That grant of rights cannot be revoked retroactively. (And there is also the bit about "released under GPL" in the source code.)
Under UCITA, licences can be retroactively revoked. All Mattel has to do is show that the essay is downloadable in Virginia (where UCITA is law) and sue in a Virginia court room.
You might well want to explore the fact that the original documents gave permission to redistribute.
Irrelevant -- Mattel can withdraw the original license. All they have to do is sue in a Virginia court (where UCITA is law); anything that can be downloaded in Virginia would be infringing. Furthermore, anybody else reverse-engineering Cyber Patrol can be sued for copyright infringement. All efforts against Cyber Patrol (or derivatives thereof) are tainted and thus illegal.
CPHACK has not been withdrawn, but turned into a offensive weapon against reverse engineering, a blunt instrument Mattel can use to bludgeon anyone having a go at Cyber Patrol, reinforcing their powers to keep the serfs ignorant.
Mattel can unambiguously sue any mirror sites this side of Libya for copyright violation if they host it, something they could only do in the US before.
One of the points mentioned is that under Linux, most people download and compile source code rather than fetching binaries. Is this still the case? I suspect that many people these days would download RPMs and install them (as root, nonetheless!) instead. Theoretically, sneaking an infected RPM for something cool/sexy (a first-person xbill variant or a Star Wars screensaver should do) onto a contrib site could infect a lot of systems as root.
Of course, most RPMs are downloaded from a central server, not traded or swapped on BBS-like local sites, which makes it harder. Such a RPMed exploit could possibly do other things, such as dynamically patch files sent by ftpd/httpd and infect any executables (standalone or in.tar.gz) sent. Or one could take a leaf out of Ken Thompson/Dennis Ritche's book and modify the C compiler (or linker) to insert extra code.
Or one could just be unimaginative and modify tcpd to contain a remotely-activated 'sleeper' denial-of-service client or backdoor root shell.
So now the wolves have scented blood and are closing in for the kill; the RIAA and others are suing MP3.com for a service which is admittedly on shaky ground. Some say that if they win they could get billions of dollars in damages.
Could MP3.com be sued into bankrupcy? If so, we could see its assets (the domain name, roster of tracks, &c.) sold off, possibly bought up by (and subsumed into) one of the major music companies. Then we could see the situation of the new MP3.com being at the vanguard of phasing out the insecure MP3 format in favour of SDMI.
1.The file system interface. By this, I mean inodes, ugo/rwx permissions, and a single hierarchy rooted at "/".
A number of non-UNIX OSes have borrowed this paradigm (INMOS's Helios and Be's BeOS are two examples; many real-time OSes also borrow from UNIX here).
2.There is one user (root) that has full access to the machine; all other users are limited to a small "sandbox"
Some secure unices eliminate the omnipotent root user and compartmentalise privileges further.
Other indicators of an operating system's UNIXness would be:
The system call API. The more it looks like POSIX, BSD or SysV the more UNIXy something is. In general, if it doesn't have UNIXlike calls for file operations, process management, &c., it's not a real UNIX.
The everything-is-a-file paradigm as mentioned by another poster; under UNIX devices are files, accessed with file I/O calls, mmap() and ioctl(). Lesser systems such as Windows and MacOS have a bizarre custom API for each set of operations (raw disk I/O, sound I/O, console I/O, etc).
Further from the field of system design and into the realms of abstract philosophy and user interface, a fundamental characteristic of UNIX is that you can perform complex tasks by using many simpler components in cooperation (i.e., shell scripts and command pipelines). Contrast this with Windows, where the norm is huge, monolithic applications, each with a defined range of operations.
The Rastafarians adopted Zion before Gundam. The Rastas identified themselves with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, seeing themselves as Jah's true Chosen People; consequently they borrowed from Jewish religious terminology (well, what they could find in common literature; I don't think there were too many Rastafarian Cabbalists or anysuch). As such, Rastafarians used the word "Zion" as their promised land, as many Bob Marley songs attest to.
Anyone else care to check in on actor choices and/or how to deal with the size without causing massive CRC errors in the story?
It isn't going to happen. Hollywood is in the business of selling to the largest possible audience. Since the demise of mid-list films in the 80s, they don't release anything unless it can be sold to a broad audience. And a few thousand hard-core scifi geeks wouldn't cut it.
