Come on, funny as the line might be, timing from power-on to having a working desktop, my systems come in like this:
Windows 2000 - 45 seconds Windows 98 - 1 minute Linux + KDE 2 - 1 minute 10 seconds
(Admittedly linux + console is about 20 seconds, but that's not really a fair comparison - Windows 98 'text mode only', i.e. DOS, is only about 2 seconds).
Also, boot up time is largely IO bound. Improving your processor speed will make comparatively little difference (I think doubling speed might shave 10% off these figures, possibly more for the Linux one because the KDE issue is dynamic linking related which is a CPU problem).
...but that stuff about the mathematicians had me imagining a SCO representative doing a Maxwell Smart impersonation.
For anyone who is too young to remember Maxwell Smart, he was played by the same guy who did the voice for Inspector Gadget in the cartoon series... and the characters themselves were rather similar. That should help you visualise the scene correctly:-)
> Email needs to be reliable communication medium. If a message can not be delivered, it has to be returned to the sender.
The thing is, the sender was forged. Since the virus scanner knows the message was a virus and correctly identifies it as such, shouldn't it know that the virus uses forged headers? And since it should know the header was forged, it should NOT return the message.
Virus scanners frequently determine that messages contain viruses when no virus is found. A number of virus scanners, for instance, consider the cygwin installation program to be a virus. Virus detection is normally performed based on a short section of code that can be replicated by chance in something that isn't a virus.
Also, its entirely possible that a message that contains a virus could be authentic. Consider the clueless newbie who receives a virus and forwards it to his friend with the message 'is this a virus?' attached to it. He would actively want his friend's virus scanner to return the message saying that it was a virus...
What gets to me is the number of badly formatted returns there are out there.
A lot of messages to me recently have included the virus straight back to me. A stupid number of them send the bounce message using my address in the 'From:' header, which is certain to get a complaint from me. During the latest outbreak, I've actually ended up subscribed to a mailing list. God knows how, that really shouldn't have happened...
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
Actually, its the same thing. Poverty is caused by having a substantially lower income than those around you. If you reduce the income of those who have the highest, then (theoretically at least) you decrease poverty.
White-list is unworkable for business, because everything must be "whited" by default.
Challenge-Response is unworkable because I/we (as a small to mid business) simply could not keep up with that. Sure. One of the real programmers we have (i'm not one of them) could come up with an auto-bot to respond to challenge-response, but then we end up back where we started, don't we?
I don't have the answers. But I do know what the answers aren't. And Whitelist/Challenge-Repsonse aren't it
A couple of questions - what makes challenge response unworkable for you? I don't understand what about it you would find hard to keep up with, it would be handled automatically by your mail server (or possibly a client side implementation if you didn't run a server).
BTW... my business is working with a fairly aggressive content-based filter (similar to SpamAssassin) combined with partial blacklisting (i.e. a blacklist hit doesn't automatically disqualify, just adds points to make rejection more likely), whitelisting and challenge response for messages that fail that. Without challenge response we would probably lose something like 1 important message per month. Now its probably down to something like 1 per year.
Our spam problem has been reduced from approximately 30 per-person-per-day to about 4 pppd.
I'm thinking of switching from content-based triggers to bayesian, but need to come up with a good way of adding received messages to the corpus from the client end. If I can figure that one, projections from various experiments suggest we should get down to less than 1 per day.
How about starting Control Panel as a different user (from the command line): "runas/profile/env/user:XXXX\XXXX C:\WINNT\system32\control.exe"
When I run that command, a new copy of explorer (yes, explorer) opens, showing me the contents of the directory that was current when I ran it. Its hard to tell what user it is running as, but it tells me that I can't change security properties on explorer.exe so I guess it isn't administrator.
The problem is that explorer uses DDE to open new windows in the same process as it is currently running on. Control panel is just a special case of explorer, so you can't open it in a different user if some user is already running explorer.
This is essentially something you learn to do when you have bunch of services running on some very limited login accounts (no console login available at all even on the local console) so you can easily change the account setting by running some other user account that has login access and then running the processes under different credentials in order to change settings.
Yeah, I'm actually very aware of how to use run as. Its just Windows' stupid design prevents you from achieving anything useful with it, at least if what you're trying to do is mess around with Windows settings.
You could run registry editor and do various things with that, you can also run cmd.exe which is handy. But half of the GUI just refuses to work. And it happens to be the most important half.
