I heard a rumor that X10 ads were actually CIA-sponsored spyware of some sort. I know that doesn't make sense, how could a "pop-under" actually contain spyware? Then I remembered that 90% or more of the web surfers use Internet Explorer - the X10 "pop-unders" probably have an ActiveX control in them. Remember NSA_KEY? It's not beyond MSFT to collaborate with the CIA. Also, the X10 ads seem to run in cycles - you get an X10 ad on just about every page load for a week or two, and then none for 6 months, and then they're back.
Spammers may thieves, but it isn't sending spam that made them so.
What we need is better technical solutions to spam, not more bad laws.
The "technical solution" here might involve replacing SMTP-based email distribution. Do you really want a standards fight with a rejuvenated Microsoft in the picture? I don't. I'm pretty sure that if "MSMTP" got codified, we would all have to pay big money to run a "server" entity for that protocol.
The "bad laws" in question must exist because market forces have an extremely weak effect on spam, unlike on regular advertising. Read the rest of my post, without the selective editing.
Email spammers are thieves, email advertising is theft. We, as a society need to penalize spammers and spam appropriately.
Spammers would have you believe that other than your time for "just clicking delete", there's no cost to spam. However, since you and I and all spam victims pay a lot of the cost of spam before purchasing the spamvertised product, market forces on spam are seriously weakened, with respect to market forces on other forms of advertising (radio and Tee Vee broadcast, newspaper and magazine advertising, billboards, stock cars, product placement in movies). For all other forms of advertising, the advertiser pays for the ads up front, before the consumer buys the product. If the ad campaign sucks ("Ring Around the Collar!") or offends (Frito Bandito, anyone?) ad victims can choose to exert market forces on the advertiser. With respect to spam, victims have already paid more than their share of the ad costs before making a decision whether or not to buy the spamvertised product. Market forces apply only weakly to spam, thus requiring government intervention. Criminalizing spam is a step in the right direction.
Spammers are all thieves. Don't forget, don't let your legislator(s) forget it. Down with the DMA!
We need to define the crime a worm writer commits
on
Why Worm Writers Stay Free
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· Score: 3, Insightful
First, the "WiReD" article confuses worm - a program or process that propagates itself to a different computer, usually via some networking protocol, and chainmail - an email message that requires human intervention to automatically send out more email messages, usually containing the same or slightly evolved chainmail. WiReD should straighten up its vocabulary on this issue, they do no service to anyone confusing the two.
Second, the techniques used by both chainmail and worms are all used by legitimate scripts, programs and emails. How does law enforcement propose to declare one email message a crime, and another legitimate? And I don't mean "Let's ask some expert like Graham Cluely."
Sure an IIS worm like Code Red usually uses some initial exploit, like overflowing a buffer in an IIS module or service or plug-in or whatever the MSFT lingo is, but Nimda used a variety of techniques built in to IIS, "shares" and Outlook. The variety of Outlook worms (Anna Kournikova, Nude Housewife, etc etc) and even the CHRISTMA EXE chainmail of 1987 used entirely legitimate techniques built in to Outlook and other email viewers. The 1988 Internet Worm used both legitimate techniques (BSD "r" commands that didn't require a password) and exploits like "fingerd" buffer overflows. How do we define the crime - "I didn't authorize this use of Outlook" really doesn't amount to a way to decide whether or not a particular program committed a crime. Similary, worms like x.c get telnet servers to crash in particular ways when they spread. Gee whiz, a network server process crashes! That's news, for sure. I guess that hasn't happened to me since yesterday. How do we make one instance of a crashed program a crime, and another instance into a bug report?
It's about time spammers started paying for their sins.
Spamming is basically a form of theft, externalizing around half the cost of sending an advertisement to the reciepiant of the spam. That's clearly what makes spam attractive to advertisers (and their swinish lobbyists, the DMA).
The second order effect of this externalization hasn't been talked about in the press much. Ordinary advertising costs up front - a Tee Vee commercial for laundry detergent gets paid for before you buy the Whisk. A two-page spread in Time magazine for the latests SUV gets paid for before any consumer buys a 2002 Yukon. And yes, the company doing the advertising prices their product to account for the ad expenditure.
