"If you intend to not distribute the sources to this project, then you are required to donate a reasonable amount of the profts back into the Open Source community."
I don't think that this would work for a number of reasons:
1: Define "reasonable". Look at MP3, for example. Because it is used in an international standard, Fraunhofer/Thomson are required to license their patents on a reasonable basis. Yet if I, as an open source developer, want to make use of an international standard, I have to fork over a minimum of $10000 up front, based on per copy distribution. A company, on the other hand, when deciding what is "reasonable" to return to the open source community, would probably go the other way and pay as little as possible -- they're out to maximize profit.
2: For a company to use code in a product, it has to either own the copyright or have a license. One of the guiding philosophies of the GPL is that every user has the right to the source code. If you give companies a loophole, you may as well throw away the entire license.
3: The software itself can be lost. If a company takes GPL'ed software, modifies it, distributes the modified copy, but does not provide the changed source code, then those changes are lost to the community at large. If the company changes it sufficiently to prevent interoperability between the original GPL'ed version and their own, then everyone loses. Either the maintainers of the original GPL'ed software are forced to reverse-engineer the changes, or accept the loss of interoperability.
No, I really believe that it is a bad idea to allow any sort of loophole, even for money, to the concept that the source code must be available.
According to this page at Midbar, it is said to be "fully transparent to the consumer." It claims to work on "existing commercial players and drives". It's not really clear to me whether it can be played on older devices or not.
I'm the author and maintainer of a Windows (don't flame me) dll for ripping CD audio, and so this interests me a great deal. But the bottom line is this -- if it can be read by a standard CD player, then there's no way that they can rip-proof it. Since it's quitting time here in Europe, I may head down to the local record store and see if I can't find either of these two CDs and get back with some hard, technical details, rather than the marketing hype from the article and Midbar's web site.
"This constitutes written demand for you to retract your false and malicious statements within 3 days, failing which, you, and your company, will be subject to civil prosecution for your actions."
Actually, the whole thing sounds like one big ole' troll to me. In any case, there's no court in the US that's going to accept an email sent via hotmail as acceptable for "written demand". Notice the lack of any sort of attempt at a digital signatire, lack of proof that it was sent or delivered, anonymity of hotmail accounts, etc...
Sorry, but your sarcasm just doesn't work here. When bankers and traders break the law, they are routinely prohibited from working their profession for years after their release from prison. Doctors found to have been negligent can no longer practice medicine. Lawyers who commit crimes are disbarred. And this is a good thing.
Just because you can't imagine life without a computer doesn't mean that it's not possible. I have nothing against Mitnick, but he's certainly not a saint, and doesn't special treatment. Give the man a broom -- that is, if you can find one without a built-in computer.
You can rebut anything you like. If it had been a ruling, then they could appeal. The main purpose for the rebuttal (actually a "conclusions of law" filing) in this case is to set up for the appeal after they lose. I've talked to a lot of people who thought that Microsoft actually *wanted* to lose the first round, and to go in prepared to win the appeal. Especially after they discovered that they didn't have a pro-MS judge.
The site may not be hosted at pssst.qc.ca, but Pssst's certainly behind it. Or one of their users.
Houby.
One of their users, definitely. But that doesn't make pssst responsible for it. It's a simple matter to look up the name of the person who registered the domain, and start there, rather than finding a site that is recommended to visit while waiting for searches to complete. The lawyers fsck'ed up, period.
Noone is arguing that Sun's releasing the JVM is not a "Good Thing". Most people are even picking up on the fact that Sun was well within their rights under their license to do what they did. But it still sucks that they couldn't make at least a token reference to Blackdown to acknowlege their contribution.
But a 2 MB executable, isn't that a bit bigger than anticipated? It probably is, but I was playing around with wxWindows recently, and even a "Hello, World!" executable for Win32 platforms came in at about 1.5 MB. Granted, it was linked statically and Opera is probably linked against dynamic libraries. But even so, I don't think that 2 MB for a browser executable is going overboard.
To answer the question -- both author and user should be held responsible, to varying degrees and depending on the circumstances. It should be based in part on the severity of the damage and in part on the intentions of the people involved. Intent to cause harm is hard to prove, however.
