So Overpeer is being paid to upload corrupted files on the networks. Why is it illegal to download those files? Aren't they implicitly giving you copyright access to those files by uploading them?
The only reason it was illegal was because they own the copyright.
So it's not like being robbed buying drugs, at all. It's like... downloading a copy of Spider-Man 2 from an MPAA affiliate site!
This is hardly casual conversation, however, when it starts talking about specifications, dimensions, bundles, software, and capabilities.
It's very possible he just flat out GUESSED, except he didn't. He flat out admits that, "highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret."
So everything he said was something someone else told him. So he "unknowingly" passed along trade secrets two weeks before the fact.
Not that he is one, but isn't that always going to be the argument of someone who's performing industrial espionage? "I didn't know it was a trade secret, sir. I just thought it was something neat someone else told me,"
Don't get me wrong, I love reading about this stuff too, but in this case I can see why/how Apple has a case against the kid. His postings compromised Apple's marketing and sales strategy. Imagine if he had posted a month earlier? Or three months earlier?
On the other hand I suspect Apple is doing this just to be mean, so boo on Apple.
If I were a spy for Sony, and I could read ThinkSecret, then what would Apple's recourse be except to go after Nick DePlume?
Our right to know is always going to be balanced against their right to privacy.
A journalist can be forced to turn in informants, but a journalist also has to act in ethical ways too.
So Nick DePlume has to take responsibility for the fact that his behavior did indeed leak information sensitive enough that if they had been leaked earlier, Apple might have suffered harm.
How do you differentiate between a journalist and an industrial saboteur then?
The fact that the journalist shares his data with everyone and the saboteur doesn't?
A journalist should have the ability to protect his sources if the journalist is doing something good by reporting; and the sources should be protected if they are doing something right; but in this case the sources are violating contracts (NDAs). If this were a case of public good or public education then you are undoubtedly correct and he should be able to protect his sources.
But this is hardly less than an issue of industrial espionage.
What if he had these documents two years ago? 8 months ago? What if had published them a year ago?
At what point is the harm so perfectly clear that this kind of lawsuit isn't questioned?
Except Malda won't try to protect you through anonymity:P
All the kid did was no different than someone accused of industrial espionage: Get a hold of information in violation of NDA and distribute that information.
If he WERE a spy stealing information and giving it to someone else, though, I imagine the lawsuit would be even tougher.
I'm not sure Nick has no responsibility to keep their secrets.
If I were a spy for Sony and I publish this information, am I held unaccountable because I never signed a contract with Apple?
Nick has a responsibility to act properly. Myself, working in the tech industry, I think if he had access to NDA material (the equivalent to Top Secret) and he knew it, he acted improperly to print it. If he was ignorant of it's NDA status then he acted negligently in printing it.
If a court forces Nick to tell Apple, I'm not thinking this is a violation of free press towards corporate America.
The point of a free press, according to our founding fathers, is that no government can opress the people by silencing it's press.
I don't think of Apple as a 'force of government'.
You are free to speak, and I am free to speak, against our government, or politicians, our policies, but we do not have license to violate contracts and legally binding agreements. Free speech is one thing. Legal agreements are another.
Free speech is a binding legal agreement between the people of America and it's government; and in this situation it has not be abridged.
But if you read any of the linked articles you'll see:
The suit, filed on Tuesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California, aims to identify who is leaking the information and to get an injunction preventing further release of trade secrets. However, in filing the suit, Apple identifies specific articles that contain trade secrets, indicating that at least parts of those reports are on the mark.
They go after the kid that discovers where you leak because the kid knows where you leak.
Isn't that obvious? How else do you find the employees you want to fire, here?
If you want to complain about what Apple is doing, restricting free speech is the wrong target. Apple is protecting itself, legally, forthrightly, and up front, according to the law.
Someone violated an NDA to tell Nick DePlume these 'trade secrets'.
Apple is trying to get out of Nick DePlume the identities of those who violated those NDAs.
To put it abstractly, Apple and a third party signed a contract. Said third party violated the contract without Apple's knowledge. Apple finds out about the violation from Nick DePlume. Apple then tries to find out from Nick DePlume who violated the contract.
If there is anything scummy in what Apple is doing, it's in not being gentler and more friendly towards 19 year old Nick, but that's not what you're complaining about.
The market has branded the iPod a winner, and this site just reports it. It's not spinning anything (as you would believe).
