Um, no. The Federal Government determined in a court of law that Microsoft is a monopoly and they are guilty of anti-trust violations. There's no assuming involved.
This is hardly the type of case that one would want to use a poster-child for open source.
There isn't one word in either the article or the lead-in that says they switched to open source. The entire claim was that they chose against Microsoft.
this story is yet another bash Microsoft for any reason at all story.
No, this is a bash-Microsoft-for-abusing-their-monopoly-power-ye t-again story. Microsoft sent them a letter "suggesting" that they might be audited if they didn't sign up for the new license. Houston told them to jump in a lake. This is a win for everybody, not just Open Source or Anti-Microsoft.
While the heart of Linux itself legally must be available for free, nearly every major computing company is trying to find ways to profit from it.
Okay, I understand it's a business publication, but they should really know the difference between libre and gratis.
Re:Spam should be 100% legal
on
Spammers Busted
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· Score: 1
In that case spam would be on the same level as junk snail mail. It doesn't cost me anything and, unless it's interfering with my real mail, I ignore it and throw it out. That I could live with. Hell, email advertisers could even subsidize the internet making it cheaper for me to get service. That I could certainly live with.
Re:This is good, but..
on
Spammers Busted
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I hate censorship as much as anyone
There are already limits on commercial speech. Truth in advertising laws, and laws against telemarketers calling cellphones to name a couple.
Not that I think making spam illegal will help anything. They'll just go offshore. But there's no First Ammendment issue with making it illegal.
Re:Playing Games you don't understand.
on
Spammers Busted
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't see how you could stop spam without enabling whoever made the decision about what was "spam" to censor anyone they wanted.
The real way to stop spam without having a central spam authority is to put all the cost of the delivery on the sender. What makes spam so profitable is half the cost of each message is born by the recipient. Someone needs to invent digital postage....
A computer can be in many states where the only real absolute control a system admin has is pulling the plug.
That's still control. And it's the ultimate control. There isn't a damned thing a remote cracker can do to your system if it's turned off or the network wire is cut or the modem is turned off.
And when you pull a plug you need a reason to do it.
Well, obviously. I'm not asking anyone to take action on a problem they don't know exists. What I am asking is that they exercise what the law calls "due diligence", meaning that they take reasonable care to prevent problems from happening and respond promptly when they do. If they don't do these things, they should be held responsible.
Practically speaking, what needs to be done before we can hold Aunt Tillie responsible for the security of her PC?
Who should be responsible for her PC? Me? You? It's her machine, she bought it, she turned it on, she uses it, she can turn it off if something goes wrong.
Aunt Tilly will never be a competent system administrator. You can spend $10,000 a person training everyone in the world about computer security, spend 60 trillion dollars, and Aunt Tilly will still not be a competent system administrator. Why even pursue this line of thought?
The line of thought is not that everyone who owns a computer should be a fully trained system administrator, only that the person who owns the computer should be responsible for what it does.
You can be an expert and still be rooted and have your computer used in an attack.
Yes, but it would still be my responsibility to clean up the mess or turn the machine off until I can get someone who can.
Anyway's in your analogy you are the one driving, when your computer is taken over and used in an attack, you are not the one in control.
The owner of the machine should still be in control, even if he has to turn it off to get it to stop doing what someone else caused it to be doing.
Except that's not a good analogy either because often with a computer you have no obvious evidence that your machine is compromised.
There are dozens of situations in real life where ignorance of the problem doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for it. Now, I am not suggesting that every person whose computer gets compromised be held financially responsible for every lost packet on the internet, but the owner of the compromised machine is still responsible for correcting the problem. Regardless of how it got that way, it's still their machine causing the problem. They need to fix it.
How many of these people know their systems have been compromised?
Not knowing what your system is doing doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for it anymore than not knowing your four-year-old is making random phone calls relieves you of having to pay the phone bill.
How many of the people in charge of these systems are even sys admins?
By definition, all of them. If they are in charge of the systems, they are the system administrators, regardless of if it's someone who is responsible for 100 servers or Aunt Tilly with her "email machine". Whether or not they are competent system administrators is a different question but it doesn't matter. Incompetence doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for what your system is doing any more than being a bad driver relieves you of the responsibility for the accident you caused.
