There's a lot of people to blame. Including Microsoft.
Blame the users. Every time a new trojan gets passed around, it's on the news, and every time they have a security expert from Symantec or McAfee on TV warning everybody to please for the love of God stop opening attachments you're not expecting, especially if you get a generic message like "Hey, open this, it's really cool!" And every time without fail they open it anyway.
Blame the ISPs. They ought to be running a filter on their SMTP servers, with signatures updated daily. If you can't send the trojan to other people, it effectively dies. Same goes for POP3. Incidentally they have the greatest incentive out of everybody to kill this sort of thing, since they're the ones paying for the bandwidth and rebooting the flooded mail servers, but from my experience surprisingly few actually run any type of filter at all on mail servers, and fewer keep it up to date.
Blame Microsoft. What were they thinking when they released a mail program that lets external programs silently read your address book? (I'm told recent versions of Outlook/OE warn users now, but that sort of thing should have been in the original version.) And AFAIK no version of Outlook/OE will tell the user that running executables attached to messages is risky, especially if you're not expecting them, so maybe you would like to reconsider? Instead Microsoft releases a brain-dead patch that simply prohibits you from running.EXE attachments at all and declares the problem solved. Trouble is, people are afraid that sometimes there might be a legitmate reason to run.EXE attachments, so they don't install the patch.
Now Microsoft isn't the party at the biggest fault here (IMHO the ISPs who don't run mail server filters are really dropping the ball here) but they're not blameless either.
What if you have your own domain name for E-mail purposes, like if you have your own small business? So much for that, unless the people hosting your E-mail have an SMTP server available, which may not be the case if you're just using it for forwarding to your Verzion POP3 box. Ideally you could set up a SMTP server, but that isn't always feasible in the real world, and if Verizon starts blocking outgoing SMTP (like a lot of ISPs, including mine do already) you're SOL.
At any rate, if the point is to stop spammers, it's not necessarily going to be very effective, since there's no reason a spammer couldn't give a bogus @verzion.com E-mail address (or, worse, use somebody else's real one).
I remember reading somewhere the way it works is the CD has a bogus TOC, where you've got tracks that overlap each other, tracks that are longer than the length of the CD or of negative length, more than 99 tracks, you get the idea. Ordinary CD players will ignore the TOC and play right through, but CD-ROM drives will take the TOC literally and assume the disk is corrupted. This doesn't sound quite right, since AFAIK there's no reason a CD player should skip over a TOC any more than a CD-ROM drive would, so I'm assuming they used multiple sessions and gave all but the first bogus TOCs since CD players only read the first session.
I'm also told some high-end stereos, like those in cars, will reject the CDs too. It'll be interesting to see how many customers complain that their CD players won't play the CD because it doesn't conform to Red Book.
My guess is it's one of those idiot pop bands. Teenyboppers traded them like mad over Napster, but from my experience few people who like them are technically inclined enough to (a) figure out what's wrong besides "MusicMatch is broken", (b) raise a stink about copy protection in general, or (c) figure out a way around it.
If so, I'm sort of torn by this decision. On the one hand, it's copy protection, which is a Bad Thing, but on the other hand it would keep people from making copies of that music, which is a Good Thing.
If you value your privacy over getting ads that don't interest you, by all means lie. That's what I do. After all, one of the great things about the Internet is that it's pretty close to anonymous as far as marketers are concerned -- for all they know, you really are a 100-year-old woman who lives in Zip code 90210.
Except that when you get an ISP plan, you're signing a contract that the ISP will let you connect in exchange for you paying the bill (assuming they don't go under). These people agreed to pay Qwest $19.95 a month, not MSN $21.95. If these people had really wanted MSN as their ISP, they would have signed up for MSN instead.
True, they have the option to switch ISPs, but then they have to deal with the hassle of switching E-mail addresses (assuming they use Qwest's POP3 servers), dial-up settings, etc. And what if they bought, say, 12 months of Internet access? (This is not just idle whining -- my folks recently got switched to Earthlink by their ISP, who bumped the monthly fee up and refused to honor the "guaranteed" price they got from buying 12 months of access at a time. Even though MSN != Earthlink, given MSFT's history, I can see where they'd pull the same stunt.)