Another problem you're going to have is your idea of punishing people for writing programs which cause (or simply are capable of causing) harm. Compilers, interpreters, and even good ole' DOS DEBUG are good examples of programs that can be either very useful, but can also be used for destructive purposes. I think we have to look back again at the overall intent of the person writing or using the program.
I've got something to do this weekend. I've still got a pretty bitter taste in the back of my throat after the Geocities/Yahoo! licensing fiasco, and have been looking for a new home. My congrats to the team at SourceForge for putting this together!
Now their network access is obviously the school's, and subject to their terms. Admins can watch what goes into and out of a box, but is it really legal to "search" their computer?"
Where from that article did you get that the students' computers were being searched? The article clearly states that CMU "randomly checked the public portions of 250 students' computer accounts". In no case, however, were system admins "illegally" searching through private computers.
Oracle has had a built-in date conversion "dd-mon-rr" for quite a while now that works exactly this way. Values for RR from 0-49 are treated as 2000-2049 and values from 50-99 are treated as 1950-1999. Don't know how long this format has been around, but it sure might be prior art.
It's a method to keep from having to pay US taxes on money made outside of the USA. The tax havens don't have to report transactions (large transactions in the US are reported by the banks to the gov't) to the US gov't, hence the US can't prove that you made any money == can't collect taxes on it. A lot of small island nations offer "citizenship" in their countries for a small fee.
"...the bundled-in games on newer Linux pre-installed boxen may drive the rapid adoption of Linux in the mainstream. Which, naturally, all the coders fear above all else."
What exactly is it that the coders are afraid of? Bundled-in games? Rapid adoption of linux? The article said nothing about coders fearing the adoption of Linux. In case you haven't noticed, most programmers actually *like* it when people use software that they have worked on -- an awful lot of us are proud of the things that we put our time and effort into.
One of the advantages of sexual reproduction is that the gene pool is constantly mixed. If you start placing the same or similar genes into large segments of the population, you're setting the human race up for major problems. Diversity is *not* a problem -- it's one of the things that keeps the human race from dying out. If everybody's got the same genes, then everyone is susceptible to the same diseases. It doesn't matter if it's accomplished naturally (inbreeding - the original genetic engineering), or by genetic engineering. Not a good idea IMHO.
How do you pronounce "dvorak"? ( ) de-vo-rack ( ) de-vor-jak
Actually, neither of the above. Dvorak (or Dvoøák, if you happen to have a Central European charset available), is originally a Czech name. The "r hook" sound does not exist in English, and to most English speakers sounds like either a "sh" or a "zh".
There is no simple answer to the question -- it depends on the platform and on what your specific goals are. To completely reverse engineer a program, ie. generate source code that can be compiled to exactly the same executable files, is extremely difficult. Commercial dissasemblers are generally expensive. So it's usually better to define a smaller section that you want to analyze, instead of trying to recreate equivalent source code. Since I only have experience disassembling/analyzing programs running on x86 DOS/Win/Win9x, I'll have to limit practical tips to those platforms -- and in most cases, you can use a combination of the methods. You'll also need to at least be able to follow assembly code, and will need to understand the function calling conventions that the particular program and operating system use.
1) Watch the program under a debugger. This is probably the most time-consuming method, as you've got to single step until you find the section of code you're interested in (and this assumes that you can recognize what you're looking for). Most modern Windows debuggers allow you to break when a DLL is loaded, and you can then set breakpoints in the loaded module.
2) Use an API Spy program (ala Matt Pietrek, which is unfortunately out-of-print). Windows programs make heavy use of calls to functions in DLL's -- it is often possible to intercept these calls. You can find out what DLLs a program is linked to by either disassembling it, or by looking at the executable under a hex editor. To get the source code to the original API Spy from Pietrek's MSJ article, look for MSDN Knowlege Base article Q122274.
3) Rename the DLL that you want to intercept calls to, and write a "wrapper" DLL with the original name of the target DLL. The "wrapper" should have stubs for all functions in the target, which simply log information about the function call, and then call the intended function in the target DLL. But if you don't have header files for the functions you want to intercept, you'll need to watch at least one call to the function under the debugger to determine the number and type of arguments, as well as the calling convention.
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 1
I'd imagine that not too many Americans surf with one eye on the connection time.
As an American living in Europe, I can confirm this. In the US, I had two phone lines so that I could stay online for longer periods of time. Here, I don't even own a modem on the computer at home. Luckily, the monopoly in the Czech Republic ends in just over a year, and hopefully that will help matters.
