One one hand, if a genuine white hat hacker finds an exploit in a network and told the owners about it
Maybe he should just not be looking for exploits in other peoples networks.Or maybe he should just forget about it and not tell anyone?
If a company leaves the gates to their service yard open, and you walk in and nosey around, eventually finding that the bars on one of their ground floor windows can be cut through with a special type of hacksaw, what do you *think* the company manager would say when you went and told him what you had done? OK he might be pissed off, he might not be. He might have already known that was the case, but was relying on security through obscurity. OK, now you've left a message for him, and he hasn't bothered to return your call, there's no way you have the right to blackmail him for money, threatening to publish and ad in the local press about how easy it is to break in.
Jeez, get with the real world, these "white hats" really need to stop dicking about scanning others peoples networks for vulnerabilities because it's "interesting" or "challenging" or because they think they're being altruistic.
(I understand the parent isn't condonding blackmail, but it seemed the most relevant post to reply to)
The redhat's that you are talking about are the consumer ones, not enterprise ones.
How is this relevant? The Windows (98) the story talks about are also the consumer ones, not the Enterprise ones.
For "enterprise"/"business" MS released NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000, there was nothing in between. Neither 98 nor ME were business operating systems.
Your post also seems to advocate that somehow enterprise software should be deemed as "more worthy" for free support than consumer software, did I read that wrong?
I sure hope the pinpoint feature is disabled when you buy the phone.
It's irrelevant - all phone positions can be found by triangulating the phones signal from multiple base stations. It's been like this for years. There are rumours that some phones, even when turned "off" are trackable, I'm not sure how reliable this is, except to say that taking the battery out would prevent this (assuming there's no on-chip capacitors) and that it's definitely possible
'These discs are only provided as backups and you must own the original game.' - which raises the question, why isn't the person backing up the game themselves?
Because the person lives in a contry run by a government which has enacted laws that, while giving them the *right* to make a backup, has made it illegal to sell, give or talk about the equipment required to make the backups. Thus, while the person has the right to carry out the activity, they are prevented by law from doing so.
So there you go. Now the whole site is unusable unless the user disables pop-up protection.
Markets are wonderful things. I'm allowed to make the decision not to use a website, and to instead use the site of a competitor which works without any popups.
Does anybody else think it would be a good idea if the life of a patent were shortened by a specific amount every time the rights changed hands? The idea would be to discourage companies that exist only to acquire rights to things without actually creating anything.
Not at all... for every post you see on Slashdot about some company using a patent in an unethical way, there are 100 patent transfer transactions between companies who actually do create things - reducing the period of time the patent is valid for would discourage transactions like this, essentially reducing the revenue streams to those inventers who come up with ideas, then sell on those ideas to larger companies with the funds to develop them.
The patent system as it stands is not too bad - it is let down by the fact that the examiners grant far far too many stupid patents, and the fact that there is no process through which someone can have a patent voided after the fact without great personal expense - so the patent system is currently a tragedy of the commons. How easy would it be for the patent office to setup a website, upon which people could complain about a patent, or mark it as "suspicious" - and the patent office employs a team of investigators to examine the patents with the most traffic from this system, to look at comments made, and investigate prior art / validity accordingly?
The problem is, the Patent Office is making lots of money, the people at the top are getting more power, and power is addictive. Didn't I read somewhere they were spending many millions building shiny new offices?
Although the cost of living has been going up, I think you'll find that people spend less of their income, percentage wise, on basic living essentials.
Can you read? The parent said : "All I know is, my montly bills are up: electricity, gas and phone. My market bill is bigger now than last year." - which means he's spending MORE on basic living essentials than he did last year.
Am I the only one who found it amusing that there's an MS ad at the top of this page, advertising "Windows Services for UNIX" - Resources for UNIX professionals who want to use their existing skills to manage the Windows OS and applications?
Why automation is considered more important than security is one thing, but why do people feel the need to defend that wierd choice of values?
It's pretty simple really, automation has a much higher value than security - people are willing to pay more. If we went back in time, and made all MS products ultra-secure, but removde the ability to automate anything, most businesses using MS software would not be as productive as they are... a (very) few might still be around because they didn't have to fold after a security incident, but almost every single one would be worse off, that makes the economy worse off, which makes you and me worse off in the long run.
The primary objective of advertising is to publicize your product, and not to track who is watching your publicity.
Indeed it is, however tracking the popularity of a trailer, how much it is watched etc. has a clear, perceived value, which is something a supplier can charge for... having "lots" of people view your trailer sounds nice, but has no defined value, so a supplier cannot charge for it.
It certainly takes a special kind of person to look at the plane that he built and say to himself "Yes, technically it can perform this task." and completely ignore the other voice in his soul saying "Although perhaps I should not force my luck."
On the other hand, it takes a *very* trusting person to look at a plane built by a bunch of people in a country they've never been to, and maintained by mechanics paid as little as the market will allow, and choose to fly in it over the permafrost in Greenland, or Canada... or over the waters of the major oceans, instead of a plane which they have built and tested themselves...
