Vengeance based culture has always been there in some form or another (see eye for an eye, Border Law).
What is on the increase is the media spotlight on absolutely everything - actions, motivation etc etc ad infinitum. This makes kneejerk reactions have to be even bigger because hey, everyone's watching.
It seems to me that the first mistake was not teaching the kids acceptable use of the machines they were given. The reason for this becomes obvious when you consider the taped password - the admin didn't know acceptable use either. The first offence was nearly forgivable under the circumstances but should have been adequately punished - detentions during which you play video games on the machine which you've just (in the absence of any better words) "hacked" does not constitute punishment. The ineptitude of the administration in providing adequate punishment looks to be the main factor in the police involvement - a classic case of needing to be "seen to be doing" something as opposed to "doing" something.
A few things surprise me about this case though:
Why was it that after the first couple of infractions that one of the kids didn't point out the taped password to either a soon to be spluttering principal who was in full flow or to their parents? Questions would have been asked. Admin would have got the sack. A new interview question would be introduced: What do you consider a secure location for the administrative password?
Did any of the kids try asking for a chat program to be stuck on? A good admin may have allowed a centrally logged chat server but not allow anything that couldn't be monitored. Or at least do some research to see if something could be worked out (or possibly nick the kids' "research";)
There was a claim about the internet access being filtered so why weren't the seaches for hacking sites picked up?
One has to wonder with all of this, can the kids claim entrapment?
Why is it that this warmed up cabbage of an argument never gets looked at the other way round? The problem is not that IE has a 90% market share and isn't standards compliant. The problem is that lazy arses write non-standards compliant code that only works properly in IE mainly because it is so "forgiving" on typo-ridden sputum.
Writing standards compliant code that works in IE as well is not hard and is good practice - indeed it is a cheap way of getting a potential 10% increase in traffic. The "Internet Explorer or nothing" kind of site is a very parochial way of doing things. It is these, rather than IE in and of itself that we should be boycotting. A significant drop in traffic might be a way of getting the designers to be a tad more considerate and upgrade the rules of their whites-only hotels of the internet age.
It's not Big Brother that's coming, it's Big Mother. Think about it - always wanting to know where you are, what you're doing; worried that you'll fall in with the "wrong kind of people"; blowing things out of all proportion on the flimsiest evidence; shouting down Big Father when he gruffly suggests that she let the boy live his own life...
For the record, my mother is not like that.
Expanding on the database behind the cards, there is a scary amount of audit trail in there as proposed (more Big Mother, remembering everything you've ever done and holding it against you when you least expect it).
Usually big databases like this come under the Data Protection Act. As originally explained to me when doing some obligatory training on said Act, this is fundamentally a human rights law. We tend to be quite good in that respect over here in Europe.
Except of course, when our governments decide to hand over airline traffic data to the USA, overruling in an ironic flourish, the elected European parliament (the Council of Ministers only represents the national governments and therefore have a smaller mandate on this). This suggested ID card data share is more of the same. Now that IS Big Brother - if he ever finds your diary, he'll run round laughing and will point out all the juicy bits to nasty ol' Uncle Sam, who'll laugh along with him.
4 (amended) Historical data over and above the previous X hours should be limited to mechanical condition, ie not speed, GPS location etc. It should be illegal for ANYONE to dump the data from the rolling log, but perfectly legal to dump data related to a part that has been replaced (or this could be automatically done when the car detects that the part is changed).
6. Information from the rolling log should never be classed as detrimental to insurance claims, criminal cases etc in and of itself. The main problem here is that the data is not contextual. Speed is always going to be the one people worry about in these arguments but whereas someone going 5mph above the limit may ordinarily be classed as "safe", the converse may be true of someone doing exactly the speed limit in thick fog. Such evidence should therefore be classed as circumstantial and not be the basis of the whole case.
Personally, I wish that they'd hurry on and get the fully automatic car developed. That way, all the liability would switch to big business, cars would become hideously expensive to cover corporate liability expenses, there'd be less cars on the road, reliance on oil would decrease and there would be less need for military adventures into Iraqistan.
However, the one thing I haven't seen is any indication that I myself will be able to authorize programs on my own computer. In my opinion, this would allow geeks to play with their own programming, download open source projects, etc. while still enjoying the knowledge that unless a program has been authorized by a signature authority or by themselves, it's not going to get a toehold in their machine.
They're going to have to in say way shape or form. How else will they be able to sell their programming tools? How are they going to write Palladium 2 (Trojan.Horse)? "Microsoft announce NO programs will work properly on Palladium" (#include win3.1.h) Microsoft have a lot staked on their.NET platform - without selective authorisation it would never work.
