I'd like to see the GPL upheld in court once and for all. A valid license is a valid license, and it'd be nice to see at least some of the FUD surrounding it smacked down via a court ruling
Its not that easy, I don't think you can have a once and for all case. There are two issues that need to be established. It is pretty clear that the GPL does give permission to others to use the code in pretty much any way they choose. It is not so clear that the restrictions on redistribution are enforceable.
On the Novell thing I really don't think it is at all likely that there is anything incriminating written on paper. Microsoft and SCO both know what the score is there.
It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to pay SCO $20 million rather than spend the more than $50 million IBM has spent littigating the SCO/IBM case so far.
The Novell deal is simply another logical step in Microsoft's efforts to keep alive some semblance of competition and to clear the decks of any and all potential IPR issues. I would not read anything more into it than that. Novell is a rather sick bunny. If Novell goes under the assets are likely to be bought by a patent troll and they will go after Microsoft. Much better to cut a reciprocal deal now while Novell has an incentive to come to the table and license Microsoft IPR.
Interesting. Most people who publish such letters want to stick it to the person who is attacking them. It is entirely believable that someone would do this sort of thing and similar things have happened. But why hide the identity of the site?
Of course it is entirely possible that the site can't be published because it never existed.
Other points that are compatible with this interpetation include the short length of time the blog has been operating for, only since July. And if you read the alleged emails themselves they appear to be written in the same style as the rest of the blog.
I am not so sure about the testimonials from other sites he has now linked to. How many people would insert the term 'a respected' in front of the name of a blogger they only just found out about. Such appreciation tends to be limited to the self.
I always thought it was a flat '2 second' distance.
That is the reaction time not the stopping time.
I can stop dead in less time than the idiot tailgating me in their SUV can take to react. So when someone tailgates me I slow down to leave a longer distance ahead of me.
I can come to a controlled stop in less than 40m at 100 Kmh. Most drivers cannot. And 40m is considerably less than most drivers of SUVs leave despite the fact that their tires have three times the weight to slow down using about a third less contact area, brakes that are considerably less effective and a car with a considerably higher center of gravity.
I would like to see strong measures against tailgaters and a requirement for new cars to be fitted with a warning indicator that states when you are too close to the car in front for your current speed.
There is an old saw in cryptography that anyone can create an encryption algorithm that they themselves cannot break. The point being that the value lies in creating an encryption algorithm that somebody else cannot break.
The same excuse does not exist for compression algorithms. Just choose a random sample of wikipedia and see how well the scheme works.
A quick read thru the article reveals not a problem with Linux, but with the idiots trying to manage the deployment without knowing what they were doing.
That is also a significant and important cost. People who know what they are doing with a computer cost serious money. Why do people find it so hard to beleive that it is cheaper to pay #100 more per PC for a product that costs less to maintain than a product that is 'free'?
Most people don't even realize the amount of effort that goes into running a computer. This morning the battery in my wireless keyboard needed replacement. It took me ten minutes to work out that the keyboard was the problem, go downstairs get a battery and install it. Not a lot of time but in a library type environment thats 1/400th of a person's day just for the nobrainer task.
Then I had another ten minutes trying to get the wireless keyboard to connect to the receiver due to an interaction with the KVM switch. Basically the KVM switch was not giving the receiver power until it was woken up and to wake it up it needed to see some keys on the keyboard. Not that difficult to work out the problem on the system that I put together but could easily have been an hour or more if I didn't know the connections.
Computer systems are much more complex than they should be. Management is much more expensive than it should be. All systems are awful, some are worse than others but all (and yes that includes Mac) are bad.
One of the structural problems with Open Source is that in many cases 'charging for support' is the business model. This is not exactly an incentive to eliminate support costs. Support centers are also a profit center for Microsoft so its not just Open Source that is conflicted.
The same is true of a lot of the Democrats who use the Iraq war as a wedge issue (not that the Republicans didn't do the same with some ephemeral "national security" platform based on half-cooked concepts a couple years ago).
Iraq is not a wedge issue, it is a monumental blunder. It has led to the mullahs of Iran becomming the regional superpower with effective control of the entire gulf. The war is not only a moral catastrophe but an economic and political one as well.
Kennedy's real complaint was that the bloggers don't like Blair.
