here we go again
on
P2P in 2001
·
· Score: 5, Funny
In the old days, our computers talked to each other. I send you a mail, and my VAX sends it to your Sun. Then, everybody put a PC on their desk, and everything was centralized. I send you an email, it goes to my mail server, then to your mail server, then to your computer.
Well, now we're back again! Imagine that! Bring out the VCs! Bring out the patents!
I predict by 2005, we'll see a new form of P2P that uses a Central Peer for maximum performance. Get this folks, we all know how great P2P is, but sometimes it can be inefficient. What if your peer is down? Why not forward your data to a Central Peer, which is a beefy computer that can handle lots of data, and let it worry about the details? So your computers are on the Edge, and the big computer is at the Center of a big conversation. In fact, the Edge computers don't even have to talk to one another, they can just communicate with the Central Peer.
I dub this exciting new invention: Center/Edge computing. I have a patent, and lawyers.
The curious thing is that despite GAs being widely researched for over 20 years, they seem to have found few practical applications that I am aware of.
They are good for optimizing functions of very many variables. Like, for instance, the weights for a spam-scoring system, to maximize the score over a sample of junk mails, and minimize it on a sample of not spam mails.
IE, you have a rule that matchs the word "viagra" and a rule that matches the word "money" in a subject, obviously the first one should count more (unless you talk about viagra a lot in your emails), but how much? Imagine you have 100s of rules you came up with, a GA can optimize the weights of each rule, if you have a good selection of emails to let it evolve over.
First, the Federal Communications Commission requires that broadcast television be sent "in the clear" -- in unencrypted form -- as a matter of public policy. The argument here is that broadcasters are custodians of a public resource -- the part of the broadcasting spectrum used for television, and need to make whatever they pump into that spectrum available to everyone.
Oh man, the US gov talking about an entertainment medium as a "public resource"??? Am I the only one that sees a giant price tag on this? "Dear corporate America: for two million dollars, the airwaves will no longer be 'a public resource', but will instead be rebranded as 'an essential component to American innovation' and 'a vital tool in the fight against media piracy'.. and a law will be passed that says ALL content must be encrypted... any takers?"
Remember kids, our US government consists of four parts: the executive, the judicial, the legislative, and the corporate.
I think security is recognized as the number-one priority across the company.
After the interview, Mr. Schmidt realized that the question was actually about Microsoft's software products, and not about locking the doors each night at MS HQ.
In Germany alone, one survey by market researcher GfK found that blank CD sales jumped 129 percent this year. Purchases of pre-recorded music dropped 2.2 percent in the same period.
What a bizarre and useless statistic. What's the point? I can't even begin to comprehend. Okay, for one thing, CDRs are much cheaper than CDs. The popularity of CDRs is rising, while pre-recorded music has been around for decades. Another thing, how do they know what people record on them, or if they've recorded on them at all? I've got stacks of blank CDRs to back up files. If I make a music CD it's from music that I bought on a regular CD.
I think they ought to compare the sale of bread to the sale of pre-recorded CDs. I bet they will find a real "disturbing trend".
Snort is really nice, but I've had problems with it. First of all, if you have it listening on a dial-up and the dial-up goes down, so does snort. Now that's not a big problem, but it makes me wonder about the internal design. An IDS shouldn't quit on it's own, for any reason.
Second, on an RH7.0 machine, snort quits randomly for no apparant reason, and with no diagnostic message. I don't know if that's my fault, or what, it must be since nobody else seems to complain about it. But an IDS shouldn't quit on it's own.
Third, I was making some changes to the code and noticed some sloppy coding, including diagnostic messages not terminated by nulls, and convoluted string-matching code that would match some bytes twice. Again not a big deal, but when you see something like that, you start to wonder what else might be flakey. Will it miss something in a string someplace else?
Fourth, I sent patches for some of this to the authors, for instance rewriting the string matching code down to a few clear lines, and was ignored. After a few new versions came and went I gave up on my patches.
So hopefully this new commercial support will help get Snort cleaned up. But I for one will be very suspicious of using Snort for more than a home LAN. Probably what it needs is a ground-up re-write along the lines of BIND9.
I hate to criticize open-source software, especially something as useful as Snort (I do use it regularly). But when it comes to security stuff, code should be bulletproof and clean.
Of course, if you run the hotel, you get to say who uses the pool...
