"The problem you will quickly run into is that those folks vote too"
And the USA's "me me me" mentality does the rest. "All for me and sod everyone else" has increasingly been the order of the day since California fell under Ronnie Raygun's spell in the late 1960s.
This is WHY the USA is spiralling the shitter. If you won't collectively invest in your future then you shouldn't be surprised when countries who do keep pulling ahead.
It also only gives upgrade access. You can't install windows on a system without an OS, etc.
With the latest licensing conditions meaning that transferring ownership invalidates the license on a system, moving them to a licsensing-free OS is logical.
MS don't particularly care about windows. It's not a big earner for them.
If schools and businesses move en-masse to Libreoffice it would be a very different story as MS Officeis their bread and butter. That's why they've put so much effort into Office365 and "Office in the cloud" to head that threat off at the pass.
"should have better management of their licenses such that they aren't tied directly to a single piece of hardware"
You clearly haven't been keeping up with MS's licensing programs - which have been nailing it down tighter and tighter to exactly that, even for MS Select customers (my employer has MS Select).
This is dirty dangerous work that needs consistency to ensure crash performance isn't variable.
Robots in this and the paint shop were generally welcomed by workers but you'll find plenty in other parts of the line.
FIAT had a 100% robot assembly line in the 1980s (the Uno - tagline "untouched by human hands"), but 30 years later there's still not widespread uptake of the things in most factories beyond the dirty/dangerous/mindlessly repetitive(*) parts.
Regarding mining, virtually all parts are dirty/dangerous, operator errors cause large amounts of downtime at great cost and mines are usually in the middle of nowhere & have trouble recruiting people so its no great surprise that they're wanting to automate as much as possible.
(*) Foxconn is one example of the areas of mindless repetitiion. Robotised pick'n'place units have been around for decades but the lines are getting more and more robots assembling bigger pieces, so that humans are relegated to QC checking and general oversight. This is driven by the cost of workers (chinese migrant workers are as expensive as USA ones once dormitories and training costs are factored in. The choices are heavy automation or move the plants to the population centres and doing the latter would screw the logistical chain that makes manufacture so cheap.)
> Where the avionics software was developed was a "cube farm",
That would be the avionics on an aircraft where the software's so crashy that only 1 out of 6 was able to startup, get to the end of the runway and actually fly?
Not a good advert for cube farms, even if they have nice lighting.
This kind of change isn't usually driven by accountants. Apart from simplistic book keepers they know that the costs for this kind of change are far beyond hardware (ask any accountant what goodwill means and why it's important)
It's all about power and control. Management have offices, That's what demonstrates they're higher than the plebs.
As a manager I see my role as running interference between the people who actually do the work and the higher-ups, so that work can get done. If my staff want privacy they get it (You can run cubical walls up to the ceiling) and no two people have the same requirements.
Cubicle farms are indicative of a lack of company vision or creativity. Their primary function is to impress upon staff that they're unimportant cogs in a machine - but noone likes being a cog.
One of the simple ways to make everyone _in management_ hate open plan and cubes is to encourage singalongs.
Ones disparaging the management are best. If you're loud enough it will penetrate the office walls.
Keeping noise levels up and deliberately going quiet en masse when a manager steps out of his office is also a good tactic as it plays to their paranoia.
This is likely to be one of the reasons this ruling is so overwhelmingly in favour of the plaintiff. Without a defendant's lawyer to argue the case the court has to proceed on what's in front of it coupled with established law.
For that reason this is a horrible precedent which is likely to be overturned at the next level and ordered returned to the lower court for rehearing.
It's not unknown for the courts to enforce exactly as written to force the legislative branch's hand.
Bad laws that are selectively enforced are a big mess and if you find them being used like that then the solution is to force the state's hand by challenging the selectiveness.
At that point they either enforce on everyone or the law gets rewritten.
Japan and Korea have been doing FTTH long before that.
This is about squeezing the last possible cent out of the copper.
If you put fibre and FTTH in, then you have to amortise the costs of the relay project over 20 years, even if you can charge the end equipment upfront.
If you put in xDSL, you get to charge 100% of the cost of the equipment up front and the copper was paid for a long time ago. Because xDSL is getting "harder" you can also scam extra subsidies for installing it.
The part that would scare the telcos is organised gangs moving in and stealing the copper. (This is happening in some countries. Even after switching to glass it takes a few thefts before they get the message that there's no salvage value in the cables)
The REAL problem is lack of competition thanks to corrupt PUCs allowing legislated local monopolies and the way US laws are written which prevents the FCC and FTC doing anything about it.