The bottom line is, forced ISP switching is bad, no matter who does it. And we're talking about a lot of people to inconvenience.
Another case of open-source programmers stealing ideas from Microsoft. Heck, Windows has been doing this kind of compression to random files on my hard drives for years!
Since you're wondering about who rates stuff like this, I'll let you know. (I don't know if this is true for TV and video games, but it's true for movies anyway.)
They get a group of volunteers -- basically people from off the street. These people then watch the movie and vote on what they think the rating should be. If it's borderline, then they also often give recommendations on what to cut out to get a lower rating. Movie studios are allowed to send back movies as often as they want to get re-rated -- for example, South Park, American Pie, and Eyes Wide Shut got send back to be re-rated many times to get an R rating instead of NC-17, each time with little changes that nobody would probably notice unless they were paying attention.
So basically, the average Joe rates movies. Not people who are trained in how violence/sex affects children (as if we trust them anyway), or movie reviewers who would know what is acceptable for an R rating, or anything like that. That's right, the very people that opposed [fill the blank with the name of a controversial movie] could effectively be deciding what gets cut from the theaters -- and considering how vocal so many of those people are, it wouldn't shock me if a lot of them volunteer.
Obviously, the system has its good points (probably no industry influence over the ratings) and its bad points (how do they find these people, anyway?), but most of the problems stem back to the fact that NC-17 is basically a no-no. Few people remember that Midnight Cowboy was originally rated X in theaters (though it was later re-rated R when time passed and the general public was more accepting of sexually explicit themes) and it still won the Oscar for Best Picture; NC-17 does not (always) mean porn, even though it is treated as such.
Speaking of Moore's Law, does this mean that in 18 months we'll have scientists promising half-atom transistors? Now that'll be really interesting . ..
(Disclaimer: don't bother flame^H^H^H^H^Hcorrecting me about Moore's Law not really being a law. I know that; I'm just joking.)
Not quite. The article states quite clearly that the reason why forwarding E-mail without permission is illegal is that it violates copyright laws. (In some countries, apparently including Australia, all original works are considered copyrighted, whether or not it is stated in the work. So you own the copywrite to all E-mail you write, since it is your original work.) By sending E-mail you are giving implicit consent for the SMTP servers to duplicate your message. (Now having somebody program the SMTP server and save logs of all the E-mail passing through it *would* be illegal, but I don't think anybody's going to be upset about that.)
Everybody is blowing this out of proportion. It's no different than copyright laws before, it's just been clearly extended to E-mail. You aren't banned from forwarding mail; but if you knowingly forward something that the author didn't want forwarded, then you could be sued for copyright infringement, just if you Xeroxed a copyrighted work and snailmailed it. You just need to apply some common sense when forwarding things (consider whether or not the author would have wanted them forwarded) which is a good practice anyway, copyright laws or no.
Magnetized needles? Ha! You don't know how good you've got it.
You kids today complain about having to download the CD image over a 56kpbs modem connection. Why, when I was a kid, we dreamed of 2400 baud modems. "Some day, far in the future, you might live to see 300 baud modems," our teachers told us. Sure, we had modems then, but they were only 1/2 bit per second (2 seconds per click/beep), so it was usually just easier to pick up the phone line and say "0, 1, 0, 0, 1 . .." And plus you didn't have to worry about line noise that way, which ate up 3/4 of the bits we sent.
Plus, we didn't have those new-fangled CD images either. We just had disks that were 3 feet by 3 feet and only stored 16 bytes of data. And you usually lost 14 of those from bad sectors. And our drives couldn't do any of that fancy writing stuff -- oh no. We had to shift the magnetic bits around ourselves. At least that made downloading disk images easy, because the magnetic bits were so big you could flip them like DIP switches, and you only had to speak 128 0's or 1's over the phone.
