Bullshit. In the 1980's, there were computer professionals and then there were people who didn't know what they were doing. The latter promised easy solutions and failed to deliver--they didn't even understand the problems.
The computer professionals you refer to were elitists whose main interest was using their control over corporate MIS systems to control the company. If you wanted some information from the machine you had to beg for it, if your request was accepted you might see the data six months later.
Whether or not someone knows what they are doing is utterly irrelevant if they won't tell me.
Visicalc and the micro-computer offered easy solutions and they delivered big time.
UNIX was and is a piece of crap. The user interface was designed for elites who could be bothered to fight the system. Besides which the original idea IBM had was to deliver MSDOS as a quick fix bootstrap loader to get the PC project off the ground quickly. The original idea was to transition to OS/2 or XENIX.
UCSD Pascal was a better designed system and ran on a 64kbyte Apple II at the whopping speed of 1MHz with a pathetic little chip called the 6502 that had three (count'em: three) one byte registers.
As a former 6502 programmer myself I know the limits of the machine. But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
And while BASIC is not the worlds best language Pascal was much worse than ALGOL 60 which had preceeded it on the same class of machine. The market rejected Pascal because it was a piece of elitist crap designed to make students 'program properly'. Microsoft BASIC was designed to allow anyone to teach themselves how to program.
That is the big difference between the geek elite and ordinary people. Ordinary people want to do a job with a minimum of fuss and the geek elite want to convert them to their way of thinking.
If you'll remember the "pip" command from CP/M? That is straight out of RT-11, and other DEC OS's.
And PIP was often used as proof that CP/M was a piece of garbage. Other indications being the idiotic copy command which worked the opposite way to every other one "copy to from", oh and it would erase your disk when you made the obvious mistake.
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
I just can't figure out why he kidnapped a severely mentally handicapped child. MS-DOS is the best case for abortion I can think of. Nothing that bad should live. Certainly, it shouldn't breed!
I would be proud to have MSDOS on my resume, as would most serious software architects. MSDOS was used by millions of users, it was a true groundbreaker. MSDOS does not do much compared to VMS or VM/CMS but what it does it does on an 8/16 bit processor running at a few MHz. The original Microsoft Basic was not exactly extensive but most people would agree that it was a cool piece of coding.
But you miss the point in any case. This guy has MSDOS on his resume, what he is objecting to is the claim that he stole it.
There have been a number of bogus bloggers where a candidate has paid a blogger to write articles for them. Then there have been outright partisan bloggers who have done consultancy work for campaigns.
I don't have a problem with either so long as it is disclosed. Atrios can go off and work for Media Matters provided he tells people that he is working for a 527 (he did). What I do not like is the submarine campaigns where candidates have been paying bloggers to write dirt about their opponent.
Regulation is not a bad thing for bloggers, it is good, it means that there is a clearly defined line that states what is allowed and what is not.
At the very top are the 13 root servers, run by people like VeriSign. If you want to make the Internet pretty useless, take out those servers (someone tried a couple of years ago).
Someone tries every day, to be more precise there are over 1000 attacks against core DNS each day. Most of the roots are run on a basis that I regard as far too casual given the critical nature of the infrastructure.
There are not 13 root DNS servers, there are 13 root IP addresses which is not the same thing at all. Several of the roots are anycast so there are actually multiple data centers serving them. The number of root servers is much larger than 13.
Another pretty major omission from the list is OASIS which has roughly the same degree of influence as W3C and considerably more than the IETF.
The premise of the list is somewhat misguided. The standards bodies themselves don't have any influence on the Internet, its the members and the software providers who have influence. The point of the standards work is to get buy in from the necessary stakeholders, not to solve problems by committee.
Giving the choice between having my spec rejected by the IESG and having it rejected by Microsoft or the Apache group I'll choose the first. One of the big problems with the IETF is that many folk think that they are somehow 'in control'. Not on this Internet you ain't, if I don't get a chance to vote on who holds an office I don't see why I have to respect the decisions made by the office holder. I certainly don't see why I should wait two years or more for them to come to a decision.
I helped set up W3C when the IETF web standards effort collapsed. HTML was originally proposed in the IETF and turned into a disaster. When W3C was not interested in doing the work I do I played a leading role in one of the early OASIS Web Security standards. I am currently sitting in a W3C working group where the discussion has got into some particularly arcane details of XML.
Standards organizations are a vehicle, they are neither the driver, nor the road.
It breaks anti-virus and anti-spyware programs (which the user might run to clean it up). It does not show up in add/remove programs. I have a problem with any application which actively tries to prevent the user from removing it, or which deliberatly causes other application to cease to function.
This is the issue that I beleive spyware legislation should center on. At the moment they look at the behavior which is a completely hopeless approach. You cannot hope to enumerate the types of unwanted stuff a program might do. Trying is very likely to end up prohibiting wanted interactions and functions. Anti-spyware behaves in very similar ways to spyware, the only difference is the matter of intent.