The fact that a spam victim pays for the ad before making a decision on whether or not to buy the laser printer toner means that market forces controlling advertising are vastly weakened. For example, the makers of "Whisk" laundry detergent used to have an ad campaign based on the phrase "Ring around the collar". During the mid 70s, the Women's Movement found this ad campaign offensive, so they boycotted "Whisk".
Fast forward to 2002 - you've already paid to receive an ad for Hotwet Russian Teen Sluts. No boycott on earth will have an effect on the advertiser - you've already paid for it, without being given a choice in the marketplace (maybe you prefer Hotwet Bulgarian Teens).
There's only very weak market forces that affect spam. We need government regulation of spam, we need the ability to punish spammers economically.
How likely do you think that the DoJ's proposed settlement with Microsoft will be accepted by the Judge?
If the DoJ's seattlement gets accepted over the 9 renegade state's proposal, what effect do you think the DoJ's seattlement will have?
Re:I'll fight this tooth and nail
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Electronic Paper
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· Score: 2
Why are we so opposed to paper?
I don't think that we (you and I, at least, maybe others) are opposed to paper. It has a lot of advantages: very high resolution, doesn't need a power supply, cheap, for the most part durable, doesn't require a license to re-read, you can make margin notes, and (here's the kicker, I believe) very high standards exist and are commonly upheld for things like typography, typesetting, spelling, and indexing.
"Electronic paper" is mostly an Upper Managment Fantasy. Presidents and CEOs and COOs hope to license content per-viewing, and they have noticed what the record industry does when it changes formats - the record industry ditches unprofitable back catalog. Also, in a new medium, people will expect less. On-line documentation, as an example, is usually not spell-checked, or paginated, and neither table of contents nor index is customary. Corporate Upper Management doesn't want to pay anyone but the janitor and themselves, so they want to ditch those pesky proofreaders, typesetters and most of all those squirrely indexers.
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
Who says there has to be only a single Pope? Ever hear of the Great Schism? Even in the middle ages there were times when 2 or even 3 popes existed, each excommunicating the other(s).
MVS is Not My Favorite OS, but it isn't crap either.
You're complaining that a steam locomotive is not a jeep.
No, I showed you an example of why the FBI qualifies as technologically backwards in terms of The Internet, and threats to The Internet.
It's certainly possible that the FBI has throngs of RACF hackers who can bust into your average script kiddie's S390 by running a job with strangely malformed JCL, but so what? To use your idiom, the evidence says that the FBI has plenty of steam engine mechanics, while the fellow I responded to was claiming they had really, really good internal combustion technicians.
i don't know what we're getting all bent out of shape about magic lantern for. any fbi technology that's even being talked about in the press is already old hat. they've moved way past that by now, i'm sure.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The FBI has been notoriously backwards technologically. For example, the FBI website was hosted by NASA for the first few years. FBI was a *major* consumer of IBM Big Iron, running crap OSes like MVS well into the 90s. The public information on DCS-1000 makes it look really amateurish (runs on NT, captures way too much information, etc etc). The FBI's "National Infrastructure Protection Center" has come under a lot of criticism. The Feds have pushed for stuff like CALEA for years because the FBI can't keep up with the hackers and phreakers.
I've heard at various times that the RIAA has some mob connections (you know, like the Teamsters, wink wink, nudge nudge). Sure, threats of lawsuits are enough to keep a fellow up late at night, but how scary is the RIAA, really?
which, for some reason, wants '$' as the end-of-string terminator
Right. The point of Gary Kildall's griping was that Kildall knew the reason, and Bill Gates didn't. This, to Kildall, proved that MS-DOS had a shady heritage, possibly involving re-assembling (to 8086 object code) a disassembled CP/M (8080 object code).
There may have been some merit in Kildall's claims, given that he sued MSFT, and settled out-of-court.
In Robert X Cringely's book "Accidental Empires", there's a section where Cringely has Gary Kildall ranting about how MSFT ripped off CP/M - the quote is something about how MS-DOS uses '$' to mark the end of a string, and at MSFT, not even Bill Gates knows why. Can someone paw through the DR-DOS code and find out why?
I must take pity on Microsoft for their situation - being so large and omnipresent, they are a constant target of attack.
You know, I've read statements like this, and shaken my head, and said, "Too bad" a lot. Then, I got to thinking about this. In the last year, The Internet experienced a bunch of worms (not chainmail, like SirCam or Snow White or Hybris, but real, self-propagating worms): l1on, adore, ramen, cheese, sadmind/IIS, lpdw0rm, x.c, Code Red and Nimda.
