am really confused now. I thought software patents weren't valid in the EU? How can this happen? Did the members of the Europarliament sneakily approve software patents anyway?
The law was never entirely clear. For a while it looked as though the way case law was going was that most software patents were invalid, with only a certain class valid (those that had a "technical effect", which is similar in some ways to the recent US appeal case that held that a mere calculation cannot be patented). Case law since then has widened the scope, but it's still much harder to get and enforce a software patent in the EU than it is in the US.
There was an effort a few years ago to get the european parliament to amend the law to include an outright rejection of software patents, but it failed, at least partially due to idiot MEPs who didn't understand what they were voting for (one of my local MEPs stated he voted against the amendment on the basis that he was ideologically opposed to the european parliament taking any action at all -- he votes against *all* bills, whether they are helpful or not).
Wouldn't be the first time they ignored the population. (I didn't say voters; they are not elected and the EU is not democratic)
The european parliament is elected; I'm not sure why you would think otherwise. You may perhaps be thinking of the Council of the European Union, the other legislative body of the EU, but they too are elected, albeit indirectly (they are members of the elected parliaments of each member state, nominated to the post by the head of government of their particular state -- a similar mechanism to the one used by the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment).
On my T-Mobile Pulse Mini Pink (how secure am *I*!?), it asked for google username and gave the option to create one. I chose not to, but doing so made the phone almost useless (IMO), since I couldn't use the contacts application (I didn't try much else).
Hmm. My 2.2 phone works fine without a google account. You lose certain features (online contacts sync, obviously, is one of them), but basic management of contacts is fine. Could be this is a flaw with earlier versions that's now fixed?
Not only that, but it's entirely feasible to set up your own "nation" within an existing governmental structure. Buy some land in the middle of nowhere, make sure you pay your taxes, and handle everything else internally.
You know of a nation that is willing to let individual communities enforce their own criminal law, rather than have the national one applied? Taxation isn't the only reason to set up a micronation, or even (I believe) the most common one. Disagreement with national laws that might prevent you from doing things you want to do is the most common one, I suspect.
No, what they're going to do is change how add-on registration works in each release, and release a new version every week. This should confuse the hell out of the malware authors, and isn't actually any more work for the firefox maintainers than the current release schedule, which is almost as frequent...
Once the virus enters a cell, that cell is going to die.
Not necessarily, no. Some viruses will insert themselves into the host DNA along with a gene that suppresses production of the virus itself. Cell & its offspring behave normally until some external factor stops the suppression, at which point the whole batch start producing viruses.
This suggests an evolutionary path: viruses that last longer before expressing themselves, thus infecting a larger proportion of the host's cells with their own DNA. At some point, this treatment will be fatal to the patient before it actually kills all the virus-producing cells.
I'm in favor of putting linux on this computer, but ubuntu will not run on any computer with a "Designed for XP" sticker. I doubt you could run it with any kind of efficiency with less than 1GB of RAM and a pentium 4 or maybe high end pentium 3. XP stretches back further than that.
Yes, but it also stretches forward further than that. Computer manufacturers didn't stop making "designed for xp" machines in 2001, you know. Also: I'm currently using a machine that came with a Celeron & 512MB. The Ubuntu installation that came with it worked fine.
let's use "Forbidden Planet" as an example. At least partly based on "The Tempest", does that mean "Forbidden Planet" is therefore automatically not entitled to copyright protection?
Let's use an example where the source material is still in copyright: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, which is heavily based on Gone with the Wind.
In this case, I would not suggest that either work is not entitled to copyright protection. I would claim, however, that as issues concerning validity of the copyright claims are complicated (particularly as regards to transformative fair use), nobody other than a court of law should be asked to enforce that copyright.
I see no reason not to apply this principle universally.
Britain doesn't have a drinking problem, at least not to the extent that our media would have you believe. It's been hyped out of proportion on the back of badly designed government statistics, which reveal that large numbers of people regularly binge drink. At least, they do if you define "binge drink" as "drink more than the daily recommended alcohol allowance in a day", where the daily recommended alcohol allowance is 3 units for women or 4 for men (i.e. 2 pints of any reasonably strong lager is "binge drinking" by this definition), an allowance which has been described by the committee that originally set it as essentially a guess with no scientific validity, and probably too low. And even the basic principle of whether a daily allowance rather than a weekly one is a good idea is questionable, because to set a daily allowance you have to consider its effects on people who drink every day, but most people only actually drink once or twice a week.
Yes. Of course, stastically, the good sysadmin is more likely than market share would suggest to be running the mac server, because good sysadmins have a tendency to avoid windows wherever possible...
So where is the variety of Apps in.Net running on all sorts of different OSes? I haven't seen much beyond proof of concept demos.