Its a bit rich to have politicians complaining about the citizens not being interested in solving problems. Its not like they have shown a great interest in that over the past twenty years. Blair in particular brought US style soundbite and spin politics to the UK.
I blogged this earlier before noticing it was on Slashdot. In a nutshell I think that the real message of the blogs is that the people writing them are fed up of the media management of politicians and the trivial approach of the legacy media.
Re:Well, you can still see it.
on
The Web Is 16 Today
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· Score: 4, Interesting
OK, who was the last person to surf the entire Web? By this I mean visit every site manually. I did that sometime in November 1992. Took me about 8 hours. At the time there were about 100 sites that were linked to the CERN list of sites.
This is just asinine. I think both the original conjectures - that the scandals were leaked 'just in time' for midterms, and that the Saddam trial was rigged to coincide with elections - are nonsense. Saddam's trial has been winding down for months now, and scandals always pop up right before elections because people are digging deeper.
Such things are rarely coincidences. Especially not in this Whitehouse.
The most likely explanation is that the Iraqis wanted to have the verdict announced before the US midterm because they thought that the likelihood of violence was very high and they may not consider the Bush administration to be as 'diligent' in supressing the violence after the election as before it.
The original timing three weeks before the election was generally considered optimal for an October suprise. The date was almost certainly moved because Rove realized that the last thing they want to do is to remind voters of the Iraq fiasco.
As idiotic election stunts go little could top 'open source intelligence', dumping Iraqi intelligence documents on the net in the hope that the 101st keyboarders would find evidence of WMD in time to save the election. Pity the documents on Saddam's WMD programs had descriptions of how to build a bomb in Arabic. Now the idiots are tying to pretend that this was not 100% forseable.
Any Journal article comprised of 1% plagiarism would be subject to law suits, apologies and the journal would face ostracism.
There is a big difference between plagarised articles and articles with plagarised passages. Pretty much every medium has a significant plagarism rate, including scholarly journals.
The methodology in this case is more than a little suspect. At least 50% of Wikipedia is utter crap. There is fancruft, stubs, POV peddling forks. Anyone who is involved with Wikipedia will admit as much. The fact is that it does not matter if the article on the garage band 'Frog the Bustards' is plagarised or not, only twelve people will read it before it gets deleted, albeit thats five more than have heard the band. The similarity to the official biography is because both were written by the lead singer's girlfriend.
The Britanica comparisons are plain silly. There are 1.5 million articles in Wikipedia of which something like 200,000 could be considered competition to Britanica. OK the Harry Potter pages are interesting and useful but thats not what Britanica claims to provide. That still leaves Britanica in the dust with a mere 100,000 articles.
Fact is that Britanica is not much use on most of the things I need an online source for and equally useful for the things I would use Britanica for. No encyclopedia is 100% trustworthy, the information is inevitably out of date in Britanica. There is no entry at all in Britanica for what I use it most often - tracking the latest computing neologisms.
The most valuable aspect of Wikipedia is precisely the fact that its pages come with 'caveat lector' written on every page. If you read Wikipedia without being aware of possible POV peddling you are an idiot, if you read Britanica without being aware of possible POV peddling you are also an idiot, if you watch Fox News without being aware that it is POV peddling 24 hours a day you are an utter fool.
You're not hallucinating, you're just seeing story spin at its finest.
I downloaded IE7, it is a major upgrade on IE6 and their implementation of tabbed browsing works rather better than the Firefox one I am used to. In my version of FF at least the 'open page in new tab' option causes focus to immediately switch to the new window which is the opposite of what I want to do which is basically queue stories up for further reading.
I have not yet downloaded the release version of FF2 because I have a beta from less than a month ago. Plus I am developing a plugin for FF so an upgrade may kill demos.
I don't see any need to get competative about this unless you are working for Microsoft or Mozilla. The number of downloads in the first week is probably not a useful measure. I waited a week to download IE7, its not like i have a desperate urge to be the first person to find the bugs.
I use IE7 for two reasons. First it means I can restart my FF plugin without loosing all the context for my web surfing, in particular the documentation I have open. Second I use the Google toolbar to store my favorites and this feature is not on FF yet.
The issue is not whether Saddam attempted to gain WMDs in the 1980s, it was whether he was still attempting to do so and whether he represented the most significant threat to the US at the time of the invasion.