As for the legality, I could make a pretty strong case that this is in violation of Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, 1030. It would depend on if the court considered the EULA sufficient authorization. Of course, in any case where the user did not see it, that could not apply.
IANAL but I would strongly argue that no EULA is can grant permission to damage the machine. The spyware companies know full well that many of the users who click to accept are NOT competent to enter into any contract they are either minors or not the owners of the machine and that they would in any case refuse to do so if they were conspiciously aware of the contract terms.
I think that the way to criminalize spyware is to criminalize any form of subterfuge to con the user into installing code and criminalize the use of techniques to prevent removal. This would not produce a huge evidentiary burden for the prosecution, there would be little risk of crimializing legitimate tools.
From the MSNBC article: "Relative youngster Google has been lauded for reaching $1 billion in sales in just six years. Well, Amazon did it in four, Yahoo in five and eBay achieved it in seven. Compare those companies with Wal-Mart, which aged to 18 before it could slap the phrase, 'the billion dollar company' on its annual report; and McDonald's took 24 years to hit the benchmark."
Yeah and IBM probably took something like eighty years since it began in 1885 and revenues probably didn't reach the billion mark till the mid 60s. The measurements are not in constant dollars. A much better measure would be looking at how long it took the companies to reach a certain fraction of GDP. AT&T probably looks similar. Its a meaningless comparison except in constant dollars.
McDonalds operated as a single diner for many years before Ray Krok drove up to sell them a mixer and ended up inventing franchising and it was another ten years before they went public. If Krok had had access to the amount of capital Amazon and EBay did they could have become a billion dollar company much faster.
A better measure would be the point at which a company had earned a billion dollars in profits (inflation adjusted).
Film canned at 3000DPI is assumed to have all useable details captured. If the film this is replacing is 35mm (1 x 1.5 inches)then a resolution of 3000x4500 is required for replacement. 2048x1080 falls a bit short.
Although 35mm photography and cinema use the same film stock the orientation is different. Still photography has the long side of the image parallel to the direction of the film advance. Cinema (except for IMAX) has the image oriented perpendicular. So the image area is about 0.75 x 1" or 2250 x 3000 pixels or about 6 Megapixels.
The 2 Megapixel projectors are certainly not optimal and much higher resolutions are used for editing but reducing from 6 to 2 Megapixel is not a major issue. People do not complain much about the use of anamorphic lenses for widescreen.
If you go close up to the screen in most commercial cinema the picture will be so out of focus you will not notice the difference in any case. The massive amount of heat put out by a Xeon arc means that the lenses heat up during the show and their optical characteristics change. Very few commercial cinemas have projectionists who check the focus at the start of a show, let alone after the projector has heated up.
The bigger constraint on the projectors is going to be the amount of light that they can throw.
However since very little pirecy is associated with cinema staff (most are from screener disks sent to reviewers) then it is mostly inefective but irretating for viewers (the coding is also thought not to work)
You jest surely. There are cases where a projectionist has had someone come up to them in a new car and offer to hand over the keys in exchange for a loan of a print. The only way to pirate a film that has not been released on DVD is to borrow a print. Screener copies may be the source of bit-torrent piracy but that is small beer compared to the Russian mob.
But not for these movies.
Digital cinema is not economic for the large budget large gross movies the pirates want to steal. The cost of striking a print is easily recouped after a few days. A digital projector costs a serious amount of money, about $20K-$50K. You can get a 35 mm projector and a cakestand for $5K and all the theatres have them already anyway.
What this is about is making it easy to show short runs of movies that are distinctly minority interest that do not justify the cost of striking a print, shipping it arround etc. Properly preparing a 35mm print to show it is about 3 hours work for a good print and for some of the worn out crap prints that are common on the art house circuit it can take 12 hours or more to do a repair job. It takes a large staff to keep changing the program for each screening quite apart from the cost factor.
The distribution systems will probably be set up to encode the print for the specific decryption box at a particular location. If the decryption box is built into the projector it is not possible to subvert the signal without taking that apart which will be noticed soon enough.
That's the sort of legislation that is very hard to "buy." Everyone wants cheap prescription medicine. Politicians can and do lose elections, especially when they stand up for legislation that is widely unpopular.
Actually there have been a whole rack of patents that have been corruptly extended. NeutraSweet for example. There is a list on the USPTO site. Patent terms were also extended when the patent act went through and made the term 20 years from date of filing, not 17 from date of issue. Patent holders got the benefit of the longer of the two terms.
Just think of the commercials. "My opponent voted against legislation that would have lowered the price of prescription medications by up to 45%." That's the sort of thing that could easily lose a politician the election.
