Re:They're not talking about used ads.
on
Recycling TV Ads
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· Score: 1
In the UK at least the law is clear on this matter - if you hire somebody (it doesn't matter whether they are an individual or a corporation, very few laws actually distinguish between the two) to perform some work and nothing else is agreed between you concerning it, you get the copyright.
My suspicion is the law in the US is similar. But you're right about checking the contracts, and that's something that I've always been careful about.
Photographers are actually notorious for this. I recall one time my company hired a photographer to take some photos for one of our clients (an IP law firm...!) and when we had paid for them the photos came back with a list of restrictions on use that was kind of hard to believe! Of course, there were no such terms mentioned in any contract, so good luck to him trying to enforce those terms of use!:-)
Re:They're not talking about used ads.
on
Recycling TV Ads
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· Score: 1
Glad to see somebody's finally actually thought about what that meant. I was thinking I might have to post that myself...
I was wondering, how do they go about with the copyright implications. When my company hires a design company (we're a web site implementation company, we regularly contract design work to others), we get copyright on _all_ of the designs that are produced, whether we use them or not, because they are, effectively, works for hire (as in we are paying somebody to produce designs for us, it doesn't matter what we do with them).
How do these people deal with this? Do people buying advertising expect to be able to control the work that they reject? I know I would be unhappy if I had paid for the development of an advert that later benefits somebody else.
I can't scroll the page to the place I want it to be. If I grab the thumbnail on the scroll bar, then drag it until it reaches the point I want the page to remain at, when I release the button, the page jumps to an entirely different place.
I also tried selecting some text, and it resized my browser window so that the bottom right is off the screen. I liked my browser the size it was, thanks!
Websites that are 'MouseGestures Enabled' are safer for viewers.
I don't think so. More annoying, perhaps...
Enhance your webpage with mouseGestures Simply place this code in the head section of your website: <SCRIPT language=Javascript src="http://www.bitesizeinc.net/gesture.js"></SCRI PT>
What, so that when the referenced file is arbitrarily changed into a pop-up ad script, we can all earn money for you?
Thanks, but I'm not that stupid. I don't run code that I don't know the source of, and I especially won't pass such code on to my site visitors.
Re:Reminds me of a fortune cookie
on
Mafia Tech Support
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I always preferred this one:
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician all live in a shared house. One night, a fire breaks out in each of their rooms. [Don't ask me how!]
The engineer wakes up and realises that there is a fire in his room. He grabs a fire extinguisher and puts it out, then goes back to bed.
The physicist wakes up and also reralises that there is a fire in his room. He grabs a notepad, works out the best way of approaching the fire, and with that knowledge picks up his fire exinguisher and puts it out. Then he goes back to bed.
The mathematician wakes up, and he too notices the fire in his room. He grabs a notepad, and works out how to put the fire out. Then, satisfied that there is a solution, he goes back to bed.:-)
The government has to be involved, because if there's a hundred thousand dollars riding on a horse or a spin of a wheel, several people have quite a motivation in fixing that game. Historically speaking, they have often fixed the game. If you let every shyster with a deck set up a casino, there's going to be many stacked decks.
There's a difference between the government being involved and criminalising the activity, though. Here in the UK, gambling is legal, but you have to have a license to run a gambling shop (I think you apply to a magistrate to get one, the same as you do if you want a license to sell alcohol), and there are strict regulations about how it can be run. We don't have much of a problem with this kind of thing. Or at least if we do, it isn't widely reported.
. All that means is that Linux and Mac users are going to have to keep up with pathces too (and yes, there *are* occasional holse for those systems, just not worms)
Speaking as someone who was nearly infected by a Linux worm through a BIND exploit, I can confirm that such things do exist and are in the wild.
The worm in question attempted to install a back door into my machine and was foiled by the greatest security measure ever taken: not having a LF on the end of/etc/inetd.conf (!)
