I don't want a workaround published for this. I want Internet users to write to their congressional representatives and complain the Microsoft is abusing its monopoly powers -- again. The goal here should not be to show how you can kludge your browser into working with MSN. The goal should be to force Microsoft to stop breaking anti-trust laws.
If that doesn't work, the next best thing is to have Microsoft see a reduction in hits to its MSN site and to even lose MSN customers.
But the worst possible result of this would be for Internet users to quietly implement a workaround and allow Microsoft to get away with this.
IANAL, so I'll not weigh in with more opinions on the particulars of this case.
What I will say is that, as a computer parts, peripherals, and software consumer, product support is incredibly poor. I recall downloading drivers for my Creative Labs soundcard and having said download render my system non-bootable. E-mails to tech support went unanswered for two weeks. How did I get a response? Started a script that e-mailed them once per minute. "I must assume that your e-mail is not working..."
Calls to my cable modem provider, Cox Communications of Fairfax, VA, are answered by incompetents, disconnected, or just result in a fast busy. When an HP CD writer failed, HP wanted me to dial a 900 number for "tech support" when all I wanted to know was where to send it for repairs (they cost more at the time than now). I tried calling Microsoft to report a bug in IE6. They wanted to charge me to take the call! What a racket: Put in thousands of annoying bugs and then charge people who try to report them!
The software industry has become incredibly arrogant. They sell you a "license" and disavow all responsibility for making the package work. Tech support often costs money -- even when the problem is the publisher's fault. They seem to feel that taking your call at all is doing you a tremendous favor and think nothing of leaving you on hold for half-an-hour while playing you pre-recorded lies about "unusually heavy call volumes" (for the last year and it's still "unusual") or how "important your call is" (if it was so damned important, why don't you hire enough people to answer the phones?).
I can only hope that the downturn in computer-related purchases will make them hungrier for sales and more responsive to customer needs.
The real reason is to create a gun-controller's Utopia: no guns, the State can easily maintain control.
If only the Chinese dissidents at Tiananmen Square had been "packing", those tanks wouldn't have stood a chance. Yeah. Right.
I am so tired of this absurd argument by gun nuts that citizens with pistols, rifles, and shotguns can successfully defend themselves against a government gone bad. That may have been the case when the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written, but it's not any longer. Tanks, planes, and bombs are relatively immune to some bunch of yahoos with Glocks, Rugers, and Colts.
P.S. Before trying to write me off as some anti-gun zealot, know that I own two pistols, a rifle, and a shotgun. But I'm not so deluded as to believe that they are going to be of much use in holding our government in check.
But even though they have improved it w/ low power consumption and general coolness, read those benchmarks.
But I, and many others, don't care. I want a laptop that runs for four hours or more per charge, doesn't give me second degree burns on my privates when I actually use it on my lap, and performs adequately for word processing, web browsing, etc. I don't need it to play Quake at 120fps. I have a machine at home for that.
Fot that reason, I think that VIA is hitting the nail on the head. People just don't need ghz-class machines to run Word, read mail, and surf the web.
VIA bought the Cyrix name and it's hardly fair to characterize any product under that name as being inferior.
VIA probably chose to clone the Intel chips because they feel that they have a license to do so (it being the same license that they feel gives them the right to create the Intel P4 chipsets).
Why not go higher performance, like AMD? In addition to the Intel license issue, the fact is that a 1.5ghz AMD is viewed by the public as being less powerful than a 2.0ghz Intel part. People are stupid, they don't read benchmarks, and it's not likely to change.
Hey fuckhead, if you had ever managed to so much as speak to a woman, you'd know that normal women are put off by porn that demeans them. But the closest that you've ever gotten to a woman is probably drawing lips on your hand with mommy's lipstick prior to one of your jerk-off sessions.
Are you really such a clueless dick that you think men and women react to porn the same? Are you really that stupid? I'm betting that you are given your writing.
I have nothing against open or closed source projects. What bothers me is when open source projects become closed source without the approval of 100% of those who contributed to the development.
If a developer gives his time because he believes in the principles behind open source, he should not see someone else declare that the project on which he worked is now closed source.
I do not know if this is the case with SkyOS and do not mean to imply that it is.
Also, I have learned the fine art of filtering(right).
I have a good e-mail filtering system in place and I rarely see more than one or two spams per day while it filters probably 30 in the same time frame. But I also send complaints to get the spammers shut down. That takes time, but it's necessary if we don't want e-mail to become as worthless as Usenet newsgroups.
however it is quite simple to just look over the absolutly obvious ie: "Cum slurping coeds hot for you!" and just get on with work.