The whole [Palladium/Microsoft/Destroy OpenSource] thing is just [Microsoft/Microsoft are evil and trying to destroy us] generated hype. The real battle is in the content arena, not the program side. What I still don't understand is how the O/S is going to ensure that the program playing the content has checked the certificate... which rather invalidates the point of having it.
This leads to the question as to who's trademark law ICANN operates under. I would be willing to bet that if I held the Guam tradmark for the word Canadian, I would have lost out to Molson. It's ludicrous that the big corps are allowed to screw around with this. Usually under tradmark law, you can't hold title to generic terms - Ford don't actually own the trademark for the word "Jaguar", they own the logo and the design for the word Jaguar that they use on the cars. Even then, it's a bit more complex than that - they only own the Jaguar trademarks in the arena of car manufacture. You could make food processors with pretty much exactly the same logo, so long as people didn't think that you were the same company as the car manufacturer. It would seem, then that ICANN is running roughshod over laws that have, interestingly enough, developed the way they have because the courts were concerned over the limited namespace for company names and logos causing this kind of abuse by large companies. ICANN are simply reverting to the maxim of he with the biggest bank balance wins.
The only way that I can see this getting resolved is if the domain name system gets changed so that the namespace isn't so limited. How about DPS - Domain Picture System? - you have to draw the logo for the site that you want. This would lead to some interesting effects as the big corporations fight to the death over who has the easiest logo to draw. Squabbles would ensue as firms selling double glazing to pensioners adopt a squiggly version of the Windows (R) logo because their target market draws a bit shaky anyway. Slashdot would still be easy to get to. An almost perfect solution for us then;)
On a similar vein, the telemarketing optimisation project at the annals of improbable research has some other protocols for getting rid of the blighters
However, also from the Gamespy website: Some U.S. states and foreign countries provide rights in addition to those above, or do not allow excluding or limiting implied warranties, or liability for incidental or consequential damages. Therefore, the above limitations may not apply to you or there may be state provisions that supersede the above. Any clause declared invalid shall be deemed severable and not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and may only be amended in a writing signed by GameSpy Industries.
In addition, there are also a number of legal challenges to EULA's and the like (although I'm not sure whether any have succeeded yet) - see here and here, for example
I don't know whether any applicable laws apply in the States, but the UK has laws which effectively mean that even though you've put up a sign saying you can't have something (eg refunds in shops), it doesn't have any legal bearing over your statutory rights.
Other laws apply which require companies to have signs in prominent positions - preventing vehicle clamping firms from stealth clamping. The legal stuff link on their home page is right at the bottom corner - you have to scroll right down (well past the files link) to even see it. OK, we'll let them off, so long as the files page has a prominent link. Erm, not quite - again right at the bottom, this time wrapped in a font size=-2 tag. Well done chaps.
Not that the people who downloaded it didn't have any responsibility to run a virus scan of their download, of course. However, you do expect a "reputable" company that you get files from should prevent this from happening in the first place. It just adds a little touch of irony to the little check box found in the security warning popup which appears when you go hereAlways trust content from Gamespy Industries, Inc.
For a look at how EULA's should be, check the SVLA at CEXX.org
Just a couple of things to add to Asprin's excellent set of suggestions:
You also need procedures to get things up and working when there is an outage. The file server isn't too much of a problem because you are doing at least daily backups on it. It is also a good idea to promote standardisation and redundancy so that minor disaster recovery is as painless as possible. That is, have a standard set of software installs (one probably won't fit all due to departments such as accounts needing specialist stuff on - solitaire, minesweeper, etc;) and have at least one spare PC just in case.
It doesn't matter so much which package you use for backup so long as a) It does what you want it to do - check, double check and triple check this!!! b) You make sure that you understand how to make the program do what you want it to do.
Once you've checked that your system works, it's time to make sure that people are backing up to the network...
One evening, do a backup of everyone's PC's
Make sure that you can restore them
Simulate massive data loss on them
See who has the look of major panic next morning.
Take pleasure in those expressions.
Point out that *this time* it was a test.
*Next time* could be different.
Get them to repeat mantra "PUT ALL FILES ON W:"
Relax, safe in the knowledge that you should have pretty much complete buy-in.
Sometimes, in the absence of a stick, you have to beat them with the carrot...
I am writing to you today because I am concerned about the proposals to extend the range of agencies able to access traffic data under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act section
25(1) as reported in today's Guardian.
Personally, I feel that the Act should never have been passed in the first place, although I accept the need for some sort of snooping powers by the police etc.
However, to extend the reach of the Act to include a variety of government departments, local authorities and agencies as diverse as the Food Standards Agency and the Postal Services Commission is pushing it a bit too far.
Although the Prime Minister's official spokesman is quoted as saying '...I think it is also important to recognise the safeguards which are in place. This data can only be sought if it
is judged to be necessary in the interests of national security; for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime or preventing disorder; or in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the
UK;...' this looks to be deliberately fuzzy in definition.
