Huh, I can upgrade a crappy old Win95 install to the equivelant of WinME by downloading only 500+Mb of files straight from Microsoft, assuming that their site hasn't been virused or DOS'd or DNS hacked or just switched off by mistake. That gives me an OS that's far more stable... not, wait... that looks totally different... no, hang on, that's not it. Something is different though... Ah! It needs twice the memory and runs half as fast. So it must be better, and it didn't cost me a penny to get there, other than the three days out of my life to download each patch one at a time then reboot.
they've decided to take a bit of license with the story line, and increase Arwen's role (she's a lead character's love interest).
Well, she is a lead character's love interest, we just don't get to see her in the book.
with the possible exception of Galadrial, no female character [has much of a role]
Eowen? If Minis Tirith falls, what's anybody coming home to? Actually, when I heard that Kate Blanchett was featured, I thought "Wow, great casting for Eowen!". When I found out she's playing Galadriel, I had a bit of a think, and came up with "Wow, great casting for Galadriel!". I love when films feature actual actors rather than stars.
This is the fantasy story that started a whole genre
Yup, and in response to the poster below who points out Homer, I'd have to say that Lord of the Rings is much closer to the Norse sagas in terms of setting, character, language and ambience. Gutteral lyricism, cleaving and hewing. You never feel that the characters are safe, and when [spoiler deleted] is killed, it feels grim and right. Oooh, I have to go and read it again!;)
Yeah, heaven forbid that these geeks, after putting in 80 hour weeks, would feel they're entitled to anything other than an asskick out the door
Hear hear. As long as you're sure that your employer actually owns the equipment, and that you're not going to get paid what you're owed or have been promised (written or verbal, and your immediate boss does in fact represent the company, so her bullshit promises are binding*), then I have no problem with swiping hardware.
The way that I'd prefer to do it is to agree to take hardware at a reasonable price, below retail but way above fire sale, in lieu of wages, bonuses or benefits. But I have no illusions that the survivors in my company will have the basic shred of common sense to agree to that, as they refuse to do it right now for obsoleted hardware. It's (confidentially expressed) company policy to retire hardware through theft, as it's easier than selling it on to employees!
This isn't an abstract issue for me. It looks like my reward for finishing my current project will be to have my office closed as being surplus to requirements. We're already training our (younger, cheaper, more gullible) replacements. Meanwhile, management exhorts us to work harder to deal with the problems of moving more and move responsibility and control to the parent office. People are putting in 80 hour weeks, and many of them are in denial that we're going to get cut. The decision will be made by accountants in a board room 3000 miles away, and it won't involve anyone we can impress with our hard work and dedication. This isn't a dot-com, it's an established tech company that's screwed up big time and has grasped further than it can reach.
My response? Work the 40 hours a week that I'm paid for, goof and surf for 20, and keep track of where the good toys are, for when the "We regret to inform you" announcement comes. While everyone else is wailing and gnashing in betrayed anguish, I'll be slipping a Sony Viao and hard drive into the bag I keep ready under my desk, then I'll scoop up a flat panel monitor and an 802.11b access point while I wait for the 200 copies of my resume to finish printing**.
I have no illusions that this is theft. But, you know what? I really don't give a fuck. I trusted my employer, and they've already screwed me over with impossible demands, tortuous contracts, and farcically worthless stock options. If they make the final betrayal, I'll loot the office without hesitation then sleep very soundly in my bed, believe me.
* I live in a jurisdiction where verbal contracts are legally binding. You should try it, it's very refreshing.
** If you think this is the actual list, or that I'm going to store my loot anywhere findable, dream on. Find another point of idiocy to deride.
You go after them in bankruptcy court. Michael's intimation that somehow the employees' theivery is justified in these situations is just so stupid it makes me sick
Strong words. How about offering to take assets at near-cost prices in lieu of wages instead? Formalise the arrangement.