Isn't that always the argument for spam? "Just hit delete" say the pro-spam advocates -- ignoring the hidden costs that we all pay in higher ISP fees. That may be a fine answer for you, but wait until some devoutly religious woman complains to personnel because she gets 10 porn spams per day at the sale@ e-mail address that she answers.
90% of IIS worm incidents could be eliminated by blocking port 80 access for non-business accounts. You objected later in your post to the port 80 blocking. Why is port 25 any different?
Because blocking outgoing port 25 does not deprive me of the ability to send mail or even to run a mail server. Blocking incoming port 80 deprives me of the ability to run a web server. In other words, port 25 is painless and port 80 hurts -- a lot.
They'd just use an open SSL proxy to tunnel through. CONNECT victim.host.com:25 HTTP/1.1. Boom, you're in. And the spam didn't even come from your ISP's netblock.
1. There aren't that many open SSL proxies with that kind of bandwidth that will happily talk to port 25 of someone else's mail server.
2. The spam-spew programs are not configured to use SSL proxies -- they talk directly to port 25.
3. Because the SSL server is not one being run by the spammer, the activity is much more likely to be detected and shut down.
How do you think that women in the workplace feel when they get "Cum slurping coeds hot for you!" e-mail just because they answer the mail for sales@companyname.com -- which is posted on the company web page? Users can't participate in newsgroups without some kind of painful REMOVETHISBEFOREREPLYINGTOME crap tossed into the middle of their e-mail address. You can't participate in list servers. You can't put your e-mail address on a for-sale web site. All you have to do is become some kind of reclusive hermit, carefully hiding your e-mail address, just to the spammers don't harass you to the point of insanity.
Oh, by the way, you also can't use your initials since spammers have taken to programs that "guess" your e-mail address if it is one or two letters long. I know. I run a mail server.
90% of the spam could be eliminated by blocking port 25 access for individual (read "non-business") accounts. If users were forced to go through their ISP's SMTP server, the ISPs would be able to quickly detect and shut down spammers. The spam-spew programs would not work as they would not be able to directly connect to their victims' SMTP servers.
Even though I run my own mail server, I relay through my ISP's SMTP server and it's just not a big problem -- and I'm one of the most vocal opponents of needless port blocking (e.g., "We blocked your port 80 because someone else has Code Red...").
SMTP is a protocol from a more innocent time. No one envisioned anyone being so unethical as to steal other people's bandwidth to advertise porn, get rich quick schemes, and online gambling. But since we are stuck with SMTP, we need to employ technical means to make up for its deficiencies.
MSN is Microsoft and this is another example of Microsoft leveraging their monopoly powers to crush competitors. In this case, Qwest users are being turned over to MSN without their permission. The user could be without DSL service for, possibly, weeks if they were to try to switch providers so, in effect, MSN does have a monopoly.
Send them a snail-mail to MSN stating that you are an employee of a firm that makes a commercial e-mail client that competes with Outlook. Ask MSN to provide to you, in writing, a statement about the use of non-Microsoft e-mail clients on MSN. Make sure to suggest that this be handled by their lawyers.
If you want to really get their sphincters to pucker, send a copy to the Justice Department.
I don't think that we are that far off from one another -- we just have a terminology difference.
I know that there has to be technical enforcement to go along with legal action. I realize that people will trespass, steal, and break the law in cyberspace and meatspace, but it does not mean that laws don't apply. Laws do apply. System owners have the legal right to decide the terms of use for their systems. Users who violate those terms might be in violation of some applicable laws. Some may get caught. Some might get prosecuted. Most will get away with it.
But the point of this whole discussion, when it started, was whether the researchers had a legal (and ethical) right to use eBay in the manner described -- assuming that they did so without permission. I contend that they did not have such a right and that eBay's web servers don't grant permission by providing a file. If that was the case, then it could be argued that IIS granted permission, on your behalf, for someone to infect your system with a worm.
Don't be fooled - in this case, the law will not really protect you. Maybe someday it will be able to, but not yet.
And don't you be fooled into thinking that eBay, Yahoo, or any other e-company is on the virge of creating AI that will enforce their usage policies for a publically accessible server. It's going to take laws, technical means, and education to keep the problem of inappropriate, unauthorized use at bay.