What percentage of Linux is infringing? Roughly one million lines of code. 20% of the Linux kernel. BSD is in a clear legal environment. There are dozens of protected BSD files that have made there way into Linux.
What the hell does he mean by a 'protected BSD file'? Is he under the impression that there is some law that would prevent the incorporation of BSD code into Linux?
Nice dodge, we'll see if it works as well in court.
It might. As I understand it, the GPL, being a copyright license, is effectively a contract. My understanding of contract law suggests that if you cannot reasonably be aware of the precise meaning of a term of the contract (e.g. because it is obfuscated in such a manner as to be almost indecipherable, not that this particular example applies to the GPL), then that term can be rendered void.
As an extension of this, it could be argued that because SCO was not aware that it was distributing its own copyright code under the GPL, and couldn't easily check for that situation [1], then the implied grant of copyright license on their own code could be rendered invalid.
I am sure there must be relevant case history with similar situations. That could have a big bearing on the case if IBM decides to pursue this line.
[1] The question to be asked, I suspect, is when should they have checked for infringments? Due diligence would suggest that a copyright holder should check any copyright license he grants to ensure he isn't giving something away by mistake before he begins distribution. This would seem a reasonable approach for any copyright holder to take, although it would be difficult to keep up-to-date with new versions of all the software packaged in Caldera. The problem in SCO's case is that they were _already_ distributing the software when they acquired the Unix license... this might make a difference. Certainly it now becomes less obvious that one ought to check the licenses being granted already to see if you're giving away code you now own.
It's not really a port to Windows itself. They're targetting Cygwin/X.
Actually, that wasn't the port I was thinking of. That port, I believe, was a fairly trivial one, and I know KDE can now run convincingly in this situation, so I think it must be fairly stable already. The one I was thinking of is more experimental.
They're still targetting cygwin, but they're removing the reliance on an X server. From the screenshots page, it seems as though they have quite a bit of the library working, although whether it is enough or not I don't know...
Real exchange admins already know all this. The people being hit by this "vulnerability" are the same morons who got hit by Code Red. That should tell you something.
Yes. That the generally accepted argument behind the 'Windows has a lower TCO than Unix' argument (that Windows admins are generally cheaper than Unix admins) is utter bollocks if you actually want a secure system that won't get your mail rejected by approximately a quarter of the internet.
And second, I've had someone break into my garage by using one of these things.
You've had somebody break into your garage by using a simple technological device that anybody with knowledge of simple mathematics and electronic principles could make. The fact that this is possible is due to the fact that your garage lock manufacturer is too cheap to investigate the many possible ways of preventing this kind of threat [possibly using public key cryptography], and instead has decided to make a cheap door that anyone with a little bit of knowledge can break into.
I.e. you should blame the [IMO] negligent door manufacturer, not somebody who exploits an inherent flaw in the way the lock works to make a tool that many people find useful for perfectly legitimate purposes.
Most P2P programs will function at an acceptable level without an open port, merely leaving you unable to communicate with the other users who don't have an open port; this tends to be about 30% of people, from my experience. The remaining 70% are quite adequate for most people's needs.
The last time I checked, being a user of an ISP or the company that carries the packets means you're a customer of that ISP/provider... your money is used to pay for their services.
Err, not really no. ISPs carry traffic for each other all of the time, and money rarely actually changes hands over it. That's how the Internet works, really. One ISP that operates in one region will agree to carry traffic for another in a different region in exchange for a reciprocal agreement. Its called peering.
Unfortunately, these Windows viruses that make a broadband customer act as a spam relay are a big reason that ISPs are considering blocking mail from dialups/dynamics.
And if this happens to any large degree, the virus writers will make their virus grab the outgoing SMTP server address out of the outlook express / outlook configuration and relay mail through that. The ISPs just cost themselves a substantial amount of traffic for a very tiny benefit.
According to the article, the poster got 404 pages back. So it wasn't a drop-all-packets sort of block, but probably one that was programmed into an HTTP proxy server somewhere along the path...