There are precedents in the US where such powers have been used on 'fishing trips' such as the FBI trying to obtain details of book
purchases by individuals.
While it is one of the functions of the state to protect the people from terrorism and serious crime, these proposals do not seem to be doing a good job of protecting the people from the state. Extending the reach of this Act would open up further avenues for abuse of power to another 24 agencies. Surely the government's stated policy of 'joined-up government' should enable routes of communication between the agencies concerned and those which already have investigatory power under RIPA, rendering the proposals unnecessary.
Regards...
I got this reply:
Thank you for you letter of 11 June. I share your concerns about this Order to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and feel that the number of authorities that may have access to emails and phone calls is quite excessive. I accept that there is a need for the state to combat terrorism and serious crime, but do not believe that that entails local authorities and bodies such as the Environment Agency having access to our phone calls and emails without any safeguards for individuals, such as Court Orders being necessary.
Please be assured that I will oppose this measure.
Coming soon, unless you lobby your MP!!!***
-24 extra agencies with sweeping powers!!!
-Including, but not restricted to: The Post Office, your local Authority, the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency
This offer must end soon!!!
Act now to prevent future disappointment!!!
A definite "Me, too!" in geisler's direction. They're not out for perfect coding in the exam - it's that you understand how to translate the theory into pseudo-code. My course exams did actually require the odd bit of perfect code in there, but only when they were wanting you to show that you understood certain language features - such as functors or curried functions in ML. Pseudocode was asked for when they wanted understanding of the algorithms or problem solving. I don't do a lot of programming these days - mainly due to my debugging ineptitude, but when I do I tend to have an A4 pad as an additional tool. There's something about the feel of putting ideas on paper that makes it a lot easier to work through the logic - I rarely stick actual code on the page. Visio just can't handle quickly doodled and scribbled out flowcharts which you then have to unscribble out because "it was right, no it wasn't (scribble), but if I stick this on here..."
The thing with liability law is that you can sue someone for your cock-up. You wrote the program/allowed the virus in/lost our data. Don't mention the fact that I didn't research the program properly, just assuming that because it's widely used that it must be good. Don't mention that I was using a free anti-virus program and didn't update the definitions as often as I should. Don't mention that I didn't backup as often as I should.
If there's anything that's highly noticable in these situations, it's that the vast majority of people are highly ignorant of computers. Many of the computer systems I get to see in my job are either:
badly specified or over-used(this for the most part is forgivable when you're short on budget - just don't hold me liable for you not upgrading to something more suitable once you have the cash)
poorly protected against viruses (everybody's heard of the damage they can do yet still do nothing against them)
not backed up (I myself am guilty of this one - but I don't have anything on my computer I can't live without).
There are a lot of system admins out there who get ignored by managers who believe all of the marketing spiel or who have had so much heaped on them due to limited resources that inappropriate or misconfigured, or unpatched software gets used.
Poor management too has a part in all this for not attaching sufficient import to systems until they go down, at which point they look for ways to cover their arses - hence calls for liability laws.
Rather aptly, the quote at the bottom of my slashdot window is "Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows." Who's fault is it? Probably not Microsoft (for once) - their software is attacked primarily because it is very widely used. GNU/Linux would probably face a similar effort against it if it had Microsoft's market share (whether they'd have a similar number of successful break-ins is a matter of debate which cannot be answered). If anyone at Microsoft is to "blame", it's their marketing department who encourage Steve Ballmer to say stuff like "The products are even less buggy than others, in terms of per capita usage".
Business is to blame for not properly investing: in time for researching product alternatives or the resources to properly maintain the systems.
Another aspect of blame is marketing departments defining release dates months in advance and shipping even if they know there are serious problems - some sort of liability law might actually be useful here. In addition, liability law could (and probably should) be brought into play in cases where companies have been informed of vulnerabilities and then proceeded to do nothing about them.
The problem with liability is that we all are, to some extent.
Even if it's not enforcable against Microsoft directly, there is surely a route against the OEM's who in turn can sort of make the Redmond Devils pay through future deals having to take this sort of thing into account
I'm not a criminal and (as far as I know) don't associate with them. However the fact that the details of any transactions (but not the content - thankfully) I make, be it via phone, fax, email or whatever can be tracked disturbs me deeply. An awful lot can be inferred from this kind of info - which football team I support, which companies I do business with etc. The potential for abuse is huge, no matter what the PM's spokesman has to say. There was a case in the states a while back where the FBI were going on fishing trips to see what books certain people had bought. To open this kind of power to another 24 agencies is stupid and (unfortunately) very New Labour.