While there is no shortage of shrill people claiming that open source is a software panacea, as a professional software engineer, I do not want to see it completely supplant commercial applications. I make my living developing software as do many of my friends. I don't want a world where I have to flip burgers or sell insurance during the day so that I can write, and give away, software at night.
I am not opposed to open source software. I use it as well as using commercial apps. When a vendor charges a fair price for a quality application, I have no problem with paying for it or recommending it to my clients. When open source is the best software for the job, I'm all in favor of using that. But I think it is morally reprehensible for a professional software engineer to go out of his/her way to avoid purchasing commercial software. If you earn your living by developing software, you should not deny your fellow software engineers payment for their efforts.
Open source software can be a valuable tool to keep commercial prices from spiralling out of control while quality takes a nose dive. I just hope that the commercial vendors wake up in time to keep open source from being the only choice.
if ebay can afford to give out $4 a signup to all the warez puppies, then they can afford to give out a few k's of bandwidth in the interest of research.
Bill Gates can afford to give me $1 million but that does not mean that I have a legal or moral right to take it from him without his permission (read "steal it").
eBay might well have chosen to participate in this bit of research. They may have felt that they had bandwidth to spare. They might have thought it was good PR. But the point is that they, and they alone, have the legal right to make that decision.
Of course, the eBay example is a little different than the gumball or "Delete" analogies, because eBay didn't run out of files, although they may have been marginally lower on server capacity and bandwidth at the time.
Right. It's called a "trespass against chatels." It's a legal principle used by AOL for successfully suing spammers who send unwanted e-mail into their computer networks. Same principle. Open network, prohibited use.
Ah, but that's exactly my point - one straw at a time is OK, it's the overall pattern of straw usage that McD's should worry about. They would want to either alter their straw dispensers, or more likely just toss you out if you started doing that.
It's their property and I think that everyone, even you, recognizes that the dispenser giving you a straw when you press the button is not the same as McDonalds' corporation giving you permission to take 2,372 straws. Taking those would be theft -- a criminal matter -- regardless of the design of the straw dispenser or whether McDonalds employees caught you.
I think of a server as sort of a secretary.
Fine. When you are finished chasing your computer around the desk, consider the fact that computers do not have intelligence while people do.
If you told your secretary to accept file submissions and store them on a global bulletin board, and she didn't know any better than to take pr0n too, then the failure is really in your instructions. What is needed is a more sophisticated way to describe to a web server what access patterns are acceptable, just like you would tell your secretary to only accept files with a legitimate business purpose.
So how is the FTP server at Yahoo supposed to know that 123456.jpg is porn and 234567.jpg is a picture of a Corvette?
You need to get off of this juvenile kick that makes you claim that you are allowed to do anything to anyone else's computer unless they find a technical means to stop you. A company's computers are their property and they have every right to set the terms for the use of that property. Period. End of story.
eBay has a robots.txt file that is a no-trespassing sign for robots. They have an acceptable use policy link on their home page. The purpose of the site is clear -- buying and selling via online auction. It is not intended as free bandwidth for anyone wanting to do research.
It is not the responsibility of eBay, Yahoo, or any other firm to devise artificial intelligence systems to enforce their policies. McDonalds does not have to put retinal scanners and computerization into straw dispensers. There are long-standing legal principles that govern this and the basic fact is that people have a right to set the terms for the use of their property and services.
You find a poster on a wall, and read the details of a meeting being held by some cultural group. When attending the cultural group meeting, you're told to go away because you weren't invited.
That's a horrible example. It is not comparable because it costs the owner of a poster nothing for you to read the poster. When someone sicks a bot on eBay, eBay pays the costs for the bandwidth and servers. That is why it is appropriate for them to limit how their service is used.
There are no "rules" on the Internet. The only way to make people behave the way you want them to, is to enact technical measures to enforce your rules. Any time your rules of behaviour on a site connected to the Internet differ from total anarchy, you have to provide the technical measures to prevent your rules from being broken.
Enjoy junior high school -- because you've got a lot of growing up to do. There are people who have been arrested, tried, jailed, and fined for Denial Of Service attacks, releasing worms, defacing web sites, stealing computing services, etc. There are rules. It is the real world and you need to get used to it.
How do you value damages caused to your company by someone downloading images that are posted in a publically accessible web-site?
By calculating the bandwidth costs you incur. And having you lawyer add on a hefty "punitive damages" figure.
You make some very valid points and I basically agree with you. I am not a web-extremist, so please hear me out. I think that there are two key points here:
1. The researchers, given that their use of eBay was clearly contrary to the stated purpose of eBay, should have taken the time to find and read the AUP.