If Telecom would decide to try and sell a whole lot of lines cheaply, instead of a few expensive ones, they would do a lot better. This goes for as well.
"Every single data provider now is at risk. We could go into court tomorrow if we wanted and ask to shut down every database." -- Jonathan Tasini, the president of the National Writers' Union and lead plaintiff.
I'm not completely sure where I stand on the overall issue, but people like Mr. Tasini really scare me. I tend to favour the individual authors, whose works were taken, though, in spite of the arrogant comment from their leader.
"The existence of the third memory slot can cause data to get lost while being transferred between memory and the main processor"
Has anyone seen any other reports with specifics on the problem? A problem like this would cause severe system instability, and basically make any machine built on top of it worthless. Since according to the article, some manufacturers have opted to ship computers with the problem, either 1) the author of the original CNET article got it wrong, or 2) computer manufacturers have a severe lack of ethics.
"The intention to harm becomes the primary criteria for bringing charges"
At least according to the above, someone who got a virus, and sent it to a anti-virus vendor would not be prosecuted. It seems to be more of a blanket method for going after the authors themselves, the various sites that post viruses for "educational" purposes, etc.
On the face of things, it sounds like a good idea. I know I'd sure like to spend a week or two up in space. But here are a few reasons why I believe it will never happen: 1) Safety: astronauts have to go through intensive training on how to handle themselves in zero-G. The average tourist can't afford to take off enough time from work to learn how to behave in zero-G. 2) Cost: Only the extremely rich will be able to afford it. And among the ones who can afford it, only a few will actually go, and even fewer will enjoy it. 3) References to "romantic possibilities" aside, sex in zero-G would just not be all that feasible or even desirable -- Newton's three laws of motion come to mind (hint: intertia and equal and opposite reactions).
do you really think people are stupid enough to think that a mail from 'slashdot@dotcomnow.com' (or 'slashdot@hotmail.com' which I just grabbed) must necessarily come from someone working for slashdot?
You're most likely correct that most people will not believe that mail coming from slashdot@hotmail.com is from the/. staff, but if even 1% of people believe it, it can mean trouble. What if you had a large commercial domain, and someone hijacked your "free" email account, and sent out a few hundrew thousand pieces of insulting, obscene, misleading (or worse) e-mail. You'll spend a large amount of time and money trying to repair the damage. Sure, only a few hundred people truly believed it, but you've got to send emails to all of them, post an apology to your web site, etc.
For a competitor, this could be a real easy way to generate bad publicity...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that this would work for a number of reasons:
No, I really believe that it is a bad idea to allow any sort of loophole, even for money, to the concept that the source code must be available.
According to this page at Midbar, it is said to be "fully transparent to the consumer." It claims to work on "existing commercial players and drives". It's not really clear to me whether it can be played on older devices or not.
I'm the author and maintainer of a Windows (don't flame me) dll for ripping CD audio, and so this interests me a great deal. But the bottom line is this -- if it can be read by a standard CD player, then there's no way that they can rip-proof it. Since it's quitting time here in Europe, I may head down to the local record store and see if I can't find either of these two CDs and get back with some hard, technical details, rather than the marketing hype from the article and Midbar's web site.
"This constitutes written demand for you to retract your false and malicious statements within 3 days, failing which, you, and your company, will be subject to civil prosecution for your actions."
Actually, the whole thing sounds like one big ole' troll to me. In any case, there's no court in the US that's going to accept an email sent via hotmail as acceptable for "written demand". Notice the lack of any sort of attempt at a digital signatire, lack of proof that it was sent or delivered, anonymity of hotmail accounts, etc...
Sorry, but your sarcasm just doesn't work here. When bankers and traders break the law, they are routinely prohibited from working their profession for years after their release from prison. Doctors found to have been negligent can no longer practice medicine. Lawyers who commit crimes are disbarred. And this is a good thing.
Just because you can't imagine life without a computer doesn't mean that it's not possible. I have nothing against Mitnick, but he's certainly not a saint, and doesn't special treatment. Give the man a broom -- that is, if you can find one without a built-in computer.
You can rebut anything you like. If it had been a ruling, then they could appeal. The main purpose for the rebuttal (actually a "conclusions of law" filing) in this case is to set up for the appeal after they lose. I've talked to a lot of people who thought that Microsoft actually *wanted* to lose the first round, and to go in prepared to win the appeal. Especially after they discovered that they didn't have a pro-MS judge.
