Not nearly as much as it used to be. I'm inside counsel for a corporation and most of the firms we work with use Word. Those that don't, seem to be able to do pretty good conversions to Word when they send stuff to us.
I suspect a lot of smaller firms may still be using Word Perfect (I know more than one legal secretary who thinks WP 5.1 was the best word processor ever), but probably the bigger firms have jumped on the Office bandwagon.
I'm not much of a C coder; sorry if this is a stupid question but I'm trying to gather information to pass on to folks who will know what to do with it.
A ham radio hardware project I'm working on is driven by sofware written under MS C++.NET. The code basically talks via the device via USB, does some math, and plots results on the screen (in XY and polar plot format).
We want to make the software available under Linux, but the author is a Windows guy and can't undertake the port, so we're looking for someone to help us out.
Apart from the obvious issue of the USB driver interface, is it reasonable to expect that Mono would allow us to build this app under Linux with relatively minor changes, or is porting still likely to be a significant undertaking? (I realize it takes a lot more detail to get a definite answer; I'm just looking for guidance on whether it's worth considering using Mono vs. essentially rewriting the code).
I have a Vaio laptop (don't remember the number, but 700MHz PIII in the slimline case with external CD and floppy). It's a really nice machine, but when I went to replace the hard disk I discovered something: Sony tech support is useless. The only thing their hardware support page tells you is where to send the machine back. No service documentation available, and no spare parts.
Contrast this with IBM, where you can download PDFs with full disassembly instructions and parts lists. You can order parts from IBM for reasonable prices, and they show up in a couple of days. They're actually *helpful* on the phone -- I bought a refurbed Thinkpad that had a European keyboard, and they cheerully talked me through finding the US replacement.
Can't tell you if other vendors are as good as IBM, but I can tell you that if you plan to touch the hardware at all, avoid Sony like the plague.
I was in Australia last spring on business, and went with a friend from Sydney to visit Canberra over the weekend that the time of the bush fires.
On Friday afternoon we went to Mt. Stromlo (on our way to the NASA deep space station at Tidbinbilla). Got there just after they closed, and decided not to take any pictures cuz, frankly, there wasn't that much to see from the parking lot.
By Saturday, the place had burned to the ground. I figure that we may have been the last two visitors to see the place. And no pictures!
This appointment doesn't have any real significance. The ABA is not a government agency; it's a private lawyer's organization that is voluntary (lots and lots of lawyers don't belong).
The ABA has a lot of different subgroups, on anti-trust, patent law, corporate law, etc. They do training on their areas of specialty, have meetings to talk about their area of interest, and do sometimes lobby about pending legislation.
The ABA Antitrust section has been pro-business, anti-enforcement forever, so this is really no big deal.
I've owned a bunch of IBM Thinkpads, and have done various things to them (replaced keyboards, etc.). As far as I'm concerned, their support has been really, really, good.
You can download full service documentation (with exploded parts diagrams) from their public web site, and the parts organization does a good job of (a) helping you figure out the right part number and (b) actually selling it to you.
The prices for what I've needed seemed generally reasonable (~$50 for a keyboard). In one instance, though, I discovered that to fix an intermittent DC power input jack they wanted me to replace the DC converter module for $150. Since I only paid $450 for the machine in the first place, I wasn't about to do that, but I was able to use the on-line manual to disassemble the thing far enough to resolder the DC jack myself.
Compare this to my Sony Vaio, where they won't even tell you how to replace the hard disk.
So, at least until something changes I'm sold on Thinkpads for serviceability.
Win4Lin's not a perfect solution, either technically or politically, but it sure does work well. I have three apps at home that I haven't yet found suitable OSS substitutes for -- Quicken with online interface, Street Atlas (for disconnected use) and a weird package for analyzing the stability of frequency sources. All three run wonderfully under Win4Lin. And it's just about as fast on a given machine as native Windows.
The only real problem I've had is with apps that need a serial port -- there is emulation for standard hardware COM1 and COM2 but only for those two ports, and an app I used to run had some quirks with the emulation. More importantly for my new laptop that lacks a DB-9, there's currently no support for USB serial adapters.
This is happening. Financial operations are being outsourced now, and there's a small but growing use of non-US lawyers for some work -- particularly patent applications. Believe it or not, New Zealand is a leader in that area. Heavy offshoring of lawyers would be tough given not just licensing requirements, but also the local legal knowledge required to do other kinds of work.