Cases like these are much more likely to result in rulings against the DMCA.
Unfortunately, it won't. Cases this ridiculous get thrown out before they go to trial. No impact on the DMCA. It's too easy for a judge in this case to say, "That's not what the law is for."
What we need is someone to get convicted of violating the DMCA and have enough resources to take it to the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, we need a martyr.
As much as I wanted Dmitry freed and Elcomsoft found not guilty because it was the right thing, it would have been better for all of us if one of them was found guilty of violating the DMCA. Only then can we get this piece-of-filth legislation in front of the Supreme Court. But after the CTEA debacle, I'm not so sure it would do any good.
If your car is stolen because you left it unlocked in a parking lot and used in a hit-and-run accident, the car owner should not be held responsible. Yes, it is his fault that he didn't lock his car, but it shouldn't be illegal for him to leave his car unlocked. The crime committed here was by the thief.
Likewise, if your computer is used in a DDoS attack on a commercial website, you should not be held responsible unless you intentionally left it vulnerable specifically for use in an attack. The insecure computer has done nothing wrong, the blame is in the hands of the person who used the computer for a malicious attack.
Just to pick a nit, the difference is that, in the case of a DDOS attack, once the owner of the system becomes aware of the problem, he has the power, and therefore the responsibility, to correct it. If someone allows his system to continue attacking someone elses, even if he didn't cause the problem, he should be held responsible.
Once the car is stolen, the car is no longer under the owner's control. Once the system is compromised, the sysadmin can still control it, even if it means pulling the plug.
That said, I still don't think it gives the victim of an attack the right to go in and muck about in someone else's machine.
Um, no. The ISP is disconnecting the service they provide until the customer can fix his equipment. They are not touching anything they do not have direct resposibility for. They aren't modifying anything on the machine at all.
It's analagous to the phone company disconnecting your fax line because your fax machine repeatedly calls the same residential number. They are shutting down the connection they are responsible for, not fixing your fax machine.
But, this business model is really just an attempt by Lexmark to obscure the true price of owning the printer and so is bad from an economic policy perspective.
There's nothing inherently immoral with the loss leader business model. It's been around long enough that the average consumer knows to check the price of the consumables before making a purchase. Grocery stores constantly advertise some common item at below cost to get people in the store to buy the higher priced stuff. It's nothing new.
But there is also a risk associated with the loss-leader model and that is that people may not buy the consumables from you. You can do all you like to make it difficult for others to offer the consumables, but unless you have a signed contract from the customer stating he will only buy them from you, he is not required to do so. I'm willing to bet that if Lexmark had made customers sign a contract requiring them to buy so many toner cartridges from them, they wouldn't have sold as many printers.
Lexmark is using the DMCA to force customers to abide by an agreement they didn't sign.
It's pretty asinine, but it's not as simple as them saying that you can't put whatever you want into the printer.
Actually, it is. The only reason the chip even exists to to make it harder to use toner cartridges not purchased from Lexmark. If it wasn't about forcing you to buy Lexmark toner cartridges, there would be no authentication chip and therefore no protocol to crack.
Spammers abuse a flaw in smtp for their own personal gain. "Anti-linkers" (for lack of a better term) don't like what http was designed to do.
Yes, spammers are working within rules of the protocol, and we should change that protocol to get rid of spam. But at the same time, just because it's open to abuse doesn't mean it should be abused. And if anti-linkers don't like http they are perfectly free to use a different protocol. But the difference is there's no abuse. Http was designed to use hyperlinks. It's not a flaw, it's intended. In short, they don't like what it's supposed to do. It's like trying to use light bulbs to heat a room and complaining about the light they give off.
Just because somethings possible doesn't make it right to do it.
I agree. But just because someone doesn't like it doesn't make it wrong, either.
The problem sites have is they want you to go through all the ads before you hit what you actually want,
This is true in some cases, to which I reply, so what? There's nothing that says I have to read all the ads in a magazine between the cover and the article I want to read. Your poor understanding of the medium in no way makes me responsible for maintaining your income.
nothing to do with bandwidth.
