What if I'm not using a VPN but just doing research on the web for work? Are the cable companies gonna stipulate that you can't do anything for a business from home, even browsing the web?
All that you're supposed to be doing with it is downloading "digital content" and associated advertisements from major media companies. You're a home user, right? That means that you aren't supposed to be able to think for yourself or want to do anything creative or interesting with your computer and your internet connection. Remember, it's a cable modem. That means you're supposed to use it like cable TV. You want to pretend that you're a thinking individual, well, in this country, you gotta pay extra for that, because that's not what the economy needs of its citizens.
...is that people seem to think that "EULA" stands for "End User Licence Agreement," and that the user is being licenced to do something.
In fact, if companies would more clearly call them "ALUE", or "Agreement of License to the User's (back) End", then it would be clear what these things are really for, and what the customer was really agreeing to, without having to read many pages of lawyereese.
On the bright side: if commercial software publishers get very agressive about their sunset clauses and charging regular relicensing fees, that is going to be a bigger advertisement for Open Source and Free software than anything any of us could do!
I would run cat-5 cable if I were you. It will be useful for the forseeable future... and who knows what you will want to have run in 10 years? Redo it when the time comes. In the mean time, for a house network, it's hard to imagine 100Mb/s not being sufficient for several years.
I've run cat-5 cable in two houses. After a few months, you forget how painful it was and are just grateful to have it. In my old house, which was very small, I only wired a couple of rooms, but it was nice once it was there. In the new house, I only wired a single room. I intended to wire several more... but instead got myself a couple of wireless cards. The desktop has a card, and I have a second for the laptop. I run them in Ad-Hoc mode. It's much more convenient this way. I had intended to have lots of drops wired in, so that I could run my laptop in whatever room, but now I can do that with a very minimum of pain. More expensive, yes, but more flexible and much easier to install in the first place.
(The one wire runs between the room with my desktop and the cable modem, and the room with my Wife's desktop. Since both computers stay in one place all the time, it makes sense to have wires for them. Since my Linux desktop is also the house router, it has three network cards: one for the cable modem, one for the house net, and one wireless card. I have two different private 192.168.x.x subnets in just my one house....)
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Why do they care how it gets used? If I spend my 10 MB/s downloading porn or if I only use half of it and then let my neighbor use the other half...seems like the problem is not people "stealing" bandwidth but the providers not provisioning correctly.
Fairness and reasonableness is irrelevant. The real reason is that they think it's easiest to charge more by charging more per device (it "seems fair" to the casual user who hasn't thought about it as you have), so therefore they are going to try to do it that way.
...this just confirms that "a map" may be the best navigation system out there, if only because it's quiet.
And "a book" may be the best way to read a book, because you can carry it with you and read it wherever, even without violating the law.
What I'm afraid of is the day where you can't get 99% of the books in paper, and where cars come with always-on navigation and "security monitoring" systems which blare ads at you without your ability to stop it.
I'm not afraid of technology. I'm afraid of the dunderheads we have running our world, and what they will do with technology (or anything else).
Patents are granted by the patent office. They are not Valid until tested in a law court. It is not the patent office's job to determine whether there is prior art.
While I'm not questioning that this is how it works, I think it should not work this way. Going to court is expensive. And, more often than not in cases like this, it's having the better and higher paid lawyer that decides who wins, not being right. So the deck is immediately stacked against open standard development projects such as PNG. Unless they can enlist rich and powerful allies, they're hosed. Apple's got the muscle and the lawyers to force compliance because the mere threat of going to court, and the resultant expense and hassle, is a very big stick, even if Apple doesn't have a chance of winning the case.
The civil law system we have in place right now is very easily used by bullies for bullying. And that sucks.
How about using a bloody stencil to paint block letters on the side of a stupid truck?
This is so irritating. Some obvious technique gets applied with computers, and all of a sudden some arrogant stuck up company gets a patent on it and starts throwing their weight around to stop open standard development. It makes me sick.
Honestly, the day somebody gets a computer to pick their nose, a company's going to have a patent on it and try to make money off of it.
Last I checked (which was a while ago), Linux kernels included only DRI support for XFree86 4.1, whereas Alan kernels included DRI support for both (or, rather one or the other, selected at compilation time). What will be the case with future official 2.4.x kernels?
Sturgeons law is utterly inadequate to describe the web. Way, way, way more than 95% of it is crap.
What's more, I do a lot of my surfing right now because it's free. I can live without it, and if I have to do any sort of pay-per-view, I will. There are a small number of web services I wouldn't want to live without; those I would much prefer to "subscribe" to. (Pay $15 a year or some such for unlimited use.) Indeed, I already do pay for a couple of them. So I'm not being a "cheap Slashdot freeloader" here. I'm just saying that it's not worth it to me to have to watch the balance rise as I surf the web, and there are a lot of pages out there that aren't even worth $0.01 to me.