Clearly he did not and the diversion of troops, logistics from Afghanistan and the failure to conclude that campaign successfully before embarking on an ill-planed and ill-judged adventure has seriously harmed US interests, US prestige and US security.
The choice that we now face is whether the Middle East is to be dominated by Iran or Al Qaeda. Neither is a particularly appealling prospect but the corrupt mullahs of Iran can at least be trusted not to harm their own private interests.
The cause of improving the security situation in the Middle East is hopelessly lost. This outcome was utterly predictable from the start and was in fact predicted. Before the invasion I predicted that the civilian deaths would at least equal the 50,000 killed during the British occupation. Turns out that I underestimated by an order of magnitude, the reported deaths are 50,000 and thats just the parts that are safe enough to compile statistics.
Its an utter disaster and those responsible have absolutely no credibility left on any question whatsoever.
In this case, the vulnerability had been made clear by others months prior to this disclosure. In fact, this wasn't so much a disclosure as much as it was a public demonstration of just how easy it is to exploit the already known vulnerability.
Yes which is precisely why it will probably be possible to persuade the Feds not to prosecute in this particular instance.
I absolutely disagree about putting the information up on the Freenet, that would have made the legal problem much much worse. In addition it would probably end up with the FBI arresting people running the Freenet.
Ten years ago this would almost certainly have ended up in the courts and a federal case made of it. Today there are enough FBI agents who understand what is going on that it is easier to persuade them to back off.
There are four points in his favor, first he created the site openly, second he did not attempt to use it for gain himself, three others had made the same point in theory without comment the issue only attracted notice after practical demonstration, four he took it down immediately when requested. When I read the first story I was concerned that the Slashlawyering might persuade him to continue which would have made the situation far worse.
There are certainly arguments that the defense might make if charges were brought. It would not be a good idea to make too much of them unless you want to force the FBI to prove that the law allows them to put a stop to it.
"I do not think they would go as far as making it retroactively illegal and charge this guy under the new law. "
They can charge anything they like. The problem here is that there are enough laws which plausibly cover the circumstances.
What I was responding to here was Slashlawyer assertions that there was absolutely nothing to worry about and that Markey was obviously a fool.
I don't think this view is correct.
I believe that Phil Zimmerman was entirely within his rights when he released PGP. That did not stop the Louis Freeh and the FBI from persecuting him for three years. Even though they couldn't find a prosecutor who would do their bidding they were able to make life as difficult for him as they liked.
Making bureaucrats look like fools is a somewhat risky pastime. Even more so with this particular administration. They could fix airport security but it would be rather easier to lock the student up as an enemy combatant and waterboard him. The public at large is not going to notice the difference, certainly not in the next ten days. The administration will simply claim that its problem solved, butts covered, time to go out and cut some brush.
As it happens there are very similar offenses and getting off would depend on making the argument that a boarding pass is not a financial instrument. This is only going to really work if it does work because of the peculiarity that a boarding pass is not a ticket.
I will not be at the APWG meeting, the W3C is holding another meeting the same days. I have not decided whether to go to the conference yet.
Touche, but I find it hard to believe the Democrats would do any better (they had their chance to fix Vietnam and failed to do so as well).
Johnson started Vietnam. Nixon ended it. It would be rather foolish to say that Nixon is the same as Johnson. One was a cynical crook the other passed the civil rights act.
Nothing is going to get better as long as there is no accountability. If the Democrats take either house in two weeks time Rumsfeld will be gone before Christmas or face impeachment hearings. The Democrats are unlikely to impeach anyone unless they are confident the Senate will convict, in Rumsfeld's case the Senate will convict.
As for the Clipper Chip, that was more of an NSA and Louis Freeh obsession than a Clinton administration initiative. Freeh's vendetta against Clinton was largely because the administration refused to back him to the extent he demanded over Clipper. Unfortunately the President of the FBI cannot be dismissed by the President. W. got rid of him by making it clear he would not be reappointed. The principal proponent of Clipper is currently part of the Bush Administration.
Seriously why? It really makes no difference. They differ on abortion, gay marriage, and gun control, that is about it.
In actual fact they differ on rather a lot, most imporantly the issue of whether Congress should perform oversight of the executive or simply rubber stamp their demands.
This is rather important if you as a US soldier sent to Iraq in insufficient force, lacking essential equipment and having your efforts sabotaged by a civilian leadership whose incompetence is only matched by their mendacity.