Don't know what this is like under XP - could be much better for all I know. I've played around with 'fast user switching' and that's OK. Although I have to wonder why they call it fast. The Linux equivalent (i.e. running multiple virtual consoles) is *much* faster...!:-)
You're joking right? At least say it's for reasons more significant than a "File Open" dialog. Reasons that make sense are things like "I want a consistent theme/font", "I need my apps to interoperate at a level deeper than the X clipboard", or "I'm more familiar with the KDE/QT toolkit so if I need to make a mod...".
Actually, none of those things are particularly important to me. The last one is kind of relevant, but I figure GTK shouldn't be too hard to learn if I ever need it. The first would be kind of nice, but I think nice file handling dialogs are much more important. They set a tone for the application, and to see something that just looks so outdated & clumsy... well, OK there are worse file dialogs out there (the one on xdvi springs to mind, what were they thinking?), and there are a number of GTK apps that I do use.
But given a choice between a GTK app and a Qt app that otherwise perform the same job roughly as well as each other, the Qt app will win, in my estimation, because of this issue. That's all there is to it.
Another thing: there is no way I could *ever* justify switching to a desktop where that dialog was the standard file dialog to my boss. He'd go nuts. He'd think we were switching back to Windows 3 or something. But KDE? I think he'd just about wear that. Maybe. If it wasn't for the compatibility issues...
There's a patch from Ximian floating around to change it to look like this which is better but still lacks some "coolness" like previews and filters.
Well, its certainly a start. But it still looks (& I suspect feels) very much like the same file dialogs that I was using 10 years ago.
Lets face it, the separate directory and file list should have been consigned to the scrapheap of history long ago. Using icons to distinguish files and directories in the same listing is just neater.
The control at the top (presumably for moving up through the directory structure) still looks clunky and unweildly, just like the original one I saw when I first used GIMP back when 1.0.0 was released. Personally, I blame Motif.
The buttons on the left look out of place (although so do the icons that provide equivalent functionality in KDE2; I haven't upgraded to v3 yet so can't comment on that). Quite usable, though, I suspect.
Yep, I'm still going to stear clear of GTK apps whenever possible, even if that patch gets applied. Thanks for reminding me why.
Have you looked at this to solve your windows portability needs?
http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
It uses cygwin, which might mean some user confusion with filenames; if that's an issue for you you might want to forget about it. Also it'll mean you're stuck with GPL. Otherwise, I understand the results are quite impressive... if you don't want to use X, you can probably substitute the windows version of Qt, and everything should work OK. It'll be a lot of work to get it going, but after that it should be stable and usable...
Huh? Looks OK to me. The ridiculous slashdot user name has a mailto: link, the article (second link) is a rather long URL to a web page which, in slashdot tradition, I haven't read.
Well, the Windows kernel also includes things like message dispatch/routing, registry access and various, GDI/user graphics/window handling and so on. So, I wouldn't say it's "micro" as such.
These aren't actually in the kernel, I believe. My understanding is that registry access is in ADVAPI32.DLL; GDI and other graphical stuff is in GDI32.DLL; window handling is in USER32.DLL.
The actual kernel, NTOSKRNL.EXE, contains relatively few functions, most of which seem to be related to threads and interprocess communication.
It's true about Windows 9x, but I'd note that sharing DSOs/DLLs is fairly common, as far as I know all major operating systems do that...
Most OSs only map a shared memory segment if you specifically request it, my understanding is that under Win9x you can access all processes shared memory, and screw around with the contents, if you know where in that address space it is.
I know how to use "Run as a different user" just as well that I can write sudo in Linux so there really is no need ever to log in with too much privileges on Windows.
I'm curious - how do you use 'run as a different user' to perform your average system maintenance task. I'm running a Windows 2000 machine here and I'd like to, say, install a new printer driver. Obviously, this requires administrator priveleges, and I'm logged in as a non-admin user. How do I do it?
When managing files, I like using a GUI. Can I open a new explorer window that runs as administrator? Or am I restricted to the crippled command line that makes common tasks difficult? If I just try running explorer, I get a new explorer window running with the same user credentials as I originally logged in with, not administrator. Am I missing something, or does this just 'not work'?
Come'on, even the graphics is running in-kernel now, with no documented way to bring up the system without graphics, even in case something goes wrong with the graphics subsystem
What do you think the recovery console is?
Besides, the graphics code isn't actually part of the kernel, but rather runs at privelege level 0. In windows-speak this is a 'kernel mode driver', and fulfills a similar purpose to linux kernel modules. Only I believe the interface used is a much more modular one (message passing, I think, although I'm not certain of the precise details).