I'm presuming that not all pages will go pay. I certainly don't intend to charge for people to view my fluffy pages (and I will be pissed if my service providers decide to do so under some future version of this scheme), and I'm hoping that a lot of the stuff out there (especially educational and academic things) will remain free. I hope that all of the rest is clearly marked so that I know to avoid it unless it's worth paying for me.
I wasn't trained. I was in a scientific group. I was a geek. I liked learning how Linux worked (and by extention Unix). Nobody else was running the computers. Next thing I knew it, even though I was supposed to be a physicist, I was probably spending 10-20% of my time keeping up to 20 workstations and cluster nodes going. I think I did a halfway decent job of it.
This is scary. I have an HP28S, but I am afraid of what to do if it ever dies.
Me three. Indeed, my 28S is showing signs of its age. The plastic battery door is gone, but the metal part is still there, so it still works. It's more precarious, though. More distressingly, somethings come a little bit detached on the right side keyboard, so that the faceplate is a little bit loose and occasionally the keys bounce. But I'd be very very sad if I had to do without this, or some other HP.
I've had this thing since 1988. One of the best Christmas presents I ever got.
Uh if you know what you are doing with RedHat you could have done that. In Redhat you can select from individual packages. I think 300M would have been emough, to install the very minimul toolset.
Believe me, I spent a long time trying. It wasn't worth it; even if at some point I could have gotten it to work, I wasted too much time trying to whittle the RedHat package list down to something that would fit on that laptop. Selecting the individual packages was great, except that the Red Hat web of interdependencies is so tangled that it's very hard to select a subset without a whole host of other things you don't think you need being advected in.
Back when I installed RedHat-6.2 on this sytem, I could do it by not installing X, then cleaning *by hand* a lot of the things like documentation and extra stuff from the rpms, and the installing the X RPMs. But as of 7.1, even that doesn't work; even a non-X install which was borderline functional didn't seem to be feasable with RedHat.
Slackware, on the other hand, was able to "fully" instal *with* X. No, I didn't install Gnome or KDE; wouldn't want to try them on a 486 anyway! But I did get X and fvwm2 working with a (relative) minimum of pain. (The only pain came from the fact that XFree86-4.1 no longer supports the video chipset in that laptop! There is a hack you can do by installing the old 3.3.6 server binary, however. See my web page for info.)
Mind you, I love RedHat for a "modern" system (i.e. anything Pentium or faster with at least a 4GB hard drive), but it's just not ideal for older more limited systems.
In III.A: Nothing in this provision shall prohibit Microsoft from enforcing any provision of any license with any OEM or any intellectual property right that is not inconsistent with this Final Judgment.
Put that together with III.J: J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall... Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, including without limitation, keys, authorization tokens or enforcement criteria
We've all seen the proposed text of the SSSCA. That says that everything which processes digital information must have security protocols for enforcing digital "rights", i.e. copyrights. Even though signs are promising that the SSSCA per se will go down in flames, it's not too much of a stretch to suppose that some legislation, at some point, will get passed which does define anything capable of processing digital data as capable of illegally copying intellectual property-- since it, of course, is. So, put that together with this loophole up here, and suddenly Microsoft can argue that they don't have to tell anybody absolutely anything about any of their protocols because it would "compromise anti-piracy systems".
Never mind the whole Microsoft "security through obscurity" argument: they're always saying that Windows is more secure because nobody sees its source code, so therefore it's harder to hack into those systems. We know it's bull$#!+, but they argue it a lot. It doesn't take much of a stretch for them to argue that their protocols are more secure if they are hidden... and then they can rest nicely in this loophole right again. They can continue "embrace and extend" monopolistic policies, making their own protocols and keeping them hidden, while claiming to maintain full compliance with this judgement, since after all they're only keeping the stuff hidden for "security reasons."
Microsoft has been slapped with a wet noodle. This is ridiculous.
I was recently very grateful for Slackware. I wanted to install a modern, up-to-date distro on an ancient 486 laptop with a ~300MB hard drive. Red Hat, which is what I use on my desktop and on all my machines at work, just laughed at my naivete, thinking that I could install Linux on a drive so small. Slackware, however, worked without a hitch. See http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/linux/canonib150c.html.
Mono is a development platform,.NET My Services are web services provided by Microsoft. What exactly makes you thing there is any relationship at all?
From the About Us page on the Ximian website, "...announced Mono Project, a community initiative to develop an open source, Linux-based version of the Microsoft.NET development platform."