Besides the story being too long, parts of it are unworkable (the sex scene, for example; hints at underage sex are OK in an arthouse film but would seem prurient in a scifi blockbuster), or unmarketable (the whole "nam shub of Enki" thing would either have to be dumbed down tremendously into a sort of Ghostbusters metaphysics or else done away with altogether, if they're going to not bore non-fan audiences (and reviewers) waiting for the next SFX sequence).
It's sort of like the much dreaded film of Neil Gaiman's Sandman books, which for a while looked like a Morpheus-vs.-Corinthian action blockbuster. There would be no way to make it true to the story and meet mass-market goals. Mercifully, though, there's no indication that it will ever see the light of day.
The story is complex, the sets would have to be extremely expensive and/or digital ala Episode1, the Uneducated Masses would think it was a rip-off of The Matrix...
If anything, that would doubly damn the Neuromancer film project, as The Matrix lifts most of the names from there (the Matrix itself, Zion (without the funky rasta back-story), &c.) Well, at least Neo (k3wl name d00d) and Trinity aren't named Case and Molly..
But another thing to consider is that large portions of the book are a thinly veiled jab at L Ron Hubbard (AKA L Bob Rife).
Other than the name I don't see much similarity. Hubbard's a pulp scifi author who founded a kooky religion on a bet, whereas Rife seems to be an industrialist who rode in on the middle-American Christian power base. They could always just call him Bob L. Rife or something if the scienos complain.
To do this you'd want to devise a meme that's catchy and compels people to spread it. Spreading it should be easy and the payoff (physical or emotional; it can be just the satisfaction of having done one's bit to make the world a better place), as expected from the start, should exceed the perceived cost of participation. That's how those good-luck chain letters spread so easily.
Problem is, memes mutate, and code isn't robust. After a few dozen generations you can expect variants of the chain letter without the source code to appear. So you might want some sort of verification mechanism (i.e., forward the whole post to an address and the guy who sent it to you gets some reward if the code is there; that'd make it in the sender's interest to keep the code there).
What should the prizes be? They could be gift vouchers, if one has the money/sponsors. If not, they can be something purely psychological which creates a reward in the form of status or honour. Perhaps a web site with a distinctive name will add senders to an honour roll, giving them a free email address or somesuch, which identifies them as a member of an elite club.
There simply aren't laws like the Digital Milennium Copyright Act in Australia at the moment and what changes are being made still generically allow the use of circumvention devices such as DeCSS
Isn't Our Esteemed Parliament debating a piece of legislation that looks just like the DMCA? There's something about that in the EFA Update.
The DMCA allows the use of circumvention devices for security research, as will the new Australian act. Which seems to be the same sort of deal as allowing approved research facilities to grow opium for medical research.
This sort of behaviour is perfectly legal under the DMCA and UCITA. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing as the megacorps treat the little people as little more than feudal serfs.
Given that it is intended for people who aren't familiar with Linux or UNIX, and who presumably run Windows, XDMCP and ssh aren't particularly useful. If it was intended for seasoned Linux users, that'd be another story, of course..
Or if they could get a (low-bandwidth) X server in a Java applet; though that'd be one big applet...
BTW - As far as the word format on your resume...sorry to burst most Ub3r h4x0rz bubbles, but most companies have lots of management, and management uses Windows...word is still the way to go in a resume, but that doesn't mean you have to like it.
Depends on the company. If it's an old corporate behemoth then layers of Microsoft-dependent pointy-hairs are likely. If it's a small startup or Linux consultancy, or it comes from an academic/UNIX background, that is not so.
One very nice piece of software (shareware) is AudioMulch. Basically, it's a set of components (FX boxes, sample players, even a TB-303 emulator) which can be connected with patch leads. It's Windows-based, though the author said (at last year's First Iteration conference in Melbourne) that he may port it to Linux. Here's hoping...
This kind of software is very time-consuming and difficult to write (I *have* considered it).
I once started writing a sequencer which was to have done a few thing Jazz didn't do (like having tracks comprised of phrases, rather than flat lengths of events). I got about as far as writing a Qt piano roll window class when I realised that it would be much quicker to save up and buy a Power Macintosh and Cubase VST than to write my own, and that every minute I spend hacking on a sequencer is time I don't spend actually using one.
As for the free/pay software cultures, there is indeed a big difference. Then again, compared with the price of music hardware (anything capable of generating halfway decent sounds will cost at least as much as a quite passable PC, and probably more), paying $300 for a virtual drum machine plug-in doesn't look so excessive.