That's what I keep telling people! I own a small hotel, and I have sign at the pool that reads very clearly "NO BLACKS ALLOWED IN POOL".. you should see the fuss that it creates!
Inspired by the terms of the Microsoft settlement, where Microsoft settles by mostly donating CD-ROMs of its software, at a cost of 1/3 of a cent per disc (market value $799), the US Government has declared it will immediately discontinue its practice of paying tax refunds from treasury funds, and instead print new money for any further refunds.
Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill said, "I have learned that it only costs us 6 cents to print a dollar bill. In fact it only costs 6 cents to print any denomination, so I'll be printing a bunch of hundreds for every American."
President Bush praised the plan by saying "We can immediately gave every Americans a tax rebate of $100,000 dollars, at a minimalum cost to the governement. That will really kick-start our economy. That will show the terrorists we won't back down." President Bush added that anyone who disagrees with his plan will suffer the same fate as terrorists.
In appreciation for his excellent idea, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will be presented a half-million dollar award from the US Government, at a lavish banquet, paid for with the newly-printed dollars.
Interestingly, Mr. Gates requested his award be given to him in the form of gold bars rather than printed currency.
That's a bad analogy. It's more like four kids pressed a button on the outside of the WTC at street level, causing the towers to explode due to an engineering flaw. In other words, there is no way for a mail message to directly cause harm to your computer. It must be interpreted by a program which you trust (a traitor, in other words) which is willing to harm your computer at the command of an outside party.
Agreed, there should be absolutely NO REASON why a block of text and/or data sent to your machine should do anything you don't want it to. Since it does, and since these viruses get written over and over again, with no end in sight, the blame is with the software writers.
Now I'm not saying these kids should be let off the hook. They did something that was wrong and costly. But if we don't want to have this happen again, punishing the kids accomplishes nothing. Actually it makes the future virus writers want to learn how to be more stealthy.
The solution is sandboxes or code-checking with proofs. Or better yet, just displaying email messages as TEXT-ONLY, like they're supposed to be.
Game ports don't actually have ADC's on them. The standard design is to discharge a capacitor, then charge it through the resitance of the joystick pot, and time how long it takes to get to a specific voltage. This is related to the resistance. So, you can't use the game port for measuring voltages directly.
Erm, that's single-slope integration, that's an ADC! Many voltmeters for instance use a variation called dual-slope integration that charges a cap for a fixed time and then times the discharge back to zero. How else can a digital device measure voltage "directly"?
I think this is because book and music publishers have been around a lot longer than the software industry, and have connections to the government, so when they want to change their "license" they just get the changes passed directly into law, skipping the license stuff.
Just wait until Microsoft gets into lobbying full gear. Their multipage EULA's will probably be the default license for all software.
Popular recording artist Vanilla Ice released a statement today blaming MP3 piracy for slow sales on his latest rap album, Ize Back in Da Hood. The new album has only sold 57 copies since being released in July, and despite a $40million advertising campaign.
"I can't understand it," says Ice. "Other artists like Britney Spears and N'Sync are selling millions of records, and living in the lap of luxury. But nobody wants to buy my record. I know it's a good record, so it must be the MP3 pirates."
Ice, whose latest album includes the hit single "White People Smell Funny", is planning a lawsuit against anyone with a computer science degree. "What a bunch of losers. Everybody knows people who program computers are just sitting around planning what to steal or hack into next. I have to send a message to those guys, buy my new album or else!"
...Midbar Tech, an Israeli firm... has signed deals with three of the five major recording labels and has had discussions with the other two.
Midbar Tech's Noam Zur called copy-protection critics a fringe group
that probably are pirates themselves.
Good morning students. For your second lesson in blatant self-serving lies, replace "copy-protection critics" with "Isrealis", and "pirates" with "terrorists".
In other news, Sony has announced a new Television Family License which allows all members of a family or household (up to 5 individuals) to watch the same television, without violating the Sony Home Electronics License Agreement.
"Unauthorized television piracy has been a real problem for us.", says Steve Smith, the newly-appointed Director of Licensing Compliance at Sony. "Families would buy a single television, and then would sit together and watch programs without any regard for our license agreements. Sometimes they would even invite other people over to watch programs, without even purchasing a Single-Use Event License. We estimated that we lost over $500 billion in sales last year to this problem. This [license activation] is just a way to recoup sales lost to theft."
