold maintenance of service, in-game physics, limits on how many other virtual islands the maintainers can add, and so on... You wind up with the same result: A set of (contractually) protected rights in something that other people want.
As of this post, the Wikipedia page has been "locked to deal with vandalism." In the time between reading the article and scrolling through about 40 posts it was edited at least 3 times.
You're absolutely right about the value, it is incredibly small. However, it is still measurable, and therefore still recoverable. The important part is not the 4/100 of a cent one gets in return, rather it is the fact that payment for the occupation, if constitutionally required as a taking, gives me notice that something is going on.
Regarding the phone: Space does not equate to quality of use. This principle was articulated in the Pennsylvania Coal case where the government prohibited mining a portion of the coal, but not all of it. Here the court noted that quality of use was reduced, but the property was not taken. No taking, no payment.
Where a government does not fully remove your use of a piece of property, it need not compensate you for a taking, such as with reduced quality on your connection. With software on a disk, there is a physical bit of space associated with it, something you can actually circle with a pen and show to a jury.
If all of these questions have been answered, how about citing me a case?
There are a couple of legal questions I would like to pose to /. about this.
1. Normally, when your government takes or uses your property in a way that prevents you from enjoying it, you get paid. If my government is installing software on my machine, that effectively occupies a portion of my hard drive and prevents me from storing data there. Thus, property is taken, should I get paid? If so when?
2. If I remove the software, am I destroying government property?
3. If the United States were to try to adopt a similar provision, under what authority would they do so?
4. If the computer with the spyware installed gets moved to another country, can the Australian authorities still use it?
This could have potential. Remember that story a while back about having a remote control to shut of televisions in public? I can't count how many times I've wanted to shut off a cellphone in public.
(Usually my wife's.)
Government ID'ed Kegs? As one who brews his own beer, I'd like to know more. Can anyone give me a url or *gasp* print source on this?
I think you're confusing "had to" and "was asked to." Police can ask you for your ID, they can ask you if you mind letting them search your car, heck they can even ask you if you are carrying drugs.
They cannot generally require any of this without reasonable suspicion, or in the case of a search probable cause.
Then again maybe constitutional protections have been abandoned in your state. Around here the fist thing we do when we get pulled over is get out of our car and go talk to the police officer.