I actually thought that the explosion of the Death Star, which occurred "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" would have just about reached us by now. Watch for a second similar "mystery" explosion in about ten years.
And watch for the "mystery" re-releases of those explosions in about twenty years, or the next time George Lucas needs money...whichever comes first.
can someone explain to me why people care about windows media player being bundled with windows? i could maybe understand internet explorer, maybe. but wmp? what?
The point of...
Internet Explorer...Originally, to put the cross-platform web browsers out of business, and to bastardize the html standard so that other web browsers can display the W3C's version of html, but cannot display what most other people pereive to be html
Windows Media Player...to run other (read "cross-platform") mp3 players out of business and to push the wma standard on the general public
Microsoft Java...to bastardize the java standard so that SUN's virtual machine cannot display what most people consider to be "java"
Active directory...to...yada...yada....bastardize LDAP...yada yada
That's the nature of "embrace and extend", but bundling Microsoft's server software with Windows server does not seem like a violation of the sherman antitrust act to me. IANAL, but Microsoft does not have a monopoly in the server-side operating system market. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and bundling is only illegal if you're using one monopoly to gain a uncompetitive advantage.
Besides, as a non-legal argument, Windows server software is the only reason you would ever want windows server. Who would buy a windows server license just to run openLDAP, apache, and mySQL?
As for bundling outlook with office, that may be a different story. I haven't worked in enough businesses to know if WORD/Excel is a monopoly, but I do know that exchange/outlook is becoming popular for it's non-mail related functions. I don't know about that one.
And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.
Windows sales overtook Unix sales by 200 million dollars, and Linux sales grew by 1 billion dollars. This isn't exactly an example of Windows toppling the competition.
Come on, the only plus of FF7AC was great gfx and cool combat sequences. The plot was pathetic.
I'm not too familiar with FF7AC, but, as a whole, the Final Fantasy series has come up with some excellent settings, and epic plots. I would have expected a final fantasy movie to have been more epic, like a Lord of The Rings movie, but instead, "the Spirits Within" was more on par with an MTV Films release.
That's one of the things I've found most interesting in my n00bie programming travels. As a chemical engineer, I find that the programming I do (mostly scripting for automating Office and text manipulation to get stuff into Excel, or Word, etc.) serves me and my buddies quite well, but the solutions developed by central IT are usually complicated, buggy, and just plain awful. They seem to have little idea of what *our* (the engineers) workflow/work process is.
Understanding the actual needs of the enduser, I think, is one of the biggest challenges for programmers. What do they really need? Will they understand it? Will new "gee-whiz" features really be welcomed? And for that matter, do the programmers really undersand my job?
To sum up, it's easier to program for yourself than for others, it seems. You know your job better than anyone else. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of interviewing and discussing before you code a single line. You'll end up with a *much* better product if you listen to your endusers well.
Do you think this has something to do with the fact that software (and, by extension, the programmer's job performance) is often judged, not by the complexity of its core requirement, but by the number of bells and whistles in the user interface?
Microsoft is finally starting to get it. Their newest innovation is a command-line interface that isn't severly nerfed. They could call it "my Bash" or "shell.net", but I think they're trying to pass it off as an original idea. It took them twenty years to realize that point and click isn't the best possible interface for all purposes.
But, I may be getting off subject...just a thought...
Umm, ever tried to use the internet in a major city in India? The fastest internet connection I've ever used was at Delhi internet cafe's. And, last time I checked, India is still supposed to be 3rd world.
That doesn't tell us much...How fast is the connection in the cafe, and the rest of india, if you don't mind me asking...
Just because you see the issue as black-and-white and obvious doesn't mean that other people do, and it also doesn't mean that it really is. You say that gay-rights don't hurt anybody. I say it depends on the right. The gov't has no right to be surveying people's sex lives, but by the same token marriage - and the family - are the bedrock of human society. In my opinion the gov't has asolutely no business issuing marriage licenses to anyone if marriage is just about love. You don't need the county clerk to give you a license to love. That's stupid. Have you ever realized how ridiculous it sounds to get a license from the gov't if marriage is just about love and commitment and all that jazz?
My sister-in-law is married, and has no intention of having children. Under your line of reasoning, that, too should be illegal. And infertile couples should also be illegal. But, there is a loophole. Gay couples can adopt. So, if a gay couple adopts a child, then they should be able to get married, right?