2. Anti-robot tags are on eBay and the researchers apparently ignored them. These are the web's version of "No Trespassing" signs and should be respected. TO not do so is simply stealing bandwidth.
It all comes down to what is reasonable to expect. If I wanted to read product specs on Sony's web site, I would not think of looking for and reading their AUP first. On the other hand, if I was about to have a robot crawl a multi-gigabyte commercial web site, I would be darned careful to make sure that what I was doing was permitted in the AUP and/or that I had permission from the site's owners.
Evil bad terrorist will use cutting edge computers, stego his message into an Ebay auction picture, and decide his cause isn't just because of the Terms of Use?
Put down the rose-coloured glasses.
Are you this dense in real life? What I said was that the researchers were, in effect, stealing from eBay by using massive quantities of bandwidth for their steganography hunt. Besides, no terrorist is going to put steganography images onto eBay. eBay logs e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and other incriminating stuff. They would upload them into some newsgroup like alt.binaries.erotica.sexyburkas.
Granting an HTTP request constitutes permission for you to download the file you asked for.
No, it does not. It does not represent a decision by the computer's owner as to whether you had a right to request the file and whether they should supply it to you. If I walked up to your computer and started deleting files, would the fact that your computer deleted the files mean that I had your permission to do so? That's what you are arguing: That the computer has power of attorney for its owner.
If you enter a restaurant with self-serve soda dispensers, do you have "permission" to steal soda just because the automated machine will dole it out at the push of a button? Do you have "permission" to take all of the straws just because the dispenser will give them to you (Your honor, I had McDonalds' permission to take 2,372 straws because their machine gave me a straw each time I pushed the button...)?
If Yahoo posts porn for you on their web site, then they didn't even have to give you permission since they already went ahead and did it.
No one at Yahoo is posting the porn. They are not manually moves the files from the FTP server to the web site. It's an automatic process and does not mean that you have their permission to upload porn. A computer responding to a file transfer request is not equivalent to the company giving you permission to transfer the file.
Just figure out the technology to lock your property down like you want, rather than relying on a crowd of mostly-anonymous, undisciplinable Internet users to follow your rules.
Now you are arguing about the practicality of enforcing a policy rather than the legalities. The most effective way to get people to follow your rules is to identify someone who violated them, sue them for civil damages, and make an example of them.
But, eBay did grant permission for the download. Somebody's client said "GET http://www.ebay.com/image/something", and eBay said "OK, here it is, catch!". If they didn't want to spend the bandwidth to send it to you, they shouldn't have done so. At no point did eBay not have a choice.
What the agreement said was "prior expressed written permission", which the people conducting the study probably did not have.
Granting an HTTP request does not constitute "permisssion" to use the service for whatever purpose you want. By analogy, the fact that Yahoo's FTP server accepts porn you upload does not mean that they have given you permission to post porn on your web page. If you send out 100,000 get-rich-quick e-mails, you cannot assume that you have "permission" from your ISP to do so because their SMTP server accepted them. The key point is intended use -- which eBay does not know. That's why they have an AUP.
I am sorry to see the above post modded down as "troll". The poster makes some very good points. Here's eBay's own 'acceptable use policy' excerpt that covers this:
Access and Interference.
Our web site contains robot exclusion headers and you agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our web pages or the content contained herein without our prior expressed written permission. You agree that you will not use any device, software or routine to bypass our robot exclusion headers, or to interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the eBay site or any auction being conducted on our site. You agree that you will not take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure. Much of the information on our site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to eBay by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content (except for Your Information) from our website without the prior expressed written permission of eBay or the appropriate third party.
I think that this very clearly shows that eBay does take a dim view of these things and that such abuses of their network are prohibited. Whether it would stand up in a court of law is another matter, but trying to predict the court system in the U.S. is about as easy as winning at roulette.
2-3 hours downloading and printing out the manuals
I don't know what kind of manuals you've gotten from any off-the-shelf distros lately, but I could download and print everything they supply in about 10 minutes.
But it's all a moot point: I can (and did) download Mandrake Linux 8.1 because no stores have it in stock. I don't think that I'm so out of touch with normalcy that my reaction was unique.
And, as the installations get easier and less problem prone, the need for manuals and support becomes less.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want a workaround published for this. I want Internet users to write to their congressional representatives and complain the Microsoft is abusing its monopoly powers -- again. The goal here should not be to show how you can kludge your browser into working with MSN. The goal should be to force Microsoft to stop breaking anti-trust laws.