Another important difference is that Republicans would like to phase out 'privatize' social security while Democrats beleive in it. The last Democratic President balanced the budget, the last three Republicans all burst it. Tax cuts mean nothing if expenditure runs out of control, the bills will have to be paid some day and taxes will be raised when they do.
But most importantly of all there has never been a US administration that has shown such utter contempt for international law and in particular the laws of war. This is the first US administration to have embraced torture.
The web site does not allow you any financial gain. The fake boarding passes will just get you into the secure area, not onto the flight. All airlines I know of have some means of verifying the validity of the tickets against their passenger database. And really, you could do just as good a job faking it with photoshop, or really an HTML editor, saving the HTML to the self-print boarding pass and modifying that.
Just getting through the security screen could be a problem.
I am not saying that I would prosecute this, just that it is not at all beyond doubt that this is legal.
Napster won every round of its legal battle up to and including the Supreme court on Slashdot, and almost nobody here posted a contrary view right up to the point they lost. The only argument they ever won was to get a temporary stay of an injunction that the appeals court seems to have allowed so Napster could survive long enough to allow a nice juicy precedent to be set.
As do I, you have absolutely no idea who I am in real life and assumptions are unwarranted. Granted "successfully prosecuted" would have been a better term, since you can pretty much be prosecuted for anything as long as a judge can be found to go along with it.
Hmm, your home page shows a series of animated cartoons and games. In contrast I am a pretty well known security specialist and specialize in methods of stopping phishing. If you were active in the area you would know me.
Security is the process of risk management. The law represents a significant area of risk. In this case it is an unnecessary and counter-productive risk.
If people rely on my argument and I am wrong they have lost very little. If people rely on your argument and you are wrong you have lost little, they end up in jail.
You are completely sidestepping the question of intent, but more important is the question of use. You are free to print up all the flight tickets and Amex travellers cheques you desire.
No, intent is absolutely not required here. There are several possible strict liability offenses here. For example possession of a device for creating fake credit cards is a strict liability offense, no intent required. Possession of a stolen access device (stolen credit card numbers, logins etc) is strict liability.
Markey knows this because he is the ranking member of the committee that wrote the laws in question.
However, do you really think they would want to draw even more attention to this by going after him?
Never underestimate the stupidity of the federal government, particularly when doing so puts you at risk of jail.
You might be right and as I said there might be a loophole that a defense attorney might be able to make use of. But on the principle of the thing, no you are dead wrong. Congress has made similar acts illegal in the past they will undoubtely make this illegal in the near future. There are many criminals behind bars today who were charged under similar strict liability offenses. If there is a loophole it will be because a boarding pass turns out to not be property or a financial instrument according to the act. That might be the case I would not count on it
Fraud is a crime of intent.
Unfortunately, there are enough weak brained person's around to get the guy for "intent" based on production of the code.
Fraud requires intent. But fraud is not the only possible crime here.
In particular there are a lot of crimes that are designed to make it easier to prosecute fraud by criminalizing conduct that is preparation for fraud. That is how the CANSPAM act works, it does not criminalize spam but it does criminalize activities spammers typically engage in.
The Secret Service agent who led the Shaddowcrew investigation told me that the charge they used most was not fraud or even having stolen credit card numbers. The charge that they used to break the case was possession of a device designed for the purpose of counterfeiting a financial instrument. Once a search of the suspects place turned up a machine for making credit cards a plea bargain was a foregone conclusion.
Looks to me that it is not very difficult to claim that the Web site is a device that enables forgery of a financial instrument. Not only could the creator of the site be liable here, the hosting service might well be.
No, you can be prosecuted for attempting to pass these off as real, but not just printing them (well, in the case of money that may not be true).
You are not a lawyer, you should not play one on the net. Markey on the other hand is a lawyer.
I am not a lawyer but I deal with Internet crime issues, law enforcement, prosecutors on a regular basis.
The boarding pass is arguably a document that is used to represent value. I don't see much difference between forging a boarding pass for a $5,000 dollar flight ticket and forging an Amex travellers cheque or such.
The theory you seem to be proposing here might be worth a shot if you were a defense attorney defending a case. It is not a good idea to rely on such theories if you want to stay out of prison. Much better to consider the theories that a prosecutor might use and steer clear of possibly illegal activity.