But let's not forget that there are people out there who would never have bought the CDs.
Hmm, actually my last post was badly phrased. What would have been better was : "That person does not have the right to own a copy of the music for his/her use"
Do IE and Mozilla treat the box model in the same way? (Example : try setting a fixed width box with a border, then adding some padding to it - it will currently look different under each browser)
there should be no scope for someone to say "pay us or we won't accept email from you.
Why's that? If Yahoo doesn't accept email from anyone except the biggest 50 companies in the world who could afford to take part, you can place a bet that there won't be many people using their email service anymore.
there seems to be a proliferation of Commanders of the Obvious who disguise their barely-adequate theories behind some sort of happy analogy. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" maps roughly to "Boy != Girl".
Have you even read this book? It's one of the greatest modern day studies of the differences between the sexes, and has helped millions of people understand their friends and partners better. This book has incredible value - it's even helped to get people I know laid. Just because something is obvious, does not mean that the techniques used to deal with it are obvious.
War is bad... *obviously* but dealing with it, and understanding it are two of the hardest takes humanity will face.
Diebold isn't putting a gun to anyone's head forcing them to use Diebold machinery.
Being fair, if Diebold is using lobbying, PACs, and other forms of legalised bribery at the state or federal level, they are putting a gun to the voters head by proxy...the government rules by force. If the government or state, or county mandates that voters must use Diebold machines, they get no choice. They cannot turn up at the polling station and ask to have their vote registered by hand, can they?
Being fair, if Diebold is using lobbying, PACs, and other forms of legalised bribery at the state or federal level, they are putting a gun to the voters head by proxy...the government rules by force. If the government or state, or county mandates that voters must use Diebold machines, they get no choice. They cannot turn up at the polling station and ask to have their vote registered by hand, can they?
From the contents of your post, I see you are aware that if we were to just release software into the public domain, modifications could then legally become propietary. So instead we it release under the GPL which prevents that from happening. But if there was no legal basis for restricting software - if all software was pubic domain, then there would be no need for the GPL. Copyleft is only necisarry because of the existence of copyright.
If software was not copyrighted, the world of software development would be free to take and use any code they wanted from anywhere, at any time, and do anything with it they pleased.
This would lead to the distribution of much of what is now "free" software, but in compiled form, sold only after being compiled with a compiler which would completely obfuscate the resulting executable making it exceedingly hard to reverse engineer/decompile the code.
Essentially, we would live in a world where the highest paid engineers were those who know how to obfuscate well. "Free" software wouldn't gain anything, and indeed may be eclipsed by closed source versions of software which have proprietary modifications to make them more attractive. Unlike todays situation where closed source companies cannot make effective business use of GPLd (or similar) code, we would enter into an era of unparalleled code theft and plagiarism. Legal, of course.
What I think the FSF wants to get to, is a point where copyright *does not apply* to software, and in addition, it becomes a legal requirement to distribute copies of source code with all software.
In return for the legal protection of copyright, developers should have to distribute their source code - this I do not argue with at all - but copyright (or copyleft) itself will still be required to keep free software free.
Note, that I am primarily a closed source user, but would prefer copyrighted software with mandated source code distribution.
This is not a part of some Evil scheme or government plot... Because if they don't track this information and enforce it... then they will be getting lawsuits left and right
Didn't you just contradict yourself? You're claiming it's not part of a government plot, and next minute you're saying the government forced them to carry out their actions? Laws are enacted by the government to force the citizenry to conform... so when you have to do something to obey the law, you have been forced to carry out that action by the government. But this has nothing to do with the government, right?
Slashdot Mirror
So it's a remote pacific island, far from New Zealand but with an indiginous population, and an airstrip which you can fly to from NZ.
Why on *earth* are they not making a killing from tourism?
If a company leaves the gates to their service yard open, and you walk in and nosey around, eventually finding that the bars on one of their ground floor windows can be cut through with a special type of hacksaw, what do you *think* the company manager would say when you went and told him what you had done?
OK he might be pissed off, he might not be. He might have already known that was the case, but was relying on security through obscurity.
OK, now you've left a message for him, and he hasn't bothered to return your call, there's no way you have the right to blackmail him for money, threatening to publish and ad in the local press about how easy it is to break in.
Jeez, get with the real world, these "white hats" really need to stop dicking about scanning others peoples networks for vulnerabilities because it's "interesting" or "challenging" or because they think they're being altruistic.
(I understand the parent isn't condonding blackmail, but it seemed the most relevant post to reply to)
For "enterprise"/"business" MS released NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000, there was nothing in between. Neither 98 nor ME were business operating systems.
Your post also seems to advocate that somehow enterprise software should be deemed as "more worthy" for free support than consumer software, did I read that wrong?
It's irrelevant - all phone positions can be found by triangulating the phones signal from multiple base stations. It's been like this for years.