6 million iPods sold, possibly 8.
You also have some strange history there. Apple didn't create the first mp3 player. Or the second, third, or even 10th. Creative and Compaq were ahead of them with hard drive units and Rio, Samsung, and a few others were ahead of them with CD and flash based units.
Apple is #1 for transforming the mp3 market from niche to mainstream. That is why the iPod is synonymous with mp3 players; not because it's the first, but because it made the market it now rules.
Kind of like how Ford created the automobile market, even though they weren't by far the first cars.
What you want is not a list of "2004 winners," and "2004 losers," you want a list of "2004 cool gadgets," but then I would argue what is important:
The device that no one remembers? The device that everyone knows?
It makes awesome products (Dual G5, iPods, iLife, PowerBooks), some smart licensing movies (HP iPod, HP Tunes, Motorola iPhone), has a good open source policy (Darwin, KHTML, ZeroConf, Darwin Streaming Server) and STILL people bitch when Apple acts to defend itself!
Let me refute your inaccurate points:
>We have a company here that's suing 21 year old mac fans for participating in the illegal sharing of a beta build of their OS.
No, we have a company here that's suing a 21 year old and others for violating a contractual agreement.
Would YOU not sue me if you paid me $2,000 to paint your car and then when you left the car overnight I sold it to someone else? There are two things that are of interest here:
Apple has an NDA, like many other companies. Intel has them, AMD has them, ATI has them. If you violate that license, you break your contractual agreement.
Apple, like any other technical company, can suffer harm from leaked technical information getting into the hands of competitors. In other words if a rival company ALSO downloads one of those builds they've got their hands on the 'crown jewels' so to speak.
>We have a company here that's extracting information from someone they are about to sue under false pretence.
We have a company here that's suing to ensure future leaks are minimized. Why do you think this is false pretenses? Their OS is almost as much their bread and butter as their desktops! You can't run any Mac without the OS.
If this were a case where someone stole 5 prototype future PowerBooks, Apple would SURELY prosecute the perpetrator for exactly the same reasons.
>We have a company here that's suing a side aimed at their fans because the site spreads some rumors about new products.
Leaks can hurt you. Osbourne computer found out the hard way when they announced a product too early in the life cycle of the current product and went bankrupt because people were waiting for the next version!
Other ways leaks can hurt you: A competitor can copy you, or clone a good enough solution to nullify any special advantages your product has.
>We have a company that refuses to use an open standard, or even simply to license their technology to other companies, in order to leverage the huge market share they have in one area to boost sales in an other area.
You mean like how HP has their HP iPod (which has a tiny HP logo on the back)? How HP ALSO has Fairplay decoding built into their version of the HP Media Center PC (under the technology HP Tunes) so that songs purchased from the iTMS can be played back OUTSIDE of iTunes? How Motorola will have a phone that plays Fairplay encoded AACs that can be purchased through the iTMS?
Are you advocating that Apple should be licensing indiscriminately? Because it sure seems to be that Apple IS licensing, but just not licensing to companies you care about, perhaps.
Like to Real software.
>We have a company that is heavily promoting software patents and is heavily involved in fileing trivial software patents.
I must have missed this. Point out some examples please?
>We have a company here that is taking open source technology for their new browser, but then refuse to give the changes they make back in a way that might be useful to the original open source developers.
Someone else already made a rebuttal, but I want to know what you think the "solution" is because I certainly don't see the "problem". Maybe you know something I don't?
>And yet it seems, Apple is still loved by the/. crowd, that would tear any other company apart if it engaged in anything similar.
As I said earlier, Apple makes great products, makes great software, and in turn allows you, in using those products and software, to enjoy yourself.
About the only other company I can think of that has similar characteristics are: Coke Hershey's Nintendo
If IBM, Alpine, and Pioneer think there is a market for car adapters for the iPod (to transform your car into an iPod sound system) why wouldn't the same market want a phone that can play all their AACs and MP3s after synching with iTunes?
It's not like the phone market is stagnant! People get new phones every few years, some of them at least.
Or, like when Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS of IBM PCs, Creative or iRiver could reverse engineer the iPod to make their devices look like iPods to iTunes.
HP has thus far been able to implement Fairplay AAC decoding on their Windows Media Center PC.
Motorola will be shipping cell phones that can play Fairplay AAC encoded content.