But, wait a second, what is the purpose of marriage, then? You say that a devoted a monogamous couple can stay devoted and monogamous, with or without a sheet of paper (and family insurance, and certain inheritance rights, and the ability to visit loved ones in Intensive care units, or to have one's opinion legally considered relevant if the spouse should end up unable to state his or her own wishes), but why can't monogamous parents do the same thing? Isn't this more about the legal right to be recognized as an important part of someone's family?
Also, even if the only purpose of marriage is to promote the family, for the children(TM), then isn't it sending a mixed marriage to state that no one else is allowed to participate? I'm not accusing you of this, but it seems to me that the religious right is pushing homosexuals as far from their religion as possible, and, by doing so, encouraging a counter-culture. Why should homosexuals have healthy, monogamous relationships, when society tells them that "the church" has a monopoly on that sort of thing, and "the church" hates them? I could easily see how some homosexuals would take great joy in doing things that would annoy the hell out of intolerent fundamentalist preachers. It seems to me that marriage encourages some good ideas which would benefit anybody.
But it doesn't have to be so purile. Ever hear of in-game weddings? Any time RP-oriented players get together, a wedding is bound to happen and WoW is no exception. Now while marriage isn't all about sex, sexuality is certainly a part of it. And in fact, the whole recent hullabaloo seems to have stemmed from a in-game same-sex marriage.
This sounds like an argument against the Bill O'Reilly philosophy. Bill O'Reilly often seems to argue that homosexuals should be invisible because the mere classification is obsene and suggestive. As if it never occurred to him that he can tell children "some men like women and some men like men", without having to explain the intricate details of "sodomy" and oral sex to an eight-year old.
IHMO, the whole issue hinges on whether this is about a gay wedding, or a gay protest. I can see the escapist argument, and wouldn't want to have a law saying that people can organize in-game protests, something-pride parades, racially motivated guild wars (race as in real-world ethnicity), or political rallies getting in the way of my killing sprees. This has the potential to turn a game into something very ugly.
To totally hose a good system to make it "fair" to people. Sorry, applying for jobs is not a "random" process. Both the worker and the company want what is best for them. picking people at "random" hurts the applicant and the company by bad pairings. way to go dc, inefficency is key!
Where are you getting "random"? The posting says that employers cannot hire people who do not meet the minimum qualifications listed, but it never says "random employment". It __DOES__ seem to have a goal of getting employers to hire people they don't know, but that is based on the employee's resume.
Plus, what the crap, if I "apply" for a job online they look at my resume and they talk to me, they setup and interview. Now if some @#*(%& employer hires an employee purely based off what is said of a bleeding website then they deserve a crappy employee.
I think this law was meant to do the opposite of what you're saying. It is common practice in the tech community for an employer to demand the moon and then settle for whatever they can get. This could also give them a convenient way around discrimination lawsuits. They can say, "well, we couldn't hire the the black guy because he wasn't qualified", but the truth is that nobody was qualified. They just bent the rules for friends/family/etc, and declared the same rules abosolute for everyone else.
As for the soviet union thing, that's way out of line. In russia, nobody got a job from a website....Oh, I guess this is a little like soviet russia, then...
So, the premise of his article is that the average user doesn't care about security
Captain Obvious strikes again!
The second premise is that people who do make backups on windows systems don't do so on linux systems...When has this ever happened? The type of user this article is talking about never made any backups on any system. Maybe they tried to, but ended up with a CD full of windows shortcuts, but I promise you, anyone who is smart enough to use linux will not throw away all good computing habits, just because they think they can.
The few points I would have conceided, had the author made them, are that one of the reasons more viruses exist on Windows is because more people use windows, so virus writers write for the more popular system, and that the best security in the world doesn't matter when the end-user doesn't care. If the end user can't install malware because he isn't root, then he'll log in as root and install it anyway. If the end-user is constantly running into this kind of thing, then the end user will use "root" as his primary account. The MAJORITY of CASUAL end-users take the path of least resisitance, which also happens to be the path of least security.
This whole thing reminds me of when Neil Cavuto remarked about the Microsoft antitrust trial. He never mentioned that the lawsuit had something to do with bundling one monopoly product with another product for anticompetive reasons, instead, he just assumed it was the far left "business hating" again, and he gave this lengthy monolgue about how "maybe Microsoft got on top because they are the best".