The hardware side of music (MIDI and such) will be the easy part. Linux supports traditional MIDI cards (such as the MPU-401, and the low-performance joystick-MIDI interfaces on most sound cards), and you can work with that. I used to use Jazz (the XView version, if you remember that) and a MPU-401. Professional audio is the next major issue. If you're doing professional music, a game-quality soundcard with lousy frequency response, an imprecise A/D converter and lots of RF noise is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
The software side will be harder. The greatest strength of systems such as Cubase VST is the number of interlocking programs. You have your effects plug-ins (ranging from homebrewed compressors and flangers to expensive proprietary DSP wizardry), soft synths (including ReBirth and the new VST 2.0 plug-ins such as Neon and LM-4), sample loop/phrase editors (i.e. ReCycle) and the like. FX plug-ins, for one, are incredibly useful. A Linux-based digital recording/sequencing application that only has a few basic reverb and echo plug-ins will look pretty poorly compared to Cubase or Logic.
On one hand, there are a lot of free (though not quite open-source) DSP plug-ins for Cubase VST, and the SDK is available. The interface has a small C++ class library to wrap it; if a compatible API could be written, a lot of plug-ins could be ported. On the other hand, maybe (just maybe) it would be possible to run some Windows VST plug-ins (i.e., DLLs with functions for doing stuff to buffers) using part of WINE.
You can bet that, if political pressure didn't work, and economic sanctions didn't either, they'd drop a laser-guided glide bomb on the server one night, and say that it was distributing child pornography or something. Those who said otherwise would soon be merged in the public eye with the Waco conspiracy theorists and black-helicopter nuts. (There are so many strains of paranoia out there, nobody would notice another one.)
We've talked about this before, but I think it's time to get serious about writing a canopener to extract files from InstallShield and similar SEA utilities without displaying, reading or parsing the license. It can't be that hard, and it would kill off the click-wrap license BS completely.
Not to mention get anyone touching or linking to it sued into debtor's prison.
The DeCSS decision suggests that the encryption research exemption places the burden of proof on defendants to prove that they are legitimate researchers (and not warez kiddies or troublemakers).
Slashdot Mirror
That grant of rights cannot be revoked retroactively. (And there is also the bit about "released under GPL" in the source code.)
Under UCITA, licences can be retroactively revoked. All Mattel has to do is show that the essay is downloadable in Virginia (where UCITA is law) and sue in a Virginia court room.
You might well want to explore the fact that the original documents gave permission to redistribute.
Irrelevant -- Mattel can withdraw the original license. All they have to do is sue in a Virginia court (where UCITA is law); anything that can be downloaded in Virginia would be infringing.
Furthermore, anybody else reverse-engineering Cyber Patrol can be sued for copyright infringement. All efforts against Cyber Patrol (or derivatives thereof) are tainted and thus illegal.
CPHACK has not been withdrawn, but turned into a offensive weapon against reverse engineering, a blunt instrument Mattel can use to bludgeon anyone having a go at Cyber Patrol, reinforcing their powers to keep the serfs ignorant.
Apparently the UCITA allows old licences to be revoked by newer licences; i.e., Mattel can cancel the GPLed licence of the released cphack.
UCITA could be a "magic bullet" against the GPL.
Mattel can unambiguously sue any mirror sites this side of Libya for copyright violation if they host it, something they could only do in the US before.
One of the points mentioned is that under Linux, most people download and compile source code rather than fetching binaries. Is this still the case? I suspect that many people these days would download RPMs and install them (as root, nonetheless!) instead. Theoretically, sneaking an infected RPM for something cool/sexy (a first-person xbill variant or a Star Wars screensaver should do) onto a contrib site could infect a lot of systems as root.
.tar.gz) sent. Or one could take a leaf out of Ken Thompson/Dennis Ritche's book and modify the C compiler (or linker) to insert extra code.
Of course, most RPMs are downloaded from a central server, not traded or swapped on BBS-like local sites, which makes it harder. Such a RPMed exploit could possibly do other things, such as dynamically patch files sent by ftpd/httpd and infect any executables (standalone or in
Or one could just be unimaginative and modify tcpd to contain a remotely-activated 'sleeper' denial-of-service client or backdoor root shell.