That said, if they work anything like my employer, they'll be too dumb to take the offer. I've actually been told that the fact of obsolete laptops being taken out of service through theft is tacit company policy. It's easier than Facilities and Information Services fighting it out to avoid administrating an employee purchase scheme.
I personally have been stopped and searched by security as I carried an obsoleted desktop to my car. It took me and my friendly local IS boss half an hour to convince them that it was going to be thrown in a dumpster if I didn't take it (along with the half dozen identical boxen already in there), and they actually made me write and sign a statement to this effect.
This is the kind of mentality that we're dealing with here. Assets left gathering dust or fire saled for peanets because nobody wants to be responsible for doing something sensible with them.
Does 2600 magazine qualify as an organization that gives advice to hackers, and would therefore be classified as a terrorist organization under this new bill?
I'd answer that, but by doing so, I'd leave myself and/. open to prosecution on the same grounds.
We badly need a "scary" mod to use instead of "funny"
The ATA would allow life imprisonment as a possible punishment for some computer crimes, that doesn't mean it automatically gets applied
Sure, and while we're at it, let's do away with all those confusing "assault", "aggravated assault", "manslaughter" and "murder" distinctions, and just have one charge of "violence" with a maximum sentence of life. After all, it's far too hard for elected legislators to have to deal with these issues. Far better to leave it to unelected judges who don't have to whore for votes every four years.
The third requires that one intentionally cause [loss aggregating at least $5,000 in value during any 1-year period] to a protected computer, where "protected computer" means [...] interstate [...] communications.
This list hardly seems to encompass "most computer crimes".
I believe case precedent allows companies to count cleanup and consultancy costs as "loss" for damage purposes, not just physical damage and loss of income. $5000 is chump change at specialist consultant rates, and this bill covers any machine that's sent or received a packet across state lines.
It is as bad as it looks. Why pass a bad law then rely on the courts to apply it reasonably? There's no need for it.
Hacking a military site can affect THOUSANDS of lives and national security
Yes, yes, because things are always in black and white.
I see a security hole in a military site that potentially leaves military details exposed. I mail the admin providing full details of the exploit, and get no response. I mail the NSA/CIA and get no response. I tell a newspaper, but without them trying the exploit, there's no story, and they know that the 1st Amendment is no protection in these cases. Weeks pass. I genuinely worry that Joe Terrorist is rooting the box and threatening uniformed lives.
So, I crack the site to demonstrate that it can be done, and again send full details of the exploit to the admin.
You're going to jail me for life? I willfully and deliberately damaged the site, and there is no provision in this bill for intent. Why not? Why do I have to trust the government to not overreact? Why do I have to be afraid of being an active patriot?
But heck, I don't even have to debunk your extreme example. If I crack any machine that is used in interstate communication (read: any internet connected machine), I go to jail for life. Amazon, Hotmail, a mail server in my old college, my friend's open Win98 box. Go to jail.
To go back to the murder analogy, we don't have one charge that says "Committing violence" with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. We have different charges with clear definitions, and scales of punishment.
Any reason why we can't do the same for computer crime?
Sabotage, deliberate, willful destruction of government property, including websites, *is* terrorism and should be dealt with as such
Since when was terrorism defined by action against a government? The American Revolution was terrorism? The coup in Panama was terrorism? Attacking goverment targets in Iraq (without a formal declaration of war) was terrorism?
Where are you going to draw the line? Burning draft papers was terrorism? They're government property, and you argue for no distinction.
By allowing any government to define terrorism as "Action against us!", you're removing all meaning from the word. You might as well just let them pass bills that say "evil is bad".
Microsoft has always taken the position that if you have a license to a new product you can install a downgraded product in it's place.
That's an interesting point. I'll take it up with our IS people. Do you have a reference for that, or is it one of these nod-and-a-wink, "We probably won't have you prosecuted" things?
I were forced to put in backdoors, I'd want to leak the details during development. But by doing so, I'd cut the throat of my own company
Wouldn't your company deserve to have its throat cut, for kowtowing to the feds?