The whole idea of auctioning spectrum in the US is very new; it only started in the deregulatory zeal of the Reagan administration. Prior to the auction idea, licenses were essentially charged at administrative cost; there was no concept that you were paying for the value of the spectrum you got.
The broadcast spectrum was already allocated, and with lots of incumbents it's very hard to shift to an auction model.
I ain't so sure about the auction model myself; many of the licenses were bid up to grotesquely high levels, and I think (but haven't done any recent research) that a significant number of the huge wins were never actually paid for -- the bidders couldn't come up with the cash, and bailed out leaving the spectrum unlicensed and unused.
If anything it would make more sense to have the license fee be a fixed percentage of revenue, rather than some speculative view of what the resource *might* be worth.
This is a smart move on Red Hat's part. By seeking a declaration that Linux doesn't infringe SCO's IP rights, they largely wipe out the "no indemnification" FUD that's being spread.
This also has the advantage of forcing SCO to "put up or shut up" -- in the discovery process Red Hat can demand that SCO identify each and every Linux element that is claimed to infringe. This is going to take some time (litigation is slow) and SCO will probably ask for a protective order to preserve the alleged confidentiality of their code, but sooner or later this process will smoke them out.
In the US, Part 15 of the FCC regulations governs unlicensed radio transmitters, and basically says two things: first, there are specific bands where you can operate unlicensed with specified power levels (like the 902-928 and 2.4GHz bands), and second, you can transmit anywhere else, including the broadcast bands, with much lower power levels (not specified in actual transmitter power, but in microvolts/meter of received signal strength at a specified difference).
Thus, all these very low power transmitters that talk in the broadcast bands are legal here.
Many other countries don't have nearly so liberal a policy about unlicensed transmitters -- that's why WiFi isn't technically legal in some places (like the Caribbean island that was the topic of an article a few weeks ago) and gadgets like this aren't allowed in the UK.
Although we like to bitch about "big gummint" in the US, at least in the communications arena US policies are far more open than in other parts of the world.
Another (off topic) example: radio scanner enthusiasts here like to complain because it's illegal to listen to cellular phone transmissions. But we can listen to damn near anything else, including police radio, while in many countries listening to any non-broadcast (or non-ham) radio service is strictly forbidden.
Bruce, a year or so ago you talked to the ham radio Digital Communications Conference and issued a challenge for the ham community to embrace the concept of "open source hardware" as exemplified by A HREF=http://www.opencoreshttp://www.opencores.org.
A year later, do how do you perceive the open source hardware movement? Will it have an impact similar to that of open source software?
A translation is absolutely a derivative work, covered under US copyright law and that of most other countries. The author has the right to control derivative works, both to protect the integrity of the work (e.g., by avoiding unauthorized, low-quality translations that would reflect poorly on her), and to gain the economic benefit of translating her work to make it available in new markets.
Although I strongly believe that the copyright law today has tilted far too heavily in favor of content owners, as a lawyer I have to say that this is an open and shut case -- there's simply no justification for an unauthorized translation of a work. (By the way, unlike the GPL, the copyright restrictrion on derivative works is not limited to distribution -- the mere fact of creating the translation, even for personal use, is technically a copyright infringement.
Although there are international treaties governing radio communications, those are mainly intended mainly to avoid interference. They don't govern how a government chooses to manage its licensing process. (Just as an example, contrast the US privately operated broadcast radio spectrum with the state operation of broadcasting in many countries.)
Particularly at the VHF/UHF/microwave frequencies that normally do not travel across national boundaries, even the international regulations become more limited and countries often opt out of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) agreements as to specific frequency allocations.
The unlicensed "Part 15" operation in the US is a creature of the US radio regulations, and not any international requirement -- though many other countries recognize (or at least tolerate) 802.11b operation, they aren't *required* to.
Porthcurno has already been mentioned in passing, but deserves a post of its own. The C&W Museum of Submariine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, Cornwall is way cool. This is the spot where many of the international cables (but not the ones to the US) landed, and the facilities were move in WWII into tunnels blasted into the cliff. The museum is mainly in the tunnels, and is really neat.
A bonus is that the cove and beach where the cables came in is really lovely, and there's a neat open-air theatre there (unfortunately, there were no performances when I visited. The whole area is beautiful, but the facility at Lands End is so commercialized that it's sure to disappoint.