The thing about people who are too in love with the principal behind capitolism is that they have a great tendency to underestimate the importance of marketting and contract law, and overestimate the insight of consumers...
1) If it is going to take them YEARS to do this audit, surely it will take MS just as long to audit it to find the infringing bits. But even supposing MS found infringing bits tomorrow, what good would it do MS to sue anyone? I doubt MS would do that right now, because ReactOS is obviously not anywhere NEAR the point yet where it is widely used, let alone useful for daily tasks like surfing the web or writing a document. Surely MS would have little (if anything) to gain from a business perspective by suing people just yet. If ReactOS suddenly became useful like Windows though, I'm sure that may change.
When the project becomes useful and reliabile, it's popularity will skyrocket (IHMO, if that day comes), but if they wait until then, Microsoft could probably shut the project down with the lawsuit they would have. Microsoft's case would be much stronger because they could say "the REACTOS community knew they were stealing code and didn't care".
Also, if they wait until then, then they will have to wade through a larger amount of code, looking for code that was submitted years ago, and they would run the risk that whoever submitted the bad code continued to submit the code, making the project practically shut down while developers scramble to replace the bad code.
2) Since a lot of the development effort on ReactOS is shared with WINE and vice-versa, I wonder if this could affect WINE, too. MS already has acknowledged WINE's existence by checking specifically for WINE registry settings in things like their Genuine Advantage program, but they obviously haven't sued anyone over that yet, either.
That's very insightful. I never used wine, because I have two PCs, and one of them is a Windows box, but I would hope that this isn't the case. I would really like to see a day when people don't have to give up 90% of the software on the market just to switch to Linux.
Are they going to get a copy of the Windows source code and compare it to ReactOS? How does someone actually go about auditing code that was submitted by many people around the world?
They originally had two hints that tipped them off that there was a problem in the first place
Code that made no sense. It existed but it's purpose didn't seem to be known (probably because the pieces that made no sense were related to the interaction between the piece of code and some other part of the OS that either hadn't yet been implemented, or had been implemented differently). Anyway, nobody could explain why certain parts of the code had been done the way they were
The code, when compiled was exactly the same, bit for bit, as Windows code.
The unix tool diff can be used to determine if any compiled binary files are exactly the same as the microsoft equivilant, and I'm curious if there are any "antidiffs" that can be fed two different files, and will point out patterns of significant length that the two files share.
As for the actual code review, I'm an IT student, not a hard-core programmer, but I would suggest looking for the following things in the code...
lack of comments (the original comments are lost when Windows is compiled, and the contributor either doesn't want to add comments, or doesn't know how the code works)
strange variable and function names (this, too, is lost when code is compiled)
Code in which the functionality doesn't make sense (a sign of microsoft code. Sorry, I haven't made a microsoft joke in a while)
Names of contributors. If they're really serious about this code review, and the original coder doesn't take credit (or legal liability) for his work, then the code needs to be examined more closely. And, of course, if someone does have their name on stolen code, then you would want to look closely at everything that person does.
Of course, none of those things can prove bad code, but, anyone who cares about the project will take credit for his own hard work (meaning, nobody is going to be quiet if a piece of code is posted on the web page, and they know it wasn't stolen because they wrote it), and these things may give the REACTOS project some things to look for
or us in the US when you speak of clean-room reverse engineering it means that one person tears apart the implementation of a device, writes documentation and another reads that documentation and implements. Other countries do not require this invisible great wall of development and allow the same person that disassembles the interface to also write the replacement implementation.
If it's legal to do so in those countries, then it's legal to release it in them as well.
Three problems with that...
If the project leader lives in the U.S., then it would be incredibly impractical for him to move to some foreign country, which he would have to do, if he wishes to avoid U.S. IP laws.
Even if he did move to some other country, REACTOS still would be illegal for U.S. use. Why devote years of your life to something that is no more legal than a hacked copy of XP that you just leeched off a p2p network? (also, one of the reasons for not using Windows is often the use of second-hand PCs donated to schools and non-profits; if the person didn't donate a certificate of authenticity, you can't legally use the OS)
From what I've heard, this is a case in which someone used a dissassembler to decompile windows, and then submitted the decompiled code without making a single change or even bothering to learn what the code did.