So now the wolves have scented blood and are closing in for the kill; the RIAA and others are suing MP3.com for a service which is admittedly on shaky ground. Some say that if they win they could get billions of dollars in damages.
Could MP3.com be sued into bankrupcy? If so, we could see its assets (the domain name, roster of tracks, &c.) sold off, possibly bought up by (and subsumed into) one of the major music companies. Then we could see the situation of the new MP3.com being at the vanguard of phasing out the insecure MP3 format in favour of SDMI.
Now that would be a coup for the RIAA.
Look at the texinfo files distributed with said packages. 'info autoconf' and 'info m4' should bring up the respective manuals.
1.The file system interface. By this, I mean inodes, ugo/rwx permissions, and a single hierarchy rooted at "/".
A number of non-UNIX OSes have borrowed this paradigm (INMOS's Helios and Be's BeOS are two examples; many real-time OSes also borrow from UNIX here).
2.There is one user (root) that has full access to the machine; all other users are limited to a small "sandbox"
Some secure unices eliminate the omnipotent root user and compartmentalise privileges further.
Other indicators of an operating system's UNIXness would be:
The Rastafarians adopted Zion before Gundam.
The Rastas identified themselves with the Hebrews
of the Old Testament, seeing themselves as Jah's
true Chosen People; consequently they borrowed
from Jewish religious terminology (well, what they
could find in common literature; I don't think there were too many Rastafarian Cabbalists or anysuch). As such, Rastafarians used the word "Zion" as their promised land, as many Bob Marley songs attest to.
Wasn't Tim Burton going to direct the live-action Astroboy film? Will this be delayed or will it be directed by someone else?
Isn't the CEO of MCI WorldCom also a Pentecostal fundamentalist of some sort?
Anyone else care to check in on actor choices and/or how to deal with the size without causing massive CRC errors in the story?
It isn't going to happen. Hollywood is in the business of selling to the largest possible audience. Since the demise of mid-list films in the 80s, they don't release anything unless it can be sold to a broad audience. And a few thousand hard-core scifi geeks wouldn't cut it.
Besides the story being too long, parts of it are unworkable (the sex scene, for example; hints at underage sex are OK in an arthouse film but would seem prurient in a scifi blockbuster), or unmarketable (the whole "nam shub of Enki" thing would either have to be dumbed down tremendously into a sort of Ghostbusters metaphysics or else done away with altogether, if they're going to not bore non-fan audiences (and reviewers) waiting for the next SFX sequence).
It's sort of like the much dreaded film of Neil Gaiman's Sandman books, which for a while looked like a Morpheus-vs.-Corinthian action blockbuster. There would be no way to make it true to the story and meet mass-market goals. Mercifully, though, there's no indication that it will ever see the light of day.
The story is complex, the sets would have to be extremely expensive and/or digital ala Episode1,
the Uneducated Masses would think it was a rip-off of The Matrix...
If anything, that would doubly damn the Neuromancer film project, as The Matrix lifts most of the names from there (the Matrix itself, Zion (without the funky rasta back-story), &c.) Well, at least Neo (k3wl name d00d) and Trinity aren't named Case and Molly..
But another thing to consider is that large portions of the book are a thinly veiled jab at L Ron Hubbard (AKA L Bob Rife).
Other than the name I don't see much similarity. Hubbard's a pulp scifi author who founded a kooky religion on a bet, whereas Rife seems to be an industrialist who rode in on the middle-American Christian power base. They could always just call him Bob L. Rife or something if the scienos complain.
They make her 21 or something, and have her played by someone who looks more like an ass-kicking cyber-ninja than teenage jailbait.
To do this you'd want to devise a meme that's catchy and compels people to spread it. Spreading it should be easy and the payoff (physical or emotional; it can be just the satisfaction of having done one's bit to make the world a better place), as expected from the start, should exceed the perceived cost of participation. That's how those good-luck chain letters spread so easily.
Problem is, memes mutate, and code isn't robust. After a few dozen generations you can expect variants of the chain letter without the source code to appear. So you might want some sort of verification mechanism (i.e., forward the whole post to an address and the guy who sent it to you gets some reward if the code is there; that'd make it in the sender's interest to keep the code there).
What should the prizes be? They could be gift vouchers, if one has the money/sponsors. If not, they can be something purely psychological which creates a reward in the form of status or honour. Perhaps a web site with a distinctive name will add senders to an honour roll, giving them a free email address or somesuch, which identifies them as a member of an elite club.