Markey has a point though, there is no need for the fake boarding pass generator to generate a fully functional boarding pass. Print 'fake' across it in a big stripe. The point is made but not in a form that can be used immediately.
Do you realize that someone's personal habits, whether they look good or bad, don't matter at all?
On the contrary, if you have to share a building with him they can matter rather a lot.
All this RMS worship becomes rather tiresome. I thought the Forbes piece was entirely justified. RMS is off on yet another crusade and has not bothered to ask if his followers are with him. Pointing out the fragility of his hold on reality seems eminently fair to me.
The article is, not surprisingly, VeriSign's version of events. The Extended Validation standard emerged from talks among a consortium of browser makers (the IE team, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror) and a ghroup of SSL certificate authorities, which includes not only VeriSign but also geoTurst (since bought by VeriSign), Comodo, Entrust and Go Daddy.
No the article is the Register's version. Its hard to tell but there is actually a panel session on this at RSA Europe and the other vendors are on the panel.
Hey Verisign, it's called "open source". If you'd like the feature added submit a patch and they'll consider it. Until then the people working on it will finish when they can. Thanks.
The Register was putting word's into Tim's mouth. They are the ones who used the phrase 'dragging their heels', not Tim.
The Mozilla team have been part of the EV development process from the start.
The real issue is that IE7 is harder to change once released. So the different deployment strategies make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not that easy, I don't think you can have a once and for all case. There are two issues that need to be established. It is pretty clear that the GPL does give permission to others to use the code in pretty much any way they choose. It is not so clear that the restrictions on redistribution are enforceable.
On the Novell thing I really don't think it is at all likely that there is anything incriminating written on paper. Microsoft and SCO both know what the score is there.
It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to pay SCO $20 million rather than spend the more than $50 million IBM has spent littigating the SCO/IBM case so far.
The Novell deal is simply another logical step in Microsoft's efforts to keep alive some semblance of competition and to clear the decks of any and all potential IPR issues. I would not read anything more into it than that. Novell is a rather sick bunny. If Novell goes under the assets are likely to be bought by a patent troll and they will go after Microsoft. Much better to cut a reciprocal deal now while Novell has an incentive to come to the table and license Microsoft IPR.
Interesting. Most people who publish such letters want to stick it to the person who is attacking them. It is entirely believable that someone would do this sort of thing and similar things have happened. But why hide the identity of the site? Of course it is entirely possible that the site can't be published because it never existed. Other points that are compatible with this interpetation include the short length of time the blog has been operating for, only since July. And if you read the alleged emails themselves they appear to be written in the same style as the rest of the blog. I am not so sure about the testimonials from other sites he has now linked to. How many people would insert the term 'a respected' in front of the name of a blogger they only just found out about. Such appreciation tends to be limited to the self.
That is the reaction time not the stopping time.
I can stop dead in less time than the idiot tailgating me in their SUV can take to react. So when someone tailgates me I slow down to leave a longer distance ahead of me.
I can come to a controlled stop in less than 40m at 100 Kmh. Most drivers cannot. And 40m is considerably less than most drivers of SUVs leave despite the fact that their tires have three times the weight to slow down using about a third less contact area, brakes that are considerably less effective and a car with a considerably higher center of gravity.
I would like to see strong measures against tailgaters and a requirement for new cars to be fitted with a warning indicator that states when you are too close to the car in front for your current speed.
There is an old saw in cryptography that anyone can create an encryption algorithm that they themselves cannot break. The point being that the value lies in creating an encryption algorithm that somebody else cannot break. The same excuse does not exist for compression algorithms. Just choose a random sample of wikipedia and see how well the scheme works.
That is also a significant and important cost. People who know what they are doing with a computer cost serious money. Why do people find it so hard to beleive that it is cheaper to pay #100 more per PC for a product that costs less to maintain than a product that is 'free'?
Most people don't even realize the amount of effort that goes into running a computer. This morning the battery in my wireless keyboard needed replacement. It took me ten minutes to work out that the keyboard was the problem, go downstairs get a battery and install it. Not a lot of time but in a library type environment thats 1/400th of a person's day just for the nobrainer task.
Then I had another ten minutes trying to get the wireless keyboard to connect to the receiver due to an interaction with the KVM switch. Basically the KVM switch was not giving the receiver power until it was woken up and to wake it up it needed to see some keys on the keyboard. Not that difficult to work out the problem on the system that I put together but could easily have been an hour or more if I didn't know the connections.
