While that all sounds good, in practice, it isn't always so.
One funny anecdote was that a person was so paranoid, that he PGP encrypted his disk and then moved his PGP keyring onto the encrypted disk, thinking "Wow, this will be really secure."
Unfortunately, this person only had a single copy of his key ring (stupid move really), so when he need to remount his drive, he couldn't. Can't remount the drive if the key is not available...
First, some of the documents that Walid submitted to the IETF working group on internationalized domain names are here and here.
Now, I won't comment on the contents of these documents with the exception that one of them was submitted to the working group after the patent was granted without any mention of the patent itself.
From the looks of things, the IETF only started publishing work on internalization of domain names in 2000, so the prior art argument looks to be moot as Walid's patent application was filed in July 1999.
I have to agree with the IETF's stance. Pushing patented technology (no matter how dubious the patent is) as a standard is akin to forcing internet users into paying a tax. I applaud the IETF in their statement; license the technology for free or we'll just use something else.
-----
patent (noun)pronounced with a short A: A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
patent (adjective)pronounced with a long A: Obvious; plain; synonym of apparent.
And to think that less than a year ago, these same corporations tried to state that self-regulated privacy initiatives was the best way to go. They touted their privacy policies in the noses of every customer that visited their website or bought their product.
The sheer volume of mass privacy violations have proven that these initiatives are only PR fronts. The simple fact is that these companies don't care at all about the privacy of individuals.
As far as I am concerned, the US government has given them a chance and they failed. Now it's time to pay the piper.
Entry level jobs (even engineering) is a lot of tedious, repetitous tasks.
Amen to that. An entry level engineering job is often tedious and repetitive work. Before I got my professional certification, I did a lot of CAD work as an engineer's assistant because "I was good at it". If you don't think CAD work is tedious and repetitive, trying doing it for three years.
But there is also another point that I think needs to be made. Most co-op students usually stay on at a company for a semester (which is usually 4-6 months). There isn't the time to get co-op students familiarized in several aspects of the work, simply because the real employees have work to do on their own. If you get lucky and get posted at the same company after school or for more co-op terms, you might get to learn more about the job.
But there is a finer wisdom in repeating tasks. For one, there is enough motivation to make the task more efficient.
I did some IT admin work in my last three undergraduate years in university, both at the student group level and at the institutional level, so let me share a few things.
One of the big issues at my university was politics. As long as whatever you worked on or did never became an issue with a specific person, you could do what was needed. The problem was trying not to appear on that person's radar.
When we first tried to start a setup that would be student run, we required some solid backing from a top official (it was the dean of our faculty in this case). As long as certain rules were followed, everything was great.
But that was also a problem. Handing down the project eventually led to its demise because the newer people didn't have the same convictions and skills as we did. Eventually, the project died out because they weren't able to put in what was necessary to keep it alive. At least, they never broke any of the rules.
At the institutional level, IT is really a pain. Half of the time, the money simply isn't available and the other half of the time, someone from faculty or administration objects. We basically ran nothing more than a help desk for a year with no way of improving the situation. It was not a great year for the IT budget.
In my case, the politics played a far greater role in the IT landscape than all other factors. It taught me as a student that IT should not fall to students unless the institution really supports it.
And while I don't doubt the abilities that students have, the fact that they only work in IT roles at these instituations for 2 or 3 years (maybe more if they become grad students) tends to make the environments they work in unstable.
I agree that Ylönen should defend his trademark. Considering that he has commercial interests based upon the SSH name, I don't see how he can not choose to defend the trademark.
However, I also must state that he should never have gotten the trademark in the first place. His trademark is the same as the name of his company, the name of the protocol (which is also a networking standard) and the descriptive name of the product. "SSH Communications Inc.'s SSH product uses the SSH protocol..." This is what is confusing a lot of people here.
So there is the paradox. Both points are opposite yet equally valid. As far as I am concerned, this is nothing more than a bad pissing contest.
What ever the outcome is, it still isn't going to change the secure shell product that I use. So please, don't go pissing in my front yard...
BTW, sorry about gratuitously using the word "piss". Unfortunately, I don't have a better word to describe what they [the involved parties] are doing.
Hmm, I think Allchin's point of view is egocentric. He's arguing that Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate" (TM) is being threated by the very "freedoms" that he is trying to remove from open-source developers.
However, Allchin doesn't realize that:
Microsoft's exploitations will end. If you exercise your IP rights and your customers too far, people won't want what you have to offer.
Ethics is a far greater opponent to Microsoft.
He is asking that government should not encourage competition. Didn't the government just bring Microsoft to trial about that very same issue not too long ago? Talk about jumping into bed with one enemy to get under the skin of another.