No offence, but so far you've asserted that Windows NT is a microkernel which hasn't been true since NT4, and that Windows 9x doesn't use protected memory, which is equally incorrect.
Actually, he is in a way correct.
By some definitions of microkernel, the Win2K kernel at least is one (the kernel itself has a very limited amount of functionality and relies on integrating external drivers in order to be able to do things like access hardware, filesystems, etc.). I can't speak for XP because I have very little experience of it.
Also, Windows 95 et al have a 1Gb area of memory space which is shared between all processes. Shared objects (eg dlls, memory mapped files and other such things) are loaded into this area, and can be accessed by any process. To say it doesn't use protected memory might be incorrect, but you could say it does use unprotected memory, which is a very subtle distinction.
According to netcraft the percentage of sites running Apache is 63.72%.
If you consider that the windows version of apache is rather insignificant, I would assume that the total linux web server installations are in line with this number.
Actually:
1. There are a significant number of people who run apache on windows. 2. There are also a significant number of people who run apache on solaris, mac osx, bsd systems, or other posix compatible operating systems.
I would expect no more than half of those apache installations to be running linux.
Because the authors of virii call them virii [...] Do you insist on calling eight-bit quantities "bites" since there was no English word "byte" before computer programmers decided to make one?
However, the reason that the authors of viruses call them that is because they don't know shit and think that virii is the latin plural for virus, so they think they're being clever.
The reason 'byte' is spelt like that was an intentional change of the spelling by Werner Buchholz when he first used the term, in order to avoid typos causing confusion with the word 'bit'.
I follow in the footsteps of people who know what they're doing. I don't blindly follow ignorant fools who think they're smart.
Another thought - the licensing in question in the contact form could be licensing of code to connect to the network. This is the kind of thing that MS have been talking about doing for a while...
That URL is just redirecting to a contact form. There is no information about whether or not licensing will be required. In fact, the URL suggests that they will be offering a certification program, so presumably other products will be able to pay to get a 'works with MSN Messenger' logo to stick on their box.
My guess is that they're trying to persuade people to add messenger support to other products by offering to license code to connect to them.
Essentially, this is ambiguous. It has always been true that these clients are unlicensed and unauthorized. MS could just be using this as an excuse for why they aren't bothering to ensure compatibility with them during the upgrade.
But, another link has shown me additional evidence that they are interested in licensing, although the licensing in question may or may not be for use of the network, but might be for code for connecting to it...
Interesting. I hadn't found the contact form, which certainly does seem to suggest that MS are interested in licensing.
I had seen the "It is our expectation that those who use our service with unlicensed or unauthorized third- party clients will likely not be able to log on after October 15" quote in various articles, but interpret this as just MS's excuse for the fact that the protocol upgrade will stop these clients from working. I read it as just them saying 'well, these clients don't pay us anything, we never said they could use the network, so if they stop working don't blame us.' It is _possible_ to read it to mean that they are going to start actively requiring licensing, but as the quote is ambiguous in this respect I didn't interpret it in this fashion.
The Techweb quote seems to just be a rephrasing of the above.
So, the contact form is certainly persuasive. MS are actively collecting information about people who might want to license access to the network, which certainly indicates that they want to license it.
All UK laws are written with the masculine pronoun intended to apply to both genders. In fact, it is fairly common in all kinds of English writing to do this, and this is an understood meaning of the word 'he' which is included in most, if not all dictionaries.
I understand that some people feel that its usage in this fashion is sexist. It is clear, however, that no sexism was intended when this law was phrased - it is just how all English law is phrased, in a tradition that dates back hundreds of years.
I don't think there is any reason for complaint here.
(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;
(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and
(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
(2) The intent a person has to have to commit an offence under this section need not be directed at--
(a) any particular program or data;
(b) a program or data of any particular kind; or
(c) a program or data held in any particular computer.
(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or to both.
It might be a bit tricky to prove condition 1.(1)(c), but I think a good barrister would get it with no question.
So, unless you authorised the original vendor of the software to acquire the information from your computer that it sends back, they can be given 6 months in prison (or more likely just the fine).
Maybe you can answer this question for me, I've so far come up blank.
Where have MS said that they will require licensing to use the network?
My interpretation of the quotes in news articles that I've seen about this is that they will require an agreement in order to assist 3rd parties in implementing the revised protocol, which obviously from what you've said you would not require. So where's the issue?