Computer systems are much more complex than they should be. Management is much more expensive than it should be. All systems are awful, some are worse than others but all (and yes that includes Mac) are bad.
One of the structural problems with Open Source is that in many cases 'charging for support' is the business model. This is not exactly an incentive to eliminate support costs. Support centers are also a profit center for Microsoft so its not just Open Source that is conflicted.
Iraq is not a wedge issue, it is a monumental blunder. It has led to the mullahs of Iran becomming the regional superpower with effective control of the entire gulf. The war is not only a moral catastrophe but an economic and political one as well.
Kennedy's real complaint was that the bloggers don't like Blair.
Its a bit rich to have politicians complaining about the citizens not being interested in solving problems. Its not like they have shown a great interest in that over the past twenty years. Blair in particular brought US style soundbite and spin politics to the UK.
I blogged this earlier before noticing it was on Slashdot. In a nutshell I think that the real message of the blogs is that the people writing them are fed up of the media management of politicians and the trivial approach of the legacy media.
OK, who was the last person to surf the entire Web? By this I mean visit every site manually. I did that sometime in November 1992. Took me about 8 hours. At the time there were about 100 sites that were linked to the CERN list of sites.
Such things are rarely coincidences. Especially not in this Whitehouse.
The most likely explanation is that the Iraqis wanted to have the verdict announced before the US midterm because they thought that the likelihood of violence was very high and they may not consider the Bush administration to be as 'diligent' in supressing the violence after the election as before it.
The original timing three weeks before the election was generally considered optimal for an October suprise. The date was almost certainly moved because Rove realized that the last thing they want to do is to remind voters of the Iraq fiasco.
As idiotic election stunts go little could top 'open source intelligence', dumping Iraqi intelligence documents on the net in the hope that the 101st keyboarders would find evidence of WMD in time to save the election. Pity the documents on Saddam's WMD programs had descriptions of how to build a bomb in Arabic. Now the idiots are tying to pretend that this was not 100% forseable.
There is a big difference between plagarised articles and articles with plagarised passages. Pretty much every medium has a significant plagarism rate, including scholarly journals.
The methodology in this case is more than a little suspect. At least 50% of Wikipedia is utter crap. There is fancruft, stubs, POV peddling forks. Anyone who is involved with Wikipedia will admit as much. The fact is that it does not matter if the article on the garage band 'Frog the Bustards' is plagarised or not, only twelve people will read it before it gets deleted, albeit thats five more than have heard the band. The similarity to the official biography is because both were written by the lead singer's girlfriend.
The Britanica comparisons are plain silly. There are 1.5 million articles in Wikipedia of which something like 200,000 could be considered competition to Britanica. OK the Harry Potter pages are interesting and useful but thats not what Britanica claims to provide. That still leaves Britanica in the dust with a mere 100,000 articles.
Fact is that Britanica is not much use on most of the things I need an online source for and equally useful for the things I would use Britanica for. No encyclopedia is 100% trustworthy, the information is inevitably out of date in Britanica. There is no entry at all in Britanica for what I use it most often - tracking the latest computing neologisms.
The most valuable aspect of Wikipedia is precisely the fact that its pages come with 'caveat lector' written on every page. If you read Wikipedia without being aware of possible POV peddling you are an idiot, if you read Britanica without being aware of possible POV peddling you are also an idiot, if you watch Fox News without being aware that it is POV peddling 24 hours a day you are an utter fool.
I downloaded IE7, it is a major upgrade on IE6 and their implementation of tabbed browsing works rather better than the Firefox one I am used to. In my version of FF at least the 'open page in new tab' option causes focus to immediately switch to the new window which is the opposite of what I want to do which is basically queue stories up for further reading.
I have not yet downloaded the release version of FF2 because I have a beta from less than a month ago. Plus I am developing a plugin for FF so an upgrade may kill demos.
I don't see any need to get competative about this unless you are working for Microsoft or Mozilla. The number of downloads in the first week is probably not a useful measure. I waited a week to download IE7, its not like i have a desperate urge to be the first person to find the bugs.
I use IE7 for two reasons. First it means I can restart my FF plugin without loosing all the context for my web surfing, in particular the documentation I have open. Second I use the Google toolbar to store my favorites and this feature is not on FF yet.