The Republican party has prevented numerous measures to reduce drug costs without penalty. In fact they were bullying third world countries over their plans to declare eminent domain over AIDS drugs that the pharmaceutical companies charged exhorbitant prices for.
The bullying on the AIDS thing stopped dead because Joe Biden is one heck of a lot smarter than Bush and Thomson. During the 'anthrax' scare the drug companies were charging exhorbitant prices for the anitbiotics. So Biden very cleverly proposed a bill to allow the US govt to declare eminent domain. The GOP etc latched onto it and rammed it through in a couple of days without pausing to think that they had just done precisely the same thing that they had been threatening third world countries not to.
Biden's proposal was not an accident, he had criticized the drug companies over their AIDS gouging earlier. The US could easily have afforded to pay full price for the Anthrax drugs, unlike the third world countries facing the AIDS crisis. But the minute a threat appeared, well all those 'principles' disolved.
--Read the first edition and you will find all sorts of politically incorrect ideas, little things like why all those savages in the colonies are so happy to receive the benefits of membership in the glorious British Empire.
Wow, the first edition came out before 1776!
Actually it did but what would 1776 have to do with the matter anyway? Perhaps you are not aware that the British Empire at its peak between WWI and WWII controlled India, the better parts of Africa and much of the Gulf.
Its a pretty silly argument to be having, Brittanica started life as a piece of blatant propaganda. Read the first edition and you will find all sorts of politically incorrect ideas, little things like why all those savages in the colonies are so happy to receive the benefits of membership in the glorious British Empire.
For a long time the first four Chinese dynasties were dismised as 'mythological' by Western academics. The original reason for this was that the dates of these dynasties were incompatible with the biblical flood and so they had to be explained away. This claim still persists today even though there is at least as much evidence for the existence of the yellow emperor as Homer. The criteria for changing the established view are far higher than creating one.
The modern Brittanica is both huge and for many purposes useless. If you want detailed information on a topic like cryptography you will find maybe a short article on RSA in Brittanica but unlikely to find out very much. Wikipedia on the other hand has extensive in depth coverage of far more obscure points.
Every information source is biased and wrong. If you have the misfortune to watch Fox News you will see plenty that is deliberately deceptive, much that is outright lies. There are very few blogs on either the right or the left that sink to the level of mendacity that is standard operating procedure for the Murdoch/Hearst press. We don't see many editorials in the old media complaining about that.
The issues raised by the Brittanica guy are not completely groundless, the Wikipedia people need to consider them carefully. Wiki is not the first extended Internet collaboration system to reach a large audience. The problem is that success brings trolls, spammers and cranks. Together the trolls spammers and cranks destroyed USENET in the mid 90's. It only recovered when the parasites moved on to try to wreck email.
I think the issues raised are fixable but we will have to think carefully about mechanism. I do not think peer review is feasible on that scale but reputation systems might be.
A deeper problem that Wiki shares with Britanica is that it tries to impose a single systematization of knowledge. This is fine for areas where there is no controversy. Where controversy is active the result is either a tug of war between extreemes or some bland statement that takes no position.
Sometimes you have to put the facts on the line, there is no 'scientific' theory of creationism. Creationism is revealled knowledge and that is simply not compatible with science. But there are people who honestly beleive the opposite.
I firmly beleive in the 'reality based' universe and want information sources that share this belief. I do not want my information contaminated by the crationist world view or any other silliness.
there are also cases of genuine academic dispute where things get equally nasty and ideological.
You need to check with better cryptographers; a massive speedup does apply to symmetric ciphers, in the form of Grover's Algorithm. It reduces the keyspace you have to search by an exponential factor of 0.5, meaning breaking 128-bit symmetric crypto by brute force is within the realm of well-funded private citizens.
But attempting to apply it to AES or even DES requires a vast quantum computer, you have to essentially unroll all the loops and apply it as hardware. So the complexity is much higher than breaking RSA.
Reducing O(N) to O(N^.5) is not that significant. SHA-1 was recently broken on a collision attack which due to the birthday 'paradox' begins with a complexity of the root of the keyspace using brute force.
If you went after 128-bit RC4 using the algorithm you still have a 2^64 complexity and you cannot perform the search in parallel plus you have only a probabalistic chance of the result being right.
256-bit AES has 2^128 complexity which is almost certainly beyond the capability of a QC machine, the key size was not chosen by accident and certainly not out of concern that someone would brute force the 128 bit key size.
If there is a concern we can in any case generate a symmetric algorithm of any desired strength simply by adding on bits. The only difference is we now need twice as many. A 512 bit key would be entirely practical.
Well it kind of depends on what the problem with their 10K filing is that is causing the auditors to balk at signing off on it. If the situation clears up, the auditors sign *and* it gets filed before the hearing then it's all moot and they stay listed. On the otherhand, as of yesterday they are also late in filing their quarterly statement as well, which as far as I am aware does not require signing off by an external auditor.