The site may not be hosted at pssst.qc.ca, but Pssst's certainly behind it. Or one of their users.
Houby.
One of their users, definitely. But that doesn't make pssst responsible for it. It's a simple matter to look up the name of the person who registered the domain, and start there, rather than finding a site that is recommended to visit while waiting for searches to complete. The lawyers fsck'ed up, period.
First Amazon trys to monopolize the cookie, then AOL gets 600k against spammers, now this?
Uh, I thought that Eric Schmidt sold Amazon the right to use cookies... <g>
Noone is arguing that Sun's releasing the JVM is not a "Good Thing". Most people are even picking up on the fact that Sun was well within their rights under their license to do what they did. But it still sucks that they couldn't make at least a token reference to Blackdown to acknowlege their contribution.
But a 2 MB executable, isn't that a bit bigger than anticipated?
It probably is, but I was playing around with wxWindows recently, and even a "Hello, World!" executable for Win32 platforms came in at about 1.5 MB. Granted, it was linked statically and Opera is probably linked against dynamic libraries. But even so, I don't think that 2 MB for a browser executable is going overboard.
To answer the question -- both author and user should be held responsible, to varying degrees and depending on the circumstances. It should be based in part on the severity of the damage and in part on the intentions of the people involved. Intent to cause harm is hard to prove, however.
Another problem you're going to have is your idea of punishing people for writing programs which cause (or simply are capable of causing) harm. Compilers, interpreters, and even good ole' DOS DEBUG are good examples of programs that can be either very useful, but can also be used for destructive purposes. I think we have to look back again at the overall intent of the person writing or using the program.
I've got something to do this weekend. I've still got a pretty bitter taste in the back of my throat after the Geocities/Yahoo! licensing fiasco, and have been looking for a new home. My congrats to the team at SourceForge for putting this together!
Here's a link with more specific information on the crackdown, directly from the CMU computing services newsletter.
o rk
http://www.cmu. edu/computing/cursor/fall99cursor.html#anchornetw
It seems that shared directories on the local university LAN were searched.
Now their network access is obviously the school's, and subject to their terms. Admins can watch what goes into and out of a box, but is it really legal to "search" their computer?"
Where from that article did you get that the students' computers were being searched? The article clearly states that CMU "randomly checked the public portions of 250 students' computer accounts". In no case, however, were system admins "illegally" searching through private computers.
Oracle has had a built-in date conversion "dd-mon-rr" for quite a while now that works exactly this way. Values for RR from 0-49 are treated as 2000-2049 and values from 50-99 are treated as 1950-1999. Don't know how long this format has been around, but it sure might be prior art.
It's a method to keep from having to pay US taxes on money made outside of the USA. The tax havens don't have to report transactions (large transactions in the US are reported by the banks to the gov't) to the US gov't, hence the US can't prove that you made any money == can't collect taxes on it. A lot of small island nations offer "citizenship" in their countries for a small fee.
"...the bundled-in games on newer Linux pre-installed boxen may drive the rapid adoption of Linux in the mainstream. Which, naturally, all the coders fear above all else."
What exactly is it that the coders are afraid of? Bundled-in games? Rapid adoption of linux? The article said nothing about coders fearing the adoption of Linux. In case you haven't noticed, most programmers actually *like* it when people use software that they have worked on -- an awful lot of us are proud of the things that we put our time and effort into.
One of the advantages of sexual reproduction is that the gene pool is constantly mixed. If you start placing the same or similar genes into large segments of the population, you're setting the human race up for major problems. Diversity is *not* a problem -- it's one of the things that keeps the human race from dying out. If everybody's got the same genes, then everyone is susceptible to the same diseases. It doesn't matter if it's accomplished naturally (inbreeding - the original genetic engineering), or by genetic engineering. Not a good idea IMHO.
How do you pronounce "dvorak"?
( ) de-vo-rack
( ) de-vor-jak
Actually, neither of the above. Dvorak (or Dvoøák, if you happen to have a Central European charset available), is originally a Czech name. The "r hook" sound does not exist in English, and to most English speakers sounds like either a "sh" or a "zh".