There simply aren't laws like the Digital Milennium Copyright Act in Australia at the moment and what changes are being made still generically allow the use of circumvention devices such as DeCSS
Isn't Our Esteemed Parliament debating a piece of legislation that looks just like the DMCA? There's something about that in the EFA Update.
The DMCA allows the use of circumvention devices for security research, as will the new Australian act. Which seems to be the same sort of deal as allowing approved research facilities to grow opium for medical research.
This sort of behaviour is perfectly legal under the DMCA and UCITA. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing as the megacorps treat the little people as little more than feudal serfs.
Given that it is intended for people who aren't familiar with Linux or UNIX, and who presumably run Windows, XDMCP and ssh aren't particularly useful. If it was intended for seasoned Linux users, that'd be another story, of course..
Or if they could get a (low-bandwidth) X server in a Java applet; though that'd be one big applet...
BTW - As far as the word format on your resume...sorry to burst most Ub3r h4x0rz bubbles, but most
companies have lots of management, and management uses Windows...word is still the way to go in a
resume, but that doesn't mean you have to like it.
Depends on the company. If it's an old corporate behemoth then layers of Microsoft-dependent pointy-hairs are likely. If it's a small startup or Linux consultancy, or it comes from an academic/UNIX background, that is not so.
One very nice piece of software (shareware) is AudioMulch. Basically, it's a set of components (FX boxes, sample players, even a TB-303 emulator) which can be connected with patch leads. It's Windows-based, though the author said (at last year's First Iteration conference in Melbourne) that he may port it to Linux. Here's hoping...
This kind of software is very time-consuming and difficult to write (I *have* considered it).
I once started writing a sequencer which was to have done a few thing Jazz didn't do (like having tracks comprised of phrases, rather than flat lengths of events). I got about as far as writing a Qt piano roll window class when I realised that it would be much quicker to save up and buy a Power Macintosh and Cubase VST than to write my own, and that every minute I spend hacking on a sequencer is time I don't spend actually using one.
As for the free/pay software cultures, there is indeed a big difference. Then again, compared with the price of music hardware (anything capable of generating halfway decent sounds will cost at least as much as a quite passable PC, and probably more), paying $300 for a virtual drum machine plug-in doesn't look so excessive.
The hardware side of music (MIDI and such) will be the easy part. Linux supports traditional MIDI cards (such as the MPU-401, and the low-performance joystick-MIDI interfaces on most sound cards), and you can work with that. I used to use Jazz (the XView version, if you remember that) and a MPU-401. Professional audio is the next major issue. If you're doing professional music, a game-quality soundcard with lousy frequency response, an imprecise A/D converter and lots of RF noise is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
The software side will be harder. The greatest strength of systems such as Cubase VST is the number of interlocking programs. You have your effects plug-ins (ranging from homebrewed compressors and flangers to expensive proprietary DSP wizardry), soft synths (including ReBirth and the new VST 2.0 plug-ins such as Neon and LM-4), sample loop/phrase editors (i.e. ReCycle) and the like. FX plug-ins, for one, are incredibly useful. A Linux-based digital recording/sequencing application that only has a few basic reverb and echo plug-ins will look pretty poorly compared to Cubase or Logic.
On one hand, there are a lot of free (though not quite open-source) DSP plug-ins for Cubase VST, and the SDK is available. The interface has a small C++ class library to wrap it; if a compatible API could be written, a lot of plug-ins could be ported. On the other hand, maybe (just maybe) it would be possible to run some Windows VST plug-ins (i.e., DLLs with functions for doing stuff to buffers) using part of WINE.
You can bet that, if political pressure didn't work, and economic sanctions didn't either, they'd drop a laser-guided glide bomb on the server one night, and say that it was distributing child pornography or something. Those who said otherwise would soon be merged in the public eye with the Waco conspiracy theorists and black-helicopter nuts. (There are so many strains of paranoia out there, nobody would notice another one.)
We've talked about this before, but I think it's time to get serious about writing a canopener to extract files from InstallShield and similar SEA utilities without displaying, reading or parsing the license. It can't be that hard, and it would kill off the click-wrap license BS completely.
Not to mention get anyone touching or linking to it sued into debtor's prison.
The DeCSS decision suggests that the encryption research exemption places the burden of proof on defendants to prove that they are legitimate researchers (and not warez kiddies or troublemakers).