Considering that the 9-11 attacks were directed towards targets of strategic importance economically and governmentally, were the attackers freedom fighters? If the civilians are seen as participating in activities counter to the attackers goals, is attacking them a terrorist activity?
Yes. The intention was to make people afraid, to try to disrupt trade. The people were civilians, not military or other direct government representatives.
For example, would threatening or killing civilian informants to the Gestapo be terrorism?
Yes. Again, the idea would be to insprire fear in order to prevent more civilians informing to the Gestapo. In this situation, only directly attacking the Gestapo themselves would not be terrorism.
Terrorists nearly always have political goals that they are trying to acheive. Whether they are "freedom fighters" or "terrorists" is not a very objective decision.
I'm sorry, it definitely is. It relates entirely to the kind of tactics that are used, not to what the goal is.
I was raised to make an effigy of a person and symbolicly burn him at the stake because he's Catholic
I think it is more likely that this is because he was a terrorist who, if successful in his aims, would have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people. Nobody really cares why he did what he did (at least not since about 20 years after he did it, I reckon)... the point was to instill a lesson in everbody's minds. Attempting to blow people up for political reasons is wrong.
That's partially true. Word is an application of the OLE compound document format, which is I believe fully specified and has been implemented many times by different people. The actual data stored within that framework is less well specified, although there are a number of files on http://www.wotsit.org which claim to be copies of official Microsoft documentation of the format.
No, it just needs idiotic web designers to stop hard coding font sizes.
Actually, hard coding font sizes isn't the issue. I can resolve that with features available in my current browser. Images that are hard to see properly on high resolution displays are the biggest issue at the moment.
The web was only resolution independent up until the tag was added...
Most peopole who want to run the flashy stuff have pc's equipped to handle it.
Yes, but they're not talking about 'the flashy stuff'. They're talking about modifications to X that would use up this memory whether or not you actually want to use the features that it makes available.
My main problem with this is that there are better ways of achieving the same results. I run Win2K on a system with only 16Mb of video RAM, and it's quite happy to do alpha blending and compositing for large windows without issue or flicker... so why can't these developers come up with a scheme that would work as well as that one?
Actually, the parent wasn't talking about vector based displays. He was talking about what Windows Longhorn is doing, which is rendering windows to a virtual surface and then scaling them for display, according to all the demos I've seen of it. Still neet technology, but not what you're talking about.
graphics card with 32mb RAM and a reasonable GPU (geforce2 MX) is $30. We're not exactly talking new whizz-bang cards here - I bought a geforce2MX eighteen months ago now, and it was outdated then.
An average, modern-ish desktop PC is probaby going to have at least 256mb ram and a 32mb graphics card.
My Dell PC is about 4 years old, which makes it quite average in terms of currently-in-use PCs. It has an on-board graphics adapter with 16Mb of RAM. That was pretty good for the time, most only had 8Mb back then, I think. The graphics adapter is on motherboard; there are no AGP slots so I can't replace it with another adapter and get performance as high as I get from the original.
Most PCs are produced by high volume manufacturers like Dell and HP/Compaq; these companies tend to favour onboard graphics, so a high proportion of PCs cannot be realistically upgraded in this fashion.
Just because some people don't have the required computer doens't mean work shouldn't be done for those that do.
No, but when you're talking about changing core system components in ways that require what many people would consider a lot of resources, it pays to check whether there's any other way of achieving what you need. X is an absolutely critical component; if it becomes too bloated, the entire OS becomes bloated, and the beauty of Unix-style systems is that they generally can be run on machines with less resources than other systems.
Also note: Windows 2000 and OSX both achieve the kind of effects the article is talking about here without needing that much video RAM. Perhaps there's another way (as in only use separate backing buffer for windows that have registered an interest in using this kind of feature, and sections of other windows that they overlap).
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK at least the law is clear on this matter - if you hire somebody (it doesn't matter whether they are an individual or a corporation, very few laws actually distinguish between the two) to perform some work and nothing else is agreed between you concerning it, you get the copyright.