Privacy is quite a new concept - in the not so distant past pretty much everyone in your neighbourhood knew who you were going out with, what you liked, what you did by day etc. However, as communities have split up, mainly due to people being able to commute, government has not been able to keep tabs on us the way it thinks it used to. The thing is: they never really kept that much tabs before - it was mainly statistical data such as how many blacksmiths there were and so on. They didn't care about the individual as they do now, in an age where they are capable o getting down to a ridiculous level of description about anyone. The irony is that due to our fragmentation of community, we are less able to stand up to Big Brother (as in Orwell, not the TV show). I don't want anonymity, I do however, want to control what is known about me to a certain level that I would regard as personal.
A lot of their perceived problem probably arises from what they think you're going to be able to see.
I don't think I'd be too impressed with a webcam that offers a perfect view into my bedroom, for example.
Probably the best way of resolving this is to show them what the view that the camera gets is. They can then tell you which bits they're not happy about and you can potentially come to a mutually agreeable solution.
Having had a look at the site, I'm guessing that it's cam #2 that's causing the issue. All it really needs is to be tilted up by a couple of degrees more to get those windows on the bottom left out of the picture.
In cases such as this it is always better to try to talk about it rationally before getting all litigious. From a legal standpoint, you'll probably end up being forced to tilt the camera up a couple of degrees. The difference will be that it'll be after a drawn out process which will alienate you from your neighbours and the only people profitting will be the lawyers.
Here in the UK, we have rights under the Data Protection Act to a copy of any video footage involving us (eg CCTV) and for our faces to be obscured if the footage is distributed without our permission. This usually only applies to footage that is stored on tape etc so webcams would be a bit of a grey area anyway (although the courts would probably say that the neighbours have the right to their privacy).
The Music Industry. Until the 18th/19th Centuries, most music was distributed within the heads of troubadours and the like who travelled round earning money for playing. By 1910, the most popular distribution format was sheet music which enabled people to play it themselves. Edison had invented the phonograph late in the 19th Century and from this, the record rose to prominance as the distribution medium of choice. As technology improved, more and more could be stored on records leading to 78's 45's and LP 33's. Tapes became a popular means of distribution at some point in the 50's or 60's (ironically, a lot of the big record companies positively encouraged tape swapping from gigs featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix as it improved record sales - how things have changed) CD's appeared on a large scale in the 1980's and the death of the record was predicted. I last remember seeing vinyl singles some time in the 90's. MP3 becomes popular in the late 90's leading to the rise of Napster and other file swapping programs. Tapes still sell. Vinyl albums are still popular (and touted as superior by some). CD's sell by the shedload but not quite as much as at their peak.
News, Television and Film Regular newspapers start cropping up in the 18th/19th Centuries. They become rather popular. By 1930, a popular news format is newsreel such as Movietone and Pathe, shown in cinemas. Newspapers are still popular. Radio is also a widely used news system. Television is invented in the 1920's. It doesn't really take off big time until the 1950's. It doesn't kill off newspapers. It does, however, kill off movie news (after all, who wants news that's a week old when you can get it every day?) VCR's start becoming really popular in the 80's and the big corporations say that videos will kill off their industry. Hollywood now makes shedloads out of video sales. More people go to cinemas than at any time since the 30's. There are dozens of dedicated TV news channels. Newspapers still aren't dead.
The big corporations have to change in order to survive. These court cases involving Napster, Digital TV recording, DeCSS et al aren't about "protecting the artists" (who only get about 2-5% of the price of a CD - guess who gets around 70%); they're about the big corporations not liking having to get off of their laurels and find a sustainable business model. OTATV as WE know it probably is dying: as far as I can see, it will eventually only remain in areas where cable cannot take off because of geography and there is sufficient public will to keep it.
It is ordinarily some 75,000 light-years from the Sun.
This statement is typical of some of the semi-logic that often permeates science journalism. Yes, I know that it can get a bit difficult to come up with a decent way of describing the situation, because of the "time travel" effect of astronomical distances, but surely they could have done better than that. "It is some 75,000 light years distant as we see it" would surely have explained it quite nicely.
Not everyone is in shares to make money (well, obviously, most are). Many companies offer special perks to shareholders like discounts, special events etc, as well as the dividends. However, there are many sleeping dragons that could move in above the Mandrake village come an IPO.
Most of the money will inevitably come not from geeks with a spare $1000, but from large company funds with a spare $1m. It is these, rather than the small investor that will control the company direction.
Mandrake seems to have done pretty well so far in getting the newbie-friendly-yet-feature-packed balance to the distro, but who's to say that the big funds won't use their clout at AGM's to steer it towards a different balance? Would the small investors still feel "part of the team" then?