What iRiver and Zen could do (Compaq did it 20 years ago!) is reverse engineer the iPod such that their devices look like iPods when plugged into iTunes.
Why haven't they done that if the market is so lucrative and they are so bright? Compaq figured out how to reverse engineer BIOs from IBM, and people are porting Linux to the iPod.
Sure, but these guys went from x86->PPC successfully, so should and did are two different things.
I'm sure there are reasons for all these architectures. The PPC has the benefit of being reasonably scalable too: There are PPC cores from 200MHz up to 2.5GHz so you can develop on one and deploy on another.
These processors are large and extremely energy-hungry; active cooling is almost universally required in x86 designs, and mains power is preferable. The dominant design factor steering x86-based designs is the baggage required by backwards compatibility (both in the CPU core and other support circuitry on the motherboard), and many people are doubtless aware of the history behind this. Vast effort has been invested to modernize the CPU and overall system architecture, but even the current 64-bit architectures are constrained to some degree by legacy considerations. There are relatively few true SoC offerings based around an x86-compatible core, and thus significant external circuitry is always required in x86 systems. It should also be noted that, unlike the vast majority of embedded devices, x86 chips lack on-chip JTAG or other hardware debugging interface support.
The problem is how to hook up mains, active cooling (liquid maybe?) and designing the external support circuitry for x86.
The PowerPC doesn't have that problem because:
one tends to find ARM in low-system-cost, high-volume applications, particularly where power consumption is the prime criterion; x86 is typically found in applications where PC-compatibility is the prime selection criterion, and PPC is often found in applications where performance is the prime criterion. The specific advantages I was hoping to realize in moving to PPC were reduced power consumption, elimination of active cooling (required in my Geode design because of the combined power dissipation of the CPU and its mandatory companion IC), and enhanced performance in some digital image processing (machine vision) code.
So the answer? PPC has lower thermal constraints, higher performance given fixed energy requirements, and lower part count.
And if you're too lazy: They decided to hold off since someone else licensed their engine, and it would be poor form to release it 'for free' after someone paid several thousands to use the source.
What if he were right and one of his clever though experiements did prove them wrong?
In his time he couldn't KNOW he was right or wrong, he just hoped he was right.
It's only in hindsight can you say, "he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life," but if you were there, then, you would STILL be dwarfed, I think, by his genius. It's only unfortunate that his genius didn't extend to embrace QM, but he honestly thought they were wrong, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait.
So Overpeer is being paid to upload corrupted files on the networks. Why is it illegal to download those files? Aren't they implicitly giving you copyright access to those files by uploading them?
The only reason it was illegal was because they own the copyright.
So it's not like being robbed buying drugs, at all. It's like... downloading a copy of Spider-Man 2 from an MPAA affiliate site!
This is hardly casual conversation, however, when it starts talking about specifications, dimensions, bundles, software, and capabilities.
It's very possible he just flat out GUESSED, except he didn't. He flat out admits that, "highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret."
So everything he said was something someone else told him. So he "unknowingly" passed along trade secrets two weeks before the fact.
Not that he is one, but isn't that always going to be the argument of someone who's performing industrial espionage? "I didn't know it was a trade secret, sir. I just thought it was something neat someone else told me,"
Don't get me wrong, I love reading about this stuff too, but in this case I can see why/how Apple has a case against the kid. His postings compromised Apple's marketing and sales strategy. Imagine if he had posted a month earlier? Or three months earlier?
On the other hand I suspect Apple is doing this just to be mean, so boo on Apple.
When has ignorance of the law ever been a good defense for violation of the law?
If I were a spy for Sony, and I could read ThinkSecret, then what would Apple's recourse be except to go after Nick DePlume?
Our right to know is always going to be balanced against their right to privacy.
A journalist can be forced to turn in informants, but a journalist also has to act in ethical ways too.
So Nick DePlume has to take responsibility for the fact that his behavior did indeed leak information sensitive enough that if they had been leaked earlier, Apple might have suffered harm.
How do you differentiate between a journalist and an industrial saboteur then?
The fact that the journalist shares his data with everyone and the saboteur doesn't?
A journalist should have the ability to protect his sources if the journalist is doing something good by reporting; and the sources should be protected if they are doing something right; but in this case the sources are violating contracts (NDAs). If this were a case of public good or public education then you are undoubtedly correct and he should be able to protect his sources.
But this is hardly less than an issue of industrial espionage.