:-)
My suspicion is the law in the US is similar. But you're right about checking the contracts, and that's something that I've always been careful about.
Photographers are actually notorious for this. I recall one time my company hired a photographer to take some photos for one of our clients (an IP law firm...!) and when we had paid for them the photos came back with a list of restrictions on use that was kind of hard to believe! Of course, there were no such terms mentioned in any contract, so good luck to him trying to enforce those terms of use!
Glad to see somebody's finally actually thought about what that meant. I was thinking I might have to post that myself...
I was wondering, how do they go about with the copyright implications. When my company hires a design company (we're a web site implementation company, we regularly contract design work to others), we get copyright on _all_ of the designs that are produced, whether we use them or not, because they are, effectively, works for hire (as in we are paying somebody to produce designs for us, it doesn't matter what we do with them).
How do these people deal with this? Do people buying advertising expect to be able to control the work that they reject? I know I would be unhappy if I had paid for the development of an advert that later benefits somebody else.
I can't scroll the page to the place I want it to be. If I grab the thumbnail on the scroll bar, then drag it until it reaches the point I want the page to remain at, when I release the button, the page jumps to an entirely different place.
:I PT>
I also tried selecting some text, and it resized my browser window so that the bottom right is off the screen. I liked my browser the size it was, thanks!
Websites that are 'MouseGestures Enabled' are safer for viewers.
I don't think so. More annoying, perhaps...
Enhance your webpage with mouseGestures
Simply place this code in the head section of your website
<SCRIPT language=Javascript src="http://www.bitesizeinc.net/gesture.js"></SCR
What, so that when the referenced file is arbitrarily changed into a pop-up ad script, we can all earn money for you?
Thanks, but I'm not that stupid. I don't run code that I don't know the source of, and I especially won't pass such code on to my site visitors.
I always preferred this one:
:-)
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician all live in a shared house. One night, a fire breaks out in each of their rooms. [Don't ask me how!]
The engineer wakes up and realises that there is a fire in his room. He grabs a fire extinguisher and puts it out, then goes back to bed.
The physicist wakes up and also reralises that there is a fire in his room. He grabs a notepad, works out the best way of approaching the fire, and with that knowledge picks up his fire exinguisher and puts it out. Then he goes back to bed.
The mathematician wakes up, and he too notices the fire in his room. He grabs a notepad, and works out how to put the fire out. Then, satisfied that there is a solution, he goes back to bed.
The government has to be involved, because if there's a hundred thousand dollars riding on a horse or a spin of a wheel, several people have quite a motivation in fixing that game. Historically speaking, they have often fixed the game. If you let every shyster with a deck set up a casino, there's going to be many stacked decks.
There's a difference between the government being involved and criminalising the activity, though. Here in the UK, gambling is legal, but you have to have a license to run a gambling shop (I think you apply to a magistrate to get one, the same as you do if you want a license to sell alcohol), and there are strict regulations about how it can be run. We don't have much of a problem with this kind of thing. Or at least if we do, it isn't widely reported.
. All that means is that Linux and Mac users are going to have to keep up with pathces too (and yes, there *are* occasional holse for those systems, just not worms)
/etc/inetd.conf (!)
Speaking as someone who was nearly infected by a Linux worm through a BIND exploit, I can confirm that such things do exist and are in the wild.
The worm in question attempted to install a back door into my machine and was foiled by the greatest security measure ever taken: not having a LF on the end of
Darl sayeth:
What percentage of Linux is infringing? Roughly one million lines of code. 20% of the Linux kernel. BSD is in a clear legal environment. There are dozens of protected BSD files that have made there way into Linux.
What the hell does he mean by a 'protected BSD file'? Is he under the impression that there is some law that would prevent the incorporation of BSD code into Linux?
Nice dodge, we'll see if it works as well in court.