And a GUI installer? The monitors we had just had 2 pixels, and each pixel was 6 inches wide, because that was the smallest they could make them. We didn't have any fancy GUI installers or those shoot-em-up games, 'cause we only had a 2x1 resolution. But we had "Guess Which Of The Pixels Is Going To Light Up Next", which is still a better game than all the new FPSes combined.
And we had to walk 2000 miles to the closest computer store to buy it, because there was only one of those back then. And it was in the desert. We had to walk uphills both ways, too.
Yeah, I know. And it's about processors, not hard drives. And the HDD industry was doing slightly better than Moore's Law at last I heard. But still, it's a usually reasonably good gauge of future performance for most computer components, even if it wasn't intended to be.
If anything, Bush's administration might push the case even farther. Remember that Bush appointed John Ashcroft to attorney general.
When Ashcroft served as attorney general for Missouri, he wasn't exactly a fan of big business. And supposedly he's also strongly opposed to Microsoft's monopoly.
I'm not exactly sure what evidence anyone has that the Bush administration will "return to a policy of ignoring Microsoft's little shortcomings". Not only is there no evidence in Ashcroft's past performance that he would not pursue the case (if anything, the opposite is true), but I'm not exactly sure when the government "ignored" Microsoft's illegal activities, either. (The Justice Department had been waving the anti-trust stick at Microsoft long before the Clinton administration -- that's why Microsoft stopped licensing Windows so that computer manufacturers had to buy a license for each computer, regardless of whether or not Windows went on it.)
I'm not a huge fan of Bush (or Gore for that matter), but I'm confident that Ashcroft will keep the Microsoft case going through the Supreme Court.
My guess for why they're doing this is that not selling CDs means they don't have to worry about manufacturing costs. Individual CDs aren't really that expensive, but the pressing and manufacturing equipment is. Plus you have to figure in distribution costs, etc.
Better to leave it to the companies that make those $1.99 Linux CDs and such. That's the beauty of GPLed software -- anyone who wants to can sell a copy.
I was thinking more along the lines of "the Human Genome isn't open-source, but then again there's no license agreement preventing binary disassembly," but I couldn't fit it in the 120 chars and still make it witty.
The fact that they won't boot Linux or FreeBSD is only the tip of the iceberg.
My question is, if they won't boot Linux or FreeBSD, what else can't they do right? When it comes to computers refusing to do things like boot operating systems, it's usually a sign of fundamental flaws in the computer design.
It's one thing when the newest version of Windows won't boot, because it seems Microsoft changes the Windows power management specifications every 15 minutes, but it's quite enough when a modular OS like Linux won't boot. I mean, there's something horribly wrong when an open-source OS won't boot, no matter what you do to the kernel. If the computer were properly designed, then it shouldn't do that.
What frightens me is that IBM either:
Didn't test Linux, which means that their QA procedures are deficient, or
Knew that Linux was broken on their notebooks, but shipped them anyway without considering that if they don't boot Linux today they might not do something more mainstream sometime in the future.
Either way, it doesn't speak well of IBM's computer design or support staff, especially when their official attitude is "it doesn't matter if it's broken, you shouldn't be doing it anyway."
For once, innovation in Internet software! Instead of somebody cranking out yet another Internet file sharing service or portal, a company is finally doing something creative. This is one of those "why-didn't-I-think-of-that" ideas. If this really works, they could make a fortune.
What's great is that this program could, if scaled down into a personal edition, make the Internet much more accessible and useable for novices. An acquaitance once asked me to show him how to do basically the same thing: he wanted a macro to automatically import his stock portfolio information from a web page into a spreadsheet. He was kind of spoiled by a simple TRS-80 BASIC program that he had once used in the hey-days of computing that automatically dialed up Compuserve (or some other online service, I don't recall which) that would automatically download and parse stock information from one of the Compuserve forums. I had to tell him that there's no simple way to parse HTML like that, but it would have been much better if I could have pointed him to a personal version of WebSQL to use for exactly this. Just imagine if Web sites could make ready-made WebSQL scripts for their portals for users to download and use with their favorite spreadsheet or database.