Anyway, this guy seems a little idealistic. He said something to the effect that it would be unfair (I think he said "injustice") to prosecute someone over this (as if fairness plays a part in IP law...). To me, this implies that he may not be as cynical as the rest of us.
Don't get me wrong...Honesty is something to admire in a person, but the point is that he may follow the U.S. standard because he agrees that whatever happened is wrong.
I personally believe that the only way to reverse engineer someone's product without stealing the code is to have as little exposure to the source code as possible, which is what the US laws enforce.
Erm... can someone give me an example of a decision that would be moral but not ethical, or vice versa? The distinction between the two seems a little blurry to me.
Hopefully, this is a concise definition.
Since morality is something that people have been trying to define since the dawn of time, it would be presumptuous for an association made up of pharmacists, or programmers, or lawyers, or butchers to say "we are the ultimate authority on what is moral".
But, on the other hand, I have heard some preachers say some crazy things in my life. Many of them have defined morality as "the strictest adherence to __my__ faith", with the keyword being my, as in "not yours". In many cases these people have defined things that I would consider to be morally reprehensible as morality, as in the case of those who have used the bible to justify bigotry against blacks, jews, catholics, and homosexuals, for one example.
So, the point is that ethics describe a code of professional behavior, often followed by people who are not dishonest.
Possible examples:
A doctor who performs life-saving surgery on a serial killer
A lawyer who defends a terrorist because he believes that everyone is entitled to a fair trial
A pharmacist who refuses to fill birth control prescriptions because it's against his religion (you might argue this is a case of moral but unethical)
Re:What happens when you have a split personality?
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ReactOS Code Audit
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Or those with Zaphod Beeblebrox' problem? Are they one or two engineers, under US law?
It depends...They have to buy two copies of windows, four copies of every music CD (one for each ear), and neither head can read out loud.
But, they still only get one paycheck, and, since one head is Jewish, neither head gets to stay home on Christmas or Chaunakah
as if there is anyone that has not heard about it yet, including the terrorists who were being tapped that have since found other means of communication.
Yes, Osama...Atlanta...I said "AT-LAN-TA"...Yeah, we're gonna blow it up. I said "BLOW it up"...as in huge freakin bom-holy crap! Are you reading the New York Times? Yeah, page six. Fuck, they're spying on us. I knew it was legal, and they do it all the time, but, crap, you never expect it to happen to you...
Time for plan B. eway eednay elloway akecay...yeah, buttloads...oh crap. I'll need time to practice our new communications system. Let's just do this some other time...
So when Mitnick says it is easier to hack OSS software, people say "duh"
When Microsoft says "making our stuff open source will make it easier to find vulnerabilities", people say "Stop FUDing, Microsoft"
I dont see how can you beleive it when Mitnick says it and how you can refute it when Allchin says the same thing.
Mitnik says he would prefer to hack oss software, due to the wider variety of tools availible, but also, that OSS is more secure, because of its openness. I admit, i didn't RTFA, but hacking open source software is about looking for flaws in the logic of another or several other intelligent people, and then, hopefully, contributing to their work. Hacking closed software is about making guesses and hoping to get lucky. It doesn't matter how easy or difficult the later option may be, most people will get bored with it eventually.
As for Microsoft, they say that making stuff open source will make it less secure. Maybe they have a point, since most of the linux hackers wouldn't be too excited about helping Bill Gates save on tech support, but the point is that Microsoft and Mitnik are saying two completely different things. In fact, they are saying the opposite things.
This isn't really about surveillence as much as it is about the president thinking he is above the law. If Osama Bin Ladin has your number on speed-dial, then, yes, it is most definitely possible to get a warrant to monitor your calls.
gfxguy said...
And who says they didn't? As you pointed out, they got thousands of warrants. How do you, at this point in time, know that the program didn't get warrants for these kinds of taps?
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My point was that many people defending Bush do so by pretending that each case was one in which there was rock-solid evidence that the person had a connection to Al-qaeda, but our overly oppressive legal system just doesn't allow law enforcement agencies to obtain search warants.
Really, it's what's known as a false dilemma. You portray the other guy as being unreasonable, and then say "either you got to join the pig-raping, baby-eating serial killers over there, or you can join the southern baptist convention. There is no third choice." In this case, the original poster was saying "either the government should be allowed to monitor whomever they want, with or without evidence, or else they won't be allowed to monitor anybody...not even known terrorists."