It might. As I understand it, the GPL, being a copyright license, is effectively a contract. My understanding of contract law suggests that if you cannot reasonably be aware of the precise meaning of a term of the contract (e.g. because it is obfuscated in such a manner as to be almost indecipherable, not that this particular example applies to the GPL), then that term can be rendered void.
As an extension of this, it could be argued that because SCO was not aware that it was distributing its own copyright code under the GPL, and couldn't easily check for that situation [1], then the implied grant of copyright license on their own code could be rendered invalid.
I am sure there must be relevant case history with similar situations. That could have a big bearing on the case if IBM decides to pursue this line.
[1] The question to be asked, I suspect, is when should they have checked for infringments? Due diligence would suggest that a copyright holder should check any copyright license he grants to ensure he isn't giving something away by mistake before he begins distribution. This would seem a reasonable approach for any copyright holder to take, although it would be difficult to keep up-to-date with new versions of all the software packaged in Caldera. The problem in SCO's case is that they were _already_ distributing the software when they acquired the Unix license... this might make a difference. Certainly it now becomes less obvious that one ought to check the licenses being granted already to see if you're giving away code you now own.
It's not really a port to Windows itself. They're targetting Cygwin/X.
Actually, that wasn't the port I was thinking of. That port, I believe, was a fairly trivial one, and I know KDE can now run convincingly in this situation, so I think it must be fairly stable already. The one I was thinking of is more experimental.
A quick google and I've found it: Here
They're still targetting cygwin, but they're removing the reliance on an X server. From the screenshots page, it seems as though they have quite a bit of the library working, although whether it is enough or not I don't know...
I understand there's a project to port the GPL version of QT to Windows... this might work. Has anyone tried it?
Real exchange admins already know all this. The people being hit by this "vulnerability" are the same morons who got hit by Code Red. That should tell you something.
Yes. That the generally accepted argument behind the 'Windows has a lower TCO than Unix' argument (that Windows admins are generally cheaper than Unix admins) is utter bollocks if you actually want a secure system that won't get your mail rejected by approximately a quarter of the internet.
And second, I've had someone break into my garage by using one of these things.
You've had somebody break into your garage by using a simple technological device that anybody with knowledge of simple mathematics and electronic principles could make. The fact that this is possible is due to the fact that your garage lock manufacturer is too cheap to investigate the many possible ways of preventing this kind of threat [possibly using public key cryptography], and instead has decided to make a cheap door that anyone with a little bit of knowledge can break into.
I.e. you should blame the [IMO] negligent
door manufacturer, not somebody who exploits an inherent flaw in the way the lock works to make a tool that many people find useful for perfectly legitimate purposes.
Most P2P programs will function at an acceptable level without an open port, merely leaving you unable to communicate with the other users who don't have an open port; this tends to be about 30% of people, from my experience. The remaining 70% are quite adequate for most people's needs.
Could one not argue that he's improving it considerably by not being there?
;-)
Unfortunately, I think he would have to have been there for this to be an improvement.
Also, this would suggest that if he did go out there, he would own Earth...!
Vintermann said:
"I'm not natural, you insensitive clod!"
The moderators said:
"(Score 3; Informative)"
Guess he must not be then, if so many people agree with him...
The last time I checked, being a user of an ISP or the company that carries the packets means you're a customer of that ISP/provider ... your money is used to pay for their services.
Err, not really no. ISPs carry traffic for each other all of the time, and money rarely actually changes hands over it. That's how the Internet works, really. One ISP that operates in one region will agree to carry traffic for another in a different region in exchange for a reciprocal agreement. Its called peering.
Unfortunately, these Windows viruses that make a broadband customer act as a spam relay are a big reason that ISPs are considering blocking mail from dialups/dynamics.
And if this happens to any large degree, the virus writers will make their virus grab the outgoing SMTP server address out of the outlook express / outlook configuration and relay mail through that. The ISPs just cost themselves a substantial amount of traffic for a very tiny benefit.
