The problem with Hacker is that it now have two different meanings in the same domain (computer science) and that these meanings are totally different (on refer to something illegal and stupid the other to something legal and not stupid at all).
If we use Crackers to refer to people that break into system computer we have the same problem but "less worse". I don't care that it may refer to people in the south of the USA because this meaning is not computer related and therefore isn't that annoying. I care more that it also refer to people breaking software security in order to copy them because they both are computer related.
So we end with either calling these two groups crackers and referring to them as people cracking software security and do a distinction between two or three groups, those that crack software securities to gain the control of a computer (the hacker/cracker crowd), those that crack software securities in order to be able to redistibute these softwares (the warez crowd) and optionnaly those that do DOS (Denial Of Service of course) and Script Kiddies (they often are the same i think).
Or we have another solution, find a new word for the hacker/cracker crowd (those that break into computers). If we choos this one I would propose breackers, not that I particulary like this word (but I don't care since I don't want to be one) but since they are breaking into computers that describe them pretty well. and if this word don't sound appealing why should we care? We don't have to make these things appealing.
"FDT: Why should a company pay for software it will not control? "
When I saw that my first thought was that a lot of company already pay for software they don't control. Do you think anybody else than Microsoft control Windows or any other proprietary software??? In the case of open source you can control the software you use by paying for the first version and modifying it to fit your needs afterwards. What you can't control is the diffusion of the software and the evolution of the software outside of the enterprise (but that still let you use your own version if you want).
With proprietary software you don't control the distribution if this is not an in-house product, neither do you control the evolution.
I personnaly think that the eXchange model let you have less control over the software that in-house development but that will probably cost you less money that in-house development. On the other hand you have more control than over a proprietary software and probably for less money in the long run (it's cheaper to pay a developper to add one feature than to pay MS 1000 or 10000 licenses for this feature you need), and for less money if it allow many company to express their needs and pay a part of the project.
"berating the user with what programming is, how to make a while statement, etc."
I think the previous poster was more thinking about a chapter for the theory applied specifically to Gnome but not to any programming langage and the other chapter gving example of implementation in C. Most programmer do know how to program in C and can read C code so they quite everybody will end with having the theory and an example of the practice but can more easily implement it in his favorite langage (COBOL anyone;)))))))))) with help of another chapter about langage independancy.
"If someone pirates a CD that includes both commercial and free software (eg, Internet Explorer)"
Internet Explorer isn't a free software. In free software free mean liberty not price, in freeware free mean price not liberty, so IE is a freeware and not a free software (some could argue that using IE cost you other things that money and i agree but this isn't the point here).
I personnaly think that forcing people to buy a software with a computer without possibility of a refound (and when you need to struggle 4 months for a refund i don't call it a possibility but a nightmare) is stealing from me because I may not want this software(s) but i'm ofrced to own it.
This is the case for windows on the PC market and I wonder if this is the case on macintosh (can you have a refund if you use LinuxPPC???, has anybody ever tried???) but i think that the situation is a little bit different. On the PC market Windows is a product and the computer is a product but on the Macintosh market the whole system is the product, designed by one entity and sold by one entity (with a few cloners some time ago).
I think he was talking about the Open Sound Software driver for Linux, you can have the free version I have heard but you can also download a time-limited version and purchase it later.
For the "is it good to society to pirate" debate i want to say that I love Free Software but i think that people should have the choice to do Free Software or proprietary one and we (the users) must have the right to choose. Since all i want and need to do can be done using free software except games (that's an exception in the software market) I use Linux (grrrr, was using. I'm abroad without my computer and whitout any *NIX box around).
The game are an exception because you can quite easily change your office suite, your operating sstem,... but games are not about productivity but about fun. You can play many great games at the same time but you generally don't use many different office suite.
About stealing software one can argue that if the company make enough bucks on the non-stealed softwares then it helps this company to make more bucks because his application is more used. When you use an illegal MS Office suite you are strenghtening MS because you are helping them having quite a monopoly on the Office suite side. But that don't make this more legal of course.
their is already a word for people being both hackers and crackers: Samourai. But i think it mainly report to these being hacker and being paid to audit the security of a computer network by cracking inside.
Personnaly i think that somebody can be called both hacker and cracker only if: 1) his hacker activity is the most important of the two. 2) he don't use pre-made programs (otherwise he would be a Lamer) but crack to know more about computer security 3) he don't use well known attacks/DOS/... but try to crack using new methods so it can help finding bugs 4) he let some instructions on how to protect the network. 5) Of course, he don't destroy anything not necessary to erase the traces left by his intrusion (log files)
I view the term hacker like a compliment and the adhesion to a technical culture (for computer hackers) and a mentality. If people being hackers begin to crack other computer in an un-ethical way (not helping people but just annoying them) then I find no reason to call them hackers.