Two other geek holy places in the general area are the site of Marconi's first transatlantic transmitting station at Poldhu, and the Goonhilly Downs (hope I didn't screw up that name) satellite receiving site that BT runs. The tour at Goonhilly is pretty lame if you're technically inclined, but the field full of big dishes is a neat site. Poldhu has no tourist facility at all, just a stunning bluff, a monmument to Marconi, and a memorial ham radio club station (unfortunately unoccupied when I was there).
Poldhu and Goonhilly are only a couple of miles apart, so you get an interesting sense of the old and the new in radio technology.
Meteor Scatter Ham Radio Contacts
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 2
It was raining here in Ohio, so no visible sign of the Leonids. But I got up early and turned on my ham 6M and 2M rigs and heard lots of meteor-scatter activity.
Meteor trails ionize the atmosphere, making them reflective to radio waves. You can bounce signals off the trails, and there were bunches of folks doing that this morning, particularly on the 6M (50MHz) band, which is optimum for this sort of thing.
It's really interesting to listen to. You hear nothing, then all of a sudden the signal goes to S9 (ie, strong) and stays that way for anything from a couple of seconds to a minute or more. Then it fades away and you wait for the next burst.
I only had a low power transmitter, so listened a lot more than I talked, but I did work a station near Boston, MA who heard my 20 watts with no problems during a good burst. Better equipped stations were working from the east coast to well west of the Mississippi.
IAAL, so unlike most of the posters here, I'm not going to give you a black-and-white answer:-)
My gut feeling is that a loadable module that does not itself incorporate any GPL'd code does not fall under the GPL just because it's run in conjunction with a GPL'd kernel. After all, even if the kernel + driver are considered together to create a derivative work, it's the user, and not you, who creates that derivative work at runtime.
And, the fact that you're using GCC to compile the module doesn't mean anything in and of itself. The real question is the license status of any libs that are linked into the resulting object code file. Whether they are under GPL, LGPL, or something else makes a big difference.
Now for the shades of gray part... any time you're dealing with GPL questions, you have to look at the genealogy of the running executable, working backwards to see what licenses govern the component pieces. It's a very fact-intensive process, and without understanding where all the code came from, you can't come close to giving a reasonable answer.
Not to take anything away from a cool project, but this kind of work is already being done in the amateur radio community.
Check out the DSP-10 designed by Bob Larkin, W7PUA and offered as a kit by TAPR. It receives and transmits in the 2 meter amateur band (144-148MHz) using a standalone DSP card (that has power similar to a PC sound card). The code to drive it is all open source, and the DSP can not only handle traditional modes, but can also be programmed to do all sorts of neat stuff. New modulation schemes programmed into the DSP-10 have resulted in successful "moonbounce" (that's right, using the moon as a radio signal reflector) contacts with much lower power/smaller antennas than ever before used.
I just tried to go to the Peacefire link shown in the story, and my company's SmartFilter told me it was blocked as "non-business related" (our block page doesn't show the category).
So, SmartFilter is at least smart enough to block its critics...
I'm kind of surprised how many KC'ers have replied. It's not a particularly common condition and I've only met one or two others in person who have it -- but there's a large online community with a very active mailing list (kc-link@nkcf.org that has several hundred subscribers.
Anyway, I have KC which reached the point where I've had (successful) cornea transplants in both eyes. I still have to wear contact lenses since the transplants, but I can now use relatively ordinary computer displays (e.g., 1024x768 on a 12.1 inch laptop screen).
Prior to the transplants, I found that a 20 inch monitor running in 800x600 mode with "large fonts" selected in Windows worked well. For character-based work in Linux, a normal 80x25 text display on the 20 inch screen was really easy to read.
Hang in there -- 90% of KCers get adequate vision with either glasses or rigid contact lenses; for the other 10% (like me), the cornea transplant has a 90%+ success rate.
In the real world, "better" isn't always the goal. The requirement is "good enough, and quickly". If I'm word processing a memo, it has to look decent and I have to be able to do it quickly. Beyond a certain level, formatting nuances just don't matter. They're a waste of time.
There are some environments (academic, desktop publishing) where this may not be true, but they're not where the money is.