Which begs the question of why they would do this, filing your annual report is a legal requirement as well as an SEC requirement. You can't trade on the Pink Sheets either if you have no accounts posted. There are standards even for the pink 'uns.
Is this a deliberate move? Unlikely because it sets up the risk of shareholder lawsuits against the officers. Just what is going on here?
It is not as if SCO exactly has a lot of accounting info to get organized at this point. They have zero revenue, a huge legal bill and not much else. Their main expenses at this point are complying with IBM's discovery demands.
The contract with the law firm is effectively a poison pill that makes it almost impossible for IBM to even buy the bastards out. The only way IBM can settle is by letting SCO go under and buying the assets out of bankruptcy.
"This dramatic advantage of quantum computers is currently known to exist for only those three problems: factoring, discrete log, and quantum physics simulations."
Actually it is slightly more general. Having spoken with some high powered cryptographers (i.e. the ones with the Turing awards) there is a strong suspiscion that any problem which allows a public key cryptosystem to be created will turn out to be efficient on a QC machine.
There seems to be something pretty fundamental going on there. The really wierd part is that the speedup does not appear to apply to symmetric ciphers. So AES is secure even if RSA is bust.
Come on, will nobody ask why SCO can't produce a simple 10K?
The only reason SCO is at risk is because they failed to file their accounts on time. That is a very very rare reason for being delisted. Most companies get trashed because they have failed to keep their marketcap above the required threshold ($50 mil??) which SCO seems to be OK on or they fail because their stock price falls bellow $1 for too long which SCO is also OK on.
So why does a company fail to make its 10K? Its the most basic thing a CEO is required to do. In every case I can recall where this has happened it is because the auditors have refused to approve the accounts.
This is not a minor issue, it is a bombshell. To fail to get your accounts in means that either the auditor thinks there is something fishy going on or the company does not have the cash on hand to pay their bill. Either way looks bad for SCO.
The point of this, if anything, was to get us bent out of shape about nothing. A blocking of Windows updates makes us worry about them possibly blocking Office updates. As a couple of people here have pointed out, Microsoft is obligated to provide updates to all users of its software, even if that software is being run under an "emulator."
And so folk proceed to get bent out of shape over blocking of 'office updates' even though they are not sent out automatically and never have been. The nearest thing to automatic updates for office is that some tools will link to MSFT to download new templates.
Now in theory it is possible to push out updates to any piece of software through windows update. And one would hope that if a bug was found in Office that was a really serious security threat that Microsoft would use windows update to push out a patch pronto, but from a legal standpoint that would probably only be possible if they would also do the same for a really serious threat to Real player or Lotus or any other similar product.
Windows update is just that, updates for the platform. The platform does not at present provide a unified update delivery mechanism for applications built on Windows, it might do so of course in the future.
And what would happen if a virus/trojan went and added that WINE registry entry? Would updates stop working so users wouldn't be able to install patches? Thanks Microsoft!
What if the trojan just disabled the automatic updates like most of them try to disable other viruses and anti-spyware code?
This is not a new attack vector and if the machine is still requesting updates it is trivial to make sure that the WGA checking does not get spoofed by a virus.
That is true. And if it required additional effort to update the emulators, I would expect them not to. But it appears as if they are are putting forth additional effort to hamper emulators. And that just makes them look like jerks.
No they are just making sure that they do not inadvertently polute any open source Zealot's machine by loading unlicensed copyright material onto it.
I don't see how anyone can honestly get steamed up about this. If you didn't pay Microsoft for the O/S you do not have the right to run their software. They are not under any obligation to Wine users.
If you want to run Windows or any part of it then you go to the store and buy it.
Besides which the chance that the windows updates would do anything other than mess up a genuine third party clone of Windows are somewhat infintesimal.
Is there any legal problem with stating something bad that is true about a company?
Plenty, its called a vexatious lawsuit.
Best approach is to report iDownload to Elliot Spitzer or the FTC who are in the habbit of taking these very seriously. They are already prosecuting one guy for running a similar scam.
Exactly and they screwed us twice. Not only are there more of them, but they decided to have fewer kids! So the "pool" paying for their asses is smaller yet.
And the fact that there are going to be so many of them on Social Security is precisely the reason why the Bush plans to dismantantle social security should be considered prima-facie evidence that doofus is either back on the bottle or got some really whacky weed past the secret service.
If you plot out the number of social security retirees that there will be in 2042 when the social security fund goes 'bust'. The chance of anyone getting a cut in social security benefits through at that point is zero. Same for any plan to taper off benefits, link to prices, not wages or any other scheme to reduce the value of the benefits.