BTW: Lots of crackers like Kevin Mitnick aren't that great genius in computer science but are very good social engineers (it's sometime easier to have people telling you their password tahn cracking their encrypted password).
I found it on a website, but you can check page 265 of "the road ahead" to be sure.
He just made a big mistake and was thinking about factorising large numbers in their prime factors, shich really would be a breakthrough and would invalidate a big amount off the cryptography used today (RSA being the most obvious example).
Sometime people make big mistake so you can laugh at them... but sometime you ARE this people and that's less funny;)
Today all the shop that use NT must deal with NT bugs and try to find some workaround because they don't have the possibility to fix it (don't have the code). Your credibility to your customer can suffer from fault that aren't yours but are in the OS. If you use some open source OS you can either fix it or help other people fixing it (bug report...). Your credibility can suffer too but you can work to fix what pulled your credibility down (if this is bug related).
In on part you have more control over your destiny but in the other part you have less control over your customer (they can more easily leave if they aren't happy). So you compete on your own quality.
I really love *NIX but I think that there would be more games on the Mac. *NIX isn't really easy to use for a non techie (it's coming thanks to Gnome and KDE) and the Mac had less HW compatibility problems than the PC and less OS compatibility problem than *NIX.
They did write RPM, they are paying people to write for Gnome.
Ok they are using a lot of code they didn't write but this is the essence of Free sotware. You're not big enough to resolve all the problem in the world so you solve some of them and give the solution away so people can improve your solution and/or solve other problem...but people need to eat, so you sell some software you didn't wrote.
Redhat is licensing all is code under GPL so don't accuse them to take advantage of the community. They take advantage and they give something back, that's the fundation of every community only this is source code and hiring of hacker instead of money.
i don't know the exact adress but there is a paper on www.fsf.org that says that their product are generally expensive because this is a way to support them. If you want to help the fsf to do more software you can buy they products or just give them a check with less money if this is too expensive.
BTW: Free Software, Free has nothing to do with price, but everything to do with liberty. any company can charge 1Million for any free software if they want, but this won't be very competitive. The FSF do that because they are not a for profit company and they don't need to be competitive, so if you buy one of these very expensives CD from the FSF you are sure that it will be used for coding new softwares (no money in marketing).
Sorry but if you want to root for Microsoft then you better not go on the net or you will use Linux/*BSD/Apache/Sendmail/Bind/... which are all Free softwares.
At least with my "Average OS" I can stay with 2 weeks of uptime on my workstation without any effort on an un-stable kernel (2.1.121) and doing day to day things (progamming, reading HTML pages offline, doing my reports on StarOffice (with Java speed emulated;))...).
And BTW I'm more a Free Software zealot than a Linux zealot (this is only for myself of course).
I like Free softwares but even if this really was a law that will help Free softwares I don't want of this law. Why? Because this law is against the customer against their liberty and against technology advance. Ok this may help Free software because of this but I prefer waiting a few more years for Free software to become mainstream and do it without any law helping it by giving all the power to editors.
FUD: Certainly not. FUD means you invent/create cases to make poeple believe a product is not good/dangerous/... . If this law is voted then it will not be FUD but the sad reality. When some danger is true it's not FUD, FUD is about intoxicating, not about using dangers/flaws/... to advocate against a product. Ok FUD use one lie between two truth so it's easy to swallow the lie but this is lie nonetheless.
That's two point of view. If you want to protect your IP by restricting other people then feel free to do it but if you want to give up some of your IP rights for the community then feel free to do it, that's what free licenses allow you to do and the GPL not only allow you to do it but allow you to protect your IP so it won't be used in commercial software. That's not because you use/make closed software that you are evil, this is just a choice.
BTW: the GPL give you very few restrictions about the USE of the software and these restrictions are about preventing loopholes allowing people to close GPL'd stuff. The GPL is very restrictive about DISTRIBUTING software (which isn't the same as using). You're not allowed to distribute GPL'd stuff in binary only form without any access to the code.
The GPL is a good thing because it fills a gap in the free licenses community, but this don't mean other license are not bad or better, they just are different and can be called better or worse only when you try to apply them on your code (ie: for what you want to do it can be worse to apply the GPL than the BSD license and vice-versa).