I've been running real-world ASP.NET applications developed in C# under Apache + mono with Linux for several years. I assure you I'm far from the only one.
Looking at the original code is and developing ANYTHING, including a set of requirements/specs means that your implementation is no longer a clean room.
So by your argument, an employee at Microsoft could publish the entire Windows source code as GPL and Microsoft would have no way of pulling that back?
If that employee had management sign-off on the action, which by the sounds of it the OP did, then yes, they wouldn't be able to do that. As long as somebody had received a copy and accepted the terms of the GPL.
He also writes the last two years of his employment was spent on this project - by his own statements, he at least worked some of the time on company time on this project.
Of course, if he can document that some of the code existed before he spent any company time on it, then that portion of the code is unequivocably his and he could use it to block a non-GPL release.
If I do something at home it does not belong to my employer. If I build a shed in my backyard, that does not belong to my employer.
What about if your employer tells you to build a shed, and you decide to do it in your back yard because that's the most convenient place for you to do it? Chances are, this is much more like the OP's situation.
Now, there are all kinds of interesting questions about who owns it. And with IP it becomes much more interesting, as the idea behind the project is much like the wood the shed was built from, so if the idea (or any part of it) was the employer's, the question becomes trickier still.
I can almost guarantee that the cost of goods analysis is wrong. There is no way in today's tablet market that Samsung wouldn't mark down it's price below the iPad if it could afford to.
It's called perceived value: if you initially sell something for a high price and then drop it, purchasers think they're getting a better deal.
It is quite possible that PayPal doesn't have the resources (i.e. the smarts) to follow the trail themselves
This would be the same PayPal who suspend your account if you use a proxy server, and seem pretty hot at detecting them (they get me *every time* I forget and try to access their site with Opera Mini)?
No, they could have produced this list within days of the attack if they had wanted.
I'd say a DDOS is much more analogous to the sit-in than a picket outside, as the disruption happens within the target's property, i.e. their computers. Even if it happens at their ISP's routers, that's still private property that they are effectively leasing the right to use, which they are being prevented from doing.
That said, the obvious extrapolation should be made: a sit-in is not a criminal offence, it is trespass. Therefore a DDOS should be relegated to the status of trespass-to-chattels. Which would mean you cannot be imprisoned for taking part in one, but you could be held liable for losses incurred by the target because of it (trespass gives rise to a chose in tort, if I understand such matters correctly, which as I am not a lawyer I may not...).
So, suppose my wife & I procreate (I know, it's/., so it's unlikely on many levels, but bear with me for a minute), and through combination and/or mutation, our offspring happens to wind up with one of the "patented" genes. Can said child be sued, and can the court issue an injunction against continued production or use of said "patented" gene by the child?
No, what's patented is the gene isolated from the rest of a human genome. So such a child would not be allowed to take their genome and cut it up in any way they wanted...
If a user can get access to the folder where these files are stored, they already have enough information to break any remaining encryption on the device.
That is absolutely incorrect. See the iOS/OS X keychain for more details.
According to research by Fraunhofer, the iOS keychain will provide protection against a concerted attack for approximately 9 minutes, being how long it takes to brute-force the encryption keys it uses (which are derived from the user's pin). A false sense of security is worse than no security, in my book.
What about devices like the police forensic scanners, that conceivably could use something like JTAG to dump all the flash, without any cooperation from the host OS?
I believe you'll find such a device can also dump all the RAM of a running phone, thus allowing access to the key for any encryption you're using.
The phone could easily require the user to enter the PIN once on boot-up to unlock a key which is used to store passwords. That would prevent your phone from downloading email until the first time you've unlocked it after boot. It would still be a huge step up in security over storing it in plain-text with the rest of the user data.
1. Users don't expect PIN resets to wipe their data. Forgotten PINs are a relatively frequent occurrence, meaning that this would represent a huge inconvenience. 2. It's not that huge a step up. Recovering it from the data requires either (a) root access on a running phone or (b) physical access to the hardware to probe the device's flash using JTAG. If you have (a), you could recover the key from memory anyway using/dev/kmem. If you have (b) and the phone's still running, you can probe its RAM using JTAG and recover the key that way. So this would only help on phones that have been switched off since last used, which is to say a small minority of those that are likely to be interesting to would-be attackers.
Slashdot Mirror
summer starts on June 21
Maybe in your f*ed up world, but for most of us, summer runs from may to august.
Seeing as Android 3.0 reportedly does not work on phones, my suspicion is that you will just see the necessary changes backported to the 2.x series.
am really confused now. I thought software patents weren't valid in the EU? How can this happen? Did the members of the Europarliament sneakily approve software patents anyway?