According to the article, the poster got 404 pages back. So it wasn't a drop-all-packets sort of block, but probably one that was programmed into an HTTP proxy server somewhere along the path...
Considering that the 9-11 attacks were directed towards targets of strategic importance economically and governmentally, were the attackers freedom fighters? If the civilians are seen as participating in activities counter to the attackers goals, is attacking them a terrorist activity?
Yes. The intention was to make people afraid, to try to disrupt trade. The people were civilians, not military or other direct government representatives.
For example, would threatening or killing civilian informants to the Gestapo be terrorism?
Yes. Again, the idea would be to insprire fear in order to prevent more civilians informing to the Gestapo. In this situation, only directly attacking the Gestapo themselves would not be terrorism.
Terrorists nearly always have political goals that they are trying to acheive. Whether they are "freedom fighters" or "terrorists" is not a very objective decision.
I'm sorry, it definitely is. It relates entirely to the kind of tactics that are used, not to what the goal is.
I was raised to make an effigy of a person and symbolicly burn him at the stake because he's Catholic
I think it is more likely that this is because he was a terrorist who, if successful in his aims, would have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people. Nobody really cares why he did what he did (at least not since about 20 years after he did it, I reckon)... the point was to instill a lesson in everbody's minds. Attempting to blow people up for political reasons is wrong.
That's partially true. Word is an application of the OLE compound document format, which is I believe fully specified and has been implemented many times by different people. The actual data stored within that framework is less well specified, although there are a number of files on http://www.wotsit.org which claim to be copies of official Microsoft documentation of the format.
No, it just needs idiotic web designers to stop hard coding font sizes.
Actually, hard coding font sizes isn't the issue. I can resolve that with features available in my current browser. Images that are hard to see properly on high resolution displays are the biggest issue at the moment.
The web was only resolution independent up until the tag was added...
Most peopole who want to run the flashy stuff have pc's equipped to handle it.
Yes, but they're not talking about 'the flashy stuff'. They're talking about modifications to X that would use up this memory whether or not you actually want to use the features that it makes available.
My main problem with this is that there are better ways of achieving the same results. I run Win2K on a system with only 16Mb of video RAM, and it's quite happy to do alpha blending and compositing for large windows without issue or flicker... so why can't these developers come up with a scheme that would work as well as that one?
Actually, the parent wasn't talking about vector based displays. He was talking about what Windows Longhorn is doing, which is rendering windows to a virtual surface and then scaling them for display, according to all the demos I've seen of it. Still neet technology, but not what you're talking about.
graphics card with 32mb RAM and a reasonable GPU (geforce2 MX) is $30. We're not exactly talking new whizz-bang cards here - I bought a geforce2MX eighteen months ago now, and it was outdated then.
An average, modern-ish desktop PC is probaby going to have at least 256mb ram and a 32mb graphics card.
My Dell PC is about 4 years old, which makes it quite average in terms of currently-in-use PCs. It has an on-board graphics adapter with 16Mb of RAM. That was pretty good for the time, most only had 8Mb back then, I think. The graphics adapter is on motherboard; there are no AGP slots so I can't replace it with another adapter and get performance as high as I get from the original.
Most PCs are produced by high volume manufacturers like Dell and HP/Compaq; these companies tend to favour onboard graphics, so a high proportion of PCs cannot be realistically upgraded in this fashion.
Just because some people don't have the required computer doens't mean work shouldn't be done for those that do.
No, but when you're talking about changing core system components in ways that require what many people would consider a lot of resources, it pays to check whether there's any other way of achieving what you need. X is an absolutely critical component; if it becomes too bloated, the entire OS becomes bloated, and the beauty of Unix-style systems is that they generally can be run on machines with less resources than other systems.
Also note: Windows 2000 and OSX both achieve the kind of effects the article is talking about here without needing that much video RAM. Perhaps there's another way (as in only use separate backing buffer for windows that have registered an interest in using this kind of feature, and sections of other windows that they overlap).