To me, it sound likes the classic "my rights end where yours start" argument. Unfortunately, Allchin's view is that he can tip the scales in his favor with Microsoft's money and the "Intellectual Property" argument.
Fortunately, that will never work as long as the US Constitution is in law. Unfortunately, it seems that the Constitution is become nothing more than a piece of paper nowadays.
Because TLD's are now international, not exclusively US'ian. It should be left to the UN to decide.
While I would like to agree that TLDs should fall under international jurisdiction, that simply isn't the fact. Remember that InterNIC owns the domains issued under the.COM,.NET and.ORG TLDs, and that it only licenses second level domains internationally.
BTW, I don't think the UN has ever made a straight out decision; most of the member nations usually agree to proposals. Another important think to note is that UN is far less efficient than any national government.
is not necessarily that Linux is better or the fact that it has great support for everything under the sun.
Microsoft fears Linux now because it can't squish out the competition [Linux] by buying it. The classical tactics that M$ has used in the past to beat the competition simply won't work. And even if they tried something, you can bet the DOJ is watching M$ really closely.
It [Linux] is a big threat because they can only fight it in the technical arena, period. That is what M$ fears...
Geez. Considering how stupid some of the patents that get granted, I might as well submit a patent application for a "patent". Who knows, maybe the drones at the USPTO might self destruct while trying to figure out this recusive loop.
I applaud them for trying this out, but I don't think it is the best way to go. I still prefer the old method of sending out all of the advisory in a single email.
I agree in that the new way to handle advisories is terrible. I wouldn't want to find out about a potential vunerability and having to go to a web site and end up encountering a "404 - File not found" or even worse, an unavailable server.
By all definitions, this is copyright enforcement. Microsoft wants to use its security advisories as a way to bolster their web stats. If BUGTRAQ wants to keep posting the Microsoft advisories, it will have to resist the enforcement or drive people to the web site.
Furthermore, this won't stop MS advisories from being posted by the people who have found the hole(there will be plenty of those I am sure) - and those are usually more informative anyway...
I believe that the legislators in the US are working to fix this problem. Microsoft is one of the companies pushing hard for this legislation. I don't know about you, but I'm starting to worry...
4.1.6. The Company does not permit sites where 20% or more of the monthly traffic is from file downloads,...
Hmm, well since any web page visit involves the web server sending the contents of a file down to a browser (pretty much equivalent to a file download), I bet that every single account holder would be in violation of this clause in the agreement.
My advice is to go to another provider. If they are half-brained to put in clauses like this (which don't give you any way of measuring whether or not you are in line with the user agreement), they have definitely made it impossible for the agreement to work in your favor...
Slashdot Mirror
While that all sounds good, in practice, it isn't always so.
One funny anecdote was that a person was so paranoid, that he PGP encrypted his disk and then moved his PGP keyring onto the encrypted disk, thinking "Wow, this will be really secure."
Unfortunately, this person only had a single copy of his key ring (stupid move really), so when he need to remount his drive, he couldn't. Can't remount the drive if the key is not available...
First, some of the documents that Walid submitted to the IETF working group on internationalized domain names are here and here.
Now, I won't comment on the contents of these documents with the exception that one of them was submitted to the working group after the patent was granted without any mention of the patent itself.
From the looks of things, the IETF only started publishing work on internalization of domain names in 2000, so the prior art argument looks to be moot as Walid's patent application was filed in July 1999.
I have to agree with the IETF's stance. Pushing patented technology (no matter how dubious the patent is) as a standard is akin to forcing internet users into paying a tax. I applaud the IETF in their statement; license the technology for free or we'll just use something else.
-----patent (noun) pronounced with a short A: A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
patent (adjective) pronounced with a long A: Obvious; plain; synonym of apparent.
And to think that less than a year ago, these same corporations tried to state that self-regulated privacy initiatives was the best way to go. They touted their privacy policies in the noses of every customer that visited their website or bought their product.
The sheer volume of mass privacy violations have proven that these initiatives are only PR fronts. The simple fact is that these companies don't care at all about the privacy of individuals.
As far as I am concerned, the US government has given them a chance and they failed. Now it's time to pay the piper.
Entry level jobs (even engineering) is a lot of tedious, repetitous tasks.
Amen to that. An entry level engineering job is often tedious and repetitive work. Before I got my professional certification, I did a lot of CAD work as an engineer's assistant because "I was good at it". If you don't think CAD work is tedious and repetitive, trying doing it for three years.
