For me, the really intriguing bit is that they talk about "hosting" a lot, so much so that it appears to be a codeword for "spamming". Its a fairly obvious thing to do for someone who makes their money off spam - try to keep a low profile and not discuss their business openly.
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Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 11:30:30 +0100
Subject: Rick Yazwinski referral
From: Mark Holyland
To: martijn@cyberangels.nl
Hi Martijn
Rick from Web Krew / Python gave me your contact regarding hosting.
Can you give me more information as to what hosting you can offer and the costs of your services ?
In my timezone, it is currently 10:30 of March 31st. Shouldn't the Internet community wait until it is April 1st everywhere before trying to implement this suggestion?
Its never 1 April everywhere. Don't believe me? Grab a globe and use a tennis ball for the sun.:)
If they want to sue over this, why not sue beer companies because you're not immediately surrounded by half-naked babes as soon as you open an ice cold Bud?
C'mon give them a break... maybe there arent any chicks there for your first Bud, by the tenth one the place is packed with stunners. It just takes Bud HQ some time to round them up and send them over.:)
There's a (biological) virus to which humans are either immune, or not - just like any other virus.
The people who catch it, however, are turned into attack zombies primed to attack specifically the immune humans.
Many novels based on vampires or zombies have this idea.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a personal favourite.
The way I see it, I'm happy to pay for an FHM a month for about a $4, then I can damn well chip in for slashdot, which I read daily not monthly, and will cost me one third of the price over time anyway (assuming I actually use all 10 impressions per day).
I've also just "subscribed" to google, by signing up for their adwords system. Its pretty nifty - I've had 452 people see my ad, for just over a fiver (the fiver being their account setup charge -- per-click costs add up to only 0.34 in a week). Its fun to subject that many people to your points of view for 0.34 a week -- give it a go, people!:)
("Microsoft" is going for only 0.37 per click -- but remember your linux advocacy HOWTO's...)
hey maybe i could go patent the rope/tire method and become a millionaire!
You've disclosed your invention already, dumbass. This kind of carelessness is why the big companies always win out - a single person just doesnt have what it takes without the support of a few good lawyers.
What's the problem here? Of course the IEEE doesnt want to take responsibility for any violations of any law on the part of the author. It shouldnt have to either -- its job (in this area) is to collate journals of the best new work using peer-review to sift through it all.
If it had to hire teams of lawyers to read over each paper and explore the legal background, then I shudder to think how much my subscriptions would cost.*
indecision
* Declarations: I am a member of the IEEE and ACM, and have so far published 3 papers through them. I've signed the forms. I've thought about their implications.
I lived in Hong Kong for 18 years; everyone over the age of 16 has to carry an ID card, with your ID number, photo, name, and date of birth. The ID cards are also proof of a right of abode in Hong Kong, like a birth certificate in the UK.
So this change is limited to putting a smart chip in a card people already carry.
Not that its not dangerous -- there are a whole load of risks associated with people not knowing what information they are giving up whenever they show it (though there are laws about who is allowed to request it), as opposed to a print-only card where its obvious what you are showing.
Its still GPL'd so I can take your company's product and distribute it for free. Where are you making your money?
The structure of the code remains the same (else why would it produce the same program), so some sort of pattern matching could be used
to compare the code against the body of GPL code out there (it may well be obvious what its based on), and then "factorise out" the GPL code, leaving just the gobbledygooked novel code. Which may, given effort, be de-gobbledygooked, and made public (distributed under the GPL as a derived work). You are left with having no IPR distinguishing your company from the next guy.
Lesson: Trusting lawyers is dodgy to begin with (there are some ideas for legal rebuttals in the comments already), but dont underestimate the technical solutions either.
User Info for kathleen (570)
kathleen has posted 1 comment.
1 I *should* have gotten First Post! posted on Thu February 14, 15:44 (Score:5 Replies: 17)
attached to Kathleen Fent Read this Story
Hey Rob, looks like she doesnt think much of your site, she's only posted once!:)
I hope she posts the reply - if not, then please "forward" it Taco because you've got a lot of fingers crossed for you here.:)
Also waiting to see how many people follow suit (probably those who have proposed today anyway).
I see a lot of people are applying this idea to a single open source app, and saying that the developers are the "good guys", and the users are "freeloaders". No surprise there -- this is slashdot.:)
And while I don't agree that this "freeloading" is a bad thing*, I think that the case of a single app is not what the article author was getting at.
Where this model is relevant is for open-source development. When you release free code (free as in beer), it becomes part of the resource pool available to all developers. However, cooperation in this way does not flourish, unless we find a way to punish freeloaders, i.e. those who use free code but do not contribute.
And we've found one. Its called the GPL, and should (if it ever gets upheld in court) force those who want to use free (as in speech) code to contribute.
indecision
* even the most non-active user still contributes by adding to download stats if nothing else and therefore providing an indicator of how popular an app is
If the current release has useful features and is relatively stable, then there's no reason for users to stop using it, especially so in the open source case since if they have problems they may well be able to fix the issues themselves. This is true of a few things I use myself.