Doesn't the MAC address appear only on the local physical network and disappear at the first router? If you're running an NAT server, won't the MAC address seen outside just be that of that sever's interface on the cablemodem side?
Slashdot Mirror
Not nearly as much as it used to be. I'm inside counsel for a corporation and most of the firms we work with use Word. Those that don't, seem to be able to do pretty good conversions to Word when they send stuff to us.
I suspect a lot of smaller firms may still be using Word Perfect (I know more than one legal secretary who thinks WP 5.1 was the best word processor ever), but probably the bigger firms have jumped on the Office bandwagon.
I'm not much of a C coder; sorry if this is a stupid question but I'm trying to gather information to pass on to folks who will know what to do with it.
.NET. The code basically talks via the device via USB, does some math, and plots results on the screen (in XY and polar plot format).
A ham radio hardware project I'm working on is driven by sofware written under MS C++
We want to make the software available under Linux, but the author is a Windows guy and can't undertake the port, so we're looking for someone to help us out.
Apart from the obvious issue of the USB driver interface, is it reasonable to expect that Mono would allow us to build this app under Linux with relatively minor changes, or is porting still likely to be a significant undertaking? (I realize it takes a lot more detail to get a definite answer; I'm just looking for guidance on whether it's worth considering using Mono vs. essentially rewriting the code).
I have a Vaio laptop (don't remember the number, but 700MHz PIII in the slimline case with external CD and floppy). It's a really nice machine, but when I went to replace the hard disk I discovered something: Sony tech support is useless. The only thing their hardware support page tells you is where to send the machine back. No service documentation available, and no spare parts.
Contrast this with IBM, where you can download PDFs with full disassembly instructions and parts lists. You can order parts from IBM for reasonable prices, and they show up in a couple of days. They're actually *helpful* on the phone -- I bought a refurbed Thinkpad that had a European keyboard, and they cheerully talked me through finding the US replacement.
Can't tell you if other vendors are as good as IBM, but I can tell you that if you plan to touch the hardware at all, avoid Sony like the plague.
On Friday afternoon we went to Mt. Stromlo (on our way to the NASA deep space station at Tidbinbilla). Got there just after they closed, and decided not to take any pictures cuz, frankly, there wasn't that much to see from the parking lot.
By Saturday, the place had burned to the ground. I figure that we may have been the last two visitors to see the place. And no pictures!
This appointment doesn't have any real significance. The ABA is not a government agency; it's a private lawyer's organization that is voluntary (lots and lots of lawyers don't belong).
The ABA has a lot of different subgroups, on anti-trust, patent law, corporate law, etc. They do training on their areas of specialty, have meetings to talk about their area of interest, and do sometimes lobby about pending legislation.
The ABA Antitrust section has been pro-business, anti-enforcement forever, so this is really no big deal.
I've owned a bunch of IBM Thinkpads, and have done various things to them (replaced keyboards, etc.). As far as I'm concerned, their support has been really, really, good.
You can download full service documentation (with exploded parts diagrams) from their public web site, and the parts organization does a good job of (a) helping you figure out the right part number and (b) actually selling it to you.
The prices for what I've needed seemed generally reasonable (~$50 for a keyboard). In one instance, though, I discovered that to fix an intermittent DC power input jack they wanted me to replace the DC converter module for $150. Since I only paid $450 for the machine in the first place, I wasn't about to do that, but I was able to use the on-line manual to disassemble the thing far enough to resolder the DC jack myself.
Compare this to my Sony Vaio, where they won't even tell you how to replace the hard disk.
So, at least until something changes I'm sold on Thinkpads for serviceability.
Just because you *can* record a rock opera, doesn't mean you *should*...
Win4Lin's not a perfect solution, either technically or politically, but it sure does work well. I have three apps at home that I haven't yet found suitable OSS substitutes for -- Quicken with online interface, Street Atlas (for disconnected use) and a weird package for analyzing the stability of frequency sources. All three run wonderfully under Win4Lin. And it's just about as fast on a given machine as native Windows.
The only real problem I've had is with apps that need a serial port -- there is emulation for standard hardware COM1 and COM2 but only for those two ports, and an app I used to run had some quirks with the emulation. More importantly for my new laptop that lacks a DB-9, there's currently no support for USB serial adapters.