Oups... say that to somebody else. This year I did a report about RedHat for my economy course and I had interesting feedback from them. At first I tried to e-mail at redhat.com and to browse their website but when i needed some information that weren't provided here I tried to e-mail to Bob Young himself. Not only did he respond, but he responded in French (oups... i forgot to say that i'm French;))...ok, not a very good french but he made the effort and gave me more appropriate person to contact.
I want to thanks Redhat for faciliting the access of Linux to newbie and for the good job (thanks to the other distros too).
Maybe you've got some bad manager at Redhat but I really don't think the company is evil and won't think that until they begin to release some of their own code on a non-open license.
"I think people will accept good quality, whoever gives it to them" Ok, I'm a manager and I hear on the radio that a group of hackers (in the wrong sense of the term) attacked the FBI site. Two days later I hear again about Linux, this "hacker OS". How can I trust a software to operate my company if it is written by a bunch of people attacking the FBI/Pentagon/... website???
The problem is that people can't tell the difference between hacker and cracker, so how can they trust hackers (the reals) if they think of them like if they were crackers? It is easier to have the media attention by cracking than by hacking because it is more "hot", so crackers calling themselves hacker had the attention during too many years and the medias and the opinion know their definition very well now. On the other side the hacker community is gaining more and more media audience with Linux and all the hype around. This is an unique occasion to teach the media about the first and only real meaning of the word hacker. this will be hard because it's hard to change people habit's but it's doable. If we don't fight for our name then we will lost but if we fight without ever withdrawing our effort then we will win.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Hacker is that it now have two different meanings in the same domain (computer science) and that these meanings are totally different (on refer to something illegal and stupid the other to something legal and not stupid at all).
If we use Crackers to refer to people that break into system computer we have the same problem but "less worse". I don't care that it may refer to people in the south of the USA because this meaning is not computer related and therefore isn't that annoying. I care more that it also refer to people breaking software security in order to copy them because they both are computer related.
So we end with either calling these two groups crackers and referring to them as people cracking software security and do a distinction between two or three groups, those that crack software securities to gain the control of a computer (the hacker/cracker crowd), those that crack software securities in order to be able to redistibute these softwares (the warez crowd) and optionnaly those that do DOS (Denial Of Service of course) and Script Kiddies (they often are the same i think).
Or we have another solution, find a new word for the hacker/cracker crowd (those that break into computers). If we choos this one I would propose breackers, not that I particulary like this word (but I don't care since I don't want to be one) but since they are breaking into computers that describe them pretty well. and if this word don't sound appealing why should we care? We don't have to make these things appealing.
Just my 2 cents.
Wasn't it SCO that paid royalties to MS until recentely because they were using some Xenix source code???
VMS+1= WNT
I did know this one, it reminds me of HAL+1=IBM (HAL of 2001, a space odissey of course)
It's the same as MKLinux that use the Mach Microkernel to abstract the hardware.
Would it be possible to reboot from MKLinux to darwin and vice versa by coming back to tehe Mach level and not to totally reboot like we do today??
would it be possible to do this to do speedy soft reboot between the two or between two Linux/BSD kernel???
"FDT: Why should a company pay for software it will not control? "
When I saw that my first thought was that a lot of company already pay for software they don't control. Do you think anybody else than Microsoft control Windows or any other proprietary software??? In the case of open source you can control the software you use by paying for the first version and modifying it to fit your needs afterwards. What you can't control is the diffusion of the software and the evolution of the software outside of the enterprise (but that still let you use your own version if you want).
With proprietary software you don't control the distribution if this is not an in-house product, neither do you control the evolution.
I personnaly think that the eXchange model let you have less control over the software that in-house development but that will probably cost you less money that in-house development. On the other hand you have more control than over a proprietary software and probably for less money in the long run (it's cheaper to pay a developper to add one feature than to pay MS 1000 or 10000 licenses for this feature you need), and for less money if it allow many company to express their needs and pay a part of the project.
"berating the user with what programming is, how to make a while statement, etc."
;)))))))))) with help of another chapter about langage independancy.
I think the previous poster was more thinking about a chapter for the theory applied specifically to Gnome but not to any programming langage and the other chapter gving example of implementation in C. Most programmer do know how to program in C and can read C code so they quite everybody will end with having the theory and an example of the practice but can more easily implement it in his favorite langage (COBOL anyone
"If someone pirates a CD that includes both commercial and free software (eg, Internet Explorer)"
Internet Explorer isn't a free software. In free software free mean liberty not price, in freeware free mean price not liberty, so IE is a freeware and not a free software (some could argue that using IE cost you other things that money and i agree but this isn't the point here).