There seems to be some parallels with demutualisation of building societies in the UK. Mandrake is considering a move from a company run for the benefit of its users (or at least one that has managed to involve them an awful lot) to one which will inevitably be a lot more driven by commercial pressures. Since the conversion to banks, many of the old building societies have reduced savings rates, increased charges and increased mortgage rates. Would the price of Mandrake and the other distro producers' going public be incompatibility between them to lock customers in, or injunctions accusing each other of stealing code (AT&T/BSD, anyone)?
Slashdot Mirror
One has to wonder whether any stability issues are caused by divide by zero errors.
Vengeance based culture has always been there in some form or another (see eye for an eye, Border Law).
What is on the increase is the media spotlight on absolutely everything - actions, motivation etc etc ad infinitum. This makes kneejerk reactions have to be even bigger because hey, everyone's watching.
It seems to me that the first mistake was not teaching the kids acceptable use of the machines they were given. The reason for this becomes obvious when you consider the taped password - the admin didn't know acceptable use either. The first offence was nearly forgivable under the circumstances but should have been adequately punished - detentions during which you play video games on the machine which you've just (in the absence of any better words) "hacked" does not constitute punishment. The ineptitude of the administration in providing adequate punishment looks to be the main factor in the police involvement - a classic case of needing to be "seen to be doing" something as opposed to "doing" something.
A few things surprise me about this case though:
One has to wonder with all of this, can the kids claim entrapment?
Why is it that this warmed up cabbage of an argument never gets looked at the other way round? The problem is not that IE has a 90% market share and isn't standards compliant. The problem is that lazy arses write non-standards compliant code that only works properly in IE mainly because it is so "forgiving" on typo-ridden sputum.
Writing standards compliant code that works in IE as well is not hard and is good practice - indeed it is a cheap way of getting a potential 10% increase in traffic. The "Internet Explorer or nothing" kind of site is a very parochial way of doing things. It is these, rather than IE in and of itself that we should be boycotting. A significant drop in traffic might be a way of getting the designers to be a tad more considerate and upgrade the rules of their whites-only hotels of the internet age.
It's not Big Brother that's coming, it's Big Mother. Think about it - always wanting to know where you are, what you're doing; worried that you'll fall in with the "wrong kind of people"; blowing things out of all proportion on the flimsiest evidence; shouting down Big Father when he gruffly suggests that she let the boy live his own life...
For the record, my mother is not like that.
Expanding on the database behind the cards, there is a scary amount of audit trail in there as proposed (more Big Mother, remembering everything you've ever done and holding it against you when you least expect it).
Usually big databases like this come under the Data Protection Act. As originally explained to me when doing some obligatory training on said Act, this is fundamentally a human rights law. We tend to be quite good in that respect over here in Europe.
Except of course, when our governments decide to hand over airline traffic data to the USA, overruling in an ironic flourish, the elected European parliament (the Council of Ministers only represents the national governments and therefore have a smaller mandate on this). This suggested ID card data share is more of the same. Now that IS Big Brother - if he ever finds your diary, he'll run round laughing and will point out all the juicy bits to nasty ol' Uncle Sam, who'll laugh along with him.
4 (amended) Historical data over and above the previous X hours should be limited to mechanical condition, ie not speed, GPS location etc. It should be illegal for ANYONE to dump the data from the rolling log, but perfectly legal to dump data related to a part that has been replaced (or this could be automatically done when the car detects that the part is changed).
6. Information from the rolling log should never be classed as detrimental to insurance claims, criminal cases etc in and of itself. The main problem here is that the data is not contextual. Speed is always going to be the one people worry about in these arguments but whereas someone going 5mph above the limit may ordinarily be classed as "safe", the converse may be true of someone doing exactly the speed limit in thick fog. Such evidence should therefore be classed as circumstantial and not be the basis of the whole case.
Personally, I wish that they'd hurry on and get the fully automatic car developed. That way, all the liability would switch to big business, cars would become hideously expensive to cover corporate liability expenses, there'd be less cars on the road, reliance on oil would decrease and there would be less need for military adventures into Iraqistan.
However, the one thing I haven't seen is any indication that I myself will be able to authorize programs on my own computer. In my opinion, this would allow geeks to play with their own programming, download open source projects, etc. while still enjoying the knowledge that unless a program has been authorized by a signature authority or by themselves, it's not going to get a toehold in their machine.
They're going to have to in say way shape or form. How else will they be able to sell their programming tools? How are they going to write Palladium 2 (Trojan.Horse)? "Microsoft announce NO programs will work properly on Palladium" (#include win3.1.h) Microsoft have a lot staked on their .NET platform - without selective authorisation it would never work.
The whole [Palladium/Microsoft/Destroy OpenSource] thing is just [Microsoft/Microsoft are evil and trying to destroy us] generated hype. The real battle is in the content arena, not the program side. What I still don't understand is how the O/S is going to ensure that the program playing the content has checked the certificate... which rather invalidates the point of having it.