In fact one of the reasons that conservatives are worried about the privatization/phase out plan is that they understand that they risk giving the private account holders a risk free bet similar to the one the Savings and loans once got. If the accounts soar in value the account holders get to keep the profits, if the accounts end up crashed the account holders can reasonably expect the government to bail them out, they will have the votes to make sure that happens.
The social security scheme has failed already, it is unlikely to even get a bare majority in either house if it comes to a vote at all. The chances of beating a fillibuster are zero. It is about time to wag the dog and launch an invasion of Iran.
As far as standing, I would expect (but certainly wouldn't bet my house on it!) that a single actual consumer as a petitioner would have standing to sue--the inability to buy devices currently on the market should be a sufficient real harm. An "assoiacion" is a much larger stretch. The courts are frequently hostile to such standing
With good reason, remember the bogus 'email marketing USA' cover that the Florida spam gang put together to bring a bunch of nuisance suits?
I would also be surprised if the plaintif group did not include at least one manufacturer and at least one individual.
Wait... are you saying that countries that are just now establishing their infrastructure should have no say over what the standards for that infrastructure will be?
And how exactly would control over ICANN change anything?
ICANN is a toothless tiger in any case, their control over the 'root' does not extend to ownership of the actual IP addresses embedded in BIND etc.
A long time ago I was a member of a dinner club, there was a guy who nobody could stand who really really wanted to be the President of the club. So he got his friends to join and elect him President even though none of them ever went to any of the dinners. So the rest of us quit and started a new club leaving him to eat on his own.
ICANN is not a control point for the Internet, nor is the IETF which is also being targetted by this campaign. The real influence lies in W3C and OASIS these days - both of which have done a MUCH better job of being inclusive than the old boy network that controls the IETF.
Seems that way. But it also seems that since he was arrested for it, he's probably going to publish his spimming methods for everyone else to copycat, just for retaliation.
He's not bright, but hopefully people who aren't quite as dumb won't pick up where he left off.
Sounds like a slam dunk extortion case, making good on the threat would substantially increase the sentence. The guy is probably being told by his public defender that making good on his threat could likely add ten years to his sentence.
I don't think that an 18 year old is likely to know anything particularly interesting about sending spam that is not going to become common knowledge soon enough. The problem with these punks is that they always think that they are sooooo smart and its all about them, it isn't.
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The computer professionals you refer to were elitists whose main interest was using their control over corporate MIS systems to control the company. If you wanted some information from the machine you had to beg for it, if your request was accepted you might see the data six months later.
Whether or not someone knows what they are doing is utterly irrelevant if they won't tell me.
Visicalc and the micro-computer offered easy solutions and they delivered big time.
UNIX was and is a piece of crap. The user interface was designed for elites who could be bothered to fight the system. Besides which the original idea IBM had was to deliver MSDOS as a quick fix bootstrap loader to get the PC project off the ground quickly. The original idea was to transition to OS/2 or XENIX.
As a former 6502 programmer myself I know the limits of the machine. But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
And while BASIC is not the worlds best language Pascal was much worse than ALGOL 60 which had preceeded it on the same class of machine. The market rejected Pascal because it was a piece of elitist crap designed to make students 'program properly'. Microsoft BASIC was designed to allow anyone to teach themselves how to program.
That is the big difference between the geek elite and ordinary people. Ordinary people want to do a job with a minimum of fuss and the geek elite want to convert them to their way of thinking.
And PIP was often used as proof that CP/M was a piece of garbage. Other indications being the idiotic copy command which worked the opposite way to every other one "copy to from", oh and it would erase your disk when you made the obvious mistake.
MSDOS was generally considered something of an improvement.
I would be proud to have MSDOS on my resume, as would most serious software architects. MSDOS was used by millions of users, it was a true groundbreaker. MSDOS does not do much compared to VMS or VM/CMS but what it does it does on an 8/16 bit processor running at a few MHz. The original Microsoft Basic was not exactly extensive but most people would agree that it was a cool piece of coding.
But you miss the point in any case. This guy has MSDOS on his resume, what he is objecting to is the claim that he stole it.
I don't have a problem with either so long as it is disclosed. Atrios can go off and work for Media Matters provided he tells people that he is working for a 527 (he did). What I do not like is the submarine campaigns where candidates have been paying bloggers to write dirt about their opponent.
Regulation is not a bad thing for bloggers, it is good, it means that there is a clearly defined line that states what is allowed and what is not.
Someone tries every day, to be more precise there are over 1000 attacks against core DNS each day. Most of the roots are run on a basis that I regard as far too casual given the critical nature of the infrastructure.
There are not 13 root DNS servers, there are 13 root IP addresses which is not the same thing at all. Several of the roots are anycast so there are actually multiple data centers serving them. The number of root servers is much larger than 13.
Another pretty major omission from the list is OASIS which has roughly the same degree of influence as W3C and considerably more than the IETF.