If I'm outraged about the Bush administration, it's because they keep doing things that, ten years ago, would have sounded like paranoid conspiracy theories, or the actions of two-dimensional villans like Darth Vader and Cobra Commander...
But, from what I hear, the specific numbers targetted were to and from terrorist's cell phones found in caves in Afganistan and the numbers that they had stored in them. Is that really so bad?
This isn't really about surveillence as much as it is about the president thinking he is above the law. If Osama Bin Ladin has your number on speed-dial, then, yes, it is most definitely possible to get a warrant to monitor your calls.
Then, there's a 1978 law that says that they can monitor without a warrant as long as they file the appropriate paperwork afterward. This court is a rubber stamp. They have received thousands of requests and denied four of them. Alberto Gonzalas recently argued that the process was such a hassle that the inconvenience alone should justify ignoring the law, and some have tried to argue that it isn't feasible considering the number of people being monitored at any one time. Then, there was the recently released legal argument saying that when congress authorized Bush to use force against terror, that that also means using wiretaps against your grandma...and pretty much anything else he wants to do as long as it is somehow argued to be part of the war on terror..All I can say is "Holy sh!t! What country are we living in?"
Slashdot Mirror
Early reports mention that one is now invisible, another turned to stone, one can now stretch, and the cocky one can set himself on fire.
And watch for the "mystery" re-releases of those explosions in about twenty years, or the next time George Lucas needs money...whichever comes first.
The point of...
That's the nature of "embrace and extend", but bundling Microsoft's server software with Windows server does not seem like a violation of the sherman antitrust act to me. IANAL, but Microsoft does not have a monopoly in the server-side operating system market. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and bundling is only illegal if you're using one monopoly to gain a uncompetitive advantage.
Besides, as a non-legal argument, Windows server software is the only reason you would ever want windows server. Who would buy a windows server license just to run openLDAP, apache, and mySQL?
As for bundling outlook with office, that may be a different story. I haven't worked in enough businesses to know if WORD/Excel is a monopoly, but I do know that exchange/outlook is becoming popular for it's non-mail related functions. I don't know about that one.
Windows sales overtook Unix sales by 200 million dollars, and Linux sales grew by 1 billion dollars. This isn't exactly an example of Windows toppling the competition.
I'm not too familiar with FF7AC, but, as a whole, the Final Fantasy series has come up with some excellent settings, and epic plots. I would have expected a final fantasy movie to have been more epic, like a Lord of The Rings movie, but instead, "the Spirits Within" was more on par with an MTV Films release.
And, oh yeah. Final Fantasy reinforced that lesson.
The eighties taught me one thing; Video games based on movies suck.
The early nineties taught me one thing; Movies based based on video games suck.
The Mortal Kombat series taught me one thing; even if the video games has a decent plot, the plot to the movie will suck.
Do you think this has something to do with the fact that software (and, by extension, the programmer's job performance) is often judged, not by the complexity of its core requirement, but by the number of bells and whistles in the user interface?
Microsoft is finally starting to get it. Their newest innovation is a command-line interface that isn't severly nerfed. They could call it "my Bash" or "shell.net", but I think they're trying to pass it off as an original idea. It took them twenty years to realize that point and click isn't the best possible interface for all purposes.
But, I may be getting off subject...just a thought...
...But with all the internet fraud out there, I'd be worried about the other guy not upholding his end of the deal...
...they need a pay-pal type thing...a sort of "death-pal", which says that if you don't kill yourself, we'll send people to finish the job.
Umm, ever tried to use the internet in a major city in India? The fastest internet connection I've ever used was at Delhi internet cafe's. And, last time I checked, India is still supposed to be 3rd world.
That doesn't tell us much...How fast is the connection in the cafe, and the rest of india, if you don't mind me asking...
Just because you see the issue as black-and-white and obvious doesn't mean that other people do, and it also doesn't mean that it really is. You say that gay-rights don't hurt anybody. I say it depends on the right. The gov't has no right to be surveying people's sex lives, but by the same token marriage - and the family - are the bedrock of human society. In my opinion the gov't has asolutely no business issuing marriage licenses to anyone if marriage is just about love. You don't need the county clerk to give you a license to love. That's stupid. Have you ever realized how ridiculous it sounds to get a license from the gov't if marriage is just about love and commitment and all that jazz?