Light-touch "Free markets" invariably end up with a single dominant player. Heavy-touch "Free markets" frequently end up with a single dominant player by law.
There's a Goldilocks position somewhere in the middle that the USA used to be good at but has forgotten about in recent years. You can only have vibrant competition in a marketplace if there is no dominant player calling the shots.
Except that because so much of the IoT is unable to be updated, this isn't single use unless ISPs start disconnecting customers who're participating in DDoS attacks.
In the case of _real_ bad apples, farmers take steps to detect and remove them as quickly as you can, because the rot in a bad apple is contagious to the rest of the crop. They usually disinfect the surrounding apples as a precautionary measure (if not remove them entirely).
This is analagous to what happens in policing too, however the problem is not so much "a" bad apple, as the covering for that bad apple and the subsequent rapid spread of the rot to the entire group. It doesn't take long before the entire group is bad apples, with any remaining good ones at high risk of becoming bad ones with every hour of continued exposure.
"Good cops" do not cover for bad cops. Doing so demonstrates that they're no longer "good cops" - and it's worth nothing that "bad guys" never believe that they're "bad guys" in the same way that good people can be manipulated into doing evil things without even realising what's happened if the right buttons are pushed in the right sequence over a long period.
Policing in the USA has become so corrupt that it attracts precisely the kinds of people who are fundamentally unsuited to the position and they're not being weeded from the selection process because those in a position of power to do so are of the same ilk. Other countries have been through this and are cleaning up, but at the moment there's massive resistance within the USA to even admitting there's a problem, let alone addressing it.
A lot of this stuff is running pirated/old firmware which has nothing to do with the original author.
A lot of the time the company in the exporting country selling this stuff to the importer has no idea what the firmware is, isn't the manufacturer and may be several steps removed from the manufacturer (which is why firmware is such a bitch to deal with)
Liabilities have a hard time crossing national boundaries. The buck stops at the importer. From a consumer point of view, liability stops with whoever sold it to them unless it was sold with specific disclaimers.
On the bright side: in the last week a couple of the largest DVR/camera makers have stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility - recalls and firmware updates are happening. The hard part is going to be to track and update every affected device out there even if they're phoning home (I have items around the net still tickling my boxes from projects that ceased working 16 years ago - and that's stuff that's supposedly operated by "responsible" network admins, let alone endusers)
"Having users change the password on first login before they can do anything else, that's the only reasonable way to go"
Which mostly means that the password will be "password" or something similar.
Better to leave it as some complex random password unless changed.
Even better, have an interlock which requires positive action to allow external access AND a requirement to ACK warning of the consequences if not properly secured (not just a OK, but scroll to the bottom first and warning that failure to read/understand properly before clicking OK may result in personal legal liabilities)
"I think the best way to handle this is to make people somehow accountable when they participate in a DDoS, whether they do it willingly or not"
Absolutely. A strict liability law and hefty fines would make most people think twice, especially after it made a few newspaper headlines.
They may have secondary rights to sue the seller(*) but at the end of the day the USER is the one who connected the device to the network.
(*) The seller has upstream rights to sue the wholesaler, importer and upwards to the maker. This has a far greater effect than a few hundred small claims cases because once importers and wholesalers start getting burned they'll get _extremely_ wary about buying in vulnerable equipment - and losing sales is the most effective message any maker can receive.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem you will quickly run into is that those folks vote too"
And the USA's "me me me" mentality does the rest. "All for me and sod everyone else" has increasingly been the order of the day since California fell under Ronnie Raygun's spell in the late 1960s.
This is WHY the USA is spiralling the shitter. If you won't collectively invest in your future then you shouldn't be surprised when countries who do keep pulling ahead.
It also only gives upgrade access. You can't install windows on a system without an OS, etc.
With the latest licensing conditions meaning that transferring ownership invalidates the license on a system, moving them to a licsensing-free OS is logical.
MS don't particularly care about windows. It's not a big earner for them.
If schools and businesses move en-masse to Libreoffice it would be a very different story as MS Officeis their bread and butter. That's why they've put so much effort into Office365 and "Office in the cloud" to head that threat off at the pass.
"should have better management of their licenses such that they aren't tied directly to a single piece of hardware"
You clearly haven't been keeping up with MS's licensing programs - which have been nailing it down tighter and tighter to exactly that, even for MS Select customers (my employer has MS Select).