If that doesn't work, the next best thing is to have Microsoft see a reduction in hits to its MSN site and to even lose MSN customers.
But the worst possible result of this would be for Internet users to quietly implement a workaround and allow Microsoft to get away with this.
IANAL, so I'll not weigh in with more opinions on the particulars of this case.
What I will say is that, as a computer parts, peripherals, and software consumer, product support is incredibly poor. I recall downloading drivers for my Creative Labs soundcard and having said download render my system non-bootable. E-mails to tech support went unanswered for two weeks. How did I get a response? Started a script that e-mailed them once per minute. "I must assume that your e-mail is not working..."
Calls to my cable modem provider, Cox Communications of Fairfax, VA, are answered by incompetents, disconnected, or just result in a fast busy. When an HP CD writer failed, HP wanted me to dial a 900 number for "tech support" when all I wanted to know was where to send it for repairs (they cost more at the time than now). I tried calling Microsoft to report a bug in IE6. They wanted to charge me to take the call! What a racket: Put in thousands of annoying bugs and then charge people who try to report them!
The software industry has become incredibly arrogant. They sell you a "license" and disavow all responsibility for making the package work. Tech support often costs money -- even when the problem is the publisher's fault. They seem to feel that taking your call at all is doing you a tremendous favor and think nothing of leaving you on hold for half-an-hour while playing you pre-recorded lies about "unusually heavy call volumes" (for the last year and it's still "unusual") or how "important your call is" (if it was so damned important, why don't you hire enough people to answer the phones?).
I can only hope that the downturn in computer-related purchases will make them hungrier for sales and more responsive to customer needs.
The real reason is to create a gun-controller's Utopia: no guns, the State can easily maintain control.
If only the Chinese dissidents at Tiananmen Square had been "packing", those tanks wouldn't have stood a chance. Yeah. Right.
I am so tired of this absurd argument by gun nuts that citizens with pistols, rifles, and shotguns can successfully defend themselves against a government gone bad. That may have been the case when the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written, but it's not any longer. Tanks, planes, and bombs are relatively immune to some bunch of yahoos with Glocks, Rugers, and Colts.
P.S. Before trying to write me off as some anti-gun zealot, know that I own two pistols, a rifle, and a shotgun. But I'm not so deluded as to believe that they are going to be of much use in holding our government in check.
But even though they have improved it w/ low power consumption and general coolness, read those benchmarks.
But I, and many others, don't care. I want a laptop that runs for four hours or more per charge, doesn't give me second degree burns on my privates when I actually use it on my lap, and performs adequately for word processing, web browsing, etc. I don't need it to play Quake at 120fps. I have a machine at home for that.
Fot that reason, I think that VIA is hitting the nail on the head. People just don't need ghz-class machines to run Word, read mail, and surf the web.
VIA bought the Cyrix name and it's hardly fair to characterize any product under that name as being inferior.
VIA probably chose to clone the Intel chips because they feel that they have a license to do so (it being the same license that they feel gives them the right to create the Intel P4 chipsets).
Why not go higher performance, like AMD? In addition to the Intel license issue, the fact is that a 1.5ghz AMD is viewed by the public as being less powerful than a 2.0ghz Intel part. People are stupid, they don't read benchmarks, and it's not likely to change.
Hey fuckhead, if you had ever managed to so much as speak to a woman, you'd know that normal women are put off by porn that demeans them. But the closest that you've ever gotten to a woman is probably drawing lips on your hand with mommy's lipstick prior to one of your jerk-off sessions.
Are you really such a clueless dick that you think men and women react to porn the same? Are you really that stupid? I'm betting that you are given your writing.
I have nothing against open or closed source projects. What bothers me is when open source projects become closed source without the approval of 100% of those who contributed to the development.
If a developer gives his time because he believes in the principles behind open source, he should not see someone else declare that the project on which he worked is now closed source.
I do not know if this is the case with SkyOS and do not mean to imply that it is.
Also, I have learned the fine art of filtering(right).
I have a good e-mail filtering system in place and I rarely see more than one or two spams per day while it filters probably 30 in the same time frame. But I also send complaints to get the spammers shut down. That takes time, but it's necessary if we don't want e-mail to become as worthless as Usenet newsgroups.
however it is quite simple to just look over the absolutly obvious ie: "Cum slurping coeds hot for you!" and just get on with work.