What if he had these documents two years ago? 8 months ago? What if had published them a year ago?
At what point is the harm so perfectly clear that this kind of lawsuit isn't questioned?
Except Malda won't try to protect you through anonymity :P
All the kid did was no different than someone accused of industrial espionage: Get a hold of information in violation of NDA and distribute that information.
If he WERE a spy stealing information and giving it to someone else, though, I imagine the lawsuit would be even tougher.
I'm not sure Nick has no responsibility to keep their secrets.
If I were a spy for Sony and I publish this information, am I held unaccountable because I never signed a contract with Apple?
Nick has a responsibility to act properly. Myself, working in the tech industry, I think if he had access to NDA material (the equivalent to Top Secret) and he knew it, he acted improperly to print it. If he was ignorant of it's NDA status then he acted negligently in printing it.
If a court forces Nick to tell Apple, I'm not thinking this is a violation of free press towards corporate America.
The point of a free press, according to our founding fathers, is that no government can opress the people by silencing it's press.
I don't think of Apple as a 'force of government'.
You are free to speak, and I am free to speak, against our government, or politicians, our policies, but we do not have license to violate contracts and legally binding agreements. Free speech is one thing. Legal agreements are another.
Free speech is a binding legal agreement between the people of America and it's government; and in this situation it has not be abridged.
It is his problem because he's the one that published those leaks. If he hadn't published them, they wouldn't be his problem.
If I have a boat that leaks and you are on the shore, why is it I have found you on board the ship?
They go after the kid that discovers where you leak because the kid knows where you leak.
Isn't that obvious? How else do you find the employees you want to fire, here?
Get your priorities straight QuantumG.
If you want to complain about what Apple is doing, restricting free speech is the wrong target. Apple is protecting itself, legally, forthrightly, and up front, according to the law.
Someone violated an NDA to tell Nick DePlume these 'trade secrets'.
Apple is trying to get out of Nick DePlume the identities of those who violated those NDAs.
To put it abstractly, Apple and a third party signed a contract. Said third party violated the contract without Apple's knowledge. Apple finds out about the violation from Nick DePlume. Apple then tries to find out from Nick DePlume who violated the contract.
If there is anything scummy in what Apple is doing, it's in not being gentler and more friendly towards 19 year old Nick, but that's not what you're complaining about.
1/3 the cost and 10x the size, to boot!
The market has branded the iPod a winner, and this site just reports it. It's not spinning anything (as you would believe).
6 million iPods sold, possibly 8.
You also have some strange history there. Apple didn't create the first mp3 player. Or the second, third, or even 10th. Creative and Compaq were ahead of them with hard drive units and Rio, Samsung, and a few others were ahead of them with CD and flash based units.
Apple is #1 for transforming the mp3 market from niche to mainstream. That is why the iPod is synonymous with mp3 players; not because it's the first, but because it made the market it now rules.
Kind of like how Ford created the automobile market, even though they weren't by far the first cars.
What you want is not a list of "2004 winners," and "2004 losers," you want a list of "2004 cool gadgets," but then I would argue what is important:
The device that no one remembers?
The device that everyone knows?
It makes awesome products (Dual G5, iPods, iLife, PowerBooks), some smart licensing movies (HP iPod, HP Tunes, Motorola iPhone), has a good open source policy (Darwin, KHTML, ZeroConf, Darwin Streaming Server) and STILL people bitch when Apple acts to defend itself!
/. crowd, that would tear any other company apart if it engaged in anything similar.
Let me refute your inaccurate points:
>We have a company here that's suing 21 year old mac fans for participating in the illegal sharing of a beta build of their OS.
No, we have a company here that's suing a 21 year old and others for violating a contractual agreement.
Would YOU not sue me if you paid me $2,000 to paint your car and then when you left the car overnight I sold it to someone else? There are two things that are of interest here:
Apple has an NDA, like many other companies. Intel has them, AMD has them, ATI has them. If you violate that license, you break your contractual agreement.
Apple, like any other technical company, can suffer harm from leaked technical information getting into the hands of competitors. In other words if a rival company ALSO downloads one of those builds they've got their hands on the 'crown jewels' so to speak.
>We have a company here that's extracting information from someone they are about to sue under false pretence.
We have a company here that's suing to ensure future leaks are minimized. Why do you think this is false pretenses? Their OS is almost as much their bread and butter as their desktops! You can't run any Mac without the OS.