So how does the system work? When you first plug in your television, a string of numbers representing the body shape of the person standing in front of the TV is sent to Sony via the HumanaLicense(tm) dialup system. At that point, another string of numbers is sent back allowing the television to view broadcast stations. Without the code, the TV only plays Sony promotional material over and over again. After initial activation, the TV needs to be re-initialized whenever a different person sits in front of it for more than 25 minutes. The TV can be re-initialized up to four times, after which it needs to be returned to Sony for repair.
Some TV enthusiasts are concerned: "How can Sony get away with this?" says Rick Rayman, a self-described "videophile" who often invites friends and family over to watch movies and sports programs on his high-end setup. "I already paid them for the TV, why should it matter what I do with it inside my home?"
However Sony executives dismiss these criticisms. Smith explains: "That's exactly the attitude we're trying to fix: this weird hippy idea that once you pay the money, somehow the item is 'yours' to do with as you please. First, these pirates invite their wife into the room to illegally watch TV together, next thing you know they're shoplifting flat-screens from Wal-mart."
But already hackers have tried to break the system. A hacker group calling themselves "Television Freedom Fighters" have discovered that cutting one wire inside the television removes the protection system. The group of six kindergarden students have been identified and are being prosecuted under new anti-terrorism legislation. In addition, because the information was released on the internet, Sony is recalling the televisions and solving the problem by adding a second wire that needs to be cut.
To help ease the transition to license-based TV viewing, Sony is starting a new advertising campaign entitled "Compliance is Cool" featuring an animated talking dog named Larry. Sony plans to extend the system to other types of home electronics soon.
It does tie in to the idea that copyright should only exist for a limited amount of time, much like parents only need to control their children for a limited amount of time.
Re:Not Doing Something vs. Doing Its Opposite
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 2
If RMS and company want to exercise their freedom of speech (in America, anyway) and not support something, why is anyone complaining?
In a way, RMS is the grandfather of Open Source and Linux and all the stuff that the/. crowd uses everyday, and I think they get pissed at how hard line he is, and how political he is. They wish he would help the community more directly rather than ranting and raving about insignificant things all the time.
I think he's doing just fine.. I'm smart enough to read what he writes and pick out what's important and what makes sense, and what's just politics or minutia.
RMS isn't god, or president, he's just presenting his opinion.
The fundamental problem with anarchism lies in this statement. Open Source's GPL itself requires a heirarchy to maintain it, although it was designed to fight a heirarchy.
Keep in mind, if their was no copyright law for software, there probably wouldn't be a need for a GPL in the first place.
And the GPL came before Open Source so you can't really say Open Source's GPL.
This software may be used by any person other than RMS, and for any reason. RMS may not view this code; hell, he can't even be told it exists. The only restriction on derived works is that it must retain all RMS-free provisions.
Well, at least the FSF says they don't discriminate against users of the software. They COULD discriminate against, say, businesses, but they don't, even though people want to pretend they do.
If so, why are programmers different from, oh, lawyers? (They must represent anyone who demands their services, without compensation.) Or doctors and dentists? Or taxi drivers. Or anyone else in the service sector?
Yes, why are programmers different? Why do they get to put the result of their services on a disc and sell it over and over again, and put you in jail for violating their arbitrary terms?
When I go to the doctor, he doesn't insist that I pay him once a year for the results of his surgery. He doesn't sue me if I tell others how to avoid getting sick. I pay my doctor for his time.
If I take my car in to get fixed, I'm allowed to reverse-engineer what the mechanic did and even do it again to my car by myself. I could even put it on the internet and I wouldn't get sued.
The taxi driver doesn't charge me based on the type of destination (oh, you're going to work? That's Business Level service. Going home from work? That's Personal Level, 5 cents cheaper!) Again he is paid for his time (or distance really).
My accountant, I can get him to do my tax return once and then use it as reference each year after. No terms to violate. Even if their were terms, how would he know?
A software license is simply a contract. If the contract says, "in exchange for the use of this software, I agree not to give copies of it away" or whatever, that's not fundamentally different from a contract that says, "in exchange for the use of this software and source code, I agree to publish any changes I make to it".
Yes and that's exactly the problem with software and copyrights. Simply by opening the box, you basically agree to an arbitrary contract. Many times the contract is INSIDE the box. That what RMS is talking about. You didn't get to negotiate this contract, many times you didn't get to read it, and many times if you did you wouldn't agree to it.