Isn't that always the argument for spam? "Just hit delete" say the pro-spam advocates -- ignoring the hidden costs that we all pay in higher ISP fees. That may be a fine answer for you, but wait until some devoutly religious woman complains to personnel because she gets 10 porn spams per day at the sale@ e-mail address that she answers.
90% of IIS worm incidents could be eliminated by blocking port 80 access for non-business accounts. You objected later in your post to the port 80 blocking. Why is port 25 any different?
Because blocking outgoing port 25 does not deprive me of the ability to send mail or even to run a mail server. Blocking incoming port 80 deprives me of the ability to run a web server. In other words, port 25 is painless and port 80 hurts -- a lot.
They'd just use an open SSL proxy to tunnel through. CONNECT victim.host.com:25 HTTP/1.1. Boom, you're in. And the spam didn't even come from your ISP's netblock.
1. There aren't that many open SSL proxies with that kind of bandwidth that will happily talk to port 25 of someone else's mail server.
2. The spam-spew programs are not configured to use SSL proxies -- they talk directly to port 25.
3. Because the SSL server is not one being run by the spammer, the activity is much more likely to be detected and shut down.
How do you think that women in the workplace feel when they get "Cum slurping coeds hot for you!" e-mail just because they answer the mail for sales@companyname.com -- which is posted on the company web page? Users can't participate in newsgroups without some kind of painful REMOVETHISBEFOREREPLYINGTOME crap tossed into the middle of their e-mail address. You can't participate in list servers. You can't put your e-mail address on a for-sale web site. All you have to do is become some kind of reclusive hermit, carefully hiding your e-mail address, just to the spammers don't harass you to the point of insanity.
Oh, by the way, you also can't use your initials since spammers have taken to programs that "guess" your e-mail address if it is one or two letters long. I know. I run a mail server.
90% of the spam could be eliminated by blocking port 25 access for individual (read "non-business") accounts. If users were forced to go through their ISP's SMTP server, the ISPs would be able to quickly detect and shut down spammers. The spam-spew programs would not work as they would not be able to directly connect to their victims' SMTP servers.
Even though I run my own mail server, I relay through my ISP's SMTP server and it's just not a big problem -- and I'm one of the most vocal opponents of needless port blocking (e.g., "We blocked your port 80 because someone else has Code Red...").
SMTP is a protocol from a more innocent time. No one envisioned anyone being so unethical as to steal other people's bandwidth to advertise porn, get rich quick schemes, and online gambling. But since we are stuck with SMTP, we need to employ technical means to make up for its deficiencies.
MSN is not a monopoly.
MSN is Microsoft and this is another example of Microsoft leveraging their monopoly powers to crush competitors. In this case, Qwest users are being turned over to MSN without their permission. The user could be without DSL service for, possibly, weeks if they were to try to switch providers so, in effect, MSN does have a monopoly.
Send them a snail-mail to MSN stating that you are an employee of a firm that makes a commercial e-mail client that competes with Outlook. Ask MSN to provide to you, in writing, a statement about the use of non-Microsoft e-mail clients on MSN. Make sure to suggest that this be handled by their lawyers.
If you want to really get their sphincters to pucker, send a copy to the Justice Department.
I don't think that we are that far off from one another -- we just have a terminology difference.
I know that there has to be technical enforcement to go along with legal action. I realize that people will trespass, steal, and break the law in cyberspace and meatspace, but it does not mean that laws don't apply. Laws do apply. System owners have the legal right to decide the terms of use for their systems. Users who violate those terms might be in violation of some applicable laws. Some may get caught. Some might get prosecuted. Most will get away with it.
But the point of this whole discussion, when it started, was whether the researchers had a legal (and ethical) right to use eBay in the manner described -- assuming that they did so without permission. I contend that they did not have such a right and that eBay's web servers don't grant permission by providing a file. If that was the case, then it could be argued that IIS granted permission, on your behalf, for someone to infect your system with a worm.
Don't be fooled - in this case, the law will not really protect you. Maybe someday it will be able to, but not yet.
And don't you be fooled into thinking that eBay, Yahoo, or any other e-company is on the virge of creating AI that will enforce their usage policies for a publically accessible server. It's going to take laws, technical means, and education to keep the problem of inappropriate, unauthorized use at bay.
I've enjoyed our debate. Thanks.
While there is no shortage of shrill people claiming that open source is a software panacea, as a professional software engineer, I do not want to see it completely supplant commercial applications. I make my living developing software as do many of my friends. I don't want a world where I have to flip burgers or sell insurance during the day so that I can write, and give away, software at night.