Of these 9 worms, 5 were for Linux, 1 for Solaris, 1 for FreeBSD and 2 were for Windows. I don't see worms targeted predominantly toward Microsoft products on that basis. Microsoft doesn't seem to get targeted any harder than anything else. In fact, it seems to get targeted with fewer worms than it's market share (percentage of machines on The Internet running windows) than it should.
Even though fewer worms target Microsoft products, those worms get enormous traction - my little home web server saw hundreds or even thousands of Code Red hits for every sadmind/IIS hit. As near as I can tell, worms for MSFT products get more press because a larger proportion of instances of those products get infected, and the extra network traffic causes actual problems.
However, Microsoft probably won't put much effort into finding whoever made the virus.
Every noticed that nobody puts that much effort into finding whoever made the latest IIS worm or Outlook virus (calling a spade a spade)? Follow the money. Without a more-or-less constant stream of IIS worms, Word Macro viruses or Outlook viruses, the "good guys", the anti-virus industry, wouldn't be able to turn a profit. That scanner that detects 8734 known viruses? No need to ever update it, if there's no new Windows viruses.
I read the original statement, and, frankly, it didn't sound to me like Gates was claiming credit for Open Source. What he said was that if it hadn't been for M$ standardizing computing with DOS, there wouldn't be a market for Open Source now. However much I may disagree with M$ policies and coding today, I would tend to agree with the thought behind that statement.
If you agree with that statement, you're simply wrong. In markets with a single CPU architecture and operating system (VAX -> VMS, SPARC -> Solaris, x86 -> MS-DOS) people just trade executables, they don't for the most part bother with source. You only need source in markets with a variety of CPU architectures and/or operating systems. The ideas behind Open Source were conceived in an environment of many, often propietary operating systems and CPU architectures, pre-1989, pre MS-DOS dominance. The economies of scale that caused cheap Pee Cee hardware have little or nothing to do with Open Source.
They need a warrant (last I checked) to search someone's house. They need a warrant to use wiretaps.
The very recently enacted PATRIOT Act probably gives USA Federal law enforcement the mechanism to get around this objection. The PATRIOT Act probably allows searching without notification, and it certainly loosens-up the criteria under which law enforcement can obtain a wiretap.
I am wondering if there's a really good explination of why the desktop metaphor is, to borrow a phrase from "1984", un-good.
This is only my opinion, but...
"Desktop metaphor" doesn't really match a real desktop. Do you drag-n-drop a "document" on a Copier Icon to get a copy of a file? You have to carry around mental models of "real desktop" vs "metaphorica desktop". People forget how confusing that sort of thing really is after 3 or 4 years of 8 hour days using Windows.
"Desktop" is very limiting in terms of data visualization. It makes people believe that everything can be stored in 8.5 x 11 inch chunks. In 10 point typeface, that's not a lot of information per "page", and if your "office" is set up to view pages at a time (think "Word" and "Excel"), it's hard to see a lot of information at once.
It's almost impossible for a "desktop metaphor" GUI to provide a grammar to its users. This limits what a "desktop" can do. Think of what kinds of formal languages a grammar can describe, vs what kinds a regular expression can provide.
Current "desktop metaphors" don't provide a clear visual or mental separation of "program" and "data". The underlying OS does make a very clear distinction between what's executable and what's usable for data. This distinction is key to understanding computation at all.
This is actually true. You could and do get enough crosstalk that a good sniffer in van could pull packets off your ethernet.
You'd have to explain why the building where this classified network resided had offices with glass windows, and terminals ('92 remember?) facing the windows. The "security" people apparently didn't consider someone with a telescope a threat.
Maybe they're worried about trojan hardware? A keyboard gets borrowed out, a small modification is made so that it logs every key pressed and then a week or two later gets "loaned" out again to extract the data.
Let's see... keyboard gets used a maximum of 12 hours a day, and an engineer types 50, 5-letter words a minute. That's 12 x 60 x 50 x 5 = 180,000 bytes of info a day to store in the keyboard. Nope. Even in '92, we had 1.44 Megabyte floppies. It would have been much more efficient to move info via floppy. Security folks being dumb again.
remember these are people who get payed to be paranoid.