If this were a case where someone stole 5 prototype future PowerBooks, Apple would SURELY prosecute the perpetrator for exactly the same reasons.
>We have a company here that's suing a side aimed at their fans because the site spreads some rumors about new products.
Leaks can hurt you. Osbourne computer found out the hard way when they announced a product too early in the life cycle of the current product and went bankrupt because people were waiting for the next version!
Other ways leaks can hurt you: A competitor can copy you, or clone a good enough solution to nullify any special advantages your product has.
>We have a company that refuses to use an open standard, or even simply to license their technology to other companies, in order to leverage the huge market share they have in one area to boost sales in an other area.
You mean like how HP has their HP iPod (which has a tiny HP logo on the back)?
How HP ALSO has Fairplay decoding built into their version of the HP Media Center PC (under the technology HP Tunes) so that songs purchased from the iTMS can be played back OUTSIDE of iTunes?
How Motorola will have a phone that plays Fairplay encoded AACs that can be purchased through the iTMS?
Are you advocating that Apple should be licensing indiscriminately? Because it sure seems to be that Apple IS licensing, but just not licensing to companies you care about, perhaps.
Like to Real software.
>We have a company that is heavily promoting software patents and is heavily involved in fileing trivial software patents.
I must have missed this. Point out some examples please?
>We have a company here that is taking open source technology for their new browser, but then refuse to give the changes they make back in a way that might be useful to the original open source developers.
Someone else already made a rebuttal, but I want to know what you think the "solution" is because I certainly don't see the "problem". Maybe you know something I don't?
>And yet it seems, Apple is still loved by the
As I said earlier, Apple makes great products, makes great software, and in turn allows you, in using those products and software, to enjoy yourself.
About the only other company I can think of that has similar characteristics are:
Coke
Hershey's
Nintendo
I think it will.
If IBM, Alpine, and Pioneer think there is a market for car adapters for the iPod (to transform your car into an iPod sound system) why wouldn't the same market want a phone that can play all their AACs and MP3s after synching with iTunes?
It's not like the phone market is stagnant! People get new phones every few years, some of them at least.
Or, like when Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS of IBM PCs, Creative or iRiver could reverse engineer the iPod to make their devices look like iPods to iTunes.
Why can't they do that?
HP has thus far been able to implement Fairplay AAC decoding on their Windows Media Center PC.
Motorola will be shipping cell phones that can play Fairplay AAC encoded content.
What iRiver and Zen could do (Compaq did it 20 years ago!) is reverse engineer the iPod such that their devices look like iPods when plugged into iTunes.
Why haven't they done that if the market is so lucrative and they are so bright? Compaq figured out how to reverse engineer BIOs from IBM, and people are porting Linux to the iPod.
Link disappeared This is the article about HP Tunes
How about this?
HP has added the ability to play iTunes AAC files to their Windows Media Center PC under the capability called HPTunes.
Then there's the fact that there will be (if rumors are correct) Motorola phones that can play back iTMS AAC files.
What, does induction and the rules of self similarity not apply to your universe?
Last I heard iTunes did work with other players.
Or did you mean the music store?
Rio has a whole lineup of iTunes compatible flash players... except it seems to only be compatible on the Mac side. Strange isn't it?
Sure, but these guys went from x86->PPC successfully, so should and did are two different things.
I'm sure there are reasons for all these architectures. The PPC has the benefit of being reasonably scalable too: There are PPC cores from 200MHz up to 2.5GHz so you can develop on one and deploy on another.
But if those other people are like you, shouldn't you care exactly because you care about yourself?
But I quote from the article:
The problem is how to hook up mains, active cooling (liquid maybe?) and designing the external support circuitry for x86.
The PowerPC doesn't have that problem because:
So the answer? PPC has lower thermal constraints, higher performance given fixed energy requirements, and lower part count.
Read the article/mirror/slashdot karma whore post
It's in there
And if you're too lazy: They decided to hold off since someone else licensed their engine, and it would be poor form to release it 'for free' after someone paid several thousands to use the source.
What if he were right and one of his clever though experiements did prove them wrong?
In his time he couldn't KNOW he was right or wrong, he just hoped he was right.
It's only in hindsight can you say, "he also made a lot of mistakes later in his life," but if you were there, then, you would STILL be dwarfed, I think, by his genius. It's only unfortunate that his genius didn't extend to embrace QM, but he honestly thought they were wrong, too.