There is no simple answer to the question -- it depends on the platform and on what your specific goals are. To completely reverse engineer a program, ie. generate source code that can be compiled to exactly the same executable files, is extremely difficult. Commercial dissasemblers are generally expensive. So it's usually better to define a smaller section that you want to analyze, instead of trying to recreate equivalent source code. Since I only have experience disassembling/analyzing programs running on x86 DOS/Win/Win9x, I'll have to limit practical tips to those platforms -- and in most cases, you can use a combination of the methods. You'll also need to at least be able to follow assembly code, and will need to understand the function calling conventions that the particular program and operating system use.
1) Watch the program under a debugger. This is probably the most time-consuming method, as you've got to single step until you find the section of code you're interested in (and this assumes that you can recognize what you're looking for). Most modern Windows debuggers allow you to break when a DLL is loaded, and you can then set breakpoints in the loaded module.
2) Use an API Spy program (ala Matt Pietrek, which is unfortunately out-of-print). Windows programs make heavy use of calls to functions in DLL's -- it is often possible to intercept these calls. You can find out what DLLs a program is linked to by either disassembling it, or by looking at the executable under a hex editor. To get the source code to the original API Spy from Pietrek's MSJ article, look for MSDN Knowlege Base article Q122274.
3) Rename the DLL that you want to intercept calls to, and write a "wrapper" DLL with the original name of the target DLL. The "wrapper" should have stubs for all functions in the target, which simply log information about the function call, and then call the intended function in the target DLL. But if you don't have header files for the functions you want to intercept, you'll need to watch at least one call to the function under the debugger to determine the number and type of arguments, as well as the calling convention.
I'd imagine that not too many Americans surf with one eye on the connection time.
As an American living in Europe, I can confirm this. In the US, I had two phone lines so that I could stay online for longer periods of time. Here, I don't even own a modem on the computer at home. Luckily, the monopoly in the Czech Republic ends in just over a year, and hopefully that will help matters.
If Telecom would decide to try and sell a whole lot of lines cheaply, instead of a few expensive ones, they would do a lot better. This goes for as well.
From the article:
"Every single data provider now is at risk. We could go into court tomorrow if we wanted and ask to shut down every database." -- Jonathan Tasini, the president of the National Writers' Union and lead plaintiff.
I'm not completely sure where I stand on the overall issue, but people like Mr. Tasini really scare me. I tend to favour the individual authors, whose works were taken, though, in spite of the arrogant comment from their leader.
"The existence of the third memory slot can cause data to get lost while being transferred between memory and the main processor"
Has anyone seen any other reports with specifics on the problem? A problem like this would cause severe system instability, and basically make any machine built on top of it worthless. Since according to the article, some manufacturers have opted to ship computers with the problem, either 1) the author of the original CNET article got it wrong, or 2) computer manufacturers have a severe lack of ethics.
At least according to the above, someone who got a virus, and sent it to a anti-virus vendor would not be prosecuted. It seems to be more of a blanket method for going after the authors themselves, the various sites that post viruses for "educational" purposes, etc.
On the face of things, it sounds like a good idea. I know I'd sure like to spend a week or two up in space. But here are a few reasons why I believe it will never happen:
1) Safety: astronauts have to go through intensive training on how to handle themselves in zero-G. The average tourist can't afford to take off enough time from work to learn how to behave in zero-G.
2) Cost: Only the extremely rich will be able to afford it. And among the ones who can afford it, only a few will actually go, and even fewer will enjoy it.
3) References to "romantic possibilities" aside, sex in zero-G would just not be all that feasible or even desirable -- Newton's three laws of motion come to mind (hint: intertia and equal and opposite reactions).
do you really think people are stupid enough to think that a mail from 'slashdot@dotcomnow.com' (or 'slashdot@hotmail.com' which I just grabbed) must necessarily come from someone working for slashdot?
/. staff, but if even 1% of people believe it, it can mean trouble. What if you had a large commercial domain, and someone hijacked your "free" email account, and sent out a few hundrew thousand pieces of insulting, obscene, misleading (or worse) e-mail. You'll spend a large amount of time and money trying to repair the damage. Sure, only a few hundred people truly believed it, but you've got to send emails to all of them, post an apology to your web site, etc.
You're most likely correct that most people will not believe that mail coming from slashdot@hotmail.com is from the
For a competitor, this could be a real easy way to generate bad publicity...