The law was never entirely clear. For a while it looked as though the way case law was going was that most software patents were invalid, with only a certain class valid (those that had a "technical effect", which is similar in some ways to the recent US appeal case that held that a mere calculation cannot be patented). Case law since then has widened the scope, but it's still much harder to get and enforce a software patent in the EU than it is in the US.
There was an effort a few years ago to get the european parliament to amend the law to include an outright rejection of software patents, but it failed, at least partially due to idiot MEPs who didn't understand what they were voting for (one of my local MEPs stated he voted against the amendment on the basis that he was ideologically opposed to the european parliament taking any action at all -- he votes against *all* bills, whether they are helpful or not).
Wouldn't be the first time they ignored the population. (I didn't say voters; they are not elected and the EU is not democratic)
The european parliament is elected; I'm not sure why you would think otherwise. You may perhaps be thinking of the Council of the European Union, the other legislative body of the EU, but they too are elected, albeit indirectly (they are members of the elected parliaments of each member state, nominated to the post by the head of government of their particular state -- a similar mechanism to the one used by the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment).
On my T-Mobile Pulse Mini Pink (how secure am *I*!?), it asked for google username and gave the option to create one. I chose not to, but doing so made the phone almost useless (IMO), since I couldn't use the contacts application (I didn't try much else).
Hmm. My 2.2 phone works fine without a google account. You lose certain features (online contacts sync, obviously, is one of them), but basic management of contacts is fine. Could be this is a flaw with earlier versions that's now fixed?
Not only that, but it's entirely feasible to set up your own "nation" within an existing governmental structure. Buy some land in the middle of nowhere, make sure you pay your taxes, and handle everything else internally.
You know of a nation that is willing to let individual communities enforce their own criminal law, rather than have the national one applied? Taxation isn't the only reason to set up a micronation, or even (I believe) the most common one. Disagreement with national laws that might prevent you from doing things you want to do is the most common one, I suspect.
No, what they're going to do is change how add-on registration works in each release, and release a new version every week. This should confuse the hell out of the malware authors, and isn't actually any more work for the firefox maintainers than the current release schedule, which is almost as frequent...
Wii is not even HD capable console, few people are bothered with that.
I know a few people who are bothered by it, but primarily because no HD => no HDMI, and a lot of newer TVs are shipping without SCART these days.
Once the virus enters a cell, that cell is going to die.
Not necessarily, no. Some viruses will insert themselves into the host DNA along with a gene that suppresses production of the virus itself. Cell & its offspring behave normally until some external factor stops the suppression, at which point the whole batch start producing viruses.
This suggests an evolutionary path: viruses that last longer before expressing themselves, thus infecting a larger proportion of the host's cells with their own DNA. At some point, this treatment will be fatal to the patient before it actually kills all the virus-producing cells.
I'm in favor of putting linux on this computer, but ubuntu will not run on any computer with a "Designed for XP" sticker. I doubt you could run it with any kind of efficiency with less than 1GB of RAM and a pentium 4 or maybe high end pentium 3. XP stretches back further than that.
Yes, but it also stretches forward further than that. Computer manufacturers didn't stop making "designed for xp" machines in 2001, you know. Also: I'm currently using a machine that came with a Celeron & 512MB. The Ubuntu installation that came with it worked fine.
let's use "Forbidden Planet" as an example. At least partly based on "The Tempest", does that mean "Forbidden Planet" is therefore automatically not entitled to copyright protection?
Let's use an example where the source material is still in copyright: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, which is heavily based on Gone with the Wind.
In this case, I would not suggest that either work is not entitled to copyright protection. I would claim, however, that as issues concerning validity of the copyright claims are complicated (particularly as regards to transformative fair use), nobody other than a court of law should be asked to enforce that copyright.
I see no reason not to apply this principle universally.
Britain doesn't have a drinking problem, at least not to the extent that our media would have you believe. It's been hyped out of proportion on the back of badly designed government statistics, which reveal that large numbers of people regularly binge drink. At least, they do if you define "binge drink" as "drink more than the daily recommended alcohol allowance in a day", where the daily recommended alcohol allowance is 3 units for women or 4 for men (i.e. 2 pints of any reasonably strong lager is "binge drinking" by this definition), an allowance which has been described by the committee that originally set it as essentially a guess with no scientific validity, and probably too low. And even the basic principle of whether a daily allowance rather than a weekly one is a good idea is questionable, because to set a daily allowance you have to consider its effects on people who drink every day, but most people only actually drink once or twice a week.
Yes. Of course, stastically, the good sysadmin is more likely than market share would suggest to be running the mac server, because good sysadmins have a tendency to avoid windows wherever possible...