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, funny as the line might be, timing from power-on to having a working desktop, my systems come in like this:
Windows 2000 - 45 seconds
Windows 98 - 1 minute
Linux + KDE 2 - 1 minute 10 seconds
(Admittedly linux + console is about 20 seconds, but that's not really a fair comparison - Windows 98 'text mode only', i.e. DOS, is only about 2 seconds).
Also, boot up time is largely IO bound. Improving your processor speed will make comparatively little difference (I think doubling speed might shave 10% off these figures, possibly more for the Linux one because the KDE issue is dynamic linking related which is a CPU problem).
For anyone who is too young to remember Maxwell Smart, he was played by the same guy who did the voice for Inspector Gadget in the cartoon series... and the characters themselves were rather similar. That should help you visualise the scene correctly
> Email needs to be reliable communication medium. If a message can not be delivered, it has to be returned to the sender.
The thing is, the sender was forged. Since the virus scanner knows the message was a virus and correctly identifies it as such, shouldn't it know that the virus uses forged headers? And since it should know the header was forged, it should NOT return the message.
Virus scanners frequently determine that messages contain viruses when no virus is found. A number of virus scanners, for instance, consider the cygwin installation program to be a virus. Virus detection is normally performed based on a short section of code that can be replicated by chance in something that isn't a virus.
Also, its entirely possible that a message that contains a virus could be authentic. Consider the clueless newbie who receives a virus and forwards it to his friend with the message 'is this a virus?' attached to it. He would actively want his friend's virus scanner to return the message saying that it was a virus...
What gets to me is the number of badly formatted returns there are out there.
A lot of messages to me recently have included the virus straight back to me. A stupid number of them send the bounce message using my address in the 'From:' header, which is certain to get a complaint from me. During the latest outbreak, I've actually ended up subscribed to a mailing list. God knows how, that really shouldn't have happened...
we ought to only tax things we want less of
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
Actually, its the same thing. Poverty is caused by having a substantially lower income than those around you. If you reduce the income of those who have the highest, then (theoretically at least) you decrease poverty.
White-list is unworkable for business, because everything must be "whited" by default.
Challenge-Response is unworkable because I/we (as a small to mid business) simply could not keep up with that. Sure. One of the real programmers we have (i'm not one of them) could come up with an auto-bot to respond to challenge-response, but then we end up back where we started, don't we?
I don't have the answers. But I do know what the answers aren't. And Whitelist/Challenge-Repsonse aren't it
A couple of questions - what makes challenge response unworkable for you? I don't understand what about it you would find hard to keep up with, it would be handled automatically by your mail server (or possibly a client side implementation if you didn't run a server).
BTW... my business is working with a fairly aggressive content-based filter (similar to SpamAssassin) combined with partial blacklisting (i.e. a blacklist hit doesn't automatically disqualify, just adds points to make rejection more likely), whitelisting and challenge response for messages that fail that. Without challenge response we would probably lose something like 1 important message per month. Now its probably down to something like 1 per year.
Our spam problem has been reduced from approximately 30 per-person-per-day to about 4 pppd.
I'm thinking of switching from content-based triggers to bayesian, but need to come up with a good way of adding received messages to the corpus from the client end. If I can figure that one, projections from various experiments suggest we should get down to less than 1 per day.
How about starting Control Panel as a different user (from the command line): "runas /profile /env /user:XXXX\XXXX C:\WINNT\system32\control.exe"
:-)
When I run that command, a new copy of explorer (yes, explorer) opens, showing me the contents of the directory that was current when I ran it. Its hard to tell what user it is running as, but it tells me that I can't change security properties on explorer.exe so I guess it isn't administrator.
The problem is that explorer uses DDE to open new windows in the same process as it is currently running on. Control panel is just a special case of explorer, so you can't open it in a different user if some user is already running explorer.
This is essentially something you learn to do when you have bunch of services running on some very limited login accounts (no console login available at all even on the local console) so you can easily change the account setting by running some other user account that has login access and then running the processes under different credentials in order to change settings.
Yeah, I'm actually very aware of how to use run as. Its just Windows' stupid design prevents you from achieving anything useful with it, at least if what you're trying to do is mess around with Windows settings.
You could run registry editor and do various things with that, you can also run cmd.exe which is handy. But half of the GUI just refuses to work. And it happens to be the most important half.
Don't know what this is like under XP - could be much better for all I know. I've played around with 'fast user switching' and that's OK. Although I have to wonder why they call it fast. The Linux equivalent (i.e. running multiple virtual consoles) is *much* faster...!