"Here is a modern assembly line"
More pedantically it's the welding section.
This is dirty dangerous work that needs consistency to ensure crash performance isn't variable.
Robots in this and the paint shop were generally welcomed by workers but you'll find plenty in other parts of the line.
FIAT had a 100% robot assembly line in the 1980s (the Uno - tagline "untouched by human hands"), but 30 years later there's still not widespread uptake of the things in most factories beyond the dirty/dangerous/mindlessly repetitive(*) parts.
Regarding mining, virtually all parts are dirty/dangerous, operator errors cause large amounts of downtime at great cost and mines are usually in the middle of nowhere & have trouble recruiting people so its no great surprise that they're wanting to automate as much as possible.
(*) Foxconn is one example of the areas of mindless repetitiion. Robotised pick'n'place units have been around for decades but the lines are getting more and more robots assembling bigger pieces, so that humans are relegated to QC checking and general oversight. This is driven by the cost of workers (chinese migrant workers are as expensive as USA ones once dormitories and training costs are factored in. The choices are heavy automation or move the plants to the population centres and doing the latter would screw the logistical chain that makes manufacture so cheap.)
I've been able to tune out everything whilst concentrating on books or other stuff since I was very young and still can at age 50
I cannot stand open plan offices or cube farms. They're a productivity and creativity killer.
> Where the avionics software was developed was a "cube farm",
That would be the avionics on an aircraft where the software's so crashy that only 1 out of 6 was able to startup, get to the end of the runway and actually fly?
Not a good advert for cube farms, even if they have nice lighting.
Noisy doors can be fixed. _IF_ someone feels it's important.
Noisy people are a bit harder to deal with and that's one of the bugbears of a cubicle farm.
I've yet to see a case where introducing one didn't result in a productivity hit.
"management loves hearing the accountant"
This kind of change isn't usually driven by accountants. Apart from simplistic book keepers they know that the costs for this kind of change are far beyond hardware (ask any accountant what goodwill means and why it's important)
It's all about power and control. Management have offices, That's what demonstrates they're higher than the plebs.
As a manager I see my role as running interference between the people who actually do the work and the higher-ups, so that work can get done. If my staff want privacy they get it (You can run cubical walls up to the ceiling) and no two people have the same requirements.
Cubicle farms are indicative of a lack of company vision or creativity. Their primary function is to impress upon staff that they're unimportant cogs in a machine - but noone likes being a cog.
One of the simple ways to make everyone _in management_ hate open plan and cubes is to encourage singalongs.
Ones disparaging the management are best. If you're loud enough it will penetrate the office walls.
Keeping noise levels up and deliberately going quiet en masse when a manager steps out of his office is also a good tactic as it plays to their paranoia.
" when they misuse it to take down the video"
There's a penalty of perjury in DMCA claims.
The problem is that the claim is akin to the Chewbacca defense - it frequently has nothing to do with the item being taken down.
IE: "I assert copyright on X, therefore I demand you take down Y"
"Who's paying for the layers?"
This is likely to be one of the reasons this ruling is so overwhelmingly in favour of the plaintiff. Without a defendant's lawyer to argue the case the court has to proceed on what's in front of it coupled with established law.
For that reason this is a horrible precedent which is likely to be overturned at the next level and ordered returned to the lower court for rehearing.
It's not unknown for the courts to enforce exactly as written to force the legislative branch's hand.
Bad laws that are selectively enforced are a big mess and if you find them being used like that then the solution is to force the state's hand by challenging the selectiveness.
At that point they either enforce on everyone or the law gets rewritten.
Japan and Korea have been doing FTTH long before that.
This is about squeezing the last possible cent out of the copper.
If you put fibre and FTTH in, then you have to amortise the costs of the relay project over 20 years, even if you can charge the end equipment upfront.
If you put in xDSL, you get to charge 100% of the cost of the equipment up front and the copper was paid for a long time ago. Because xDSL is getting "harder" you can also scam extra subsidies for installing it.
The part that would scare the telcos is organised gangs moving in and stealing the copper. (This is happening in some countries. Even after switching to glass it takes a few thefts before they get the message that there's no salvage value in the cables)
The problem is not Comcast.
The REAL problem is lack of competition thanks to corrupt PUCs allowing legislated local monopolies and the way US laws are written which prevents the FCC and FTC doing anything about it.