You make a correct statement, but "paranoid" doesn't mean "intelligent". It means "a variety of insanity". I'd rather have security people paid to be intelligent, than paid to be insane.
the government already has several separate, secure internets, for various purposes, and they were still infected by Melissa and LoveLetter
Now that's something we didn't see on C|Net.
I worked in the aerospace industry from '86 to '92. Every big defence contractor had one or more classified IP networks. Unfortunately, the security measures imposed were sort of stupid: the ethernet cables of the classified net had to be at least so many feet from a phone line (they were worried that induced voltages from ethernet would allow someone on the phone to "tap" the classified net), keyboards attached to computers attached to the classified net couldn't be traded out to unclassified areas, and had to be elaborately destroyed when they broke. At the same time, you could walk through checkpoints with pockets full of floppies.
It was as if a Korean War Drill Instructor dreamed up ways to actually impede using the classified network, but at the same time allow (possibly) classified information in and out of the building.
Just quietly delete all of you spam, and when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop. Or if you don't want spam, just don't use email.
The only problem with "just hit delete" is that the spammers actually steal from their victims. Email spams cost (admittedly each one only costs a small amount) in terms of network connection time, CPU cycles, disk space, user time to hit delete. I suspect that what you're advocating would minimize any given individual's cost of dealing with spam, but we'd end up in a "tragedy of the commons" situtation, and ultimately any given individual's spam burden would be unbearable.
The other problem with email spam is that the economics of it differ from traditional advertising. In traditional advertising, the ads get paid for by a firm before you or I make a decision on buying a product. If the ad for the product in question sucks, we don't buy. If the ad for the product in question offends enough people, we don't buy. There's feedback between the ad and the "invisible hand" of the marketplace. If the ad isn't good (for whatever reason) the product doesn't get bought, and the firm is out the cost fo the ad. Email spam, the potential customers bear a large part of the cost before making a decision about buying the product advertised by spam. Any given ad budget can finance way more spam than conventional advertising because those being advertised too have to pay for the ad before they buy the product. The feedback, although not totally eliminated, is vastly weaker than before.
Because of the greatly weaker market forces, we do need legislation to stop spam.
Today, there are very few good business models that work on the Web, and this deficit has a significant effect. The Web is becoming somewhat like a desert. There are some survivors -- Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon and so on -- but nothing new is germinating in any significant way.
First, "Marshall Brain" seems to tacitly assume that all the WWW should do is make money for corporations. Second, Mr Brain assumes that only corporate sites are worth visiting. Aren't both of these rather flawed? For a single counterexample to both of these flawed assumptions, what about e-prints of scientific papers? The authors of the papers are more interested in getting the papers out there and read than in getting paid when the paper's content gets read. Advancement of Science and all that. Also, the occasional paper has way more interesting content than the usual slick, marketeer-approved corporate collateral web site.
Brain gets other things wrong, too: When you go to the book store, you never see free books. Walk by a locally-owned used book store. I guarantee that you'll find a "Free! Take one!" rack full of books in front. Walk around any heavy-foot-traffic downtown in the USA and you'll be able to collect a large number of (free!) tracts, flyers and even funny newspapers, like the Onion. Try it, Marshall.
Marshall Brain's underlying assumptions are totally wrong. His penny-a-page scheme won't work.
Please do define "globalization" or "globalism"
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Defining Globalism
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· Score: 2
But globalization is an elusive notion.
"Globalization" must constitute an elusive notion: Katz utterly fails to provide even one definition in his article, ironically entitled Defining Globalism.
Come on, Jon. Give it a shot. Try to provide a three sentence or less, dictionary-style definition of one or more meanings of the word "globalization".
Gee whiz, at least try to distinguish between "globalISM" and "globalIZATION"
Why would the White House frown on a national US ID card, when it was all in favor of the strongly authoritarian "PATRIOT" act?
There's a weird undercurrent in USA Right Wing politics against things like national ID cards. The more crazed Republicans ("Black Helicopter Republicans", sort of like "Log Cabin Republicans", only the average BHR gets less respect) usually believe that national ID cards equate to the "Mark of the Beast". I can't really believe that consideration of weird, fringe beliefs keeps the current White House from doing the national ID card thing.
People actually use CDE? What on earth for? It's buggy, slow, ugly, has no apps, poorly documented, closed source and bloated. In short, it has absolutely *no* good points.