My sister-in-law is married, and has no intention of having children. Under your line of reasoning, that, too should be illegal. And infertile couples should also be illegal. But, there is a loophole. Gay couples can adopt. So, if a gay couple adopts a child, then they should be able to get married, right?
But, wait a second, what is the purpose of marriage, then? You say that a devoted a monogamous couple can stay devoted and monogamous, with or without a sheet of paper (and family insurance, and certain inheritance rights, and the ability to visit loved ones in Intensive care units, or to have one's opinion legally considered relevant if the spouse should end up unable to state his or her own wishes), but why can't monogamous parents do the same thing? Isn't this more about the legal right to be recognized as an important part of someone's family?
Also, even if the only purpose of marriage is to promote the family, for the children(TM), then isn't it sending a mixed marriage to state that no one else is allowed to participate? I'm not accusing you of this, but it seems to me that the religious right is pushing homosexuals as far from their religion as possible, and, by doing so, encouraging a counter-culture. Why should homosexuals have healthy, monogamous relationships, when society tells them that "the church" has a monopoly on that sort of thing, and "the church" hates them? I could easily see how some homosexuals would take great joy in doing things that would annoy the hell out of intolerent fundamentalist preachers. It seems to me that marriage encourages some good ideas which would benefit anybody.
But it doesn't have to be so purile. Ever hear of in-game weddings? Any time RP-oriented players get together, a wedding is bound to happen and WoW is no exception. Now while marriage isn't all about sex, sexuality is certainly a part of it. And in fact, the whole recent hullabaloo seems to have stemmed from a in-game same-sex marriage.
This sounds like an argument against the Bill O'Reilly philosophy. Bill O'Reilly often seems to argue that homosexuals should be invisible because the mere classification is obsene and suggestive. As if it never occurred to him that he can tell children "some men like women and some men like men", without having to explain the intricate details of "sodomy" and oral sex to an eight-year old.
IHMO, the whole issue hinges on whether this is about a gay wedding, or a gay protest. I can see the escapist argument, and wouldn't want to have a law saying that people can organize in-game protests, something-pride parades, racially motivated guild wars (race as in real-world ethnicity), or political rallies getting in the way of my killing sprees. This has the potential to turn a game into something very ugly.
To totally hose a good system to make it "fair" to people. Sorry, applying for jobs is not a "random" process. Both the worker and the company want what is best for them. picking people at "random" hurts the applicant and the company by bad pairings. way to go dc, inefficency is key!
Where are you getting "random"? The posting says that employers cannot hire people who do not meet the minimum qualifications listed, but it never says "random employment". It __DOES__ seem to have a goal of getting employers to hire people they don't know, but that is based on the employee's resume.
Plus, what the crap, if I "apply" for a job online they look at my resume and they talk to me, they setup and interview. Now if some @#*(%& employer hires an employee purely based off what is said of a bleeding website then they deserve a crappy employee.
I think this law was meant to do the opposite of what you're saying. It is common practice in the tech community for an employer to demand the moon and then settle for whatever they can get. This could also give them a convenient way around discrimination lawsuits. They can say, "well, we couldn't hire the the black guy because he wasn't qualified", but the truth is that nobody was qualified. They just bent the rules for friends/family/etc, and declared the same rules abosolute for everyone else.
As for the soviet union thing, that's way out of line. In russia, nobody got a job from a website....Oh, I guess this is a little like soviet russia, then...
So, the premise of his article is that the average user doesn't care about security
Captain Obvious strikes again!
The second premise is that people who do make backups on windows systems don't do so on linux systems...When has this ever happened? The type of user this article is talking about never made any backups on any system. Maybe they tried to, but ended up with a CD full of windows shortcuts, but I promise you, anyone who is smart enough to use linux will not throw away all good computing habits, just because they think they can.
The few points I would have conceided, had the author made them, are that one of the reasons more viruses exist on Windows is because more people use windows, so virus writers write for the more popular system, and that the best security in the world doesn't matter when the end-user doesn't care. If the end user can't install malware because he isn't root, then he'll log in as root and install it anyway. If the end-user is constantly running into this kind of thing, then the end user will use "root" as his primary account. The MAJORITY of CASUAL end-users take the path of least resisitance, which also happens to be the path of least security.