Actually, in some cases, it is the bandwidth or, in the case of a slashdotting, the server load. To which I also say, so what? There are ways to limit the access. Your poor understanding of the medium in no way makes me responsible for reducing your expenses.
Don't try to use the law to make up for your ignorance, incompetance, or laziness.
And for the rest of them, if you don't want it public, don't make it publicly accessible.
It's a bit closed-minded to simply dismiss those who question the veracity of this "accepted truth" without hearing what they have to say. The use of the term crackpot is more ad hominem than anything else.
The point is we have heard what they have to say and they are crackpots.
Surely there are people with completely irrational beliefs out there, but if you don't ever listen, you may never hear truth that contradicts conventional wisdom....
Show me some evidence backed up with the scientific method and I will listen. Until then, their "irrational beliefs" are just that.
You're assuming that the people arguing for the hoax are making logical, rational arguments. They aren't. That's why it's called "pseudoscience". They make outlandish claims and back it up with "prinicples" that sound good, but have no basis in scientific fact. It's the same thing that makes astrology popular.
Remember, most of these people won't be convinced until you bring each and every one of them to the moon, and even then some will insist it was a drug induced hallucination.
The only reason the independents aren't getting any of this slush money is because they're not in power. As soon as they can influence Congress, they will be bought. It's how the game is played.
And it's not going to change. The people who can change are only able to change it because the system works in their favor. Where is the incentive to change it? It's like expecting coporations to support laws that will make them less profitable. It ain't gonna happen.
Re:shake me down, rattle, and roll...
on
Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 2
Somebody has to pay, somebody has to be paid, but where does that leave the RIAA?
In the same boat as blacksmiths and buggy whip makers....
So you want to make it illegal then? Oh, no, it's not illegal, it's forced education. Those two concepts have totally different connotations! They are more or less the same thing, yet I feel so differently about them based on the context you put them in. Thank you.
Look, if you can't see the difference between outlawing unacceptable behavior and encouraging acceptable behavior, I can't help you.
That's not a "real" solution, that's a basis for a solution, not a solution itself.
Sorry, I didn't realize it was my job to solve all the world's problems this week.
So teach everyone, all the time?
Essentially, yes. Make it obvious, all the time, that hate is not acceptable behavior.
I don't get it. How can you tell whether someone's been "taught" or not?
We're not talking about getting a diploma. It's simply a concept. Different != bad.
Having a principle for a solution and having an actual solution are two very different things. And that's why we see laws like this.
Ah. "We must do something, and this is something, so we must do this". Sorry, it doesn't make it right.
You want specific ideas? OK. How about producing children's programming that carries the message different isn't bad but hate is? How about public service announcements carrying the same message to adults? How about speaking out against hatred instead of ignoring it?
I may not have the best solution but that doesn't mean I can't see that outlawing hate isn't a good one.
The victim is just as dead whether or not it was premeditated. The point is that we don't just look at the action, but the mental state behind the action.
Premeditation implies "malicious forethought" meaning that the killer was a) fully cognizant of what he was doing, b) aware that what he was doing was wrong, and c) did it anyway. It doesn't consider at all why he was killing. The law thinks this person deserves to be punished more harshly than someone who just "flew off the handle". I happen to agree.
A hate crime is both a crime against the direct victim, and an act of terrorism against a whole group, designed to cause fear and intimidation among that group. That justifies additional punishment.
Then the terrorism itself should be illegal, regardless of what group the terrorized people belong to. Suppose the people being intimidated don't belong to a "protected" group, or the perpetrator is different in a way that's not covered under hate crime law. Are they less deserving of the same protection?
For the sake of argument, let's look at a person who beats up blondes in order to intimidate other blondes. Isn't he as guilty as someone who beats up blacks, or gays, or Jews? Somehow, I doubt blondes are going to be listed as a protected group or that hair color is going to be listed as a trait covered by hate crime laws. And even if it is, if this guy's hair is blonde, does that make him not guilty of hate crimes?