It's little statements like that that make stupid people like me think Mono might just have something to do with.NET.
The FAQ you point at claims that Mono has nothing to do with Passport-- although I think my questions still stand. Would users have to pay if they use Mono to hook into passport? (Presumably yes.) Would Mono developers have to pay if Mono had the capacity to hook into Passport? (No clue).
That FAQ doesn't say a damn thing about "My Services", whatever that is. The article says something about creating applications which can hook into "My Services." Is this going to include anything that uses the.NET API (that thing which Mono is emulating)? Again, I don't know. Saying "Mono has nothing to do with.NET My Services" doesn't even come close to addressing any of the questions I ask. Indeed since Mono trumpets itself as a replacement of some of the things in.NET, it's only natural to ask how Mono is affected when there is an article about licensing fees of some portion of.NET (particularly if the vocabulary is not the same as what's in the Mono FAQ).
With the failings of the dotcom model, someone needs to start using the web for just more than a bunch of websites offering resources and to put this emmence network to some practical use.
Where does this assumption come from that if big companies aren't making money off of it, the net is not being of practical use? I just don't get it. Yes, I can see why companies would want to find a way to make the web useful for business. What I don't get is why all of us as a whole world population should think that this is necessary for the web to be useful. I send lots of E-mail; I find scientific preprints online; I can easily post information that people across the world can see; I download huge quantities of free software to run personal and professonal workstations; I order some books and computer hardware online. All of these things are of tremedous use to me, but by and large only the infrastructure providers are profiting off of it. Why should we think that the web isn't of any use right now just because, as one self-styled luminary noted, it isn't obeying some basic rules of business?
Mind you, if companies do find ways to make money off if it, I don't begrudge that... IF (1) I'm not forced into using it (and with M$ behind passport, I bet it will get very difficult for me to do the sort of online commerce I've done in the pass without giving into it, which will piss me off), and if (2) the great elements about the open web which is a "collection of websites" right now don't go away (and the entertainment industry very much wants them to go away in order to turn the internet into the next TV so that they can more easily make money off of it). I'm not anti-business, but I really would like the internet and the web to keep some of the great features it has right now.
I see things like this, and my first reaction is that it confirms my biases that Miguel de Icaza et al. have gone completely off their rocker by thinking that they can work with Microsoft and support.NET using Mono or anything else developed as true free or open source software.
How does this affect Mono anyway? Will somebody have to cough up in order to develop Mono? While, sure, Ximian could pay, what happens when Ximian does an Eazel? Nautilus is still with us; if Mono is open source, it would still be with us too, except then who has to pay? Or does M$ then sue the entire open source community for working on a.NET application without anybody paying the fees? Or do we really believe that somehow Mono is going to have unfettered access to the APIs it needs without having to pay?
Or would it only be the users of Mono who had to pay the fees?
The lesson I personally would take from this is "stay away." The free software community would do much better to come up with its own solution to the need (if there is one) that.NET is addressing, rather than trying to support the.NET platform. Honestly, if we don't want to hand over all final control of all computing and web standards to Microsoft, we need to be doing everything we can right now to (at best) make them irrelevant, or (at worst) keep just enough of a competing presence in there that open standards can't be summarily ignored.
Certainly, the X model can be improved upon. The main problem with using X over the Net is that it is very sensitive to latency. It doesn't matter if you have a Gigabit connection -- if you have significant lag (like the ~250ms in satellite connections), X will run like a dog.
Tell me about it. Especially for those of us who use terminal sessions-- latency is a killer when there's a 1/4-1/2 second delay between typing and seeing what you type.
I would love to see an "X Replacement," but if it driven by what games need, it probably won't really do what we need X to do very well...
However it only applies to things in the future....They will have to cease manufacture of all non-secure hardwares and softwares.
Like, say, the next release of Linux? So linux 2.4.12-ac3 is grandfathered in. But nobody can release any security patched versions without putting in SSSCA controls. This is not a very wide loophole you mention here.
Even Linux aside, look at the computer industry. How much hardware and software which was released even a few years ago is still relevant? This is a fast moving industry. Start right now requiring that everything have copy controls, and in less than a decade, it will be impossible to find or use a computer anywhere that doesn't have it. If the law at all resembles the SSSCA, it will also be impossible to find or use any open source software in this country, at least legally.
Stupid and overzealous? Are all you people insane?
A real lawyer, (i.e. not some AC posting on slashdot) has told him that if he publishes this there's a slim but real chance he could do *#!%ing Federal jail time! Prison!