From that to Billionaire. God bless America.
This whole thing reminds me of when Neil Cavuto remarked about the Microsoft antitrust trial. He never mentioned that the lawsuit had something to do with bundling one monopoly product with another product for anticompetive reasons, instead, he just assumed it was the far left "business hating" again, and he gave this lengthy monolgue about how "maybe Microsoft got on top because they are the best".
The thing about people who are too in love with the principal behind capitolism is that they have a great tendency to underestimate the importance of marketting and contract law, and overestimate the insight of consumers...
1) If it is going to take them YEARS to do this audit, surely it will take MS just as long to audit it to find the infringing bits. But even supposing MS found infringing bits tomorrow, what good would it do MS to sue anyone? I doubt MS would do that right now, because ReactOS is obviously not anywhere NEAR the point yet where it is widely used, let alone useful for daily tasks like surfing the web or writing a document. Surely MS would have little (if anything) to gain from a business perspective by suing people just yet. If ReactOS suddenly became useful like Windows though, I'm sure that may change.
When the project becomes useful and reliabile, it's popularity will skyrocket (IHMO, if that day comes), but if they wait until then, Microsoft could probably shut the project down with the lawsuit they would have. Microsoft's case would be much stronger because they could say "the REACTOS community knew they were stealing code and didn't care".
Also, if they wait until then, then they will have to wade through a larger amount of code, looking for code that was submitted years ago, and they would run the risk that whoever submitted the bad code continued to submit the code, making the project practically shut down while developers scramble to replace the bad code.
2) Since a lot of the development effort on ReactOS is shared with WINE and vice-versa, I wonder if this could affect WINE, too. MS already has acknowledged WINE's existence by checking specifically for WINE registry settings in things like their Genuine Advantage program, but they obviously haven't sued anyone over that yet, either.
That's very insightful. I never used wine, because I have two PCs, and one of them is a Windows box, but I would hope that this isn't the case. I would really like to see a day when people don't have to give up 90% of the software on the market just to switch to Linux.Are they going to get a copy of the Windows source code and compare it to ReactOS? How does someone actually go about auditing code that was submitted by many people around the world?
They originally had two hints that tipped them off that there was a problem in the first place
The unix tool diff can be used to determine if any compiled binary files are exactly the same as the microsoft equivilant, and I'm curious if there are any "antidiffs" that can be fed two different files, and will point out patterns of significant length that the two files share.
As for the actual code review, I'm an IT student, not a hard-core programmer, but I would suggest looking for the following things in the code...
Of course, none of those things can prove bad code, but, anyone who cares about the project will take credit for his own hard work (meaning, nobody is going to be quiet if a piece of code is posted on the web page, and they know it wasn't stolen because they wrote it), and these things may give the REACTOS project some things to look for
or us in the US when you speak of clean-room reverse engineering it means that one person tears apart the implementation of a device, writes documentation and another reads that documentation and implements. Other countries do not require this invisible great wall of development and allow the same person that disassembles the interface to also write the replacement implementation.
If it's legal to do so in those countries, then it's legal to release it in them as well.
Three problems with that...
From what I've heard, this is a case in which someone used a dissassembler to decompile windows, and then submitted the decompiled code without making a single change or even bothering to learn what the code did.
Anyway, this guy seems a little idealistic. He said something to the effect that it would be unfair (I think he said "injustice") to prosecute someone over this (as if fairness plays a part in IP law...). To me, this implies that he may not be as cynical as the rest of us.
Don't get me wrong...Honesty is something to admire in a person, but the point is that he may follow the U.S. standard because he agrees that whatever happened is wrong.
I personally believe that the only way to reverse engineer someone's product without stealing the code is to have as little exposure to the source code as possible, which is what the US laws enforce.
Erm... can someone give me an example of a decision that would be moral but not ethical, or vice versa? The distinction between the two seems a little blurry to me.
Hopefully, this is a concise definition.
Since morality is something that people have been trying to define since the dawn of time, it would be presumptuous for an association made up of pharmacists, or programmers, or lawyers, or butchers to say "we are the ultimate authority on what is moral".