I am not opposed to open source software. I use it as well as using commercial apps. When a vendor charges a fair price for a quality application, I have no problem with paying for it or recommending it to my clients. When open source is the best software for the job, I'm all in favor of using that. But I think it is morally reprehensible for a professional software engineer to go out of his/her way to avoid purchasing commercial software. If you earn your living by developing software, you should not deny your fellow software engineers payment for their efforts.
Open source software can be a valuable tool to keep commercial prices from spiralling out of control while quality takes a nose dive. I just hope that the commercial vendors wake up in time to keep open source from being the only choice.
if ebay can afford to give out $4 a signup to all the warez puppies, then they can afford to give out a few k's of bandwidth in the interest of research.
Bill Gates can afford to give me $1 million but that does not mean that I have a legal or moral right to take it from him without his permission (read "steal it").
eBay might well have chosen to participate in this bit of research. They may have felt that they had bandwidth to spare. They might have thought it was good PR. But the point is that they, and they alone, have the legal right to make that decision.
Of course, the eBay example is a little different than the gumball or "Delete" analogies, because eBay didn't run out of files, although they may have been marginally lower on server capacity and bandwidth at the time.
Right. It's called a "trespass against chatels." It's a legal principle used by AOL for successfully suing spammers who send unwanted e-mail into their computer networks. Same principle. Open network, prohibited use.
Ah, but that's exactly my point - one straw at a time is OK, it's the overall pattern of straw usage that McD's should worry about. They would want to either alter their straw dispensers, or more likely just toss you out if you started doing that.
It's their property and I think that everyone, even you, recognizes that the dispenser giving you a straw when you press the button is not the same as McDonalds' corporation giving you permission to take 2,372 straws. Taking those would be theft -- a criminal matter -- regardless of the design of the straw dispenser or whether McDonalds employees caught you.
I think of a server as sort of a secretary.
Fine. When you are finished chasing your computer around the desk, consider the fact that computers do not have intelligence while people do.
If you told your secretary to accept file submissions and store them on a global bulletin board, and she didn't know any better than to take pr0n too, then the failure is really in your instructions. What is needed is a more sophisticated way to describe to a web server what access patterns are acceptable, just like you would tell your secretary to only accept files with a legitimate business purpose.
So how is the FTP server at Yahoo supposed to know that 123456.jpg is porn and 234567.jpg is a picture of a Corvette?
You need to get off of this juvenile kick that makes you claim that you are allowed to do anything to anyone else's computer unless they find a technical means to stop you. A company's computers are their property and they have every right to set the terms for the use of that property. Period. End of story.
eBay has a robots.txt file that is a no-trespassing sign for robots. They have an acceptable use policy link on their home page. The purpose of the site is clear -- buying and selling via online auction. It is not intended as free bandwidth for anyone wanting to do research.
It is not the responsibility of eBay, Yahoo, or any other firm to devise artificial intelligence systems to enforce their policies. McDonalds does not have to put retinal scanners and computerization into straw dispensers. There are long-standing legal principles that govern this and the basic fact is that people have a right to set the terms for the use of their property and services.
A better example would be:
You find a poster on a wall, and read the details of a meeting being held by some cultural group. When attending the cultural group meeting, you're told to go away because you weren't invited.
That's a horrible example. It is not comparable because it costs the owner of a poster nothing for you to read the poster. When someone sicks a bot on eBay, eBay pays the costs for the bandwidth and servers. That is why it is appropriate for them to limit how their service is used.
There are no "rules" on the Internet. The only way to make people behave the way you want them to, is to enact technical measures to enforce your rules. Any time your rules of behaviour on a site connected to the Internet differ from total anarchy, you have to provide the technical measures to prevent your rules from being broken.
Enjoy junior high school -- because you've got a lot of growing up to do. There are people who have been arrested, tried, jailed, and fined for Denial Of Service attacks, releasing worms, defacing web sites, stealing computing services, etc. There are rules. It is the real world and you need to get used to it.
How do you value damages caused to your company by someone downloading images that are posted in a publically accessible web-site?
By calculating the bandwidth costs you incur. And having you lawyer add on a hefty "punitive damages" figure.
OK, it's nice that EBay has a acceptable use policy. But how can a robot agree to that policy?
./robots.txt file that disallows bots (http://{FQDN}/robots.txt). eBay has such a file.
1. It can't. The person running the robot needs to read the policy before running it.
2. The bot can respect the rules in the
3. The bot can respect the html meta tag (e.g., meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" ) that appears on individual html files.
