It only works for a while. People soon start to hate the new name as much they hate the old one. Think of Verizon, Cingular, Qwest, all of which were once new names thought up at great expense.
The one semi-successful one so far is "Altria" (Philip Morris), but that's only because it doesn't really use the new name for much. It's just a way for the parent company to distance itself from the tobacco business. Claria could be something similar: a way for the company to present itself to investors or customers while still conducting its spyware activities as Gator. The business plan is something like this:
1. Salesman from Claria approaches Megacorp offering dirt-cheap online advertising.
2. Megacorp buys advertising, believing that Claria is like DoubleClick or Google adwords, not the hated Gator.
3. Ads for Megacorp pop up in Gator, earning it boycotts, class-action lawsuits and general ill-will among potential customers.
4. Gator/Claria is sued into oblivion. But by then, it's had an IPO (people are more likely to buy stock in Claria than Gator) so the management and VCs are already rich and don't care.
This is a free speech issue. It may not be a constitutional rights issue, becuase (as the writeup says) MS isn't the government. Firing this guy probably isn't illegal, and you may not think it's unethical or unwise. But it is an attempt by the company to censor others' speech.
Microsoft attempts at censorship are hardly unprecedented. Many of its EULAs now contain a clause where users must agree not to disclose benchmark tests of the.Net framework.
When publishers "sit on a book", they claim that it isn't out of print, even though for all practical purposes it is. This usually prevents the author from selling the rights to another publisher.
Software companies might try something similar. In a few years, Microsoft could be saying, "Windows XP isn't abandonware; we've just shut down the product activation servers as a security measure."
This is actually a very good point. If you receive an OpenOffice file, you should be able to read and edit it in the offfice suite of your choice, not have to go to the trouble of installing OpenOffice.
The program itself matters less than the file format. In fact, the OpenOffice people should be encouraging even non-free software developers to support their format. Interoperability is even more important than open source.
From the many identical emails I've been getting, Plaxo seems to be a program that goes though your contact list and then spams everyone you know with what appear to be personal messages from you but are really just ads asking you to download and run the program (and enter your personal information for the company to harvest).
If some kid had written this in his spare time, it would be called a virus. Because Plaxo is a company, it's called an innovative application. There are several other startups all doing the same thing (search on Google), and when they go bankrupt their privacy polices will mean nothing.
You can report criminal telemarketers to three different enforcement agencies: The FCC, FTC and (sometimes) your state attorney general. All have Web forms, and the FCC's even has a drop-down boxes with a list of common offenders (eg. AT&T, SBC) and crimes (eg. failing to put you on the do-not-call list)!
Almost all tech magazines and Web sites (including this one) are biased in favour of new technology. It's partly to please advertisers, but partly just the basic philosophy: If you're not interested in new technology, you're probably not going to read a tech magazine or site.
Lotus Notes (now Domino) has had this "feature" for five years!
Now, I hate Lotus Notes as much as the next person who is forced to use it at work, but I think Lotus deserves credit for this. Its documentation even says that it is "not a security feature", because it is so easily bypassed. Contrast IBM honesty to MS hype.
You won't be able to do this for long. Third-party screen capture apps are one of the "security holes" that Palladium is intended to patch. Vmware is another. The analog screen output jack (could connect to a VCR) is a third.
The one thing it can't stop is an actual photograph. Time to buy one of those 3G phones...
Why should Joe Schmoe, who is sharing a bunch of Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit MP3s, spend time in PRISON for doing so?
Lots of reasons, aside from the MPAA/RIAA lobbyists:
Jails provide profits for prison corporations and jobs for members of the prison guards' union. Both of these are even more politically powerful than the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc.
Jails provide a pool of slave labor for US corporations that would otherwise rely on sweatshops in China or India.
The more poeple in jail, the fewer are looking for real jobs. This allows right-wing politicians to claim that the US's corporation-friendly economic model results in lower unemployment than Europe's (very slightly) more human-friendly system.
It's physically impossible to incarcerate all 60 million Kazaa users, so the government can choose who to prosecute based on criteria other than the law. When everybody is a criminal, the police are freed from the need to investigate crime and better able to target people of a particular race, political opinion or socioeconomic background.
That depends what you mean by open-source. Democracy doesn't depend on voting software being open-source in the sense of the official definition (which is virtually the same as the FSF's concept of copyleft), but the source code itself should be published.
Voters don't need the right to make unlimited copies and derivative works (free as in beer/speech) of voting software. We do need to be sure that our votes are counted correctly, which means being able to look over the source code of the software, compile it, and reverse-engineer any hardware components.