There are rumours that some phones, even when turned "off" are trackable, I'm not sure how reliable this is, except to say that taking the battery out would prevent this (assuming there's no on-chip capacitors) and that it's definitely possible
Actually, there's a film based on a true story of a man suing god:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0268437/
Because the person lives in a contry run by a government which has enacted laws that, while giving them the *right* to make a backup, has made it illegal to sell, give or talk about the equipment required to make the backups. Thus, while the person has the right to carry out the activity, they are prevented by law from doing so.
Not at all... for every post you see on Slashdot about some company using a patent in an unethical way, there are 100 patent transfer transactions between companies who actually do create things - reducing the period of time the patent is valid for would discourage transactions like this, essentially reducing the revenue streams to those inventers who come up with ideas, then sell on those ideas to larger companies with the funds to develop them.
The patent system as it stands is not too bad - it is let down by the fact that the examiners grant far far too many stupid patents, and the fact that there is no process through which someone can have a patent voided after the fact without great personal expense - so the patent system is currently a tragedy of the commons.
How easy would it be for the patent office to setup a website, upon which people could complain about a patent, or mark it as "suspicious" - and the patent office employs a team of investigators to examine the patents with the most traffic from this system, to look at comments made, and investigate prior art / validity accordingly?
The problem is, the Patent Office is making lots of money, the people at the top are getting more power, and power is addictive. Didn't I read somewhere they were spending many millions building shiny new offices?
Am I the only one who found it amusing that there's an MS ad at the top of this page, advertising "Windows Services for UNIX" - Resources for UNIX professionals who want to use their existing skills to manage the Windows OS and applications?
It's pretty simple really, automation has a much higher value than security - people are willing to pay more.
If we went back in time, and made all MS products ultra-secure, but removde the ability to automate anything, most businesses using MS software would not be as productive as they are... a (very) few might still be around because they didn't have to fold after a security incident, but almost every single one would be worse off, that makes the economy worse off, which makes you and me worse off in the long run.
Indeed it is, however tracking the popularity of a trailer, how much it is watched etc. has a clear, perceived value, which is something a supplier can charge for... having "lots" of people view your trailer sounds nice, but has no defined value, so a supplier cannot charge for it.
I did it as soon as Slashdot would let me! ;)
Hmm, actually my last post was badly phrased. What would have been better was : "That person does not have the right to own a copy of the music for his/her use"
Then that person doesn't have the right to listen to the music.
Do IE and Mozilla treat the box model in the same way? (Example : try setting a fixed width box with a border, then adding some padding to it - it will currently look different under each browser)
If it does, then cool, but I'd be surprised.
mutual tolerance
and possibly:
respect for diversity
Why's that? If Yahoo doesn't accept email from anyone except the biggest 50 companies in the world who could afford to take part, you can place a bet that there won't be many people using their email service anymore.
Have you even read this book? It's one of the greatest modern day studies of the differences between the sexes, and has helped millions of people understand their friends and partners better. This book has incredible value - it's even helped to get people I know laid. Just because something is obvious, does not mean that the techniques used to deal with it are obvious.
War is bad... *obviously* but dealing with it, and understanding it are two of the hardest takes humanity will face.
Being fair, if Diebold is using lobbying, PACs, and other forms of legalised bribery at the state or federal level, they are putting a gun to the voters head by proxy...the government rules by force. If the government or state, or county mandates that voters must use Diebold machines, they get no choice. They cannot turn up at the polling station and ask to have their vote registered by hand, can they?
That software *patents* should be abolished, in so far as they only extend ideas from other mediums.
If software was not copyrighted, the world of software development would be free to take and use any code they wanted from anywhere, at any time, and do anything with it they pleased.
This would lead to the distribution of much of what is now "free" software, but in compiled form, sold only after being compiled with a compiler which would completely obfuscate the resulting executable making it exceedingly hard to reverse engineer/decompile the code.
Essentially, we would live in a world where the highest paid engineers were those who know how to obfuscate well. "Free" software wouldn't gain anything, and indeed may be eclipsed by closed source versions of software which have proprietary modifications to make them more attractive. Unlike todays situation where closed source companies cannot make effective business use of GPLd (or similar) code, we would enter into an era of unparalleled code theft and plagiarism. Legal, of course.
What I think the FSF wants to get to, is a point where copyright *does not apply* to software, and in addition, it becomes a legal requirement to distribute copies of source code with all software.
In return for the legal protection of copyright, developers should have to distribute their source code - this I do not argue with at all - but copyright (or copyleft) itself will still be required to keep free software free.
Note, that I am primarily a closed source user, but would prefer copyrighted software with mandated source code distribution.
Didn't you just contradict yourself? You're claiming it's not part of a government plot, and next minute you're saying the government forced them to carry out their actions?
Laws are enacted by the government to force the citizenry to conform... so when you have to do something to obey the law, you have been forced to carry out that action by the government.
But this has nothing to do with the government, right?