It shouldn't be possible for me to get you to agree to a contract just by clicking a button or opening a box. Think about this, how many times a week do you click a button when surfing the web or opening a box to eat breakfast? Should it really be possible for those actions to put you in a legally binding contract??? I don't think so.
I'd like to see software licenses require a signature on pen and paper. Then I bet you'd see a lot less of this bullshit like "You can't use this software to disparage Microsoft". Companies might even compete on the basis of license.
Of course I hear you say, I can learn about the license and choose whether or not to wiggle my little finger or whatever I need to do to agree to it, and thus freedom is preserved. But it's a matter of degrees, and just having a copy should not be enough to bind you to arbitrary terms. Or just surfing a web site or similar actions.
In my opinion, RMS is right, the licenses grant arbitrary power to the copyright holder in exchange for distributing copies. The solution is to either 1) do away with software copyright, or 2) create a default set of limitations on distribution and allow a copyright holder only to remove restrictions from this set, not add any.
Well some docs are here, and the mod_rewrite reference is here.
Here is a goofy example that does a redirect back to their google query, except with the word "porn" appended to it. As an added bonus, it only does it when the clock's seconds are an even number. (Or do the same test to the last digit of their IP address). Replace the plus sign before "porn" with about 100 plus signs and they won't see the addition because each plus sign becomes a space. The "%1" refers to their original query.
Here's another one that checks the user-agent for an URL, and then redirects to it. This keeps most spiders and stuff off your pages since they usually put their URLs in the User-Agent:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "(http://[^ )]+)"
RewriteRule . %1 [R=permanent,L]
Anything you can think of is possible. I think you can even hook it into external scripts.
Well it's not as good/effective an idea as what this fellow is suggesting, but you can have a lot of fun with people based on their Referer fields. for instance, use it to just bounce them back to their queries, or bounce them to a different query (one for porn sites is always fun), or bounce them to a more relevant page, or fuck with them however you like. If you've ever had to set up Apache to block people from linking your images, you already know how to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
In the old days, our computers talked to each other. I send you a mail, and my VAX sends it to your Sun. Then, everybody put a PC on their desk, and everything was centralized. I send you an email, it goes to my mail server, then to your mail server, then to your computer.
Well, now we're back again! Imagine that! Bring out the VCs! Bring out the patents!
I predict by 2005, we'll see a new form of P2P that uses a Central Peer for maximum performance. Get this folks, we all know how great P2P is, but sometimes it can be inefficient. What if your peer is down? Why not forward your data to a Central Peer, which is a beefy computer that can handle lots of data, and let it worry about the details? So your computers are on the Edge, and the big computer is at the Center of a big conversation. In fact, the Edge computers don't even have to talk to one another, they can just communicate with the Central Peer.
I dub this exciting new invention: Center/Edge computing. I have a patent, and lawyers.
Yawn.
The curious thing is that despite GAs being widely researched for over 20 years, they seem to have found few practical applications that I am aware of.
They are good for optimizing functions of very many variables. Like, for instance, the weights for a spam-scoring system, to maximize the score over a sample of junk mails, and minimize it on a sample of not spam mails.
IE, you have a rule that matchs the word "viagra" and a rule that matches the word "money" in a subject, obviously the first one should count more (unless you talk about viagra a lot in your emails), but how much? Imagine you have 100s of rules you came up with, a GA can optimize the weights of each rule, if you have a good selection of emails to let it evolve over.
Forget Skylarov, I want to know more about this beautiful and intelligent Lisa Rein person!!!
*swoon*
First, the Federal Communications Commission requires that broadcast television be sent "in the clear" -- in unencrypted form -- as a matter of public policy. The argument here is that broadcasters are custodians of a public resource -- the part of the broadcasting spectrum used for television, and need to make whatever they pump into that spectrum available to everyone.
Oh man, the US gov talking about an entertainment medium as a "public resource"??? Am I the only one that sees a giant price tag on this? "Dear corporate America: for two million dollars, the airwaves will no longer be 'a public resource', but will instead be rebranded as 'an essential component to American innovation' and 'a vital tool in the fight against media piracy'.. and a law will be passed that says ALL content must be encrypted... any takers?"
Remember kids, our US government consists of four parts: the executive, the judicial, the legislative, and the corporate.
I think security is recognized as the number-one priority across the company.
After the interview, Mr. Schmidt realized that the question was actually about Microsoft's software products, and not about locking the doors each night at MS HQ.