You're joking right? At least say it's for reasons more significant than a "File Open" dialog. Reasons that make sense are things like "I want a consistent theme/font", "I need my apps to interoperate at a level deeper than the X clipboard", or "I'm more familiar with the KDE/QT toolkit so if I need to make a mod ...".
... well, OK there are worse file dialogs out there (the one on xdvi springs to mind, what were they thinking?), and there are a number of GTK apps that I do use.
Actually, none of those things are particularly important to me. The last one is kind of relevant, but I figure GTK shouldn't be too hard to learn if I ever need it. The first would be kind of nice, but I think nice file handling dialogs are much more important. They set a tone for the application, and to see something that just looks so outdated & clumsy
But given a choice between a GTK app and a Qt app that otherwise perform the same job roughly as well as each other, the Qt app will win, in my estimation, because of this issue. That's all there is to it.
Another thing: there is no way I could *ever* justify switching to a desktop where that dialog was the standard file dialog to my boss. He'd go nuts. He'd think we were switching back to Windows 3 or something. But KDE? I think he'd just about wear that. Maybe. If it wasn't for the compatibility issues...
There's a patch from Ximian floating around to change it to look like this which is better but still lacks some "coolness" like previews and filters.
Well, its certainly a start. But it still looks (& I suspect feels) very much like the same file dialogs that I was using 10 years ago.
Lets face it, the separate directory and file list should have been consigned to the scrapheap of history long ago. Using icons to distinguish files and directories in the same listing is just neater.
The control at the top (presumably for moving up through the directory structure) still looks clunky and unweildly, just like the original one I saw when I first used GIMP back when 1.0.0 was released. Personally, I blame Motif.
The buttons on the left look out of place (although so do the icons that provide equivalent functionality in KDE2; I haven't upgraded to v3 yet so can't comment on that). Quite usable, though, I suspect.
Yep, I'm still going to stear clear of GTK apps whenever possible, even if that patch gets applied. Thanks for reminding me why.
Have you looked at this to solve your windows portability needs?
http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
It uses cygwin, which might mean some user confusion with filenames; if that's an issue for you you might want to forget about it. Also it'll mean you're stuck with GPL. Otherwise, I understand the results are quite impressive... if you don't want to use X, you can probably substitute the windows version of Qt, and everything should work OK. It'll be a lot of work to get it going, but after that it should be stable and usable...
Yeech. What did they think they were doing? :-)
But there are some illegal ones that could be inferred from his statement: DOS, DDOS, DRDOS,
:-)
Despite much FUD to the contrary, I don't believe DRDOS is illegal.
If my memory is correct, however, it is owned by SCO (or some parent/sibling company thereof), and should hence be boycotted.
Huh? Looks OK to me. The ridiculous slashdot user name has a mailto: link, the article (second link) is a rather long URL to a web page which, in slashdot tradition, I haven't read.
Well, the Windows kernel also includes things like message dispatch/routing, registry access and various, GDI/user graphics/window handling and so on. So, I wouldn't say it's "micro" as such.
These aren't actually in the kernel, I believe. My understanding is that registry access is in ADVAPI32.DLL; GDI and other graphical stuff is in GDI32.DLL; window handling is in USER32.DLL.
The actual kernel, NTOSKRNL.EXE, contains relatively few functions, most of which seem to be related to threads and interprocess communication.
It's true about Windows 9x, but I'd note that sharing DSOs/DLLs is fairly common, as far as I know all major operating systems do that...
Most OSs only map a shared memory segment if you specifically request it, my understanding is that under Win9x you can access all processes shared memory, and screw around with the contents, if you know where in that address space it is.
I know how to use "Run as a different user" just as well that I can write sudo in Linux so there really is no need ever to log in with too much privileges on Windows.
I'm curious - how do you use 'run as a different user' to perform your average system maintenance task. I'm running a Windows 2000 machine here and I'd like to, say, install a new printer driver. Obviously, this requires administrator priveleges, and I'm logged in as a non-admin user. How do I do it?
When managing files, I like using a GUI. Can I open a new explorer window that runs as administrator? Or am I restricted to the crippled command line that makes common tasks difficult? If I just try running explorer, I get a new explorer window running with the same user credentials as I originally logged in with, not administrator. Am I missing something, or does this just 'not work'?
Come'on, even the graphics is running in-kernel now, with no documented way to bring up the system without graphics, even in case something goes wrong with the graphics subsystem
What do you think the recovery console is?