The premise of the list is somewhat misguided. The standards bodies themselves don't have any influence on the Internet, its the members and the software providers who have influence. The point of the standards work is to get buy in from the necessary stakeholders, not to solve problems by committee.
Giving the choice between having my spec rejected by the IESG and having it rejected by Microsoft or the Apache group I'll choose the first. One of the big problems with the IETF is that many folk think that they are somehow 'in control'. Not on this Internet you ain't, if I don't get a chance to vote on who holds an office I don't see why I have to respect the decisions made by the office holder. I certainly don't see why I should wait two years or more for them to come to a decision.
I helped set up W3C when the IETF web standards effort collapsed. HTML was originally proposed in the IETF and turned into a disaster. When W3C was not interested in doing the work I do I played a leading role in one of the early OASIS Web Security standards. I am currently sitting in a W3C working group where the discussion has got into some particularly arcane details of XML.
Standards organizations are a vehicle, they are neither the driver, nor the road.
This is the issue that I beleive spyware legislation should center on. At the moment they look at the behavior which is a completely hopeless approach. You cannot hope to enumerate the types of unwanted stuff a program might do. Trying is very likely to end up prohibiting wanted interactions and functions. Anti-spyware behaves in very similar ways to spyware, the only difference is the matter of intent.
As for the legality, I could make a pretty strong case that this is in violation of Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, 1030. It would depend on if the court considered the EULA sufficient authorization. Of course, in any case where the user did not see it, that could not apply.
IANAL but I would strongly argue that no EULA is can grant permission to damage the machine. The spyware companies know full well that many of the users who click to accept are NOT competent to enter into any contract they are either minors or not the owners of the machine and that they would in any case refuse to do so if they were conspiciously aware of the contract terms.
I think that the way to criminalize spyware is to criminalize any form of subterfuge to con the user into installing code and criminalize the use of techniques to prevent removal. This would not produce a huge evidentiary burden for the prosecution, there would be little risk of crimializing legitimate tools.
Yeah and IBM probably took something like eighty years since it began in 1885 and revenues probably didn't reach the billion mark till the mid 60s. The measurements are not in constant dollars. A much better measure would be looking at how long it took the companies to reach a certain fraction of GDP. AT&T probably looks similar. Its a meaningless comparison except in constant dollars.
McDonalds operated as a single diner for many years before Ray Krok drove up to sell them a mixer and ended up inventing franchising and it was another ten years before they went public. If Krok had had access to the amount of capital Amazon and EBay did they could have become a billion dollar company much faster.
A better measure would be the point at which a company had earned a billion dollars in profits (inflation adjusted).
Although 35mm photography and cinema use the same film stock the orientation is different. Still photography has the long side of the image parallel to the direction of the film advance. Cinema (except for IMAX) has the image oriented perpendicular. So the image area is about 0.75 x 1" or 2250 x 3000 pixels or about 6 Megapixels.
The 2 Megapixel projectors are certainly not optimal and much higher resolutions are used for editing but reducing from 6 to 2 Megapixel is not a major issue. People do not complain much about the use of anamorphic lenses for widescreen.
If you go close up to the screen in most commercial cinema the picture will be so out of focus you will not notice the difference in any case. The massive amount of heat put out by a Xeon arc means that the lenses heat up during the show and their optical characteristics change. Very few commercial cinemas have projectionists who check the focus at the start of a show, let alone after the projector has heated up.
The bigger constraint on the projectors is going to be the amount of light that they can throw.
You jest surely. There are cases where a projectionist has had someone come up to them in a new car and offer to hand over the keys in exchange for a loan of a print. The only way to pirate a film that has not been released on DVD is to borrow a print. Screener copies may be the source of bit-torrent piracy but that is small beer compared to the Russian mob.
But not for these movies.
Digital cinema is not economic for the large budget large gross movies the pirates want to steal. The cost of striking a print is easily recouped after a few days. A digital projector costs a serious amount of money, about $20K-$50K. You can get a 35 mm projector and a cakestand for $5K and all the theatres have them already anyway.
What this is about is making it easy to show short runs of movies that are distinctly minority interest that do not justify the cost of striking a print, shipping it arround etc. Properly preparing a 35mm print to show it is about 3 hours work for a good print and for some of the worn out crap prints that are common on the art house circuit it can take 12 hours or more to do a repair job. It takes a large staff to keep changing the program for each screening quite apart from the cost factor.
The distribution systems will probably be set up to encode the print for the specific decryption box at a particular location. If the decryption box is built into the projector it is not possible to subvert the signal without taking that apart which will be noticed soon enough.
Actually there have been a whole rack of patents that have been corruptly extended. NeutraSweet for example. There is a list on the USPTO site. Patent terms were also extended when the patent act went through and made the term 20 years from date of filing, not 17 from date of issue. Patent holders got the benefit of the longer of the two terms.