In Germany alone, one survey by market researcher GfK found that blank CD sales jumped 129 percent this year. Purchases of pre-recorded music dropped 2.2 percent in the same period.
What a bizarre and useless statistic. What's the point? I can't even begin to comprehend. Okay, for one thing, CDRs are much cheaper than CDs. The popularity of CDRs is rising, while pre-recorded music has been around for decades. Another thing, how do they know what people record on them, or if they've recorded on them at all? I've got stacks of blank CDRs to back up files. If I make a music CD it's from music that I bought on a regular CD.
I think they ought to compare the sale of bread to the sale of pre-recorded CDs. I bet they will find a real "disturbing trend".
Snort is really nice, but I've had problems with it. First of all, if you have it listening on a dial-up and the dial-up goes down, so does snort. Now that's not a big problem, but it makes me wonder about the internal design. An IDS shouldn't quit on it's own, for any reason.
Second, on an RH7.0 machine, snort quits randomly for no apparant reason, and with no diagnostic message. I don't know if that's my fault, or what, it must be since nobody else seems to complain about it. But an IDS shouldn't quit on it's own.
Third, I was making some changes to the code and noticed some sloppy coding, including diagnostic messages not terminated by nulls, and convoluted string-matching code that would match some bytes twice. Again not a big deal, but when you see something like that, you start to wonder what else might be flakey. Will it miss something in a string someplace else?
Fourth, I sent patches for some of this to the authors, for instance rewriting the string matching code down to a few clear lines, and was ignored. After a few new versions came and went I gave up on my patches.
So hopefully this new commercial support will help get Snort cleaned up. But I for one will be very suspicious of using Snort for more than a home LAN. Probably what it needs is a ground-up re-write along the lines of BIND9.
I hate to criticize open-source software, especially something as useful as Snort (I do use it regularly). But when it comes to security stuff, code should be bulletproof and clean.
Of course, if you run the hotel, you get to say who uses the pool ...
That's what I keep telling people! I own a small hotel, and I have sign at the pool that reads very clearly "NO BLACKS ALLOWED IN POOL".. you should see the fuss that it creates!
In a future version of Linux, you'll probably see something like:
I wonder if that would good enough to let Linux off the hook in the future Copyright Wars?
Inspired by the terms of the Microsoft settlement, where Microsoft settles by mostly donating CD-ROMs of its software, at a cost of 1/3 of a cent per disc (market value $799), the US Government has declared it will immediately discontinue its practice of paying tax refunds from treasury funds, and instead print new money for any further refunds.
Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill said, "I have learned that it only costs us 6 cents to print a dollar bill. In fact it only costs 6 cents to print any denomination, so I'll be printing a bunch of hundreds for every American."
President Bush praised the plan by saying "We can immediately gave every Americans a tax rebate of $100,000 dollars, at a minimalum cost to the governement. That will really kick-start our economy. That will show the terrorists we won't back down." President Bush added that anyone who disagrees with his plan will suffer the same fate as terrorists.
In appreciation for his excellent idea, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will be presented a half-million dollar award from the US Government, at a lavish banquet, paid for with the newly-printed dollars.
Interestingly, Mr. Gates requested his award be given to him in the form of gold bars rather than printed currency.
That's a bad analogy. It's more like four kids pressed a button on the outside of the WTC at street level, causing the towers to explode due to an engineering flaw. In other words, there is no way for a mail message to directly cause harm to your computer. It must be interpreted by a program which you trust (a traitor, in other words) which is willing to harm your computer at the command of an outside party.
Agreed, there should be absolutely NO REASON why a block of text and/or data sent to your machine should do anything you don't want it to. Since it does, and since these viruses get written over and over again, with no end in sight, the blame is with the software writers.
Now I'm not saying these kids should be let off the hook. They did something that was wrong and costly. But if we don't want to have this happen again, punishing the kids accomplishes nothing. Actually it makes the future virus writers want to learn how to be more stealthy.
The solution is sandboxes or code-checking with proofs. Or better yet, just displaying email messages as TEXT-ONLY, like they're supposed to be.
Game ports don't actually have ADC's on them. The standard design is to discharge a capacitor, then charge it through the resitance of the joystick pot, and time how long it takes to get to a specific voltage. This is related to the resistance. So, you can't use the game port for measuring voltages directly.