I'm flabbergasted that anyone can prefer the steaming pile of crap that includes "dtterm" and that lame "tool bar" that takes up 12% of the screen and offers no noticeable benefits. I forget what that piece o' junk is called, the "control pane" or somesuch. It's the only thing worse than the Windows tool bar in terms of incomprehensibility and unusability.
It just goes to show you - you can sell about a thousand of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard a rumor that X10 ads were actually CIA-sponsored spyware of some sort. I know that doesn't make sense, how could a "pop-under" actually contain spyware? Then I remembered that 90% or more of the web surfers use Internet Explorer - the X10 "pop-unders" probably have an ActiveX control in them. Remember NSA_KEY? It's not beyond MSFT to collaborate with the CIA. Also, the X10 ads seem to run in cycles - you get an X10 ad on just about every page load for a week or two, and then none for 6 months, and then they're back.
Spammers may thieves, but it isn't sending spam that made them so. What we need is better technical solutions to spam, not more bad laws.
The "technical solution" here might involve replacing SMTP-based email distribution. Do you really want a standards fight with a rejuvenated Microsoft in the picture? I don't. I'm pretty sure that if "MSMTP" got codified, we would all have to pay big money to run a "server" entity for that protocol.
The "bad laws" in question must exist because market forces have an extremely weak effect on spam, unlike on regular advertising. Read the rest of my post, without the selective editing.
Email spammers are thieves, email advertising is theft. We, as a society need to penalize spammers and spam appropriately.
Spammers would have you believe that other than your time for "just clicking delete", there's no cost to spam. However, since you and I and all spam victims pay a lot of the cost of spam before purchasing the spamvertised product, market forces on spam are seriously weakened, with respect to market forces on other forms of advertising (radio and Tee Vee broadcast, newspaper and magazine advertising, billboards, stock cars, product placement in movies). For all other forms of advertising, the advertiser pays for the ads up front, before the consumer buys the product. If the ad campaign sucks ("Ring Around the Collar!") or offends (Frito Bandito, anyone?) ad victims can choose to exert market forces on the advertiser. With respect to spam, victims have already paid more than their share of the ad costs before making a decision whether or not to buy the spamvertised product. Market forces apply only weakly to spam, thus requiring government intervention. Criminalizing spam is a step in the right direction.
Spammers are all thieves. Don't forget, don't let your legislator(s) forget it. Down with the DMA!
First, the "WiReD" article confuses worm - a program or process that propagates itself to a different computer, usually via some networking protocol, and chainmail - an email message that requires human intervention to automatically send out more email messages, usually containing the same or slightly evolved chainmail. WiReD should straighten up its vocabulary on this issue, they do no service to anyone confusing the two.
Second, the techniques used by both chainmail and worms are all used by legitimate scripts, programs and emails. How does law enforcement propose to declare one email message a crime, and another legitimate? And I don't mean "Let's ask some expert like Graham Cluely."
Sure an IIS worm like Code Red usually uses some initial exploit, like overflowing a buffer in an IIS module or service or plug-in or whatever the MSFT lingo is, but Nimda used a variety of techniques built in to IIS, "shares" and Outlook. The variety of Outlook worms (Anna Kournikova, Nude Housewife, etc etc) and even the CHRISTMA EXE chainmail of 1987 used entirely legitimate techniques built in to Outlook and other email viewers. The 1988 Internet Worm used both legitimate techniques (BSD "r" commands that didn't require a password) and exploits like "fingerd" buffer overflows. How do we define the crime - "I didn't authorize this use of Outlook" really doesn't amount to a way to decide whether or not a particular program committed a crime. Similary, worms like x.c get telnet servers to crash in particular ways when they spread. Gee whiz, a network server process crashes! That's news, for sure. I guess that hasn't happened to me since yesterday. How do we make one instance of a crashed program a crime, and another instance into a bug report?
It's about time spammers started paying for their sins.
Spamming is basically a form of theft, externalizing around half the cost of sending an advertisement to the reciepiant of the spam. That's clearly what makes spam attractive to advertisers (and their swinish lobbyists, the DMA).