But there is also another point that I think needs to be made. Most co-op students usually stay on at a company for a semester (which is usually 4-6 months). There isn't the time to get co-op students familiarized in several aspects of the work, simply because the real employees have work to do on their own. If you get lucky and get posted at the same company after school or for more co-op terms, you might get to learn more about the job.
But there is a finer wisdom in repeating tasks. For one, there is enough motivation to make the task more efficient.
I did some IT admin work in my last three undergraduate years in university, both at the student group level and at the institutional level, so let me share a few things.
One of the big issues at my university was politics. As long as whatever you worked on or did never became an issue with a specific person, you could do what was needed. The problem was trying not to appear on that person's radar.
When we first tried to start a setup that would be student run, we required some solid backing from a top official (it was the dean of our faculty in this case). As long as certain rules were followed, everything was great.
But that was also a problem. Handing down the project eventually led to its demise because the newer people didn't have the same convictions and skills as we did. Eventually, the project died out because they weren't able to put in what was necessary to keep it alive. At least, they never broke any of the rules.
At the institutional level, IT is really a pain. Half of the time, the money simply isn't available and the other half of the time, someone from faculty or administration objects. We basically ran nothing more than a help desk for a year with no way of improving the situation. It was not a great year for the IT budget.
In my case, the politics played a far greater role in the IT landscape than all other factors. It taught me as a student that IT should not fall to students unless the institution really supports it.
And while I don't doubt the abilities that students have, the fact that they only work in IT roles at these instituations for 2 or 3 years (maybe more if they become grad students) tends to make the environments they work in unstable.
I agree that Ylönen should defend his trademark. Considering that he has commercial interests based upon the SSH name, I don't see how he can not choose to defend the trademark.
However, I also must state that he should never have gotten the trademark in the first place. His trademark is the same as the name of his company, the name of the protocol (which is also a networking standard) and the descriptive name of the product. "SSH Communications Inc.'s SSH product uses the SSH protocol..." This is what is confusing a lot of people here.
So there is the paradox. Both points are opposite yet equally valid. As far as I am concerned, this is nothing more than a bad pissing contest.
What ever the outcome is, it still isn't going to change the secure shell product that I use. So please, don't go pissing in my front yard...
BTW, sorry about gratuitously using the word "piss". Unfortunately, I don't have a better word to describe what they [the involved parties] are doing.
Hmm, I think Allchin's point of view is egocentric. He's arguing that Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate" (TM) is being threated by the very "freedoms" that he is trying to remove from open-source developers.
However, Allchin doesn't realize that:
To me, it sound likes the classic "my rights end where yours start" argument. Unfortunately, Allchin's view is that he can tip the scales in his favor with Microsoft's money and the "Intellectual Property" argument.
Fortunately, that will never work as long as the US Constitution is in law. Unfortunately, it seems that the Constitution is become nothing more than a piece of paper nowadays.
While I would like to agree that TLDs should fall under international jurisdiction, that simply isn't the fact. Remember that InterNIC owns the domains issued under the .COM, .NET and .ORG TLDs, and that it only licenses second level domains internationally.
BTW, I don't think the UN has ever made a straight out decision; most of the member nations usually agree to proposals. Another important think to note is that UN is far less efficient than any national government.
Microsoft fears Linux now because it can't squish out the competition [Linux] by buying it. The classical tactics that M$ has used in the past to beat the competition simply won't work. And even if they tried something, you can bet the DOJ is watching M$ really closely.
It [Linux] is a big threat because they can only fight it in the technical arena, period. That is what M$ fears...
Geez. Considering how stupid some of the patents that get granted, I might as well submit a patent application for a "patent". Who knows, maybe the drones at the USPTO might self destruct while trying to figure out this recusive loop.
I agree in that the new way to handle advisories is terrible. I wouldn't want to find out about a potential vunerability and having to go to a web site and end up encountering a "404 - File not found" or even worse, an unavailable server.
By all definitions, this is copyright enforcement. Microsoft wants to use its security advisories as a way to bolster their web stats. If BUGTRAQ wants to keep posting the Microsoft advisories, it will have to resist the enforcement or drive people to the web site.
Furthermore, this won't stop MS advisories from being posted by the people who have found the hole(there will be plenty of those I am sure) - and those are usually more informative anyway...
I believe that the legislators in the US are working to fix this problem. Microsoft is one of the companies pushing hard for this legislation. I don't know about you, but I'm starting to worry...
Hmm, well since any web page visit involves the web server sending the contents of a file down to a browser (pretty much equivalent to a file download), I bet that every single account holder would be in violation of this clause in the agreement.
My advice is to go to another provider. If they are half-brained to put in clauses like this (which don't give you any way of measuring whether or not you are in line with the user agreement), they have definitely made it impossible for the agreement to work in your favor...