Bullshitter ability is helpful in every job, especially when getting the job in the first place or asking for a raise. When two coders have identical ability and are doing the same job, there's a good chance that the one who is better at spouting BS will be paid more, go on the best junkets and then get the promotion or avoid the layoff.
Forbes is, unfortunately, a magazine that powerful people take seriously, despite its admiration for Enron. Reading the bad guys' propaganda and understanding the arguments they make is useful for anyone who wants to influence PHBs, politicians, etc.
OTOH, many Web sites do print pro-SCO or anti-GPL articles that are essentially trolls: The sites run their own discussion forums and want to generate feedback for these (the more content they get from readers, the fewer writers they need) or they have a heavy tech readership and want to get linked to by/. or pro-Linux bloggers.
If software patents had been around back then and Kildall had patented CP/M, MS-DOS probably would have been found to be infringing. The same is true of Apple's attempt to sue Microsoft over Windows (which failed because it was based on copyright, not patents).
There does now seem to be a movement among some corporations to have the same expansive definition of "intellectual property" applied to copyright as to software patents. SCO is the most obvious example, but there are others, and they're not all in the software industry: Musicians have been sued over silence, and the publisher of Harry Potter has claimed copyright over an entire genre of fiction.
The Fortune article is pushing the same crazy agenda. Expansive copyright is even more dangerous than software patents, because copyright is automatic and (for all practical purposes) eternal
Re:Who said anything about secure?
on
Longhorn in 2006
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· Score: 1
You will have to use it if you want to access Palladium-"enhanced" Web sites, watch movies online or read MS files.
If you expect the Web to be as bad as (US) TV, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Yes, it's getting worse, but it's still better than other forms of media, and the Internet as a whole is less polluted by commercialization than many other communication technologies.
The number of "channels" on the Web is practically unlimited, and Web advertising at its most intrusive (popups, flah, shockwave, Activex...) is as easy to bypass as TV advertising at its lest intrusive (ie. while using a VCR or Tivo). Even spam, while evil, is less annoying and expensive than some other forms of unsolicited intrusion, like pre-recorded telemarkting and junk faxes.
Still, Copps is right to warn that things are getting worse. "Convergence" (ie. consolidation into monopolies) of digital media means that the Internet will become as bad as everything else.
The perceived value to the RIAA member is that users who doesn't disable autorun will be unable to transfer the files to an MP3 player. If they're hardcore fans, they might buy a player that supports DRM-restricted content and then go to to a site such as i-tunes or the new Napster and pay for a download. The fans have paid twice for the same song, meaning more money for the RIAA. Some fans may even buy the same CD twice, if they want to listen to it in two different places without actually carrying it around all the time.
This ignores the fact that many more people will just be so disgusted by the inability to make an MP3 that they'll stop buying CDs altogether. But the record industry isn't rational, just greedy.
The big problem for Linux on the desktop isn't usability. It's the lack of an application that can read and write every arcane and undocumented feature of.doc,.xls and.ppt files.
We all know that MS proprietary file formats are mostly a waste of bandwidth and/or disk space, and that they're the main transmission vector for viruses. But many people don't, and sometimes we still need to accept files from them. OpenOffice does a good job, but it isn't perfect, and MS keeps moving the goalposts.
Maybe he has even grander ambitions: change the landscape of the whole patent situation. That would be a greater victory than bringing down IE or even Microsoft.
Poeple have already tried to show how ludicrous the PTO is by patenting swinging on a swing and exercising a cat, but that doesn't change anything. Suing Microsoft might just persuade the rich and powerful that software patents are a bad idea.
The broken window fallacy isn't a fallacy if you're one of the window-fixers.
Yes, breaking windows is still bad for society as a whole, but our economic system is designed to punish people who consider the needs of society as a whole and reward the greedy. That's why so many windows are broken.
This is the reason I'm glad that my broadband provider doesn't give me a static IP! Thanks to NAT and DHCP, IP addresses aren't a reliable tracking mechanism.
Sure, your ISP can still track you, but Web sites need to cooperate with (or sue, hack, threaten...) your ISP to get your details. And as the RIAA has demonstrated by suing "Kazaa pirates" who don't even own a Wintel box, ISP logs aren't too accurate.