This leads to the question as to who's trademark law ICANN operates under. I would be willing to bet that if I held the Guam tradmark for the word Canadian, I would have lost out to Molson.
;)
It's ludicrous that the big corps are allowed to screw around with this. Usually under tradmark law, you can't hold title to generic terms - Ford don't actually own the trademark for the word "Jaguar", they own the logo and the design for the word Jaguar that they use on the cars. Even then, it's a bit more complex than that - they only own the Jaguar trademarks in the arena of car manufacture. You could make food processors with pretty much exactly the same logo, so long as people didn't think that you were the same company as the car manufacturer.
It would seem, then that ICANN is running roughshod over laws that have, interestingly enough, developed the way they have because the courts were concerned over the limited namespace for company names and logos causing this kind of abuse by large companies. ICANN are simply reverting to the maxim of he with the biggest bank balance wins.
The only way that I can see this getting resolved is if the domain name system gets changed so that the namespace isn't so limited. How about DPS - Domain Picture System? - you have to draw the logo for the site that you want. This would lead to some interesting effects as the big corporations fight to the death over who has the easiest logo to draw. Squabbles would ensue as firms selling double glazing to pensioners adopt a squiggly version of the Windows (R) logo because their target market draws a bit shaky anyway. Slashdot would still be easy to get to. An almost perfect solution for us then
On a similar vein, the telemarketing optimisation project at the annals of improbable research has some other protocols for getting rid of the blighters
However, also from the Gamespy website:
Some U.S. states and foreign countries provide rights in addition to those above, or do not allow excluding or limiting implied warranties, or liability for incidental or consequential damages. Therefore, the above limitations may not apply to you or there may be state provisions that supersede the above. Any clause declared invalid shall be deemed severable and not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and may only be amended in a writing signed by GameSpy Industries.
In addition, there are also a number of legal challenges to EULA's and the like (although I'm not sure whether any have succeeded yet) - see here and here, for example
I don't know whether any applicable laws apply in the States, but the UK has laws which effectively mean that even though you've put up a sign saying you can't have something (eg refunds in shops), it doesn't have any legal bearing over your statutory rights.
Other laws apply which require companies to have signs in prominent positions - preventing vehicle clamping firms from stealth clamping. The legal stuff link on their home page is right at the bottom corner - you have to scroll right down (well past the files link) to even see it. OK, we'll let them off, so long as the files page has a prominent link. Erm, not quite - again right at the bottom, this time wrapped in a font size=-2 tag. Well done chaps.
Not that the people who downloaded it didn't have any responsibility to run a virus scan of their download, of course. However, you do expect a "reputable" company that you get files from should prevent this from happening in the first place. It just adds a little touch of irony to the little check box found in the security warning popup which appears when you go here Always trust content from Gamespy Industries, Inc.
For a look at how EULA's should be, check the SVLA at CEXX.org
Just a couple of things to add to Asprin's excellent set of suggestions:
You also need procedures to get things up and working when there is an outage. The file server isn't too much of a problem because you are doing at least daily backups on it. It is also a good idea to promote standardisation and redundancy so that minor disaster recovery is as painless as possible. That is, have a standard set of software installs (one probably won't fit all due to departments such as accounts needing specialist stuff on - solitaire, minesweeper, etc ;) and have at least one spare PC just in case.
It doesn't matter so much which package you use for backup so long as a) It does what you want it to do - check, double check and triple check this!!! b) You make sure that you understand how to make the program do what you want it to do.
Once you've checked that your system works, it's time to make sure that people are backing up to the network...
Sometimes, in the absence of a stick, you have to beat them with the carrot...
I sent the following off to mine last week:
I am writing to you today because I am concerned about the proposals to extend the range of agencies able to access traffic data under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act section 25(1) as reported in today's Guardian.
Personally, I feel that the Act should never have been passed in the first place, although I accept the need for some sort of snooping powers by the police etc.
However, to extend the reach of the Act to include a variety of government departments, local authorities and agencies as diverse as the Food Standards Agency and the Postal Services Commission is pushing it a bit too far.
Although the Prime Minister's official spokesman is quoted as saying '...I think it is also important to recognise the safeguards which are in place. This data can only be sought if it is judged to be necessary in the interests of national security; for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime or preventing disorder; or in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the UK; ...' this looks to be deliberately fuzzy in definition.
There are precedents in the US where such powers have been used on 'fishing trips' such as the FBI trying to obtain details of book purchases by individuals.