Not to mention what I could do with such a fun toy.:) If they make a personal edition, and it works as advertised, I'll buy a copy for sure.
Except that this isn't just a recompilation. If it would have been just a recompilation, then SSE2 wouldn't have gotten in there (that has to be written in by hand) and the menu options to enable SSE2 couldn't be there. Even if Intel is right that they made very few modifications, they still made some, so they have to follow the GPL.
From the GPL:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
Intel's violating this section of the GPL by distributing a work based on FlasK MPEG and telling Tom that he can't redistribute the binary. The GPL prohibits them from telling Tom what he can do with the binary, or even the source for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame the users. Every time a new trojan gets passed around, it's on the news, and every time they have a security expert from Symantec or McAfee on TV warning everybody to please for the love of God stop opening attachments you're not expecting, especially if you get a generic message like "Hey, open this, it's really cool!" And every time without fail they open it anyway.
Blame the ISPs. They ought to be running a filter on their SMTP servers, with signatures updated daily. If you can't send the trojan to other people, it effectively dies. Same goes for POP3. Incidentally they have the greatest incentive out of everybody to kill this sort of thing, since they're the ones paying for the bandwidth and rebooting the flooded mail servers, but from my experience surprisingly few actually run any type of filter at all on mail servers, and fewer keep it up to date.
Blame Microsoft. What were they thinking when they released a mail program that lets external programs silently read your address book? (I'm told recent versions of Outlook/OE warn users now, but that sort of thing should have been in the original version.) And AFAIK no version of Outlook/OE will tell the user that running executables attached to messages is risky, especially if you're not expecting them, so maybe you would like to reconsider? Instead Microsoft releases a brain-dead patch that simply prohibits you from running .EXE attachments at all and declares the problem solved. Trouble is, people are afraid that sometimes there might be a legitmate reason to run .EXE attachments, so they don't install the patch.
Now Microsoft isn't the party at the biggest fault here (IMHO the ISPs who don't run mail server filters are really dropping the ball here) but they're not blameless either.
At any rate, if the point is to stop spammers, it's not necessarily going to be very effective, since there's no reason a spammer couldn't give a bogus @verzion.com E-mail address (or, worse, use somebody else's real one).
I'm also told some high-end stereos, like those in cars, will reject the CDs too. It'll be interesting to see how many customers complain that their CD players won't play the CD because it doesn't conform to Red Book.
If so, I'm sort of torn by this decision. On the one hand, it's copy protection, which is a Bad Thing, but on the other hand it would keep people from making copies of that music, which is a Good Thing.
If you value your privacy over getting ads that don't interest you, by all means lie. That's what I do. After all, one of the great things about the Internet is that it's pretty close to anonymous as far as marketers are concerned -- for all they know, you really are a 100-year-old woman who lives in Zip code 90210.
Hmm . . . I just figured somebody accidentally linked to slashdot.org in a Slashdot news story and the site finally Slashdotted itself.
A .sucks TLD was proposed to ICANN (listed here in ICANN's list of proposed TLDs in October 2000), with the stipulation that the owner of domain.sucks could not be associated with the product/company/etc. domain. I'm assuming this was rejected by ICANN, since it's not on their list of new TLDs.
Looks like NASA's finally responding to what the people want! [/me dodges thrown tomatoes]
True, they have the option to switch ISPs, but then they have to deal with the hassle of switching E-mail addresses (assuming they use Qwest's POP3 servers), dial-up settings, etc. And what if they bought, say, 12 months of Internet access? (This is not just idle whining -- my folks recently got switched to Earthlink by their ISP, who bumped the monthly fee up and refused to honor the "guaranteed" price they got from buying 12 months of access at a time. Even though MSN != Earthlink, given MSFT's history, I can see where they'd pull the same stunt.)
The bottom line is, forced ISP switching is bad, no matter who does it. And we're talking about a lot of people to inconvenience.
Moronic slogans? You mean like this?