1. Hardware that isn't approved by Microsoft. A Lexmark printer is currently "protected" against third-party ink cartridges by an encryption scheme (which, in the US, is in turn protected by the DMCA). This will allow Microsoft to do the same with every component in a PC. You won't actually need to buy all your hardware from Microsoft, of course, but hardware manufacturers will need to obtain MS's (expensive) authorization. To prevent a backlash against a huge extension of the MS tax, Microsoft will spin it as something like "compatability assurance" or "security testing".
2. Non-DRM hardware. Pay-per-view movies and pay-per-play music won't generate much revenue for the MPAA/RIAA if the consumer can simply hook up the media player (which is what the PC will become) to a VCR or tape recorder. You'll need MS-approved, DRM-crippled monitors and headphones.
Microsoft claims that unathorized devices are a threat. In particular, they say that Palladium (of which this BIOS is a crucial part) will prevent hardware keystroke sniffers, by encrypting everything between the keyboard and the PC. The problem with this argument is that the encryption keys are held by Microsoft, not the computer owner.
Base stations can be dangerous things, but the received radiation diminishes very rapidly with distance (inverse square law). That's why it's critical to know just how far away the people were from the base stations, and the news reports don't say this.
If you hold your head directly in front of a microwave transmitter (even a 2G one), you're going to experience some bad effects. If you stand at the bottom of a hill and the transmitter is on top, you should be okay.
The other kind of advertising you find lots of in the WSJ is attepting to sell a company's stock, not any actual product. You saw this everywhere during the dot-com boom, of course, but even "real" companies are at it.
The news actually contains a huge amount of product placement, and much of it is paid for by the companies whose products are placed. They (or their PR companies) will hire a producer to make a short 2-minute clip about their product, then shop it around local TV stations. Running that is cheaper than actually going out and doing any reporting, which is why you see a lot of stories like "A local company is helping the war on terror by..."
The "open" TCPA might be a better choice than MS's Palladium, and would remove the need to trust MS. Palladium is basically just TCPA with a few extra-oppressive DRM features added (the kind required by the ultra-paranoid and powerful MPAA, not just the incrasingly desperate and marginalized RIAA). It's mostly intended to "protect" a PC against being connected to a device that isn't approved by MS --- thus plugging the "analog hole" and giving MS a monopoly on hardware as well as software.
TCPA can be used for all of Palladium's non-DRM applications, of which electronic voting could be one. It can even be implemented in a completely open way that doesn't require the user to trust any single company, though obviously the RIAA won't like this, and Intel seems to be moving away from it. (It's already announced that Verisign will digitally sign the Centrino.) Still, there are other TCPA-supporting chip companies out there, and Intel hasn't said anything about its other platforms.
Not saying that TCPA is good. It obviously has a huge downside, but it also has a few legitimate uses. Palladium has the same legitimate uses, but an even bigger downside.
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It only works for a while. People soon start to hate the new name as much they hate the old one. Think of Verizon, Cingular, Qwest, all of which were once new names thought up at great expense.
The one semi-successful one so far is "Altria" (Philip Morris), but that's only because it doesn't really use the new name for much. It's just a way for the parent company to distance itself from the tobacco business. Claria could be something similar: a way for the company to present itself to investors or customers while still conducting its spyware activities as Gator. The business plan is something like this:
1. Salesman from Claria approaches Megacorp offering dirt-cheap online advertising.
2. Megacorp buys advertising, believing that Claria is like DoubleClick or Google adwords, not the hated Gator.
3. Ads for Megacorp pop up in Gator, earning it boycotts, class-action lawsuits and general ill-will among potential customers.
4. Gator/Claria is sued into oblivion. But by then, it's had an IPO (people are more likely to buy stock in Claria than Gator) so the management and VCs are already rich and don't care.
This is a free speech issue. It may not be a constitutional rights issue, becuase (as the writeup says) MS isn't the government. Firing this guy probably isn't illegal, and you may not think it's unethical or unwise. But it is an attempt by the company to censor others' speech.
.Net framework.
Microsoft attempts at censorship are hardly unprecedented. Many of its EULAs now contain a clause where users must agree not to disclose benchmark tests of the
When publishers "sit on a book", they claim that it isn't out of print, even though for all practical purposes it is. This usually prevents the author from selling the rights to another publisher.
Software companies might try something similar. In a few years, Microsoft could be saying, "Windows XP isn't abandonware; we've just shut down the product activation servers as a security measure."
This is actually a very good point. If you receive an OpenOffice file, you should be able to read and edit it in the offfice suite of your choice, not have to go to the trouble of installing OpenOffice.
The program itself matters less than the file format. In fact, the OpenOffice people should be encouraging even non-free software developers to support their format. Interoperability is even more important than open source.