Besides, the graphics code isn't actually part of the kernel, but rather runs at privelege level 0. In windows-speak this is a 'kernel mode driver', and fulfills a similar purpose to linux kernel modules. Only I believe the interface used is a much more modular one (message passing, I think, although I'm not certain of the precise details).
No offence, but so far you've asserted that Windows NT is a microkernel which hasn't been true since NT4, and that Windows 9x doesn't use protected memory, which is equally incorrect.
Actually, he is in a way correct.
By some definitions of microkernel, the Win2K kernel at least is one (the kernel itself has a very limited amount of functionality and relies on integrating external drivers in order to be able to do things like access hardware, filesystems, etc.). I can't speak for XP because I have very little experience of it.
Also, Windows 95 et al have a 1Gb area of memory space which is shared between all processes. Shared objects (eg dlls, memory mapped files and other such things) are loaded into this area, and can be accessed by any process. To say it doesn't use protected memory might be incorrect, but you could say it does use unprotected memory, which is a very subtle distinction.
According to netcraft the percentage of sites running Apache is 63.72%.
If you consider that the windows version of apache is rather insignificant, I would assume that the total linux web server installations are in line with this number.
Actually:
1. There are a significant number of people who run apache on windows.
2. There are also a significant number of people who run apache on solaris, mac osx, bsd systems, or other posix compatible operating systems.
I would expect no more than half of those apache installations to be running linux.
Because the authors of virii call them virii [...] Do you insist on calling eight-bit quantities "bites" since there was no English word "byte" before computer programmers decided to make one?
However, the reason that the authors of viruses call them that is because they don't know shit and think that virii is the latin plural for virus, so they think they're being clever.
The reason 'byte' is spelt like that was an intentional change of the spelling by Werner Buchholz when he first used the term, in order to avoid typos causing confusion with the word 'bit'.
I follow in the footsteps of people who know what they're doing. I don't blindly follow ignorant fools who think they're smart.
Another thought - the licensing in question in the contact form could be licensing of code to connect to the network. This is the kind of thing that MS have been talking about doing for a while...
That URL is just redirecting to a contact form. There is no information about whether or not licensing will be required. In fact, the URL suggests that they will be offering a certification program, so presumably other products will be able to pay to get a 'works with MSN Messenger' logo to stick on their box.
My guess is that they're trying to persuade people to add messenger support to other products by offering to license code to connect to them.
See my reply to another post here:
7 83 552
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75651&cid=6
Essentially, this is ambiguous. It has always been true that these clients are unlicensed and unauthorized. MS could just be using this as an excuse for why they aren't bothering to ensure compatibility with them during the upgrade.
But, another link has shown me additional evidence that they are interested in licensing, although the licensing in question may or may not be for use of the network, but might be for code for connecting to it...
Interesting. I hadn't found the contact form, which certainly does seem to suggest that MS are interested in licensing.
I had seen the "It is our expectation that
those who use our service with unlicensed or unauthorized third-
party clients will likely not be able to log on after October 15" quote in various articles, but interpret this as just MS's excuse for the fact that the protocol upgrade will stop these clients from working. I read it as just them saying 'well, these clients don't pay us anything, we never said they could use the network, so if they stop working don't blame us.' It is _possible_ to read it to mean that they are going to start actively requiring licensing, but as the quote is ambiguous in this respect I didn't interpret it in this fashion.
The Techweb quote seems to just be a rephrasing of the above.
So, the contact form is certainly persuasive. MS are actively collecting information about people who might want to license access to the network, which certainly indicates that they want to license it.
All UK laws are written with the masculine pronoun intended to apply to both genders. In fact, it is fairly common in all kinds of English writing to do this, and this is an understood meaning of the word 'he' which is included in most, if not all dictionaries.
I understand that some people feel that its usage in this fashion is sexist. It is clear, however, that no sexism was intended when this law was phrased - it is just how all English law is phrased, in a tradition that dates back hundreds of years.
I don't think there is any reason for complaint here.
It might be a bit tricky to prove condition 1.(1)(c), but I think a good barrister would get it with no question.
So, unless you authorised the original vendor of the software to acquire the information from your computer that it sends back, they can be given 6 months in prison (or more likely just the fine).
Maybe you can answer this question for me, I've so far come up blank.
Where have MS said that they will require licensing to use the network?
My interpretation of the quotes in news articles that I've seen about this is that they will require an agreement in order to assist 3rd parties in implementing the revised protocol, which obviously from what you've said you would not require. So where's the issue?