Clearly he did not and the diversion of troops, logistics from Afghanistan and the failure to conclude that campaign successfully before embarking on an ill-planed and ill-judged adventure has seriously harmed US interests, US prestige and US security.
The choice that we now face is whether the Middle East is to be dominated by Iran or Al Qaeda. Neither is a particularly appealling prospect but the corrupt mullahs of Iran can at least be trusted not to harm their own private interests.
The cause of improving the security situation in the Middle East is hopelessly lost. This outcome was utterly predictable from the start and was in fact predicted. Before the invasion I predicted that the civilian deaths would at least equal the 50,000 killed during the British occupation. Turns out that I underestimated by an order of magnitude, the reported deaths are 50,000 and thats just the parts that are safe enough to compile statistics.
Its an utter disaster and those responsible have absolutely no credibility left on any question whatsoever.
Yes which is precisely why it will probably be possible to persuade the Feds not to prosecute in this particular instance.
I absolutely disagree about putting the information up on the Freenet, that would have made the legal problem much much worse. In addition it would probably end up with the FBI arresting people running the Freenet.
Ten years ago this would almost certainly have ended up in the courts and a federal case made of it. Today there are enough FBI agents who understand what is going on that it is easier to persuade them to back off.
There are four points in his favor, first he created the site openly, second he did not attempt to use it for gain himself, three others had made the same point in theory without comment the issue only attracted notice after practical demonstration, four he took it down immediately when requested. When I read the first story I was concerned that the Slashlawyering might persuade him to continue which would have made the situation far worse.
There are certainly arguments that the defense might make if charges were brought. It would not be a good idea to make too much of them unless you want to force the FBI to prove that the law allows them to put a stop to it.
They can charge anything they like. The problem here is that there are enough laws which plausibly cover the circumstances.
What I was responding to here was Slashlawyer assertions that there was absolutely nothing to worry about and that Markey was obviously a fool.
I don't think this view is correct.
I believe that Phil Zimmerman was entirely within his rights when he released PGP. That did not stop the Louis Freeh and the FBI from persecuting him for three years. Even though they couldn't find a prosecutor who would do their bidding they were able to make life as difficult for him as they liked.
Making bureaucrats look like fools is a somewhat risky pastime. Even more so with this particular administration. They could fix airport security but it would be rather easier to lock the student up as an enemy combatant and waterboard him. The public at large is not going to notice the difference, certainly not in the next ten days. The administration will simply claim that its problem solved, butts covered, time to go out and cut some brush.
As it happens there are very similar offenses and getting off would depend on making the argument that a boarding pass is not a financial instrument. This is only going to really work if it does work because of the peculiarity that a boarding pass is not a ticket.
I will not be at the APWG meeting, the W3C is holding another meeting the same days. I have not decided whether to go to the conference yet.
Johnson started Vietnam. Nixon ended it. It would be rather foolish to say that Nixon is the same as Johnson. One was a cynical crook the other passed the civil rights act.
Nothing is going to get better as long as there is no accountability. If the Democrats take either house in two weeks time Rumsfeld will be gone before Christmas or face impeachment hearings. The Democrats are unlikely to impeach anyone unless they are confident the Senate will convict, in Rumsfeld's case the Senate will convict.
As for the Clipper Chip, that was more of an NSA and Louis Freeh obsession than a Clinton administration initiative. Freeh's vendetta against Clinton was largely because the administration refused to back him to the extent he demanded over Clipper. Unfortunately the President of the FBI cannot be dismissed by the President. W. got rid of him by making it clear he would not be reappointed. The principal proponent of Clipper is currently part of the Bush Administration.
In actual fact they differ on rather a lot, most imporantly the issue of whether Congress should perform oversight of the executive or simply rubber stamp their demands.
This is rather important if you as a US soldier sent to Iraq in insufficient force, lacking essential equipment and having your efforts sabotaged by a civilian leadership whose incompetence is only matched by their mendacity.
Another important difference is that Republicans would like to phase out 'privatize' social security while Democrats beleive in it. The last Democratic President balanced the budget, the last three Republicans all burst it. Tax cuts mean nothing if expenditure runs out of control, the bills will have to be paid some day and taxes will be raised when they do.
But most importantly of all there has never been a US administration that has shown such utter contempt for international law and in particular the laws of war. This is the first US administration to have embraced torture.