I personnaly think that forcing people to buy a software with a computer without possibility of a refound (and when you need to struggle 4 months for a refund i don't call it a possibility but a nightmare) is stealing from me because I may not want this software(s) but i'm ofrced to own it.
This is the case for windows on the PC market and I wonder if this is the case on macintosh (can you have a refund if you use LinuxPPC???, has anybody ever tried???) but i think that the situation is a little bit different. On the PC market Windows is a product and the computer is a product but on the Macintosh market the whole system is the product, designed by one entity and sold by one entity (with a few cloners some time ago).
I think he was talking about the Open Sound Software driver for Linux, you can have the free version I have heard but you can also download a time-limited version and purchase it later.
For the "is it good to society to pirate" debate i want to say that I love Free Software but i think that people should have the choice to do Free Software or proprietary one and we (the users) must have the right to choose. Since all i want and need to do can be done using free software except games (that's an exception in the software market) I use Linux (grrrr, was using. I'm abroad without my computer and whitout any *NIX box around).
The game are an exception because you can quite easily change your office suite, your operating sstem,... but games are not about productivity but about fun. You can play many great games at the same time but you generally don't use many different office suite.
About stealing software one can argue that if the company make enough bucks on the non-stealed softwares then it helps this company to make more bucks because his application is more used. When you use an illegal MS Office suite you are strenghtening MS because you are helping them having quite a monopoly on the Office suite side. But that don't make this more legal of course.
No, even Disney.com would be banned. The word toy seems to be banned and Disney made Toy story a few yaers ago
their is already a word for people being both hackers and crackers: Samourai. But i think it mainly report to these being hacker and being paid to audit the security of a computer network by cracking inside.
Personnaly i think that somebody can be called both hacker and cracker only if:
1) his hacker activity is the most important of the two.
2) he don't use pre-made programs (otherwise he would be a Lamer) but crack to know more about computer security
3) he don't use well known attacks/DOS/... but try to crack using new methods so it can help finding bugs
4) he let some instructions on how to protect the network.
5) Of course, he don't destroy anything not necessary to erase the traces left by his intrusion (log files)
I view the term hacker like a compliment and the adhesion to a technical culture (for computer hackers) and a mentality. If people being hackers begin to crack other computer in an un-ethical way (not helping people but just annoying them) then I find no reason to call them hackers.
BTW: Lots of crackers like Kevin Mitnick aren't that great genius in computer science but are very good social engineers (it's sometime easier to have people telling you their password tahn cracking their encrypted password).
Just my 2 cents.
I found it on a website, but you can check page 265 of "the road ahead" to be sure.
He just made a big mistake and was thinking about factorising large numbers in their prime factors, shich really would be a breakthrough and would invalidate a big amount off the cryptography used today (RSA being the most obvious example).
Sometime people make big mistake so you can laugh at them... but sometime you ARE this people and that's less funny
Today all the shop that use NT must deal with NT bugs and try to find some workaround because they don't have the possibility to fix it (don't have the code). Your credibility to your customer can suffer from fault that aren't yours but are in the OS.
If you use some open source OS you can either fix it or help other people fixing it (bug report...). Your credibility can suffer too but you can work to fix what pulled your credibility down (if this is bug related).
In on part you have more control over your destiny but in the other part you have less control over your customer (they can more easily leave if they aren't happy). So you compete on your own quality.
I really love *NIX but I think that there would be more games on the Mac. *NIX isn't really easy to use for a non techie (it's coming thanks to Gnome and KDE) and the Mac had less HW compatibility problems than the PC and less OS compatibility problem than *NIX.
They did write RPM, they are paying people to write for Gnome.
Ok they are using a lot of code they didn't write but this is the essence of Free sotware. You're not big enough to resolve all the problem in the world so you solve some of them and give the solution away so people can improve your solution and/or solve other problem...but people need to eat, so you sell some software you didn't wrote.
Redhat is licensing all is code under GPL so don't accuse them to take advantage of the community. They take advantage and they give something back, that's the fundation of every community only this is source code and hiring of hacker instead of money.
i don't know the exact adress but there is a paper on www.fsf.org that says that their product are generally expensive because this is a way to support them. If you want to help the fsf to do more software you can buy they products or just give them a check with less money if this is too expensive.