Yes, and this is probably true, and that's why the law is so stupid. On the other hand, think about what really gets you in trouble-- it's not just violating a law with potential high penalties. It's violating a law and doing it in such a way that it annoys somebody enough to do something about it. Sklyarov is in jail because of an insane law and because Adobe and the APA realized that they could use this insane law
get him jailed; it was Adobe, after all, that filed the complaint with the justice department and tipped them off that Sklyarov would be in the country. Felten ticked off the RIAA. The DeCSS kid ticked off the DVDCCA. None of these people violated any copyrights, and indeed were exercising traditional constitutional freedoms or doing things necessary for others to exercise fair use-- but each one of them ticked off some pretty powerful people.
Posting the nature of whatever those user/file permission security patches were, however, would not tick off anybody. Yes, file permissions could theoretically be used as a copy control measure. Who with the power of Adobe or the RIAA is really using them as such however? While Alan's legal advice that posting his security fixes is probably technically correct, practically speaking the probability of his serving jail time, even if he foolishly comes to that police state known as the USA, is vanishingly small. Hence, he's being overzealous in reality-- although it is an effectively way of making a point.
That posting the security fix would even technically be against the DMCA is a striking illustration of just how stupid that law is, and how stupid our country (for those of us in the USA) is. United We Stand, Never We Think.
Is the USA in danger of losing its lead in the technology sector?
Yes. A combination of a monopoly in part of that sector, which incidentally uses its huge financial power to great effect on the government, and the stranglehold of the huge powerful USA entertainment industry on our (eminently purchasable) government, threatens to choke of technical innovation altogether (while meanwhile outlawing open source and free software). It hasn't happened yet, and it doesn't have to happen, but if you deny that there are serious threats that it's happening, you're either a not-paying-attention optimist, or an apologist.
(b) The X window system is a network-transparent graphical desktop environment based around the client-server paradigm. Sure, that could be useful.
You can't really have it both ways. It would probably be true to say, though, that the need for (b) is dying out,
My need for (b) is most definitely not dying out! I would find it sad if support for X under Linux started to seriously wane as people put all of their emphasis in having everything work blindingly fast when rendering directly to the hardware on which the application is running. I do play games occasionally, but most of the time I'm using my Linux boxen to do work. Remote shell sessions are the most common, but it's not infrequent for me to use a number of other remote X sessions, which are made possible, easy, and transparent by the client/server architecture of X. I do not forsee any time in the near future where I could hope to run the things I need to run entirely on whichever machine I happen to be working locally on.
Hopefully, there are enough other people out there like me to keep XFree86 going, so that even if "most people" start using something like DirectFB, X will still be an option. (Much as Gnome will still be an option if everybody starts using KDE, or vice versa; this is the beauty of free software.)
On a list that reaches US citizens - no. File permissions and userids may
constitute and be used for rights management.
By that theory, telling somebody how to set the root password on their Linux machine constitutes trafficking in circumvention technology.
There are two conclusions from this. One, Alan is being stupid and overzealous, even if he did find a lawyer who told him that posting information about the security fixes could violate the DMCA. Two, the DMCA is a stupid and ridiculous law, and the full level of its stupidity (and the stupidity of our lawmakers and law enforcers) is being demostrated by the DeCSS, Felton, and Sklyarov cases. I am embarassed to be a citizen of a country that has such a law (although it will take the SSSCA to force me to flee the country as a political defector, the DMCA isn't enough to push me that far).
The DMCA has got to go, but I fear I see no way in the world that we'll ever be able to get rid of it short of it being declared unconstitutional, or short of extreme campaign finance reform that remakes Congress into representatives of their constituents.
I didn't write to Gregg, though I did write to my own congressman and senators. I also sent E-mail to a whole bunch of friends encouraging them to write. (My wife wrote in, and got an E-mail back from the senator saying that yes, he too was strongly in favor of gun rights. Gotta love it when it's so bloody obvious that nobody reads these things.)
I doubt I can take much credit for this, though. I suspect that Gregg was swayed by either public opinion, or, more likely, by the usual suite of deep pockets in Washington who pointed out that these sorts of things would make life very difficult for big campaign donors.
Of course, there's recent rumblings from the RIAA and the MPAA that they think that privacy legislation is their biggest threat; wait for the "defense of copyright" bills which say that any encryption product must pass escrowed keys to the government and to the AAP, RIAA, and MPAA so that they can enforce their copyrights! Terrorism schmerrorism, the greatest threat to the USA is that somebody somewhere might be making copies of USA mass media products!!!!!.
Slashdot Mirror
What if I'm not using a VPN but just doing research on the web for work? Are the cable companies gonna stipulate that you can't do anything for a business from home, even browsing the web?