Light-touch "Free markets" invariably end up with a single dominant player.
Heavy-touch "Free markets" frequently end up with a single dominant player by law.
There's a Goldilocks position somewhere in the middle that the USA used to be good at but has forgotten about in recent years. You can only have vibrant competition in a marketplace if there is no dominant player calling the shots.
Except that because so much of the IoT is unable to be updated, this isn't single use unless ISPs start disconnecting customers who're participating in DDoS attacks.
Sometimes these kinds of attacks end up being orchestrated to demonstrate that "something needs to be done".
IE: the motivation is to demonstrate that the network is at risk and it needs to be fixed before this happens again.
That might be perpetrated by script kiddies but in such cases you'll find someone out back pulling the strings.
" this is a bad apple problem."
In the case of _real_ bad apples, farmers take steps to detect and remove them as quickly as you can, because the rot in a bad apple is contagious to the rest of the crop. They usually disinfect the surrounding apples as a precautionary measure (if not remove them entirely).
This is analagous to what happens in policing too, however the problem is not so much "a" bad apple, as the covering for that bad apple and the subsequent rapid spread of the rot to the entire group. It doesn't take long before the entire group is bad apples, with any remaining good ones at high risk of becoming bad ones with every hour of continued exposure.
"Good cops" do not cover for bad cops. Doing so demonstrates that they're no longer "good cops" - and it's worth nothing that "bad guys" never believe that they're "bad guys" in the same way that good people can be manipulated into doing evil things without even realising what's happened if the right buttons are pushed in the right sequence over a long period.
Policing in the USA has become so corrupt that it attracts precisely the kinds of people who are fundamentally unsuited to the position and they're not being weeded from the selection process because those in a position of power to do so are of the same ilk. Other countries have been through this and are cleaning up, but at the moment there's massive resistance within the USA to even admitting there's a problem, let alone addressing it.
> but they just sold what the customers wanted, secure in the legal protection of "You can't sue us no matter how much harm our devices cause.
This kind of disclaimer won't hold water in the EU - Consumer protection laws and the laws against unfair terms in contracts see to that.
For full liability indemnity the enduser would have to explicitly sign it away and clicking OK on a shrinkwrap license is not sufficient.
A lot of this stuff is running pirated/old firmware which has nothing to do with the original author.
A lot of the time the company in the exporting country selling this stuff to the importer has no idea what the firmware is, isn't the manufacturer and may be several steps removed from the manufacturer (which is why firmware is such a bitch to deal with)
Liabilities have a hard time crossing national boundaries. The buck stops at the importer.
From a consumer point of view, liability stops with whoever sold it to them unless it was sold with specific disclaimers.
On the bright side: in the last week a couple of the largest DVR/camera makers have stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility - recalls and firmware updates are happening. The hard part is going to be to track and update every affected device out there even if they're phoning home (I have items around the net still tickling my boxes from projects that ceased working 16 years ago - and that's stuff that's supposedly operated by "responsible" network admins, let alone endusers)
"Having users change the password on first login before they can do anything else, that's the only reasonable way to go"
Which mostly means that the password will be "password" or something similar.
Better to leave it as some complex random password unless changed.
Even better, have an interlock which requires positive action to allow external access AND a requirement to ACK warning of the consequences if not properly secured (not just a OK, but scroll to the bottom first and warning that failure to read/understand properly before clicking OK may result in personal legal liabilities)
NAT's inbound "security" is entirely accidental and any decent IPv6 device applies the same firewalling rules for inbound IPv6 as for IPv4
"You are being reasonable, unfortunately, the FCC has no jurisdiction here"
The FTC does though.
Apart from ISPs applying spoofed address filtering, enduser ROUTERS should be filtering this shit too.
"I think the best way to handle this is to make people somehow accountable when they participate in a DDoS, whether they do it willingly or not"
Absolutely. A strict liability law and hefty fines would make most people think twice, especially after it made a few newspaper headlines.
They may have secondary rights to sue the seller(*) but at the end of the day the USER is the one who connected the device to the network.
(*) The seller has upstream rights to sue the wholesaler, importer and upwards to the maker. This has a far greater effect than a few hundred small claims cases because once importers and wholesalers start getting burned they'll get _extremely_ wary about buying in vulnerable equipment - and losing sales is the most effective message any maker can receive.
Which is why the default password should be randomly(*) set and uPNP disabled by default.
(*) Not according to some algorithm predictable from the MAC, etc.