The second order effect of this externalization hasn't been talked about in the press much. Ordinary advertising costs up front - a Tee Vee commercial for laundry detergent gets paid for before you buy the Whisk. A two-page spread in Time magazine for the latests SUV gets paid for before any consumer buys a 2002 Yukon. And yes, the company doing the advertising prices their product to account for the ad expenditure.
The fact that a spam victim pays for the ad before making a decision on whether or not to buy the laser printer toner means that market forces controlling advertising are vastly weakened. For example, the makers of "Whisk" laundry detergent used to have an ad campaign based on the phrase "Ring around the collar". During the mid 70s, the Women's Movement found this ad campaign offensive, so they boycotted "Whisk".
Fast forward to 2002 - you've already paid to receive an ad for Hotwet Russian Teen Sluts. No boycott on earth will have an effect on the advertiser - you've already paid for it, without being given a choice in the marketplace (maybe you prefer Hotwet Bulgarian Teens).
There's only very weak market forces that affect spam. We need government regulation of spam, we need the ability to punish spammers economically.
How likely do you think that the DoJ's proposed settlement with Microsoft will be accepted by the Judge?
If the DoJ's seattlement gets accepted over the 9 renegade state's proposal, what effect do you think the DoJ's seattlement will have?
Why are we so opposed to paper?
I don't think that we (you and I, at least, maybe others) are opposed to paper. It has a lot of advantages: very high resolution, doesn't need a power supply, cheap, for the most part durable, doesn't require a license to re-read, you can make margin notes, and (here's the kicker, I believe) very high standards exist and are commonly upheld for things like typography, typesetting, spelling, and indexing.
"Electronic paper" is mostly an Upper Managment Fantasy. Presidents and CEOs and COOs hope to license content per-viewing, and they have noticed what the record industry does when it changes formats - the record industry ditches unprofitable back catalog. Also, in a new medium, people will expect less. On-line documentation, as an example, is usually not spell-checked, or paginated, and neither table of contents nor index is customary. Corporate Upper Management doesn't want to pay anyone but the janitor and themselves, so they want to ditch those pesky proofreaders, typesetters and most of all those squirrely indexers.
Taking the medieval analogy to its logical conclusion I have one question: who gets to be the pope? Bill Gates or Richard Stallman?
Who says there has to be only a single Pope? Ever hear of the Great Schism? Even in the middle ages there were times when 2 or even 3 popes existed, each excommunicating the other(s).
There's nothing new under the sun.
MVS is Not My Favorite OS, but it isn't crap either.
You're complaining that a steam locomotive is not a jeep.
No, I showed you an example of why the FBI qualifies as technologically backwards in terms of The Internet, and threats to The Internet.
It's certainly possible that the FBI has throngs of RACF hackers who can bust into your average script kiddie's S390 by running a job with strangely malformed JCL, but so what? To use your idiom, the evidence says that the FBI has plenty of steam engine mechanics, while the fellow I responded to was claiming they had really, really good internal combustion technicians.
i don't know what we're getting all bent out of shape about magic lantern for. any fbi technology that's even being talked about in the press is already old hat. they've moved way past that by now, i'm sure.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The FBI has been notoriously backwards technologically. For example, the FBI website was hosted by NASA for the first few years. FBI was a *major* consumer of IBM Big Iron, running crap OSes like MVS well into the 90s. The public information on DCS-1000 makes it look really amateurish (runs on NT, captures way too much information, etc etc). The FBI's "National Infrastructure Protection Center" has come under a lot of criticism. The Feds have pushed for stuff like CALEA for years because the FBI can't keep up with the hackers and phreakers.
I've heard at various times that the RIAA has some mob connections (you know, like the Teamsters, wink wink, nudge nudge). Sure, threats of lawsuits are enough to keep a fellow up late at night, but how scary is the RIAA, really?
which, for some reason, wants '$' as the end-of-string terminator
Right. The point of Gary Kildall's griping was that Kildall knew the reason, and Bill Gates didn't. This, to Kildall, proved that MS-DOS had a shady heritage, possibly involving re-assembling (to 8086 object code) a disassembled CP/M (8080 object code).
There may have been some merit in Kildall's claims, given that he sued MSFT, and settled out-of-court.
In Robert X Cringely's book "Accidental Empires", there's a section where Cringely has Gary Kildall ranting about how MSFT ripped off CP/M - the quote is something about how MS-DOS uses '$' to mark the end of a string, and at MSFT, not even Bill Gates knows why. Can someone paw through the DR-DOS code and find out why?