All that you're supposed to be doing with it is downloading "digital content" and associated advertisements from major media companies. You're a home user, right? That means that you aren't supposed to be able to think for yourself or want to do anything creative or interesting with your computer and your internet connection. Remember, it's a cable modem. That means you're supposed to use it like cable TV. You want to pretend that you're a thinking individual, well, in this country, you gotta pay extra for that, because that's not what the economy needs of its citizens.
-Rob
...is that people seem to think that "EULA" stands for "End User Licence Agreement," and that the user is being licenced to do something.
In fact, if companies would more clearly call them "ALUE", or "Agreement of License to the User's (back) End", then it would be clear what these things are really for, and what the customer was really agreeing to, without having to read many pages of lawyereese.
On the bright side: if commercial software publishers get very agressive about their sunset clauses and charging regular relicensing fees, that is going to be a bigger advertisement for Open Source and Free software than anything any of us could do!
-Rob
I would run cat-5 cable if I were you. It will be useful for the forseeable future... and who knows what you will want to have run in 10 years? Redo it when the time comes. In the mean time, for a house network, it's hard to imagine 100Mb/s not being sufficient for several years.
I've run cat-5 cable in two houses. After a few months, you forget how painful it was and are just grateful to have it. In my old house, which was very small, I only wired a couple of rooms, but it was nice once it was there. In the new house, I only wired a single room. I intended to wire several more... but instead got myself a couple of wireless cards. The desktop has a card, and I have a second for the laptop. I run them in Ad-Hoc mode. It's much more convenient this way. I had intended to have lots of drops wired in, so that I could run my laptop in whatever room, but now I can do that with a very minimum of pain. More expensive, yes, but more flexible and much easier to install in the first place.
(The one wire runs between the room with my desktop and the cable modem, and the room with my Wife's desktop. Since both computers stay in one place all the time, it makes sense to have wires for them. Since my Linux desktop is also the house router, it has three network cards: one for the cable modem, one for the house net, and one wireless card. I have two different private 192.168.x.x subnets in just my one house....)
-Rob
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Why do they care how it gets used? If I spend my 10 MB/s downloading porn or if I only use half of it and then let my neighbor use the other half...seems like the problem is not people "stealing" bandwidth but the providers not provisioning correctly.
Fairness and reasonableness is irrelevant. The real reason is that they think it's easiest to charge more by charging more per device (it "seems fair" to the casual user who hasn't thought about it as you have), so therefore they are going to try to do it that way.
-Rob
...this just confirms that "a map" may be the best navigation system out there, if only because it's quiet.
And "a book" may be the best way to read a book, because you can carry it with you and read it wherever, even without violating the law.
What I'm afraid of is the day where you can't get 99% of the books in paper, and where cars come with always-on navigation and "security monitoring" systems which blare ads at you without your ability to stop it.
I'm not afraid of technology. I'm afraid of the dunderheads we have running our world, and what they will do with technology (or anything else).
-Rob
Patents are granted by the patent office. They are not Valid until tested in a law court. It is not the patent office's job to determine whether there is prior art.
While I'm not questioning that this is how it works, I think it should not work this way. Going to court is expensive. And, more often than not in cases like this, it's having the better and higher paid lawyer that decides who wins, not being right. So the deck is immediately stacked against open standard development projects such as PNG. Unless they can enlist rich and powerful allies, they're hosed. Apple's got the muscle and the lawyers to force compliance because the mere threat of going to court, and the resultant expense and hassle, is a very big stick, even if Apple doesn't have a chance of winning the case.
The civil law system we have in place right now is very easily used by bullies for bullying. And that sucks.
-Rob
How about using a bloody stencil to paint block letters on the side of a stupid truck?
This is so irritating. Some obvious technique gets applied with computers, and all of a sudden some arrogant stuck up company gets a patent on it and starts throwing their weight around to stop open standard development. It makes me sick.
Honestly, the day somebody gets a computer to pick their nose, a company's going to have a patent on it and try to make money off of it.
-Rob
Last I checked (which was a while ago), Linux kernels included only DRI support for XFree86 4.1, whereas Alan kernels included DRI support for both (or, rather one or the other, selected at compilation time). What will be the case with future official 2.4.x kernels?
-Rob
Sturgeons law is utterly inadequate to describe the web. Way, way, way more than 95% of it is crap.
What's more, I do a lot of my surfing right now because it's free. I can live without it, and if I have to do any sort of pay-per-view, I will. There are a small number of web services I wouldn't want to live without; those I would much prefer to "subscribe" to. (Pay $15 a year or some such for unlimited use.) Indeed, I already do pay for a couple of them. So I'm not being a "cheap Slashdot freeloader" here. I'm just saying that it's not worth it to me to have to watch the balance rise as I surf the web, and there are a lot of pages out there that aren't even worth $0.01 to me.