Slashdot Mirror
Its a big assumption to assume MS is a monopoly.
Um, no. The Federal Government determined in a court of law that Microsoft is a monopoly and they are guilty of anti-trust violations. There's no assuming involved.
This is hardly the type of case that one would want to use a poster-child for open source.
e t-again story. Microsoft sent them a letter "suggesting" that they might be audited if they didn't sign up for the new license. Houston told them to jump in a lake. This is a win for everybody, not just Open Source or Anti-Microsoft.
There isn't one word in either the article or the lead-in that says they switched to open source. The entire claim was that they chose against Microsoft.
this story is yet another bash Microsoft for any reason at all story.
No, this is a bash-Microsoft-for-abusing-their-monopoly-power-y
While the heart of Linux itself legally must be available for free, nearly every major computing company is trying to find ways to profit from it.
Okay, I understand it's a business publication, but they should really know the difference between libre and gratis.
In that case spam would be on the same level as junk snail mail. It doesn't cost me anything and, unless it's interfering with my real mail, I ignore it and throw it out. That I could live with. Hell, email advertisers could even subsidize the internet making it cheaper for me to get service. That I could certainly live with.
I hate censorship as much as anyone
There are already limits on commercial speech. Truth in advertising laws, and laws against telemarketers calling cellphones to name a couple.
Not that I think making spam illegal will help anything. They'll just go offshore. But there's no First Ammendment issue with making it illegal.
There's an old con-artist saying:
"You can't cheat an honest man."
I don't see how you could stop spam without enabling whoever made the decision about what was "spam" to censor anyone they wanted.
The real way to stop spam without having a central spam authority is to put all the cost of the delivery on the sender. What makes spam so profitable is half the cost of each message is born by the recipient. Someone needs to invent digital postage....
A computer can be in many states where the only real absolute control a system admin has is pulling the plug.
That's still control. And it's the ultimate control. There isn't a damned thing a remote cracker can do to your system if it's turned off or the network wire is cut or the modem is turned off.
And when you pull a plug you need a reason to do it.
Well, obviously. I'm not asking anyone to take action on a problem they don't know exists. What I am asking is that they exercise what the law calls "due diligence", meaning that they take reasonable care to prevent problems from happening and respond promptly when they do. If they don't do these things, they should be held responsible.
Practically speaking, what needs to be done before we can hold Aunt Tillie responsible for the security of her PC?
Who should be responsible for her PC? Me? You? It's her machine, she bought it, she turned it on, she uses it, she can turn it off if something goes wrong.
Aunt Tilly will never be a competent system administrator. You can spend $10,000 a person training everyone in the world about computer security, spend 60 trillion dollars, and Aunt Tilly will still not be a competent system administrator. Why even pursue this line of thought?
The line of thought is not that everyone who owns a computer should be a fully trained system administrator, only that the person who owns the computer should be responsible for what it does.
You can be an expert and still be rooted and have your computer used in an attack.
Yes, but it would still be my responsibility to clean up the mess or turn the machine off until I can get someone who can.
Anyway's in your analogy you are the one driving, when your computer is taken over and used in an attack, you are not the one in control.
The owner of the machine should still be in control, even if he has to turn it off to get it to stop doing what someone else caused it to be doing.
Except that's not a good analogy either because often with a computer you have no obvious evidence that your machine is compromised.
There are dozens of situations in real life where ignorance of the problem doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for it. Now, I am not suggesting that every person whose computer gets compromised be held financially responsible for every lost packet on the internet, but the owner of the compromised machine is still responsible for correcting the problem. Regardless of how it got that way, it's still their machine causing the problem. They need to fix it.
How many of these people know their systems have been compromised?
Not knowing what your system is doing doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for it anymore than not knowing your four-year-old is making random phone calls relieves you of having to pay the phone bill.
How many of the people in charge of these systems are even sys admins?
By definition, all of them. If they are in charge of the systems, they are the system administrators, regardless of if it's someone who is responsible for 100 servers or Aunt Tilly with her "email machine". Whether or not they are competent system administrators is a different question but it doesn't matter. Incompetence doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for what your system is doing any more than being a bad driver relieves you of the responsibility for the accident you caused.