Ugh. This is going to take those annoying goatse.cx posts to a whole new level . . .
Another case of open-source programmers stealing ideas from Microsoft. Heck, Windows has been doing this kind of compression to random files on my hard drives for years!
Since you're wondering about who rates stuff like this, I'll let you know. (I don't know if this is true for TV and video games, but it's true for movies anyway.) They get a group of volunteers -- basically people from off the street. These people then watch the movie and vote on what they think the rating should be. If it's borderline, then they also often give recommendations on what to cut out to get a lower rating. Movie studios are allowed to send back movies as often as they want to get re-rated -- for example, South Park, American Pie, and Eyes Wide Shut got send back to be re-rated many times to get an R rating instead of NC-17, each time with little changes that nobody would probably notice unless they were paying attention. So basically, the average Joe rates movies. Not people who are trained in how violence/sex affects children (as if we trust them anyway), or movie reviewers who would know what is acceptable for an R rating, or anything like that. That's right, the very people that opposed [fill the blank with the name of a controversial movie] could effectively be deciding what gets cut from the theaters -- and considering how vocal so many of those people are, it wouldn't shock me if a lot of them volunteer. Obviously, the system has its good points (probably no industry influence over the ratings) and its bad points (how do they find these people, anyway?), but most of the problems stem back to the fact that NC-17 is basically a no-no. Few people remember that Midnight Cowboy was originally rated X in theaters (though it was later re-rated R when time passed and the general public was more accepting of sexually explicit themes) and it still won the Oscar for Best Picture; NC-17 does not (always) mean porn, even though it is treated as such.
Speaking of Moore's Law, does this mean that in 18 months we'll have scientists promising half-atom transistors? Now that'll be really interesting . . .
(Disclaimer: don't bother flame^H^H^H^H^Hcorrecting me about Moore's Law not really being a law. I know that; I'm just joking.)
Not quite. The article states quite clearly that the reason why forwarding E-mail without permission is illegal is that it violates copyright laws. (In some countries, apparently including Australia, all original works are considered copyrighted, whether or not it is stated in the work. So you own the copywrite to all E-mail you write, since it is your original work.) By sending E-mail you are giving implicit consent for the SMTP servers to duplicate your message. (Now having somebody program the SMTP server and save logs of all the E-mail passing through it *would* be illegal, but I don't think anybody's going to be upset about that.) Everybody is blowing this out of proportion. It's no different than copyright laws before, it's just been clearly extended to E-mail. You aren't banned from forwarding mail; but if you knowingly forward something that the author didn't want forwarded, then you could be sued for copyright infringement, just if you Xeroxed a copyrighted work and snailmailed it. You just need to apply some common sense when forwarding things (consider whether or not the author would have wanted them forwarded) which is a good practice anyway, copyright laws or no.
You kids today complain about having to download the CD image over a 56kpbs modem connection. Why, when I was a kid, we dreamed of 2400 baud modems. "Some day, far in the future, you might live to see 300 baud modems," our teachers told us. Sure, we had modems then, but they were only 1/2 bit per second (2 seconds per click/beep), so it was usually just easier to pick up the phone line and say "0, 1, 0, 0, 1 . . ." And plus you didn't have to worry about line noise that way, which ate up 3/4 of the bits we sent.
Plus, we didn't have those new-fangled CD images either. We just had disks that were 3 feet by 3 feet and only stored 16 bytes of data. And you usually lost 14 of those from bad sectors. And our drives couldn't do any of that fancy writing stuff -- oh no. We had to shift the magnetic bits around ourselves. At least that made downloading disk images easy, because the magnetic bits were so big you could flip them like DIP switches, and you only had to speak 128 0's or 1's over the phone.
And a GUI installer? The monitors we had just had 2 pixels, and each pixel was 6 inches wide, because that was the smallest they could make them. We didn't have any fancy GUI installers or those shoot-em-up games, 'cause we only had a 2x1 resolution. But we had "Guess Which Of The Pixels Is Going To Light Up Next", which is still a better game than all the new FPSes combined.