From the many identical emails I've been getting, Plaxo seems to be a program that goes though your contact list and then spams everyone you know with what appear to be personal messages from you but are really just ads asking you to download and run the program (and enter your personal information for the company to harvest).
If some kid had written this in his spare time, it would be called a virus. Because Plaxo is a company, it's called an innovative application. There are several other startups all doing the same thing (search on Google), and when they go bankrupt their privacy polices will mean nothing.
You can report criminal telemarketers to three different enforcement agencies: The FCC, FTC and (sometimes) your state attorney general. All have Web forms, and the FCC's even has a drop-down boxes with a list of common offenders (eg. AT&T, SBC) and crimes (eg. failing to put you on the do-not-call list)!
Almost all tech magazines and Web sites (including this one) are biased in favour of new technology. It's partly to please advertisers, but partly just the basic philosophy: If you're not interested in new technology, you're probably not going to read a tech magazine or site.
Lotus Notes (now Domino) has had this "feature" for five years!
Now, I hate Lotus Notes as much as the next person who is forced to use it at work, but I think Lotus deserves credit for this. Its documentation even says that it is "not a security feature", because it is so easily bypassed. Contrast IBM honesty to MS hype.
You won't be able to do this for long. Third-party screen capture apps are one of the "security holes" that Palladium is intended to patch. Vmware is another. The analog screen output jack (could connect to a VCR) is a third.
The one thing it can't stop is an actual photograph. Time to buy one of those 3G phones...
Lots of reasons, aside from the MPAA/RIAA lobbyists:
That depends what you mean by open-source. Democracy doesn't depend on voting software being open-source in the sense of the official definition (which is virtually the same as the FSF's concept of copyleft), but the source code itself should be published.
Voters don't need the right to make unlimited copies and derivative works (free as in beer/speech) of voting software. We do need to be sure that our votes are counted correctly, which means being able to look over the source code of the software, compile it, and reverse-engineer any hardware components.
Bullshitter ability is helpful in every job, especially when getting the job in the first place or asking for a raise. When two coders have identical ability and are doing the same job, there's a good chance that the one who is better at spouting BS will be paid more, go on the best junkets and then get the promotion or avoid the layoff.
Forbes is, unfortunately, a magazine that powerful people take seriously, despite its admiration for Enron. Reading the bad guys' propaganda and understanding the arguments they make is useful for anyone who wants to influence PHBs, politicians, etc.
/. or pro-Linux bloggers.
OTOH, many Web sites do print pro-SCO or anti-GPL articles that are essentially trolls: The sites run their own discussion forums and want to generate feedback for these (the more content they get from readers, the fewer writers they need) or they have a heavy tech readership and want to get linked to by
If software patents had been around back then and Kildall had patented CP/M, MS-DOS probably would have been found to be infringing. The same is true of Apple's attempt to sue Microsoft over Windows (which failed because it was based on copyright, not patents).
There does now seem to be a movement among some corporations to have the same expansive definition of "intellectual property" applied to copyright as to software patents. SCO is the most obvious example, but there are others, and they're not all in the software industry: Musicians have been sued over silence, and the publisher of Harry Potter has claimed copyright over an entire genre of fiction.
The Fortune article is pushing the same crazy agenda. Expansive copyright is even more dangerous than software patents, because copyright is automatic and (for all practical purposes) eternal
You will have to use it if you want to access Palladium-"enhanced" Web sites, watch movies online or read MS files.
If you expect the Web to be as bad as (US) TV, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Yes, it's getting worse, but it's still better than other forms of media, and the Internet as a whole is less polluted by commercialization than many other communication technologies.
The number of "channels" on the Web is practically unlimited, and Web advertising at its most intrusive (popups, flah, shockwave, Activex...) is as easy to bypass as TV advertising at its lest intrusive (ie. while using a VCR or Tivo). Even spam, while evil, is less annoying and expensive than some other forms of unsolicited intrusion, like pre-recorded telemarkting and junk faxes.
Still, Copps is right to warn that things are getting worse. "Convergence" (ie. consolidation into monopolies) of digital media means that the Internet will become as bad as everything else.
The perceived value to the RIAA member is that users who doesn't disable autorun will be unable to transfer the files to an MP3 player. If they're hardcore fans, they might buy a player that supports DRM-restricted content and then go to to a site such as i-tunes or the new Napster and pay for a download. The fans have paid twice for the same song, meaning more money for the RIAA. Some fans may even buy the same CD twice, if they want to listen to it in two different places without actually carrying it around all the time.