I'm presuming that not all pages will go pay. I certainly don't intend to charge for people to view my fluffy pages (and I will be pissed if my service providers decide to do so under some future version of this scheme), and I'm hoping that a lot of the stuff out there (especially educational and academic things) will remain free. I hope that all of the rest is clearly marked so that I know to avoid it unless it's worth paying for me.
-Rob
I wasn't trained. I was in a scientific group. I was a geek. I liked learning how Linux worked (and by extention Unix). Nobody else was running the computers. Next thing I knew it, even though I was supposed to be a physicist, I was probably spending 10-20% of my time keeping up to 20 workstations and cluster nodes going. I think I did a halfway decent job of it.
-Rob
This is scary. I have an HP28S, but I am afraid of what to do if it ever dies.
Me three. Indeed, my 28S is showing signs of its age. The plastic battery door is gone, but the metal part is still there, so it still works. It's more precarious, though. More distressingly, somethings come a little bit detached on the right side keyboard, so that the faceplate is a little bit loose and occasionally the keys bounce. But I'd be very very sad if I had to do without this, or some other HP.
I've had this thing since 1988. One of the best Christmas presents I ever got.
-Rob
Uh if you know what you are doing with RedHat you could have done that. In Redhat you can select from individual packages. I think 300M would have been emough, to install the very minimul toolset.
Believe me, I spent a long time trying. It wasn't worth it; even if at some point I could have gotten it to work, I wasted too much time trying to whittle the RedHat package list down to something that would fit on that laptop. Selecting the individual packages was great, except that the Red Hat web of interdependencies is so tangled that it's very hard to select a subset without a whole host of other things you don't think you need being advected in.
Back when I installed RedHat-6.2 on this sytem, I could do it by not installing X, then cleaning *by hand* a lot of the things like documentation and extra stuff from the rpms, and the installing the X RPMs. But as of 7.1, even that doesn't work; even a non-X install which was borderline functional didn't seem to be feasable with RedHat.
Slackware, on the other hand, was able to "fully" instal *with* X. No, I didn't install Gnome or KDE; wouldn't want to try them on a 486 anyway! But I did get X and fvwm2 working with a (relative) minimum of pain. (The only pain came from the fact that XFree86-4.1 no longer supports the video chipset in that laptop! There is a hack you can do by installing the old 3.3.6 server binary, however. See my web page for info.)
Mind you, I love RedHat for a "modern" system (i.e. anything Pentium or faster with at least a 4GB hard drive), but it's just not ideal for older more limited systems.
-Rob
That's no moon.
In III.A: Nothing in this provision shall prohibit Microsoft from enforcing any provision of any license with any OEM or any intellectual property right that is not inconsistent with this Final Judgment.
Put that together with III.J: J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall... Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, including without limitation, keys, authorization tokens or enforcement criteria
We've all seen the proposed text of the SSSCA. That says that everything which processes digital information must have security protocols for enforcing digital "rights", i.e. copyrights. Even though signs are promising that the SSSCA per se will go down in flames, it's not too much of a stretch to suppose that some legislation, at some point, will get passed which does define anything capable of processing digital data as capable of illegally copying intellectual property-- since it, of course, is. So, put that together with this loophole up here, and suddenly Microsoft can argue that they don't have to tell anybody absolutely anything about any of their protocols because it would "compromise anti-piracy systems".
Never mind the whole Microsoft "security through obscurity" argument: they're always saying that Windows is more secure because nobody sees its source code, so therefore it's harder to hack into those systems. We know it's bull$#!+, but they argue it a lot. It doesn't take much of a stretch for them to argue that their protocols are more secure if they are hidden... and then they can rest nicely in this loophole right again. They can continue "embrace and extend" monopolistic policies, making their own protocols and keeping them hidden, while claiming to maintain full compliance with this judgement, since after all they're only keeping the stuff hidden for "security reasons."
Microsoft has been slapped with a wet noodle. This is ridiculous.
Foo.
-Rob
I was recently very grateful for Slackware. I wanted to install a modern, up-to-date distro on an ancient 486 laptop with a ~300MB hard drive. Red Hat, which is what I use on my desktop and on all my machines at work, just laughed at my naivete, thinking that I could install Linux on a drive so small. Slackware, however, worked without a hitch. See http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/linux/canonib150c.html .
-Rob
Mono is a development platform, .NET My Services are web services provided by Microsoft. What exactly makes you thing there is any relationship at all?
From the About Us page on the Ximian website, "...announced Mono Project, a community initiative to develop an open source, Linux-based version of the Microsoft.NET development platform."