Erm, that's single-slope integration, that's an ADC! Many voltmeters for instance use a variation called dual-slope integration that charges a cap for a fixed time and then times the discharge back to zero. How else can a digital device measure voltage "directly"?
If you read a book, there is no license
I think this is because book and music publishers have been around a lot longer than the software industry, and have connections to the government, so when they want to change their "license" they just get the changes passed directly into law, skipping the license stuff.
Just wait until Microsoft gets into lobbying full gear. Their multipage EULA's will probably be the default license for all software.
Piracy Ruins Vanilla Ice's Career
Artist blames MP3 sharing services for slow sales
Popular recording artist Vanilla Ice released a statement today blaming MP3 piracy for slow sales on his latest rap album, Ize Back in Da Hood. The new album has only sold 57 copies since being released in July, and despite a $40million advertising campaign.
"I can't understand it," says Ice. "Other artists like Britney Spears and N'Sync are selling millions of records, and living in the lap of luxury. But nobody wants to buy my record. I know it's a good record, so it must be the MP3 pirates."
Ice, whose latest album includes the hit single "White People Smell Funny", is planning a lawsuit against anyone with a computer science degree. "What a bunch of losers. Everybody knows people who program computers are just sitting around planning what to steal or hack into next. I have to send a message to those guys, buy my new album or else!"
Midbar Tech's Noam Zur called copy-protection critics a fringe group that probably are pirates themselves.
Good morning students. For your second lesson in blatant self-serving lies, replace "copy-protection critics" with "Isrealis", and "pirates" with "terrorists".
The German Constitution (Grundgesetz) does not allow censorship however there are some restrictions on free speech..
Hmm... "does not allow censorship" ... "there are some restrictions on free speech"
Glad to see that America isn't the only country where people sometimes have difficulty reading the constitution! :-)
(I know, I know, the constitution isn't black and white like that.. save your flames.)
In other news, Sony has announced a new Television Family License which allows all members of a family or household (up to 5 individuals) to watch the same television, without violating the Sony Home Electronics License Agreement.
"Unauthorized television piracy has been a real problem for us.", says Steve Smith, the newly-appointed Director of Licensing Compliance at Sony. "Families would buy a single television, and then would sit together and watch programs without any regard for our license agreements. Sometimes they would even invite other people over to watch programs, without even purchasing a Single-Use Event License. We estimated that we lost over $500 billion in sales last year to this problem. This [license activation] is just a way to recoup sales lost to theft."
So how does the system work? When you first plug in your television, a string of numbers representing the body shape of the person standing in front of the TV is sent to Sony via the HumanaLicense(tm) dialup system. At that point, another string of numbers is sent back allowing the television to view broadcast stations. Without the code, the TV only plays Sony promotional material over and over again. After initial activation, the TV needs to be re-initialized whenever a different person sits in front of it for more than 25 minutes. The TV can be re-initialized up to four times, after which it needs to be returned to Sony for repair.
Some TV enthusiasts are concerned: "How can Sony get away with this?" says Rick Rayman, a self-described "videophile" who often invites friends and family over to watch movies and sports programs on his high-end setup. "I already paid them for the TV, why should it matter what I do with it inside my home?"
However Sony executives dismiss these criticisms. Smith explains: "That's exactly the attitude we're trying to fix: this weird hippy idea that once you pay the money, somehow the item is 'yours' to do with as you please. First, these pirates invite their wife into the room to illegally watch TV together, next thing you know they're shoplifting flat-screens from Wal-mart."
But already hackers have tried to break the system. A hacker group calling themselves "Television Freedom Fighters" have discovered that cutting one wire inside the television removes the protection system. The group of six kindergarden students have been identified and are being prosecuted under new anti-terrorism legislation. In addition, because the information was released on the internet, Sony is recalling the televisions and solving the problem by adding a second wire that needs to be cut.
To help ease the transition to license-based TV viewing, Sony is starting a new advertising campaign entitled "Compliance is Cool" featuring an animated talking dog named Larry. Sony plans to extend the system to other types of home electronics soon.
Eric Leach is an intellectual property and business law attorney at the firm of Goodman and Leach.
Good Man or Leech? I think I'd like to talk to Mr. Good Man please!!
It does tie in to the idea that copyright should only exist for a limited amount of time, much like parents only need to control their children for a limited amount of time.
If RMS and company want to exercise their freedom of speech (in America, anyway) and not support something, why is anyone complaining?