This is happening. Financial operations are being outsourced now, and there's a small but growing use of non-US lawyers for some work -- particularly patent applications. Believe it or not, New Zealand is a leader in that area. Heavy offshoring of lawyers would be tough given not just licensing requirements, but also the local legal knowledge required to do other kinds of work.
Hope you see this very late comment, gerardrj.
The whole idea of auctioning spectrum in the US is very new; it only started in the deregulatory zeal of the Reagan administration. Prior to the auction idea, licenses were essentially charged at administrative cost; there was no concept that you were paying for the value of the spectrum you got.
The broadcast spectrum was already allocated, and with lots of incumbents it's very hard to shift to an auction model.
I ain't so sure about the auction model myself; many of the licenses were bid up to grotesquely high levels, and I think (but haven't done any recent research) that a significant number of the huge wins were never actually paid for -- the bidders couldn't come up with the cash, and bailed out leaving the spectrum unlicensed and unused.
If anything it would make more sense to have the license fee be a fixed percentage of revenue, rather than some speculative view of what the resource *might* be worth.
This is a smart move on Red Hat's part. By seeking a declaration that Linux doesn't infringe SCO's IP rights, they largely wipe out the "no indemnification" FUD that's being spread.
This also has the advantage of forcing SCO to "put up or shut up" -- in the discovery process Red Hat can demand that SCO identify each and every Linux element that is claimed to infringe. This is going to take some time (litigation is slow) and SCO will probably ask for a protective order to preserve the alleged confidentiality of their code, but sooner or later this process will smoke them out.
In the US, Part 15 of the FCC regulations governs unlicensed radio transmitters, and basically says two things: first, there are specific bands where you can operate unlicensed with specified power levels (like the 902-928 and 2.4GHz bands), and second, you can transmit anywhere else, including the broadcast bands, with much lower power levels (not specified in actual transmitter power, but in microvolts/meter of received signal strength at a specified difference).
Thus, all these very low power transmitters that talk in the broadcast bands are legal here.
Many other countries don't have nearly so liberal a policy about unlicensed transmitters -- that's why WiFi isn't technically legal in some places (like the Caribbean island that was the topic of an article a few weeks ago) and gadgets like this aren't allowed in the UK.
Although we like to bitch about "big gummint" in the US, at least in the communications arena US policies are far more open than in other parts of the world.
Another (off topic) example: radio scanner enthusiasts here like to complain because it's illegal to listen to cellular phone transmissions. But we can listen to damn near anything else, including police radio, while in many countries listening to any non-broadcast (or non-ham) radio service is strictly forbidden.
Bruce, a year or so ago you talked to the ham radio Digital Communications Conference and issued a challenge for the ham community to embrace the concept of "open source hardware" as exemplified by A HREF=http://www.opencoreshttp://www.opencores.org.
A year later, do how do you perceive the open source hardware movement? Will it have an impact similar to that of open source software?
A translation is absolutely a derivative work, covered under US copyright law and that of most other countries. The author has the right to control derivative works, both to protect the integrity of the work (e.g., by avoiding unauthorized, low-quality translations that would reflect poorly on her), and to gain the economic benefit of translating her work to make it available in new markets.
Although I strongly believe that the copyright law today has tilted far too heavily in favor of content owners, as a lawyer I have to say that this is an open and shut case -- there's simply no justification for an unauthorized translation of a work. (By the way, unlike the GPL, the copyright restrictrion on derivative works is not limited to distribution -- the mere fact of creating the translation, even for personal use, is technically a copyright infringement.
Although there are international treaties governing radio communications, those are mainly intended mainly to avoid interference. They don't govern how a government chooses to manage its licensing process. (Just as an example, contrast the US privately operated broadcast radio spectrum with the state operation of broadcasting in many countries.)
Particularly at the VHF/UHF/microwave frequencies that normally do not travel across national boundaries, even the international regulations become more limited and countries often opt out of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) agreements as to specific frequency allocations.
The unlicensed "Part 15" operation in the US is a creature of the US radio regulations, and not any international requirement -- though many other countries recognize (or at least tolerate) 802.11b operation, they aren't *required* to.
Porthcurno has already been mentioned in passing, but deserves a post of its own. The C&W Museum of Submariine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, Cornwall is way cool. This is the spot where many of the international cables (but not the ones to the US) landed, and the facilities were move in WWII into tunnels blasted into the cliff. The museum is mainly in the tunnels, and is really neat.