It's little statements like that that make stupid people like me think Mono might just have something to do with .NET.
The FAQ you point at claims that Mono has nothing to do with Passport-- although I think my questions still stand. Would users have to pay if they use Mono to hook into passport? (Presumably yes.) Would Mono developers have to pay if Mono had the capacity to hook into Passport? (No clue).
That FAQ doesn't say a damn thing about "My Services", whatever that is. The article says something about creating applications which can hook into "My Services." Is this going to include anything that uses the .NET API (that thing which Mono is emulating)? Again, I don't know. Saying "Mono has nothing to do with .NET My Services" doesn't even come close to addressing any of the questions I ask. Indeed since Mono trumpets itself as a replacement of some of the things in .NET, it's only natural to ask how Mono is affected when there is an article about licensing fees of some portion of .NET (particularly if the vocabulary is not the same as what's in the Mono FAQ).
-Rob
With the failings of the dotcom model, someone needs to start using the web for just more than a bunch of websites offering resources and to put this emmence network to some practical use.
Where does this assumption come from that if big companies aren't making money off of it, the net is not being of practical use? I just don't get it. Yes, I can see why companies would want to find a way to make the web useful for business. What I don't get is why all of us as a whole world population should think that this is necessary for the web to be useful. I send lots of E-mail; I find scientific preprints online; I can easily post information that people across the world can see; I download huge quantities of free software to run personal and professonal workstations; I order some books and computer hardware online. All of these things are of tremedous use to me, but by and large only the infrastructure providers are profiting off of it. Why should we think that the web isn't of any use right now just because, as one self-styled luminary noted, it isn't obeying some basic rules of business?
Mind you, if companies do find ways to make money off if it, I don't begrudge that... IF (1) I'm not forced into using it (and with M$ behind passport, I bet it will get very difficult for me to do the sort of online commerce I've done in the pass without giving into it, which will piss me off), and if (2) the great elements about the open web which is a "collection of websites" right now don't go away (and the entertainment industry very much wants them to go away in order to turn the internet into the next TV so that they can more easily make money off of it). I'm not anti-business, but I really would like the internet and the web to keep some of the great features it has right now.
-Rob
I see things like this, and my first reaction is that it confirms my biases that Miguel de Icaza et al. have gone completely off their rocker by thinking that they can work with Microsoft and support .NET using Mono or anything else developed as true free or open source software.
How does this affect Mono anyway? Will somebody have to cough up in order to develop Mono? While, sure, Ximian could pay, what happens when Ximian does an Eazel? Nautilus is still with us; if Mono is open source, it would still be with us too, except then who has to pay? Or does M$ then sue the entire open source community for working on a .NET application without anybody paying the fees? Or do we really believe that somehow Mono is going to have unfettered access to the APIs it needs without having to pay?
Or would it only be the users of Mono who had to pay the fees?
The lesson I personally would take from this is "stay away." The free software community would do much better to come up with its own solution to the need (if there is one) that .NET is addressing, rather than trying to support the .NET platform. Honestly, if we don't want to hand over all final control of all computing and web standards to Microsoft, we need to be doing everything we can right now to (at best) make them irrelevant, or (at worst) keep just enough of a competing presence in there that open standards can't be summarily ignored.
-Rob
Certainly, the X model can be improved upon. The main problem with using X over the Net is that it is very sensitive to latency. It doesn't matter if you have a Gigabit connection -- if you have significant lag (like the ~250ms in satellite connections), X will run like a dog.
Tell me about it. Especially for those of us who use terminal sessions-- latency is a killer when there's a 1/4-1/2 second delay between typing and seeing what you type.
I would love to see an "X Replacement," but if it driven by what games need, it probably won't really do what we need X to do very well...
-Rob
However it only applies to things in the future. ...They will have to cease manufacture of all non-secure hardwares and softwares.
Like, say, the next release of Linux? So linux 2.4.12-ac3 is grandfathered in. But nobody can release any security patched versions without putting in SSSCA controls. This is not a very wide loophole you mention here.
Even Linux aside, look at the computer industry. How much hardware and software which was released even a few years ago is still relevant? This is a fast moving industry. Start right now requiring that everything have copy controls, and in less than a decade, it will be impossible to find or use a computer anywhere that doesn't have it. If the law at all resembles the SSSCA, it will also be impossible to find or use any open source software in this country, at least legally.
Stupid and overzealous? Are all you people insane?
A real lawyer, (i.e. not some AC posting on slashdot) has told him that if he publishes this there's a slim but real chance he could do *#!%ing Federal jail time! Prison!