In a way, RMS is the grandfather of Open Source and Linux and all the stuff that the /. crowd uses everyday, and I think they get pissed at how hard line he is, and how political he is. They wish he would help the community more directly rather than ranting and raving about insignificant things all the time.
I think he's doing just fine.. I'm smart enough to read what he writes and pick out what's important and what makes sense, and what's just politics or minutia.
RMS isn't god, or president, he's just presenting his opinion.
The fundamental problem with anarchism lies in this statement. Open Source's GPL itself requires a heirarchy to maintain it, although it was designed to fight a heirarchy.
Keep in mind, if their was no copyright law for software, there probably wouldn't be a need for a GPL in the first place.
And the GPL came before Open Source so you can't really say Open Source's GPL.
This software may be used by any person other than RMS, and for any reason. RMS may not view this code; hell, he can't even be told it exists. The only restriction on derived works is that it must retain all RMS-free provisions.
Well, at least the FSF says they don't discriminate against users of the software. They COULD discriminate against, say, businesses, but they don't, even though people want to pretend they do.
If so, why are programmers different from, oh, lawyers? (They must represent anyone who demands their services, without compensation.) Or doctors and dentists? Or taxi drivers. Or anyone else in the service sector?
Yes, why are programmers different? Why do they get to put the result of their services on a disc and sell it over and over again, and put you in jail for violating their arbitrary terms?
When I go to the doctor, he doesn't insist that I pay him once a year for the results of his surgery. He doesn't sue me if I tell others how to avoid getting sick. I pay my doctor for his time.
If I take my car in to get fixed, I'm allowed to reverse-engineer what the mechanic did and even do it again to my car by myself. I could even put it on the internet and I wouldn't get sued.
The taxi driver doesn't charge me based on the type of destination (oh, you're going to work? That's Business Level service. Going home from work? That's Personal Level, 5 cents cheaper!) Again he is paid for his time (or distance really).
My accountant, I can get him to do my tax return once and then use it as reference each year after. No terms to violate. Even if their were terms, how would he know?
A software license is simply a contract. If the contract says, "in exchange for the use of this software, I agree not to give copies of it away" or whatever, that's not fundamentally different from a contract that says, "in exchange for the use of this software and source code, I agree to publish any changes I make to it".
Yes and that's exactly the problem with software and copyrights. Simply by opening the box, you basically agree to an arbitrary contract. Many times the contract is INSIDE the box. That what RMS is talking about. You didn't get to negotiate this contract, many times you didn't get to read it, and many times if you did you wouldn't agree to it.
It shouldn't be possible for me to get you to agree to a contract just by clicking a button or opening a box. Think about this, how many times a week do you click a button when surfing the web or opening a box to eat breakfast? Should it really be possible for those actions to put you in a legally binding contract??? I don't think so.
I'd like to see software licenses require a signature on pen and paper. Then I bet you'd see a lot less of this bullshit like "You can't use this software to disparage Microsoft". Companies might even compete on the basis of license.
Of course I hear you say, I can learn about the license and choose whether or not to wiggle my little finger or whatever I need to do to agree to it, and thus freedom is preserved. But it's a matter of degrees, and just having a copy should not be enough to bind you to arbitrary terms. Or just surfing a web site or similar actions.
In my opinion, RMS is right, the licenses grant arbitrary power to the copyright holder in exchange for distributing copies. The solution is to either 1) do away with software copyright, or 2) create a default set of limitations on distribution and allow a copyright holder only to remove restrictions from this set, not add any.
Well some docs are here, and the mod_rewrite reference is here.
Here is a goofy example that does a redirect back to their google query, except with the word "porn" appended to it. As an added bonus, it only does it when the clock's seconds are an even number. (Or do the same test to the last digit of their IP address). Replace the plus sign before "porn" with about 100 plus signs and they won't see the addition because each plus sign becomes a space. The "%1" refers to their original query.
Here's another one that checks the user-agent for an URL, and then redirects to it. This keeps most spiders and stuff off your pages since they usually put their URLs in the User-Agent:
Anything you can think of is possible. I think you can even hook it into external scripts.
Well it's not as good/effective an idea as what this fellow is suggesting, but you can have a lot of fun with people based on their Referer fields. for instance, use it to just bounce them back to their queries, or bounce them to a different query (one for porn sites is always fun), or bounce them to a more relevant page, or fuck with them however you like. If you've ever had to set up Apache to block people from linking your images, you already know how to do it.