And we had to walk 2000 miles to the closest computer store to buy it, because there was only one of those back then. And it was in the desert. We had to walk uphills both ways, too.
Yeah, I know. And it's about processors, not hard drives. And the HDD industry was doing slightly better than Moore's Law at last I heard. But still, it's a usually reasonably good gauge of future performance for most computer components, even if it wasn't intended to be.
(And I'm kind of doubting that's going to happen. I mean, come on, 10 TB for $50 in 2 years? That's a bit ahead of Moore's Law.)
If anything, Bush's administration might push the case even farther. Remember that Bush appointed John Ashcroft to attorney general.
When Ashcroft served as attorney general for Missouri, he wasn't exactly a fan of big business. And supposedly he's also strongly opposed to Microsoft's monopoly.
I'm not exactly sure what evidence anyone has that the Bush administration will "return to a policy of ignoring Microsoft's little shortcomings". Not only is there no evidence in Ashcroft's past performance that he would not pursue the case (if anything, the opposite is true), but I'm not exactly sure when the government "ignored" Microsoft's illegal activities, either. (The Justice Department had been waving the anti-trust stick at Microsoft long before the Clinton administration -- that's why Microsoft stopped licensing Windows so that computer manufacturers had to buy a license for each computer, regardless of whether or not Windows went on it.)
I'm not a huge fan of Bush (or Gore for that matter), but I'm confident that Ashcroft will keep the Microsoft case going through the Supreme Court.
My guess for why they're doing this is that not selling CDs means they don't have to worry about manufacturing costs. Individual CDs aren't really that expensive, but the pressing and manufacturing equipment is. Plus you have to figure in distribution costs, etc. Better to leave it to the companies that make those $1.99 Linux CDs and such. That's the beauty of GPLed software -- anyone who wants to can sell a copy.
I was thinking more along the lines of "the Human Genome isn't open-source, but then again there's no license agreement preventing binary disassembly," but I couldn't fit it in the 120 chars and still make it witty.
Well, consider the .sig put on hiatus until I think of something clever and right.
My question is, if they won't boot Linux or FreeBSD, what else can't they do right? When it comes to computers refusing to do things like boot operating systems, it's usually a sign of fundamental flaws in the computer design.
It's one thing when the newest version of Windows won't boot, because it seems Microsoft changes the Windows power management specifications every 15 minutes, but it's quite enough when a modular OS like Linux won't boot. I mean, there's something horribly wrong when an open-source OS won't boot, no matter what you do to the kernel. If the computer were properly designed, then it shouldn't do that.
What frightens me is that IBM either:
Didn't test Linux, which means that their QA procedures are deficient, or
Knew that Linux was broken on their notebooks, but shipped them anyway without considering that if they don't boot Linux today they might not do something more mainstream sometime in the future.
Either way, it doesn't speak well of IBM's computer design or support staff, especially when their official attitude is "it doesn't matter if it's broken, you shouldn't be doing it anyway."
What's great is that this program could, if scaled down into a personal edition, make the Internet much more accessible and useable for novices. An acquaitance once asked me to show him how to do basically the same thing: he wanted a macro to automatically import his stock portfolio information from a web page into a spreadsheet. He was kind of spoiled by a simple TRS-80 BASIC program that he had once used in the hey-days of computing that automatically dialed up Compuserve (or some other online service, I don't recall which) that would automatically download and parse stock information from one of the Compuserve forums. I had to tell him that there's no simple way to parse HTML like that, but it would have been much better if I could have pointed him to a personal version of WebSQL to use for exactly this. Just imagine if Web sites could make ready-made WebSQL scripts for their portals for users to download and use with their favorite spreadsheet or database.
Not to mention what I could do with such a fun toy. :) If they make a personal edition, and it works as advertised, I'll buy a copy for sure.
From the GPL:
Intel's violating this section of the GPL by distributing a work based on FlasK MPEG and telling Tom that he can't redistribute the binary. The GPL prohibits them from telling Tom what he can do with the binary, or even the source for that matter.