Cases like these are much more likely to result in rulings against the DMCA.
Unfortunately, it won't. Cases this ridiculous get thrown out before they go to trial. No impact on the DMCA. It's too easy for a judge in this case to say, "That's not what the law is for."
What we need is someone to get convicted of violating the DMCA and have enough resources to take it to the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, we need a martyr.
As much as I wanted Dmitry freed and Elcomsoft found not guilty because it was the right thing, it would have been better for all of us if one of them was found guilty of violating the DMCA. Only then can we get this piece-of-filth legislation in front of the Supreme Court. But after the CTEA debacle, I'm not so sure it would do any good.
If your car is stolen because you left it unlocked in a parking lot and used in a hit-and-run accident, the car owner should not be held responsible. Yes, it is his fault that he didn't lock his car, but it shouldn't be illegal for him to leave his car unlocked. The crime committed here was by the thief.
Likewise, if your computer is used in a DDoS attack on a commercial website, you should not be held responsible unless you intentionally left it vulnerable specifically for use in an attack. The insecure computer has done nothing wrong, the blame is in the hands of the person who used the computer for a malicious attack.
Just to pick a nit, the difference is that, in the case of a DDOS attack, once the owner of the system becomes aware of the problem, he has the power, and therefore the responsibility, to correct it. If someone allows his system to continue attacking someone elses, even if he didn't cause the problem, he should be held responsible.
Once the car is stolen, the car is no longer under the owner's control. Once the system is compromised, the sysadmin can still control it, even if it means pulling the plug.
That said, I still don't think it gives the victim of an attack the right to go in and muck about in someone else's machine.
Um, no. The ISP is disconnecting the service they provide until the customer can fix his equipment. They are not touching anything they do not have direct resposibility for. They aren't modifying anything on the machine at all.
It's analagous to the phone company disconnecting your fax line because your fax machine repeatedly calls the same residential number. They are shutting down the connection they are responsible for, not fixing your fax machine.
But, this business model is really just an attempt by Lexmark to obscure the true price of owning the printer and so is bad from an economic policy perspective.
There's nothing inherently immoral with the loss leader business model. It's been around long enough that the average consumer knows to check the price of the consumables before making a purchase. Grocery stores constantly advertise some common item at below cost to get people in the store to buy the higher priced stuff. It's nothing new.
But there is also a risk associated with the loss-leader model and that is that people may not buy the consumables from you. You can do all you like to make it difficult for others to offer the consumables, but unless you have a signed contract from the customer stating he will only buy them from you, he is not required to do so. I'm willing to bet that if Lexmark had made customers sign a contract requiring them to buy so many toner cartridges from them, they wouldn't have sold as many printers.
Lexmark is using the DMCA to force customers to abide by an agreement they didn't sign.
It's pretty asinine, but it's not as simple as them saying that you can't put whatever you want into the printer.
Actually, it is. The only reason the chip even exists to to make it harder to use toner cartridges not purchased from Lexmark. If it wasn't about forcing you to buy Lexmark toner cartridges, there would be no authentication chip and therefore no protocol to crack.
Spammers abuse a flaw in smtp for their own personal gain. "Anti-linkers" (for lack of a better term) don't like what http was designed to do.
Yes, spammers are working within rules of the protocol, and we should change that protocol to get rid of spam. But at the same time, just because it's open to abuse doesn't mean it should be abused. And if anti-linkers don't like http they are perfectly free to use a different protocol. But the difference is there's no abuse. Http was designed to use hyperlinks. It's not a flaw, it's intended. In short, they don't like what it's supposed to do. It's like trying to use light bulbs to heat a room and complaining about the light they give off.
Just because somethings possible doesn't make it right to do it.
I agree. But just because someone doesn't like it doesn't make it wrong, either.
The problem sites have is they want you to go through all the ads before you hit what you actually want,
This is true in some cases, to which I reply, so what? There's nothing that says I have to read all the ads in a magazine between the cover and the article I want to read. Your poor understanding of the medium in no way makes me responsible for maintaining your income.
nothing to do with bandwidth.