While it is one of the functions of the state to protect the people from terrorism and serious crime, these proposals do not seem to be doing a good job of protecting the people from the state. Extending the reach of this Act would open up further avenues for abuse of power to another 24 agencies. Surely the government's stated policy of 'joined-up government' should enable routes of communication between the agencies concerned and those which already have investigatory power under RIPA, rendering the proposals unnecessary.
Regards...
I got this reply:
Thank you for you letter of 11 June. I share your concerns about this Order to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and feel that the number of authorities that may have access to emails and phone calls is quite excessive. I accept that there is a need for the state to combat terrorism and serious crime, but do not believe that that entails local authorities and bodies such as the Environment Agency having access to our phone calls and emails without any safeguards for individuals, such as Court Orders being necessary.
Please be assured that I will oppose this measure.
Yours...
That's one vote against, hopefully.
© RIP Act. We know who you are, where you live, what websites you visit, who you email, who you phone, who you write to. All we need to find this out is a request from a "senior" member of the secret services or the police. You have no right to appeal. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.
Coming soon, unless you lobby your MP!!!***
-24 extra agencies with sweeping powers!!!
-Including, but not restricted to: The Post Office, your local Authority, the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency
This offer must end soon!!!
Act now to prevent future disappointment!!!
A definite "Me, too!" in geisler's direction. They're not out for perfect coding in the exam - it's that you understand how to translate the theory into pseudo-code. My course exams did actually require the odd bit of perfect code in there, but only when they were wanting you to show that you understood certain language features - such as functors or curried functions in ML. Pseudocode was asked for when they wanted understanding of the algorithms or problem solving.
I don't do a lot of programming these days - mainly due to my debugging ineptitude, but when I do I tend to have an A4 pad as an additional tool. There's something about the feel of putting ideas on paper that makes it a lot easier to work through the logic - I rarely stick actual code on the page. Visio just can't handle quickly doodled and scribbled out flowcharts which you then have to unscribble out because "it was right, no it wasn't (scribble), but if I stick this on here..."
The thing with liability law is that you can sue someone for your cock-up. You wrote the program/allowed the virus in/lost our data. Don't mention the fact that I didn't research the program properly, just assuming that because it's widely used that it must be good. Don't mention that I was using a free anti-virus program and didn't update the definitions as often as I should. Don't mention that I didn't backup as often as I should.
If there's anything that's highly noticable in these situations, it's that the vast majority of people are highly ignorant of computers. Many of the computer systems I get to see in my job are either:
There are a lot of system admins out there who get ignored by managers who believe all of the marketing spiel or who have had so much heaped on them due to limited resources that inappropriate or misconfigured, or unpatched software gets used.
Poor management too has a part in all this for not attaching sufficient import to systems until they go down, at which point they look for ways to cover their arses - hence calls for liability laws.
Rather aptly, the quote at the bottom of my slashdot window is "Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows."
Who's fault is it? Probably not Microsoft (for once) - their software is attacked primarily because it is very widely used. GNU/Linux would probably face a similar effort against it if it had Microsoft's market share (whether they'd have a similar number of successful break-ins is a matter of debate which cannot be answered). If anyone at Microsoft is to "blame", it's their marketing department who encourage Steve Ballmer to say stuff like "The products are even less buggy than others, in terms of per capita usage".
Business is to blame for not properly investing: in time for researching product alternatives or the resources to properly maintain the systems.
Another aspect of blame is marketing departments defining release dates months in advance and shipping even if they know there are serious problems - some sort of liability law might actually be useful here. In addition, liability law could (and probably should) be brought into play in cases where companies have been informed of vulnerabilities and then proceeded to do nothing about them.
The problem with liability is that we all are, to some extent.
Even if it's not enforcable against Microsoft directly, there is surely a route against the OEM's who in turn can sort of make the Redmond Devils pay through future deals having to take this sort of thing into account
Well, that's the MP well and truly faxed :)
I'm not a criminal and (as far as I know) don't associate with them. However the fact that the details of any transactions (but not the content - thankfully) I make, be it via phone, fax, email or whatever can be tracked disturbs me deeply. An awful lot can be inferred from this kind of info - which football team I support, which companies I do business with etc. The potential for abuse is huge, no matter what the PM's spokesman has to say. There was a case in the states a while back where the FBI were going on fishing trips to see what books certain people had bought. To open this kind of power to another 24 agencies is stupid and (unfortunately) very New Labour.
Privacy is quite a new concept - in the not so distant past pretty much everyone in your neighbourhood knew who you were going out with, what you liked, what you did by day etc. However, as communities have split up, mainly due to people being able to commute, government has not been able to keep tabs on us the way it thinks it used to. The thing is: they never really kept that much tabs before - it was mainly statistical data such as how many blacksmiths there were and so on. They didn't care about the individual as they do now, in an age where they are capable o getting down to a ridiculous level of description about anyone. The irony is that due to our fragmentation of community, we are less able to stand up to Big Brother (as in Orwell, not the TV show). I don't want anonymity, I do however, want to control what is known about me to a certain level that I would regard as personal.