You make some very valid points and I basically agree with you. I am not a web-extremist, so please hear me out. I think that there are two key points here:
1. The researchers, given that their use of eBay was clearly contrary to the stated purpose of eBay, should have taken the time to find and read the AUP.
2. Anti-robot tags are on eBay and the researchers apparently ignored them. These are the web's version of "No Trespassing" signs and should be respected. TO not do so is simply stealing bandwidth.
It all comes down to what is reasonable to expect. If I wanted to read product specs on Sony's web site, I would not think of looking for and reading their AUP first. On the other hand, if I was about to have a robot crawl a multi-gigabyte commercial web site, I would be darned careful to make sure that what I was doing was permitted in the AUP and/or that I had permission from the site's owners.
I don't quite follow you.
Evil bad terrorist will use cutting edge computers, stego his message into an Ebay auction picture, and decide his cause isn't just because of the Terms of Use?
Put down the rose-coloured glasses.
Are you this dense in real life? What I said was that the researchers were, in effect, stealing from eBay by using massive quantities of bandwidth for their steganography hunt. Besides, no terrorist is going to put steganography images onto eBay. eBay logs e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and other incriminating stuff. They would upload them into some newsgroup like alt.binaries.erotica.sexyburkas.
Granting an HTTP request constitutes permission for you to download the file you asked for.
No, it does not. It does not represent a decision by the computer's owner as to whether you had a right to request the file and whether they should supply it to you. If I walked up to your computer and started deleting files, would the fact that your computer deleted the files mean that I had your permission to do so? That's what you are arguing: That the computer has power of attorney for its owner.
If you enter a restaurant with self-serve soda dispensers, do you have "permission" to steal soda just because the automated machine will dole it out at the push of a button? Do you have "permission" to take all of the straws just because the dispenser will give them to you (Your honor, I had McDonalds' permission to take 2,372 straws because their machine gave me a straw each time I pushed the button...)?
If Yahoo posts porn for you on their web site, then they didn't even have to give you permission since they already went ahead and did it.
No one at Yahoo is posting the porn. They are not manually moves the files from the FTP server to the web site. It's an automatic process and does not mean that you have their permission to upload porn. A computer responding to a file transfer request is not equivalent to the company giving you permission to transfer the file.
Just figure out the technology to lock your property down like you want, rather than relying on a crowd of mostly-anonymous, undisciplinable Internet users to follow your rules.
Now you are arguing about the practicality of enforcing a policy rather than the legalities. The most effective way to get people to follow your rules is to identify someone who violated them, sue them for civil damages, and make an example of them.
But, eBay did grant permission for the download. Somebody's client said "GET http://www.ebay.com/image/something", and eBay said "OK, here it is, catch!". If they didn't want to spend the bandwidth to send it to you, they shouldn't have done so. At no point did eBay not have a choice.
What the agreement said was "prior expressed written permission", which the people conducting the study probably did not have.
Granting an HTTP request does not constitute "permisssion" to use the service for whatever purpose you want. By analogy, the fact that Yahoo's FTP server accepts porn you upload does not mean that they have given you permission to post porn on your web page. If you send out 100,000 get-rich-quick e-mails, you cannot assume that you have "permission" from your ISP to do so because their SMTP server accepted them. The key point is intended use -- which eBay does not know. That's why they have an AUP.
I am sorry to see the above post modded down as "troll". The poster makes some very good points. Here's eBay's own 'acceptable use policy' excerpt that covers this:
Access and Interference.
Our web site contains robot exclusion headers and you agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our web pages or the content contained herein without our prior expressed written permission. You agree that you will not use any device, software or routine to bypass our robot exclusion headers, or to interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the eBay site or any auction being conducted on our site. You agree that you will not take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure. Much of the information on our site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to eBay by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content (except for Your Information) from our website without the prior expressed written permission of eBay or the appropriate third party.
I think that this very clearly shows that eBay does take a dim view of these things and that such abuses of their network are prohibited. Whether it would stand up in a court of law is another matter, but trying to predict the court system in the U.S. is about as easy as winning at roulette.
2-3 hours downloading and printing out the manuals
I don't know what kind of manuals you've gotten from any off-the-shelf distros lately, but I could download and print everything they supply in about 10 minutes.
But it's all a moot point: I can (and did) download Mandrake Linux 8.1 because no stores have it in stock. I don't think that I'm so out of touch with normalcy that my reaction was unique.
And, as the installations get easier and less problem prone, the need for manuals and support becomes less.