Just think of the commercials. "My opponent voted against legislation that would have lowered the price of prescription medications by up to 45%." That's the sort of thing that could easily lose a politician the election.
The Republican party has prevented numerous measures to reduce drug costs without penalty. In fact they were bullying third world countries over their plans to declare eminent domain over AIDS drugs that the pharmaceutical companies charged exhorbitant prices for.
The bullying on the AIDS thing stopped dead because Joe Biden is one heck of a lot smarter than Bush and Thomson. During the 'anthrax' scare the drug companies were charging exhorbitant prices for the anitbiotics. So Biden very cleverly proposed a bill to allow the US govt to declare eminent domain. The GOP etc latched onto it and rammed it through in a couple of days without pausing to think that they had just done precisely the same thing that they had been threatening third world countries not to.
Biden's proposal was not an accident, he had criticized the drug companies over their AIDS gouging earlier. The US could easily have afforded to pay full price for the Anthrax drugs, unlike the third world countries facing the AIDS crisis. But the minute a threat appeared, well all those 'principles' disolved.
Wow, the first edition came out before 1776!
Actually it did but what would 1776 have to do with the matter anyway? Perhaps you are not aware that the British Empire at its peak between WWI and WWII controlled India, the better parts of Africa and much of the Gulf.
For a long time the first four Chinese dynasties were dismised as 'mythological' by Western academics. The original reason for this was that the dates of these dynasties were incompatible with the biblical flood and so they had to be explained away. This claim still persists today even though there is at least as much evidence for the existence of the yellow emperor as Homer. The criteria for changing the established view are far higher than creating one.
The modern Brittanica is both huge and for many purposes useless. If you want detailed information on a topic like cryptography you will find maybe a short article on RSA in Brittanica but unlikely to find out very much. Wikipedia on the other hand has extensive in depth coverage of far more obscure points.
Every information source is biased and wrong. If you have the misfortune to watch Fox News you will see plenty that is deliberately deceptive, much that is outright lies. There are very few blogs on either the right or the left that sink to the level of mendacity that is standard operating procedure for the Murdoch/Hearst press. We don't see many editorials in the old media complaining about that.
The issues raised by the Brittanica guy are not completely groundless, the Wikipedia people need to consider them carefully. Wiki is not the first extended Internet collaboration system to reach a large audience. The problem is that success brings trolls, spammers and cranks. Together the trolls spammers and cranks destroyed USENET in the mid 90's. It only recovered when the parasites moved on to try to wreck email.
I think the issues raised are fixable but we will have to think carefully about mechanism. I do not think peer review is feasible on that scale but reputation systems might be.
A deeper problem that Wiki shares with Britanica is that it tries to impose a single systematization of knowledge. This is fine for areas where there is no controversy. Where controversy is active the result is either a tug of war between extreemes or some bland statement that takes no position.
Sometimes you have to put the facts on the line, there is no 'scientific' theory of creationism. Creationism is revealled knowledge and that is simply not compatible with science. But there are people who honestly beleive the opposite.
I firmly beleive in the 'reality based' universe and want information sources that share this belief. I do not want my information contaminated by the crationist world view or any other silliness.
there are also cases of genuine academic dispute where things get equally nasty and ideological.
But attempting to apply it to AES or even DES requires a vast quantum computer, you have to essentially unroll all the loops and apply it as hardware. So the complexity is much higher than breaking RSA.
Reducing O(N) to O(N^.5) is not that significant. SHA-1 was recently broken on a collision attack which due to the birthday 'paradox' begins with a complexity of the root of the keyspace using brute force.
If you went after 128-bit RC4 using the algorithm you still have a 2^64 complexity and you cannot perform the search in parallel plus you have only a probabalistic chance of the result being right.
256-bit AES has 2^128 complexity which is almost certainly beyond the capability of a QC machine, the key size was not chosen by accident and certainly not out of concern that someone would brute force the 128 bit key size.
If there is a concern we can in any case generate a symmetric algorithm of any desired strength simply by adding on bits. The only difference is we now need twice as many. A 512 bit key would be entirely practical.
Which begs the question of why they would do this, filing your annual report is a legal requirement as well as an SEC requirement. You can't trade on the Pink Sheets either if you have no accounts posted. There are standards even for the pink 'uns.
Is this a deliberate move? Unlikely because it sets up the risk of shareholder lawsuits against the officers. Just what is going on here?
It is not as if SCO exactly has a lot of accounting info to get organized at this point. They have zero revenue, a huge legal bill and not much else. Their main expenses at this point are complying with IBM's discovery demands.
The contract with the law firm is effectively a poison pill that makes it almost impossible for IBM to even buy the bastards out. The only way IBM can settle is by letting SCO go under and buying the assets out of bankruptcy.