Just getting through the security screen could be a problem.
I am not saying that I would prosecute this, just that it is not at all beyond doubt that this is legal.
Napster won every round of its legal battle up to and including the Supreme court on Slashdot, and almost nobody here posted a contrary view right up to the point they lost. The only argument they ever won was to get a temporary stay of an injunction that the appeals court seems to have allowed so Napster could survive long enough to allow a nice juicy precedent to be set.
Hmm, your home page shows a series of animated cartoons and games. In contrast I am a pretty well known security specialist and specialize in methods of stopping phishing. If you were active in the area you would know me.
Security is the process of risk management. The law represents a significant area of risk. In this case it is an unnecessary and counter-productive risk.
If people rely on my argument and I am wrong they have lost very little. If people rely on your argument and you are wrong you have lost little, they end up in jail.
You are completely sidestepping the question of intent, but more important is the question of use. You are free to print up all the flight tickets and Amex travellers cheques you desire.
No, intent is absolutely not required here. There are several possible strict liability offenses here. For example possession of a device for creating fake credit cards is a strict liability offense, no intent required. Possession of a stolen access device (stolen credit card numbers, logins etc) is strict liability.
Markey knows this because he is the ranking member of the committee that wrote the laws in question.
However, do you really think they would want to draw even more attention to this by going after him?
Never underestimate the stupidity of the federal government, particularly when doing so puts you at risk of jail.
You might be right and as I said there might be a loophole that a defense attorney might be able to make use of. But on the principle of the thing, no you are dead wrong. Congress has made similar acts illegal in the past they will undoubtely make this illegal in the near future. There are many criminals behind bars today who were charged under similar strict liability offenses. If there is a loophole it will be because a boarding pass turns out to not be property or a financial instrument according to the act. That might be the case I would not count on it
Unfortunately, there are enough weak brained person's around to get the guy for "intent" based on production of the code.
Fraud requires intent. But fraud is not the only possible crime here.
In particular there are a lot of crimes that are designed to make it easier to prosecute fraud by criminalizing conduct that is preparation for fraud. That is how the CANSPAM act works, it does not criminalize spam but it does criminalize activities spammers typically engage in.
The Secret Service agent who led the Shaddowcrew investigation told me that the charge they used most was not fraud or even having stolen credit card numbers. The charge that they used to break the case was possession of a device designed for the purpose of counterfeiting a financial instrument. Once a search of the suspects place turned up a machine for making credit cards a plea bargain was a foregone conclusion.
Looks to me that it is not very difficult to claim that the Web site is a device that enables forgery of a financial instrument. Not only could the creator of the site be liable here, the hosting service might well be.
You are not a lawyer, you should not play one on the net. Markey on the other hand is a lawyer.
I am not a lawyer but I deal with Internet crime issues, law enforcement, prosecutors on a regular basis.
The boarding pass is arguably a document that is used to represent value. I don't see much difference between forging a boarding pass for a $5,000 dollar flight ticket and forging an Amex travellers cheque or such.
The theory you seem to be proposing here might be worth a shot if you were a defense attorney defending a case. It is not a good idea to rely on such theories if you want to stay out of prison. Much better to consider the theories that a prosecutor might use and steer clear of possibly illegal activity.
At last count 15 Republicans and 2 Democrats from the 109th Congress under investigation, indicted or convicted. Roll call forgot about Katherine Harris.
Markey has a point though, there is no need for the fake boarding pass generator to generate a fully functional boarding pass. Print 'fake' across it in a big stripe. The point is made but not in a form that can be used immediately.
On the contrary, if you have to share a building with him they can matter rather a lot.
All this RMS worship becomes rather tiresome. I thought the Forbes piece was entirely justified. RMS is off on yet another crusade and has not bothered to ask if his followers are with him. Pointing out the fragility of his hold on reality seems eminently fair to me.
No the article is the Register's version. Its hard to tell but there is actually a panel session on this at RSA Europe and the other vendors are on the panel.
yes, Microsoft has thought of that one, there are other, non colour cues.
The Register was putting word's into Tim's mouth. They are the ones who used the phrase 'dragging their heels', not Tim.
The Mozilla team have been part of the EV development process from the start.
The real issue is that IE7 is harder to change once released. So the different deployment strategies make sense.
That depends who you are. They are all going to cooperate with Microsoft.