So where is the variety of Apps in .Net running on all sorts of different OSes? I haven't seen much beyond proof of concept demos.
I've been running real-world ASP.NET applications developed in C# under Apache + mono with Linux for several years. I assure you I'm far from the only one.
Looking at the original code is and developing ANYTHING, including a set of requirements/specs means that your implementation is no longer a clean room.
You're wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corporation
In some cases, it can be justified to use original code in the process of reverse engineering. This is particularly the case if the original code is the only available reference to the actual behaviour you need to implement.
So by your argument, an employee at Microsoft could publish the entire Windows source code as GPL and Microsoft would have no way of pulling that back?
If that employee had management sign-off on the action, which by the sounds of it the OP did, then yes, they wouldn't be able to do that. As long as somebody had received a copy and accepted the terms of the GPL.
He also writes the last two years of his employment was spent on this project - by his own statements, he at least worked some of the time on company time on this project.
Of course, if he can document that some of the code existed before he spent any company time on it, then that portion of the code is unequivocably his and he could use it to block a non-GPL release.
If I do something at home it does not belong to my employer. If I build a shed in my backyard, that does not belong to my employer.
What about if your employer tells you to build a shed, and you decide to do it in your back yard because that's the most convenient place for you to do it? Chances are, this is much more like the OP's situation.
Now, there are all kinds of interesting questions about who owns it. And with IP it becomes much more interesting, as the idea behind the project is much like the wood the shed was built from, so if the idea (or any part of it) was the employer's, the question becomes trickier still.
I can almost guarantee that the cost of goods analysis is wrong. There is no way in today's tablet market that Samsung wouldn't mark down it's price below the iPad if it could afford to.
It's called perceived value: if you initially sell something for a high price and then drop it, purchasers think they're getting a better deal.
It is quite possible that PayPal doesn't have the resources (i.e. the smarts) to follow the trail themselves
This would be the same PayPal who suspend your account if you use a proxy server, and seem pretty hot at detecting them (they get me *every time* I forget and try to access their site with Opera Mini)?
No, they could have produced this list within days of the attack if they had wanted.
I'd say a DDOS is much more analogous to the sit-in than a picket outside, as the disruption happens within the target's property, i.e. their computers. Even if it happens at their ISP's routers, that's still private property that they are effectively leasing the right to use, which they are being prevented from doing.
That said, the obvious extrapolation should be made: a sit-in is not a criminal offence, it is trespass. Therefore a DDOS should be relegated to the status of trespass-to-chattels. Which would mean you cannot be imprisoned for taking part in one, but you could be held liable for losses incurred by the target because of it (trespass gives rise to a chose in tort, if I understand such matters correctly, which as I am not a lawyer I may not...).
So, suppose my wife & I procreate (I know, it's /., so it's unlikely on many levels, but bear with me for a minute), and through combination and/or mutation, our offspring happens to wind up with one of the "patented" genes. Can said child be sued, and can the court issue an injunction against continued production or use of said "patented" gene by the child?
No, what's patented is the gene isolated from the rest of a human genome. So such a child would not be allowed to take their genome and cut it up in any way they wanted...
FWIW, Alibaba isn't exactly a startup. They're probably the largest exporter of low-cost Chinese tech to the west, and have been for years.
If a user can get access to the folder where these files are stored, they already have enough information to break any remaining encryption on the device.
That is absolutely incorrect. See the iOS/OS X keychain for more details.
According to research by Fraunhofer, the iOS keychain will provide protection against a concerted attack for approximately 9 minutes, being how long it takes to brute-force the encryption keys it uses (which are derived from the user's pin). A false sense of security is worse than no security, in my book.
What about devices like the police forensic scanners, that conceivably could use something like JTAG to dump all the flash, without any cooperation from the host OS?
I believe you'll find such a device can also dump all the RAM of a running phone, thus allowing access to the key for any encryption you're using.
The phone could easily require the user to enter the PIN once on boot-up to unlock a key which is used to store passwords. That would prevent your phone from downloading email until the first time you've unlocked it after boot. It would still be a huge step up in security over storing it in plain-text with the rest of the user data.
1. Users don't expect PIN resets to wipe their data. Forgotten PINs are a relatively frequent occurrence, meaning that this would represent a huge inconvenience. /dev/kmem. If you have (b) and the phone's still running, you can probe its RAM using JTAG and recover the key that way. So this would only help on phones that have been switched off since last used, which is to say a small minority of those that are likely to be interesting to would-be attackers.
2. It's not that huge a step up. Recovering it from the data requires either (a) root access on a running phone or (b) physical access to the hardware to probe the device's flash using JTAG. If you have (a), you could recover the key from memory anyway using