What might well "die" is the evolution of the product; a user patching their own code is not likely to go through the effort of propogating their patch, when there's no active maintainer who they can simply email. The project may well end up not evolving further because of this, but hey if the program is mature, that isnt too much of a loss.
And then eventually someone might come along with an idea that uses the "stale" project as a seed for something greater, and start evolving it again.
Sites which let any random joe with a hotmail account post stories for the front page, which are rarely if ever checked.
Especially those on which the so-called-editors add a little "Here's my in-the-know take on it" blurb at the bottom to lull you into a false sense of security.
Even worse are sites where they let anybody and everybody with an axe to grind post huge informative comments which actually just serve their hidden agendas.
Worse still are those which let anybody and their dog moderate, I mean just because somebody's posted a few +5 Funny's doesnt mean they know the first thing about Satellite Phones. They, too, are going to be following their agendas.
Whoops, I work for a company selling chips that go in satellite phones, oh no I've accidentally marked all negative comments as trolls. Doh.
OK so now I've read all the other "Slashdot Slashdotted!" posts and realised that mine is going to attract a -1 Redundant faster than you can say "ping". In fact I would do it myself if I could both post and moderate:)
The thing is... how is that possible? Surely this "new hardware" Taco mentioned isnt older and crappier than the "old hardware" Im posting to now. Maybe it's running IIS?:)
Or maybe its that normally slashdot doesnt have to cope with the hordes of geeks actually clicking around the site... most people might find an interesting article and then go bash on the linked servers instead.
So the cops pick up some guy on a fair suspicion, and they turn out to be wrong. What's so new about that? Cops have been picking up the wrong people for ages, like people who were in the area of a crime or people who had a valid gripe against the victim (but didnt act on it and commit the crime).
In this day and age, much more crime is committed remotely, so police need and have new techniques for identifying potential suspects from afar, like the face recognition thing. There should be no problem with that.
Also, it appears the technology wasnt even the cause of the false arrest - the woman identified the man from demo footage.
The only lesson to learn here is in the attitude towards the technology. It is all too easy, when seeing camera footage of people while being told about police using cameras to catch criminals, to assume the person shown must be a criminal.
The police themselves appear to have made that mistake , and treated the man with perhaps less benefit-of-the-doubt than they should have, because he was identified in connection with their fancy new computer system, which could obviously never go wrong.
The "copy protection" mechanism is based on the fact that Music CD players handle errors in the CD gracefully, interpolating the data on either side and playing a best-guess at what the sound should have been, whereas Data CD players give you the data raw.
There are no real difficulties in writing code to read over a ripped CD image, and do the interpolation in software.
I just hope that solutions to this come out soon (and, in particular, for Windows and not just linux), so that the record companies realise how pointless the scheme is and stop writing trash all over our fairly purchased music!
--indecision
Reed: "how I'm dealing with Theo being obnoxious"
on
IPFilter Clarification
·
· Score: 1
Quote from Darren Reedin reply to Bill Corrigan's reply to the original message:
If OpenBSD had a more reasonable leadership as do FreeBSD/NetBSD, then maybe this would never have happened. This is not a vendetta thing, it
is just how I'm dealing with Theo being obnoxious.
Slashdot Mirror
They list one email as being particularly interesting, as copied below.
For me, the really intriguing bit is that they talk about "hosting" a lot, so much so that it appears to be a codeword for "spamming". Its a fairly obvious thing to do for someone who makes their money off spam - try to keep a low profile and not discuss their business openly.
Its never 1 April everywhere. Don't believe me? Grab a globe and use a tennis ball for the sun. :)
Now if they could please point out the filenames and line numbers in question, perhaps we could eliminate the bugs altogether...
C'mon give them a break... maybe there arent any chicks there for your first Bud, by the tenth one the place is packed with stunners. It just takes Bud HQ some time to round them up and send them over. :)
indecision
The people who catch it, however, are turned into attack zombies primed to attack specifically the immune humans.
Many novels based on vampires or zombies have this idea.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a personal favourite.
Enjoy
indecision
I've also just "subscribed" to google, by signing up for their adwords system. Its pretty nifty - I've had 452 people see my ad, for just over a fiver (the fiver being their account setup charge -- per-click costs add up to only 0.34 in a week). Its fun to subject that many people to your points of view for 0.34 a week -- give it a go, people! :)
("Microsoft" is going for only 0.37 per click -- but remember your linux advocacy HOWTO's...)
indecision
You've disclosed your invention already, dumbass. This kind of carelessness is why the big companies always win out - a single person just doesnt have what it takes without the support of a few good lawyers.
indecision
If it had to hire teams of lawyers to read over each paper and explore the legal background, then I shudder to think how much my subscriptions would cost.*
indecision
* Declarations: I am a member of the IEEE and ACM, and have so far published 3 papers through them. I've signed the forms. I've thought about their implications.