I must take pity on Microsoft for their situation - being so large and omnipresent, they are a constant target of attack.
You know, I've read statements like this, and shaken my head, and said, "Too bad" a lot. Then, I got to thinking about this. In the last year, The Internet experienced a bunch of worms (not chainmail, like SirCam or Snow White or Hybris, but real, self-propagating worms): l1on, adore, ramen, cheese, sadmind/IIS, lpdw0rm, x.c, Code Red and Nimda.
Of these 9 worms, 5 were for Linux, 1 for Solaris, 1 for FreeBSD and 2 were for Windows. I don't see worms targeted predominantly toward Microsoft products on that basis. Microsoft doesn't seem to get targeted any harder than anything else. In fact, it seems to get targeted with fewer worms than it's market share (percentage of machines on The Internet running windows) than it should.
Even though fewer worms target Microsoft products, those worms get enormous traction - my little home web server saw hundreds or even thousands of Code Red hits for every sadmind/IIS hit. As near as I can tell, worms for MSFT products get more press because a larger proportion of instances of those products get infected, and the extra network traffic causes actual problems.
However, Microsoft probably won't put much effort into finding whoever made the virus.
Every noticed that nobody puts that much effort into finding whoever made the latest IIS worm or Outlook virus (calling a spade a spade)? Follow the money. Without a more-or-less constant stream of IIS worms, Word Macro viruses or Outlook viruses, the "good guys", the anti-virus industry, wouldn't be able to turn a profit. That scanner that detects 8734 known viruses? No need to ever update it, if there's no new Windows viruses.
I read the original statement, and, frankly, it didn't sound to me like Gates was claiming credit for Open Source. What he said was that if it hadn't been for M$ standardizing computing with DOS, there wouldn't be a market for Open Source now. However much I may disagree with M$ policies and coding today, I would tend to agree with the thought behind that statement.
If you agree with that statement, you're simply wrong. In markets with a single CPU architecture and operating system (VAX -> VMS, SPARC -> Solaris, x86 -> MS-DOS) people just trade executables, they don't for the most part bother with source. You only need source in markets with a variety of CPU architectures and/or operating systems. The ideas behind Open Source were conceived in an environment of many, often propietary operating systems and CPU architectures, pre-1989, pre MS-DOS dominance. The economies of scale that caused cheap Pee Cee hardware have little or nothing to do with Open Source.
They need a warrant (last I checked) to search someone's house. They need a warrant to use wiretaps.
The very recently enacted PATRIOT Act probably gives USA Federal law enforcement the mechanism to get around this objection. The PATRIOT Act probably allows searching without notification, and it certainly loosens-up the criteria under which law enforcement can obtain a wiretap.
Before the PATRIOT Act, it apparently wasn't really too tough to get a wiretap warrant anyway. I don't think that 1 in 500 requests was denied. The feds have some captive "secret court" that just rubberstamps any wiretap request anyway.
I am wondering if there's a really good explination of why the desktop metaphor is, to borrow a phrase from "1984", un-good.
This is only my opinion, but...
This is actually true. You could and do get enough crosstalk that a good sniffer in van could pull packets off your ethernet.
You'd have to explain why the building where this classified network resided had offices with glass windows, and terminals ('92 remember?) facing the windows. The "security" people apparently didn't consider someone with a telescope a threat.
Maybe they're worried about trojan hardware? A keyboard gets borrowed out, a small modification is made so that it logs every key pressed and then a week or two later gets "loaned" out again to extract the data.
Let's see... keyboard gets used a maximum of 12 hours a day, and an engineer types 50, 5-letter words a minute. That's 12 x 60 x 50 x 5 = 180,000 bytes of info a day to store in the keyboard. Nope. Even in '92, we had 1.44 Megabyte floppies. It would have been much more efficient to move info via floppy. Security folks being dumb again.
remember these are people who get payed to be paranoid.
You make a correct statement, but "paranoid" doesn't mean "intelligent". It means "a variety of insanity". I'd rather have security people paid to be intelligent, than paid to be insane.
the government already has several separate, secure internets, for various purposes, and they were still infected by Melissa and LoveLetter
Now that's something we didn't see on C|Net.