A bonus is that the cove and beach where the cables came in is really lovely, and there's a neat open-air theatre there (unfortunately, there were no performances when I visited. The whole area is beautiful, but the facility at Lands End is so commercialized that it's sure to disappoint.
Two other geek holy places in the general area are the site of Marconi's first transatlantic transmitting station at Poldhu, and the Goonhilly Downs (hope I didn't screw up that name) satellite receiving site that BT runs. The tour at Goonhilly is pretty lame if you're technically inclined, but the field full of big dishes is a neat site. Poldhu has no tourist facility at all, just a stunning bluff, a monmument to Marconi, and a memorial ham radio club station (unfortunately unoccupied when I was there).
Poldhu and Goonhilly are only a couple of miles apart, so you get an interesting sense of the old and the new in radio technology.
It was raining here in Ohio, so no visible sign of the Leonids. But I got up early and turned on my ham 6M and 2M rigs and heard lots of meteor-scatter activity.
Meteor trails ionize the atmosphere, making them reflective to radio waves. You can bounce signals off the trails, and there were bunches of folks doing that this morning, particularly on the 6M (50MHz) band, which is optimum for this sort of thing.
It's really interesting to listen to. You hear nothing, then all of a sudden the signal goes to S9 (ie, strong) and stays that way for anything from a couple of seconds to a minute or more. Then it fades away and you wait for the next burst.
I only had a low power transmitter, so listened a lot more than I talked, but I did work a station near Boston, MA who heard my 20 watts with no problems during a good burst. Better equipped stations were working from the east coast to well west of the Mississippi.
My gut feeling is that a loadable module that does not itself incorporate any GPL'd code does not fall under the GPL just because it's run in conjunction with a GPL'd kernel. After all, even if the kernel + driver are considered together to create a derivative work, it's the user, and not you, who creates that derivative work at runtime.
And, the fact that you're using GCC to compile the module doesn't mean anything in and of itself. The real question is the license status of any libs that are linked into the resulting object code file. Whether they are under GPL, LGPL, or something else makes a big difference.
Now for the shades of gray part... any time you're dealing with GPL questions, you have to look at the genealogy of the running executable, working backwards to see what licenses govern the component pieces. It's a very fact-intensive process, and without understanding where all the code came from, you can't come close to giving a reasonable answer.
This -- this is the funniest and most apropos post on Slashdot this year.
Check out the DSP-10 designed by Bob Larkin, W7PUA and offered as a kit by TAPR. It receives and transmits in the 2 meter amateur band (144-148MHz) using a standalone DSP card (that has power similar to a PC sound card). The code to drive it is all open source, and the DSP can not only handle traditional modes, but can also be programmed to do all sorts of neat stuff. New modulation schemes programmed into the DSP-10 have resulted in successful "moonbounce" (that's right, using the moon as a radio signal reflector) contacts with much lower power/smaller antennas than ever before used.
So, SmartFilter is at least smart enough to block its critics...
I'm kind of surprised how many KC'ers have replied. It's not a particularly common condition and I've only met one or two others in person who have it -- but there's a large online community with a very active mailing list (kc-link@nkcf.org that has several hundred subscribers.
Anyway, I have KC which reached the point where I've had (successful) cornea transplants in both eyes. I still have to wear contact lenses since the transplants, but I can now use relatively ordinary computer displays (e.g., 1024x768 on a 12.1 inch laptop screen).
Prior to the transplants, I found that a 20 inch monitor running in 800x600 mode with "large fonts" selected in Windows worked well. For character-based work in Linux, a normal 80x25 text display on the 20 inch screen was really easy to read.
Hang in there -- 90% of KCers get adequate vision with either glasses or rigid contact lenses; for the other 10% (like me), the cornea transplant has a 90%+ success rate.
In the real world, "better" isn't always the goal. The requirement is "good enough, and quickly". If I'm word processing a memo, it has to look decent and I have to be able to do it quickly. Beyond a certain level, formatting nuances just don't matter. They're a waste of time.
There are some environments (academic, desktop publishing) where this may not be true, but they're not where the money is.
But I suspect that Magic Lantern isn't going to be too easy to find in the wild... you can't characterize it if you don't have a copy available.
Doesn't the MAC address appear only on the local physical network and disappear at the first router? If you're running an NAT server, won't the MAC address seen outside just be that of that sever's interface on the cablemodem side?