Actually it is slightly more general. Having spoken with some high powered cryptographers (i.e. the ones with the Turing awards) there is a strong suspiscion that any problem which allows a public key cryptosystem to be created will turn out to be efficient on a QC machine.
There seems to be something pretty fundamental going on there. The really wierd part is that the speedup does not appear to apply to symmetric ciphers. So AES is secure even if RSA is bust.
Come on, will nobody ask why SCO can't produce a simple 10K?
The only reason SCO is at risk is because they failed to file their accounts on time. That is a very very rare reason for being delisted. Most companies get trashed because they have failed to keep their marketcap above the required threshold ($50 mil??) which SCO seems to be OK on or they fail because their stock price falls bellow $1 for too long which SCO is also OK on.
So why does a company fail to make its 10K? Its the most basic thing a CEO is required to do. In every case I can recall where this has happened it is because the auditors have refused to approve the accounts.
This is not a minor issue, it is a bombshell. To fail to get your accounts in means that either the auditor thinks there is something fishy going on or the company does not have the cash on hand to pay their bill. Either way looks bad for SCO.
And so folk proceed to get bent out of shape over blocking of 'office updates' even though they are not sent out automatically and never have been. The nearest thing to automatic updates for office is that some tools will link to MSFT to download new templates.
Now in theory it is possible to push out updates to any piece of software through windows update. And one would hope that if a bug was found in Office that was a really serious security threat that Microsoft would use windows update to push out a patch pronto, but from a legal standpoint that would probably only be possible if they would also do the same for a really serious threat to Real player or Lotus or any other similar product.
Windows update is just that, updates for the platform. The platform does not at present provide a unified update delivery mechanism for applications built on Windows, it might do so of course in the future.
What if the trojan just disabled the automatic updates like most of them try to disable other viruses and anti-spyware code?
This is not a new attack vector and if the machine is still requesting updates it is trivial to make sure that the WGA checking does not get spoofed by a virus.
No they are just making sure that they do not inadvertently polute any open source Zealot's machine by loading unlicensed copyright material onto it.
I don't see how anyone can honestly get steamed up about this. If you didn't pay Microsoft for the O/S you do not have the right to run their software. They are not under any obligation to Wine users.
If you want to run Windows or any part of it then you go to the store and buy it.
Besides which the chance that the windows updates would do anything other than mess up a genuine third party clone of Windows are somewhat infintesimal.
Plenty, its called a vexatious lawsuit.
Best approach is to report iDownload to Elliot Spitzer or the FTC who are in the habbit of taking these very seriously. They are already prosecuting one guy for running a similar scam.
And the fact that there are going to be so many of them on Social Security is precisely the reason why the Bush plans to dismantantle social security should be considered prima-facie evidence that doofus is either back on the bottle or got some really whacky weed past the secret service.
If you plot out the number of social security retirees that there will be in 2042 when the social security fund goes 'bust'. The chance of anyone getting a cut in social security benefits through at that point is zero. Same for any plan to taper off benefits, link to prices, not wages or any other scheme to reduce the value of the benefits.
In fact one of the reasons that conservatives are worried about the privatization/phase out plan is that they understand that they risk giving the private account holders a risk free bet similar to the one the Savings and loans once got. If the accounts soar in value the account holders get to keep the profits, if the accounts end up crashed the account holders can reasonably expect the government to bail them out, they will have the votes to make sure that happens.
The social security scheme has failed already, it is unlikely to even get a bare majority in either house if it comes to a vote at all. The chances of beating a fillibuster are zero. It is about time to wag the dog and launch an invasion of Iran.
With good reason, remember the bogus 'email marketing USA' cover that the Florida spam gang put together to bring a bunch of nuisance suits?
I would also be surprised if the plaintif group did not include at least one manufacturer and at least one individual.
And how exactly would control over ICANN change anything?
ICANN is a toothless tiger in any case, their control over the 'root' does not extend to ownership of the actual IP addresses embedded in BIND etc.
A long time ago I was a member of a dinner club, there was a guy who nobody could stand who really really wanted to be the President of the club. So he got his friends to join and elect him President even though none of them ever went to any of the dinners. So the rest of us quit and started a new club leaving him to eat on his own.
ICANN is not a control point for the Internet, nor is the IETF which is also being targetted by this campaign. The real influence lies in W3C and OASIS these days - both of which have done a MUCH better job of being inclusive than the old boy network that controls the IETF.
Sounds like a slam dunk extortion case, making good on the threat would substantially increase the sentence. The guy is probably being told by his public defender that making good on his threat could likely add ten years to his sentence.
I don't think that an 18 year old is likely to know anything particularly interesting about sending spam that is not going to become common knowledge soon enough. The problem with these punks is that they always think that they are sooooo smart and its all about them, it isn't.