Yes, and this is probably true, and that's why the law is so stupid. On the other hand, think about what really gets you in trouble-- it's not just violating a law with potential high penalties. It's violating a law and doing it in such a way that it annoys somebody enough to do something about it. Sklyarov is in jail because of an insane law and because Adobe and the APA realized that they could use this insane law get him jailed; it was Adobe, after all, that filed the complaint with the justice department and tipped them off that Sklyarov would be in the country. Felten ticked off the RIAA. The DeCSS kid ticked off the DVDCCA. None of these people violated any copyrights, and indeed were exercising traditional constitutional freedoms or doing things necessary for others to exercise fair use-- but each one of them ticked off some pretty powerful people.
Posting the nature of whatever those user/file permission security patches were, however, would not tick off anybody. Yes, file permissions could theoretically be used as a copy control measure. Who with the power of Adobe or the RIAA is really using them as such however? While Alan's legal advice that posting his security fixes is probably technically correct, practically speaking the probability of his serving jail time, even if he foolishly comes to that police state known as the USA, is vanishingly small. Hence, he's being overzealous in reality-- although it is an effectively way of making a point.
That posting the security fix would even technically be against the DMCA is a striking illustration of just how stupid that law is, and how stupid our country (for those of us in the USA) is. United We Stand, Never We Think.
-Rob
Is the USA in danger of losing its lead in the technology sector?
Yes. A combination of a monopoly in part of that sector, which incidentally uses its huge financial power to great effect on the government, and the stranglehold of the huge powerful USA entertainment industry on our (eminently purchasable) government, threatens to choke of technical innovation altogether (while meanwhile outlawing open source and free software). It hasn't happened yet, and it doesn't have to happen, but if you deny that there are serious threats that it's happening, you're either a not-paying-attention optimist, or an apologist.
-Rob
(b) The X window system is a network-transparent graphical desktop environment based around the client-server paradigm. Sure, that could be useful.
You can't really have it both ways. It would probably be true to say, though, that the need for (b) is dying out,
My need for (b) is most definitely not dying out! I would find it sad if support for X under Linux started to seriously wane as people put all of their emphasis in having everything work blindingly fast when rendering directly to the hardware on which the application is running. I do play games occasionally, but most of the time I'm using my Linux boxen to do work. Remote shell sessions are the most common, but it's not infrequent for me to use a number of other remote X sessions, which are made possible, easy, and transparent by the client/server architecture of X. I do not forsee any time in the near future where I could hope to run the things I need to run entirely on whichever machine I happen to be working locally on.
Hopefully, there are enough other people out there like me to keep XFree86 going, so that even if "most people" start using something like DirectFB, X will still be an option. (Much as Gnome will still be an option if everybody starts using KDE, or vice versa; this is the beauty of free software.)
-Rob
On a list that reaches US citizens - no. File permissions and userids may constitute and be used for rights management.
By that theory, telling somebody how to set the root password on their Linux machine constitutes trafficking in circumvention technology.
There are two conclusions from this. One, Alan is being stupid and overzealous, even if he did find a lawyer who told him that posting information about the security fixes could violate the DMCA. Two, the DMCA is a stupid and ridiculous law, and the full level of its stupidity (and the stupidity of our lawmakers and law enforcers) is being demostrated by the DeCSS, Felton, and Sklyarov cases. I am embarassed to be a citizen of a country that has such a law (although it will take the SSSCA to force me to flee the country as a political defector, the DMCA isn't enough to push me that far).
The DMCA has got to go, but I fear I see no way in the world that we'll ever be able to get rid of it short of it being declared unconstitutional, or short of extreme campaign finance reform that remakes Congress into representatives of their constituents.
-Rob
I didn't write to Gregg, though I did write to my own congressman and senators. I also sent E-mail to a whole bunch of friends encouraging them to write. (My wife wrote in, and got an E-mail back from the senator saying that yes, he too was strongly in favor of gun rights. Gotta love it when it's so bloody obvious that nobody reads these things.)
I doubt I can take much credit for this, though. I suspect that Gregg was swayed by either public opinion, or, more likely, by the usual suite of deep pockets in Washington who pointed out that these sorts of things would make life very difficult for big campaign donors.
Of course, there's recent rumblings from the RIAA and the MPAA that they think that privacy legislation is their biggest threat; wait for the "defense of copyright" bills which say that any encryption product must pass escrowed keys to the government and to the AAP, RIAA, and MPAA so that they can enforce their copyrights! Terrorism schmerrorism, the greatest threat to the USA is that somebody somewhere might be making copies of USA mass media products!!!!!.
-Rob
I work for a company that (among other things) sells predictive dialer systems to telemarketing services.
No offense, but...
...can you sleep at night?
-Rob