But, on the other hand, I have heard some preachers say some crazy things in my life. Many of them have defined morality as "the strictest adherence to __my__ faith", with the keyword being my, as in "not yours". In many cases these people have defined things that I would consider to be morally reprehensible as morality, as in the case of those who have used the bible to justify bigotry against blacks, jews, catholics, and homosexuals, for one example.
So, the point is that ethics describe a code of professional behavior, often followed by people who are not dishonest.
Possible examples:
Or those with Zaphod Beeblebrox' problem? Are they one or two engineers, under US law?
It depends...They have to buy two copies of windows, four copies of every music CD (one for each ear), and neither head can read out loud.
But, they still only get one paycheck, and, since one head is Jewish, neither head gets to stay home on Christmas or Chaunakah
as if there is anyone that has not heard about it yet, including the terrorists who were being tapped that have since found other means of communication.
Yes, Osama...Atlanta...I said "AT-LAN-TA"...Yeah, we're gonna blow it up. I said "BLOW it up"...as in huge freakin bom-holy crap! Are you reading the New York Times? Yeah, page six. Fuck, they're spying on us. I knew it was legal, and they do it all the time, but, crap, you never expect it to happen to you...
Time for plan B. eway eednay elloway akecay...yeah, buttloads...oh crap. I'll need time to practice our new communications system. Let's just do this some other time...
So when Mitnick says it is easier to hack OSS software, people say "duh"
When Microsoft says "making our stuff open source will make it easier to find vulnerabilities", people say "Stop FUDing, Microsoft"
I dont see how can you beleive it when Mitnick says it and how you can refute it when Allchin says the same thing.
Mitnik says he would prefer to hack oss software, due to the wider variety of tools availible, but also, that OSS is more secure, because of its openness. I admit, i didn't RTFA, but hacking open source software is about looking for flaws in the logic of another or several other intelligent people, and then, hopefully, contributing to their work. Hacking closed software is about making guesses and hoping to get lucky. It doesn't matter how easy or difficult the later option may be, most people will get bored with it eventually.
As for Microsoft, they say that making stuff open source will make it less secure. Maybe they have a point, since most of the linux hackers wouldn't be too excited about helping Bill Gates save on tech support, but the point is that Microsoft and Mitnik are saying two completely different things. In fact, they are saying the opposite things.
This isn't really about surveillence as much as it is about the president thinking he is above the law. If Osama Bin Ladin has your number on speed-dial, then, yes, it is most definitely possible to get a warrant to monitor your calls.
gfxguy said...And who says they didn't? As you pointed out, they got thousands of warrants. How do you, at this point in time, know that the program didn't get warrants for these kinds of taps?
----My point was that many people defending Bush do so by pretending that each case was one in which there was rock-solid evidence that the person had a connection to Al-qaeda, but our overly oppressive legal system just doesn't allow law enforcement agencies to obtain search warants.
Really, it's what's known as a false dilemma. You portray the other guy as being unreasonable, and then say "either you got to join the pig-raping, baby-eating serial killers over there, or you can join the southern baptist convention. There is no third choice." In this case, the original poster was saying "either the government should be allowed to monitor whomever they want, with or without evidence, or else they won't be allowed to monitor anybody...not even known terrorists."
If I'm outraged about the Bush administration, it's because they keep doing things that, ten years ago, would have sounded like paranoid conspiracy theories, or the actions of two-dimensional villans like Darth Vader and Cobra Commander...
But, from what I hear, the specific numbers targetted were to and from terrorist's cell phones found in caves in Afganistan and the numbers that they had stored in them. Is that really so bad?
This isn't really about surveillence as much as it is about the president thinking he is above the law. If Osama Bin Ladin has your number on speed-dial, then, yes, it is most definitely possible to get a warrant to monitor your calls.
Then, there's a 1978 law that says that they can monitor without a warrant as long as they file the appropriate paperwork afterward. This court is a rubber stamp. They have received thousands of requests and denied four of them. Alberto Gonzalas recently argued that the process was such a hassle that the inconvenience alone should justify ignoring the law, and some have tried to argue that it isn't feasible considering the number of people being monitored at any one time. Then, there was the recently released legal argument saying that when congress authorized Bush to use force against terror, that that also means using wiretaps against your grandma...and pretty much anything else he wants to do as long as it is somehow argued to be part of the war on terror..All I can say is "Holy sh!t! What country are we living in?"