So this change is limited to putting a smart chip in a card people already carry.
Not that its not dangerous -- there are a whole load of risks associated with people not knowing what information they are giving up whenever they show it (though there are laws about who is allowed to request it), as opposed to a print-only card where its obvious what you are showing.
indecision
Its still GPL'd so I can take your company's product and distribute it for free. Where are you making your money?
The structure of the code remains the same (else why would it produce the same program), so some sort of pattern matching could be used to compare the code against the body of GPL code out there (it may well be obvious what its based on), and then "factorise out" the GPL code, leaving just the gobbledygooked novel code. Which may, given effort, be de-gobbledygooked, and made public (distributed under the GPL as a derived work). You are left with having no IPR distinguishing your company from the next guy.
Lesson: Trusting lawyers is dodgy to begin with (there are some ideas for legal rebuttals in the comments already), but dont underestimate the technical solutions either.
I hope she posts the reply - if not, then please "forward" it Taco because you've got a lot of fingers crossed for you here. :)
Also waiting to see how many people follow suit (probably those who have proposed today anyway).
Congrats.
James
3am wrote:
Just an aside, this is a fantastic search resource for computer science, math, and related fields:
http://researchindex.com/
This is a great site, everyone, have a peek if you've got a moment. A direct link to the search page follows:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
And while I don't agree that this "freeloading" is a bad thing*, I think that the case of a single app is not what the article author was getting at.
Where this model is relevant is for open-source development. When you release free code (free as in beer), it becomes part of the resource pool available to all developers. However, cooperation in this way does not flourish, unless we find a way to punish freeloaders, i.e. those who use free code but do not contribute.
And we've found one. Its called the GPL, and should (if it ever gets upheld in court) force those who want to use free (as in speech) code to contribute.
indecision
* even the most non-active user still contributes by adding to download stats if nothing else and therefore providing an indicator of how popular an app is
What might well "die" is the evolution of the product; a user patching their own code is not likely to go through the effort of propogating their patch, when there's no active maintainer who they can simply email. The project may well end up not evolving further because of this, but hey if the program is mature, that isnt too much of a loss.
And then eventually someone might come along with an idea that uses the "stale" project as a seed for something greater, and start evolving it again.
~price = $25,000,000
plus p+p, and relevant taxes :)
Please note. My name is Cringely, not Cringley.
The former sounds like what people do when they read the alarmist drivel I write.
The latter sounds like a potato chip commercial.
Sincerely,
Robert X. Cringely
Especially those on which the so-called-editors add a little "Here's my in-the-know take on it" blurb at the bottom to lull you into a false sense of security.
Even worse are sites where they let anybody and everybody with an axe to grind post huge informative comments which actually just serve their hidden agendas.
Worse still are those which let anybody and their dog moderate, I mean just because somebody's posted a few +5 Funny's doesnt mean they know the first thing about Satellite Phones. They, too, are going to be following their agendas.
Whoops, I work for a company selling chips that go in satellite phones, oh no I've accidentally marked all negative comments as trolls. Doh.
Just my 2p (of humour).
The thing is... how is that possible? Surely this "new hardware" Taco mentioned isnt older and crappier than the "old hardware" Im posting to now. Maybe it's running IIS? :)
Or maybe its that normally slashdot doesnt have to cope with the hordes of geeks actually clicking around the site... most people might find an interesting article and then go bash on the linked servers instead.
Just my p+p.
Chortle chortle snigger snigger
This is scary. Really scary.
--indecision
PS Anyone want some books? And do any of you know where I can buy a small caribbean island by banker's draft?
In this day and age, much more crime is committed remotely, so police need and have new techniques for identifying potential suspects from afar, like the face recognition thing. There should be no problem with that.
Also, it appears the technology wasnt even the cause of the false arrest - the woman identified the man from demo footage.
The only lesson to learn here is in the attitude towards the technology. It is all too easy, when seeing camera footage of people while being told about police using cameras to catch criminals, to assume the person shown must be a criminal.
The police themselves appear to have made that mistake , and treated the man with perhaps less benefit-of-the-doubt than they should have, because he was identified in connection with their fancy new computer system, which could obviously never go wrong.
There are no real difficulties in writing code to read over a ripped CD image, and do the interpolation in software.
I just hope that solutions to this come out soon (and, in particular, for Windows and not just linux), so that the record companies realise how pointless the scheme is and stop writing trash all over our fairly purchased music!
--indecision
If OpenBSD had a more reasonable leadership as do FreeBSD/NetBSD, then maybe this would never have happened. This is not a vendetta thing, it is just how I'm dealing with Theo being obnoxious.
Hmmm... not a vendetta.. right...