I worked in the aerospace industry from '86 to '92. Every big defence contractor had one or more classified IP networks. Unfortunately, the security measures imposed were sort of stupid: the ethernet cables of the classified net had to be at least so many feet from a phone line (they were worried that induced voltages from ethernet would allow someone on the phone to "tap" the classified net), keyboards attached to computers attached to the classified net couldn't be traded out to unclassified areas, and had to be elaborately destroyed when they broke. At the same time, you could walk through checkpoints with pockets full of floppies.
It was as if a Korean War Drill Instructor dreamed up ways to actually impede using the classified network, but at the same time allow (possibly) classified information in and out of the building.
Just quietly delete all of you spam, and when spammers stop making money then they will eventually stop. Or if you don't want spam, just don't use email.
The only problem with "just hit delete" is that the spammers actually steal from their victims. Email spams cost (admittedly each one only costs a small amount) in terms of network connection time, CPU cycles, disk space, user time to hit delete. I suspect that what you're advocating would minimize any given individual's cost of dealing with spam, but we'd end up in a "tragedy of the commons" situtation, and ultimately any given individual's spam burden would be unbearable.
The other problem with email spam is that the economics of it differ from traditional advertising. In traditional advertising, the ads get paid for by a firm before you or I make a decision on buying a product. If the ad for the product in question sucks, we don't buy. If the ad for the product in question offends enough people, we don't buy. There's feedback between the ad and the "invisible hand" of the marketplace. If the ad isn't good (for whatever reason) the product doesn't get bought, and the firm is out the cost fo the ad. Email spam, the potential customers bear a large part of the cost before making a decision about buying the product advertised by spam. Any given ad budget can finance way more spam than conventional advertising because those being advertised too have to pay for the ad before they buy the product. The feedback, although not totally eliminated, is vastly weaker than before.
Because of the greatly weaker market forces, we do need legislation to stop spam.
Today, there are very few good business models that work on the Web, and this deficit has a significant effect. The Web is becoming somewhat like a desert. There are some survivors -- Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon and so on -- but nothing new is germinating in any significant way.
First, "Marshall Brain" seems to tacitly assume that all the WWW should do is make money for corporations. Second, Mr Brain assumes that only corporate sites are worth visiting. Aren't both of these rather flawed? For a single counterexample to both of these flawed assumptions, what about e-prints of scientific papers? The authors of the papers are more interested in getting the papers out there and read than in getting paid when the paper's content gets read. Advancement of Science and all that. Also, the occasional paper has way more interesting content than the usual slick, marketeer-approved corporate collateral web site.
Brain gets other things wrong, too: When you go to the book store, you never see free books. Walk by a locally-owned used book store. I guarantee that you'll find a "Free! Take one!" rack full of books in front. Walk around any heavy-foot-traffic downtown in the USA and you'll be able to collect a large number of (free!) tracts, flyers and even funny newspapers, like the Onion. Try it, Marshall.
Marshall Brain's underlying assumptions are totally wrong. His penny-a-page scheme won't work.
But globalization is an elusive notion.
"Globalization" must constitute an elusive notion: Katz utterly fails to provide even one definition in his article, ironically entitled Defining Globalism.
Come on, Jon. Give it a shot. Try to provide a three sentence or less, dictionary-style definition of one or more meanings of the word "globalization".
Gee whiz, at least try to distinguish between "globalISM" and "globalIZATION"
Why would the White House frown on a national US ID card, when it was all in favor of the strongly authoritarian "PATRIOT" act?
There's a weird undercurrent in USA Right Wing politics against things like national ID cards. The more crazed Republicans ("Black Helicopter Republicans", sort of like "Log Cabin Republicans", only the average BHR gets less respect) usually believe that national ID cards equate to the "Mark of the Beast". I can't really believe that consideration of weird, fringe beliefs keeps the current White House from doing the national ID card thing.
People actually use CDE? What on earth for? It's buggy, slow, ugly, has no apps, poorly documented, closed source and bloated. In short, it has absolutely *no* good points.
I'm flabbergasted that anyone can prefer the steaming pile of crap that includes "dtterm" and that lame "tool bar" that takes up 12% of the screen and offers no noticeable benefits. I forget what that piece o' junk is called, the "control pane" or somesuch. It's the only thing worse than the Windows tool bar in terms of incomprehensibility and unusability.
It just goes to show you - you can sell about a thousand of anything.