A lot of their perceived problem probably arises from what they think you're going to be able to see.
I don't think I'd be too impressed with a webcam that offers a perfect view into my bedroom, for example.
Probably the best way of resolving this is to show them what the view that the camera gets is. They can then tell you which bits they're not happy about and you can potentially come to a mutually agreeable solution.
Having had a look at the site, I'm guessing that it's cam #2 that's causing the issue. All it really needs is to be tilted up by a couple of degrees more to get those windows on the bottom left out of the picture.
In cases such as this it is always better to try to talk about it rationally before getting all litigious. From a legal standpoint, you'll probably end up being forced to tilt the camera up a couple of degrees. The difference will be that it'll be after a drawn out process which will alienate you from your neighbours and the only people profitting will be the lawyers.
Here in the UK, we have rights under the Data Protection Act to a copy of any video footage involving us (eg CCTV) and for our faces to be obscured if the footage is distributed without our permission. This usually only applies to footage that is stored on tape etc so webcams would be a bit of a grey area anyway (although the courts would probably say that the neighbours have the right to their privacy).
First some history...
The Music Industry.
Until the 18th/19th Centuries, most music was distributed within the heads of troubadours and the like who travelled round earning money for playing.
By 1910, the most popular distribution format was sheet music which enabled people to play it themselves.
Edison had invented the phonograph late in the 19th Century and from this, the record rose to prominance as the distribution medium of choice. As technology improved, more and more could be stored on records leading to 78's 45's and LP 33's.
Tapes became a popular means of distribution at some point in the 50's or 60's (ironically, a lot of the big record companies positively encouraged tape swapping from gigs featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix as it improved record sales - how things have changed)
CD's appeared on a large scale in the 1980's and the death of the record was predicted.
I last remember seeing vinyl singles some time in the 90's.
MP3 becomes popular in the late 90's leading to the rise of Napster and other file swapping programs. Tapes still sell. Vinyl albums are still popular (and touted as superior by some). CD's sell by the shedload but not quite as much as at their peak.
News, Television and Film
Regular newspapers start cropping up in the 18th/19th Centuries. They become rather popular.
By 1930, a popular news format is newsreel such as Movietone and Pathe, shown in cinemas. Newspapers are still popular. Radio is also a widely used news system.
Television is invented in the 1920's. It doesn't really take off big time until the 1950's. It doesn't kill off newspapers. It does, however, kill off movie news (after all, who wants news that's a week old when you can get it every day?)
VCR's start becoming really popular in the 80's and the big corporations say that videos will kill off their industry.
Hollywood now makes shedloads out of video sales. More people go to cinemas than at any time since the 30's. There are dozens of dedicated TV news channels. Newspapers still aren't dead.
The big corporations have to change in order to survive. These court cases involving Napster, Digital TV recording, DeCSS et al aren't about "protecting the artists" (who only get about 2-5% of the price of a CD - guess who gets around 70%); they're about the big corporations not liking having to get off of their laurels and find a sustainable business model. OTATV as WE know it probably is dying: as far as I can see, it will eventually only remain in areas where cable cannot take off because of geography and there is sufficient public will to keep it.
It is ordinarily some 75,000 light-years from the Sun.
This statement is typical of some of the semi-logic that often permeates science journalism. Yes, I know that it can get a bit difficult to come up with a decent way of describing the situation, because of the "time travel" effect of astronomical distances, but surely they could have done better than that. "It is some 75,000 light years distant as we see it" would surely have explained it quite nicely.
Not everyone is in shares to make money (well, obviously, most are). Many companies offer special perks to shareholders like discounts, special events etc, as well as the dividends. However, there are many sleeping dragons that could move in above the Mandrake village come an IPO. Most of the money will inevitably come not from geeks with a spare $1000, but from large company funds with a spare $1m. It is these, rather than the small investor that will control the company direction.
Mandrake seems to have done pretty well so far in getting the newbie-friendly-yet-feature-packed balance to the distro, but who's to say that the big funds won't use their clout at AGM's to steer it towards a different balance? Would the small investors still feel "part of the team" then?
There seems to be some parallels with demutualisation of building societies in the UK. Mandrake is considering a move from a company run for the benefit of its users (or at least one that has managed to involve them an awful lot) to one which will inevitably be a lot more driven by commercial pressures. Since the conversion to banks, many of the old building societies have reduced savings rates, increased charges and increased mortgage rates. Would the price of Mandrake and the other distro producers' going public be incompatibility between them to lock customers in, or injunctions accusing each other of stealing code (AT&T/BSD, anyone)?