This ignores the fact that many more people will just be so disgusted by the inability to make an MP3 that they'll stop buying CDs altogether. But the record industry isn't rational, just greedy.
The big problem for Linux on the desktop isn't usability. It's the lack of an application that can read and write every arcane and undocumented feature of .doc, .xls and .ppt files.
We all know that MS proprietary file formats are mostly a waste of bandwidth and/or disk space, and that they're the main transmission vector for viruses. But many people don't, and sometimes we still need to accept files from them. OpenOffice does a good job, but it isn't perfect, and MS keeps moving the goalposts.
Maybe he has even grander ambitions: change the landscape of the whole patent situation. That would be a greater victory than bringing down IE or even Microsoft.
Poeple have already tried to show how ludicrous the PTO is by patenting swinging on a swing and exercising a cat, but that doesn't change anything. Suing Microsoft might just persuade the rich and powerful that software patents are a bad idea.
The broken window fallacy isn't a fallacy if you're one of the window-fixers.
Yes, breaking windows is still bad for society as a whole, but our economic system is designed to punish people who consider the needs of society as a whole and reward the greedy. That's why so many windows are broken.
This is the reason I'm glad that my broadband provider doesn't give me a static IP! Thanks to NAT and DHCP, IP addresses aren't a reliable tracking mechanism.
Sure, your ISP can still track you, but Web sites need to cooperate with (or sue, hack, threaten...) your ISP to get your details. And as the RIAA has demonstrated by suing "Kazaa pirates" who don't even own a Wintel box, ISP logs aren't too accurate.
Unauthorized devices means two different things:
1. Hardware that isn't approved by Microsoft. A Lexmark printer is currently "protected" against third-party ink cartridges by an encryption scheme (which, in the US, is in turn protected by the DMCA). This will allow Microsoft to do the same with every component in a PC. You won't actually need to buy all your hardware from Microsoft, of course, but hardware manufacturers will need to obtain MS's (expensive) authorization. To prevent a backlash against a huge extension of the MS tax, Microsoft will spin it as something like "compatability assurance" or "security testing".
2. Non-DRM hardware. Pay-per-view movies and pay-per-play music won't generate much revenue for the MPAA/RIAA if the consumer can simply hook up the media player (which is what the PC will become) to a VCR or tape recorder. You'll need MS-approved, DRM-crippled monitors and headphones.
Microsoft claims that unathorized devices are a threat. In particular, they say that Palladium (of which this BIOS is a crucial part) will prevent hardware keystroke sniffers, by encrypting everything between the keyboard and the PC. The problem with this argument is that the encryption keys are held by Microsoft, not the computer owner.
Base stations can be dangerous things, but the received radiation diminishes very rapidly with distance (inverse square law). That's why it's critical to know just how far away the people were from the base stations, and the news reports don't say this.
If you hold your head directly in front of a microwave transmitter (even a 2G one), you're going to experience some bad effects. If you stand at the bottom of a hill and the transmitter is on top, you should be okay.
The other kind of advertising you find lots of in the WSJ is attepting to sell a company's stock, not any actual product. You saw this everywhere during the dot-com boom, of course, but even "real" companies are at it.
The news actually contains a huge amount of product placement, and much of it is paid for by the companies whose products are placed. They (or their PR companies) will hire a producer to make a short 2-minute clip about their product, then shop it around local TV stations. Running that is cheaper than actually going out and doing any reporting, which is why you see a lot of stories like "A local company is helping the war on terror by..."
The "open" TCPA might be a better choice than MS's Palladium, and would remove the need to trust MS. Palladium is basically just TCPA with a few extra-oppressive DRM features added (the kind required by the ultra-paranoid and powerful MPAA, not just the incrasingly desperate and marginalized RIAA). It's mostly intended to "protect" a PC against being connected to a device that isn't approved by MS --- thus plugging the "analog hole" and giving MS a monopoly on hardware as well as software.
TCPA can be used for all of Palladium's non-DRM applications, of which electronic voting could be one. It can even be implemented in a completely open way that doesn't require the user to trust any single company, though obviously the RIAA won't like this, and Intel seems to be moving away from it. (It's already announced that Verisign will digitally sign the Centrino.) Still, there are other TCPA-supporting chip companies out there, and Intel hasn't said anything about its other platforms.
Not saying that TCPA is good. It obviously has a huge downside, but it also has a few legitimate uses. Palladium has the same legitimate uses, but an even bigger downside.