Actually, in some cases, it is the bandwidth or, in the case of a slashdotting, the server load. To which I also say, so what? There are ways to limit the access. Your poor understanding of the medium in no way makes me responsible for reducing your expenses.
Don't try to use the law to make up for your ignorance, incompetance, or laziness.
And for the rest of them, if you don't want it public, don't make it publicly accessible.
It's a bit closed-minded to simply dismiss those who question the veracity of this "accepted truth" without hearing what they have to say. The use of the term crackpot is more ad hominem than anything else.
The point is we have heard what they have to say and they are crackpots.
Surely there are people with completely irrational beliefs out there, but if you don't ever listen, you may never hear truth that contradicts conventional wisdom....
Show me some evidence backed up with the scientific method and I will listen. Until then, their "irrational beliefs" are just that.
You're assuming that the people arguing for the hoax are making logical, rational arguments. They aren't. That's why it's called "pseudoscience". They make outlandish claims and back it up with "prinicples" that sound good, but have no basis in scientific fact. It's the same thing that makes astrology popular.
Remember, most of these people won't be convinced until you bring each and every one of them to the moon, and even then some will insist it was a drug induced hallucination.
And vote for who?
The only reason the independents aren't getting any of this slush money is because they're not in power. As soon as they can influence Congress, they will be bought. It's how the game is played.
And it's not going to change. The people who can change are only able to change it because the system works in their favor. Where is the incentive to change it? It's like expecting coporations to support laws that will make them less profitable. It ain't gonna happen.
Somebody has to pay, somebody has to be paid, but where does that leave the RIAA?
In the same boat as blacksmiths and buggy whip makers....
Well, according to the RIAA, 85% of albums don't break even. So, it seems that being signed doesn't improve the odds of not sucking...
So you want to make it illegal then? Oh, no, it's not illegal, it's forced education. Those two concepts have totally different connotations! They are more or less the same thing, yet I feel so differently about them based on the context you put them in. Thank you.
Look, if you can't see the difference between outlawing unacceptable behavior and encouraging acceptable behavior, I can't help you.
That's not a "real" solution, that's a basis for a solution, not a solution itself.
Sorry, I didn't realize it was my job to solve all the world's problems this week.
So teach everyone, all the time?
Essentially, yes. Make it obvious, all the time, that hate is not acceptable behavior.
I don't get it. How can you tell whether someone's been "taught" or not?
We're not talking about getting a diploma. It's simply a concept. Different != bad.
Having a principle for a solution and having an actual solution are two very different things. And that's why we see laws like this.
Ah. "We must do something, and this is something, so we must do this". Sorry, it doesn't make it right.
You want specific ideas? OK. How about producing children's programming that carries the message different isn't bad but hate is? How about public service announcements carrying the same message to adults? How about speaking out against hatred instead of ignoring it?
I may not have the best solution but that doesn't mean I can't see that outlawing hate isn't a good one.
The victim is just as dead whether or not it was premeditated. The point is that we don't just look at the action, but the mental state behind the action.
Premeditation implies "malicious forethought" meaning that the killer was a) fully cognizant of what he was doing, b) aware that what he was doing was wrong, and c) did it anyway. It doesn't consider at all why he was killing. The law thinks this person deserves to be punished more harshly than someone who just "flew off the handle". I happen to agree.
A hate crime is both a crime against the direct victim, and an act of terrorism against a whole group, designed to cause fear and intimidation among that group. That justifies additional punishment.
Then the terrorism itself should be illegal, regardless of what group the terrorized people belong to. Suppose the people being intimidated don't belong to a "protected" group, or the perpetrator is different in a way that's not covered under hate crime law. Are they less deserving of the same protection?
For the sake of argument, let's look at a person who beats up blondes in order to intimidate other blondes. Isn't he as guilty as someone who beats up blacks, or gays, or Jews? Somehow, I doubt blondes are going to be listed as a protected group or that hair color is going to be listed as a trait covered by hate crime laws. And even if it is, if this guy's hair is blonde, does that make him not guilty of hate crimes?