BTW: Free Software, Free has nothing to do with price, but everything to do with liberty. any company can charge 1Million for any free software if they want, but this won't be very competitive. The FSF do that because they are not a for profit company and they don't need to be competitive, so if you buy one of these very expensives CD from the FSF you are sure that it will be used for coding new softwares (no money in marketing).
Sorry but if you want to root for Microsoft then you better not go on the net or you will use Linux/*BSD/Apache/Sendmail/Bind/... which are all Free softwares.
At least with my "Average OS" I can stay with 2 weeks of uptime on my workstation without any effort on an un-stable kernel (2.1.121) and doing day to day things (progamming, reading HTML pages offline, doing my reports on StarOffice (with Java speed emulated
And BTW I'm more a Free Software zealot than a Linux zealot (this is only for myself of course).
"is there any Microsoft stuff you would like to see on Linux? I'd like to hear answers for that one.
And I forgot: drivers for their joysticks/mouses/other hardwares. I think Microsoft do good Hardware products.
"is there any Microsoft stuff you would like to see on Linux? I'd like to hear answers for that one.
well, yes: Age of empire
It's a great game edited by Microsoft and this would do on more game for Linux.
I love Enlightenment but I would reather talk about WindowMaker for great in functionality and looks all at once (and very small BTW).
I love enlightenment but I would reather talk about WindowMaker for great in functionality and looks all at once (and very small BTW).
I like Free softwares but even if this really was a law that will help Free softwares I don't want of this law. Why? Because this law is against the customer against their liberty and against technology advance. Ok this may help Free software because of this but I prefer waiting a few more years for Free software to become mainstream and do it without any law helping it by giving all the power to editors.
"pro-OSS FUD"
pro-OSS: Yes certainly.
FUD: Certainly not. FUD means you invent/create cases to make poeple believe a product is not good/dangerous/... . If this law is voted then it will not be FUD but the sad reality. When some danger is true it's not FUD, FUD is about intoxicating, not about using dangers/flaws/... to advocate against a product. Ok FUD use one lie between two truth so it's easy to swallow the lie but this is lie nonetheless.
That's two point of view. If you want to protect your IP by restricting other people then feel free to do it but if you want to give up some of your IP rights for the community then feel free to do it, that's what free licenses allow you to do and the GPL not only allow you to do it but allow you to protect your IP so it won't be used in commercial software. That's not because you use/make closed software that you are evil, this is just a choice.
BTW: the GPL give you very few restrictions about the USE of the software and these restrictions are about preventing loopholes allowing people to close GPL'd stuff. The GPL is very restrictive about DISTRIBUTING software (which isn't the same as using). You're not allowed to distribute GPL'd stuff in binary only form without any access to the code.
The GPL is a good thing because it fills a gap in the free licenses community, but this don't mean other license are not bad or better, they just are different and can be called better or worse only when you try to apply them on your code (ie: for what you want to do it can be worse to apply the GPL than the BSD license and vice-versa).
"Redhat's growing arrogance."
Oups... say that to somebody else. This year I did a report about RedHat for my economy course and I had interesting feedback from them. At first I tried to e-mail at redhat.com and to browse their website but when i needed some information that weren't provided here I tried to e-mail to Bob Young himself. Not only did he respond, but he responded in French (oups... i forgot to say that i'm French
I want to thanks Redhat for faciliting the access of Linux to newbie and for the good job (thanks to the other distros too).
Maybe you've got some bad manager at Redhat but I really don't think the company is evil and won't think that until they begin to release some of their own code on a non-open license.
BTW: don't go and e-mail Bob without need.
"I think people will accept good quality, whoever gives it to them"
Ok, I'm a manager and I hear on the radio that a group of hackers (in the wrong sense of the term) attacked the FBI site. Two days later I hear again about Linux, this "hacker OS". How can I trust a software to operate my company if it is written by a bunch of people attacking the FBI/Pentagon/... website???
The problem is that people can't tell the difference between hacker and cracker, so how can they trust hackers (the reals) if they think of them like if they were crackers? It is easier to have the media attention by cracking than by hacking because it is more "hot", so crackers calling themselves hacker had the attention during too many years and the medias and the opinion know their definition very well now. On the other side the hacker community is gaining more and more media audience with Linux and all the hype around. This is an unique occasion to teach the media about the first and only real meaning of the word hacker. this will be hard because it's hard to change people habit's but it's doable. If we don't fight for our name then we will lost but if we fight without ever withdrawing our effort then we will win.
May the force be with all hackers.