It's rarely so black and white, especially when you've got kids and a mortgage. Commercial vendors will have to comply, but if there's any doubt over the security of their product, the customers will go to a rival, or even (gasp) to "illegal" open source alternatives.
Either way, it's a big old nasty mess, and nobody wins out of it.:(
There may be people out there who hate the idea of unbreakable encryption so much that they want to ban it just on principle
Maybe. After RIPA and super-DMCA, nothing is unthinkable. Compromise? License it. Corporate UK gets to use it so the French and US can't intercept and undercut them, gubmint collects license fees, and Joe Public doesn't matter , because only criminals (*cough* business *cough*) have anything to hide.
I'll reiterate: under David Blunkett, anything is possible in the UK. He's a scary, hard nosed fucker. This is a guy that frightens P.E. teachers.
Let's assume that Congress passes a law making it illegal to use any encryption software without a 'back-door'. One of the solutions to the ordinary user is to hide his/her encrypted text using steganography
Why bother even hiding it? Just encrypt your plaintext with any old pre-backdoor package, then backdoor encrypt that, and send it. To even look inside the backdoor encrypted version, the gubmint needs to get a court order, and if it's come to that, you're already in a world of shit.
Mind you, they could just claim that they got a FISA warrant, and how are you going to prove otherwise? Erk. OK, your idea has a fair bit of merit after all.
The idea is seriously being canvassed in the UK, of making it a criminal offence to send strongly encrypted material by email, or to put it up on a web page. Could such a law be enforced?
Unlikely. A better response would be to increase the penalties under RIPA for not disclosing your encrpytion keys, to 20 years or so. That way, you have a targetted weapon to use against people who you genuinely believe are Really Bad.
By the way, I think RIPA is vile and reprehensible, I'm just saying that it's slightly less vile - and more useful as the tool of a still slightly honest government - than a blanket ban.
would a non-computer saavy editor recognize the PGP signature and see it as valid, or just assume that I'm some wacko saying, "Yeah, Phil told me this on the street yesterday. Publish it and attribute it to him."
As opposed to manufacturing quotes falsely and deliberately? They'd have to get some integrity before this would become an issue.
That said... I blindly trusted that the letter above is from Phil. More fool me.
1. What are the uses of cryptography as a "Human Rights Tool"?
To pass information, opinions and political speech around or into and out of oppressive regimes (e.g. China, Afghanistan) without being prosecuted for the content. For example, in China, any criticism of the government is punishable, while in Afghanistan, you can be locked up for the heinous crime of organising a makeover for a female friend.
The only option left to the regime is to then make it illegal to use unbreakable encryption at all, so they can just assume guilt and lock you up for that. Horribly, the UK has already done that, and now (potentially) the USA is going to join them. Sure, if you just prove your innocence, you probably won't currently be punished for the content of the message, but before the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, nobody expected that they'd ever be locked up for discussing lipstick.
A truly benevolent government will go out of its way to protect against excesses by a future corrupt government, c.f. the US Constitution. That begs the question of whether the current UK and US governments are already corrupt, or whether they're just astonishingly stupid. Either way, it's not good news.
2. If in fact tools such as PGP are used by terrorists, how do governments protect against this?
Same way that they protected against 'phone calls, letters, dead letter drops, personals ads, and face to face meetings. By using intelligence services. Specifically, by having real people working on the inside. The CIA has been tied up in red tape in this regards since 1995, and we've just seen the results of that. The tools have changed, but the solution is the same.
the current maintainers of the PGP software will [...] have to comply [with putting in back doors]
Only the people working on or selling versions in a jurisdiction that mandates it.
Hmm. If I develop PGP-ish code (i.e. do the typing) inside the USA, but it's stored entirely on servers outside the USA ((barely) workable with current technology), and sold and marketed entirely outside the USA, will I still go to jail under the proposed legislation? Or if I go outside of the US to work on it, then re-enter the country, do I get Sklyarov'd? Questions to ask of any proposed bill.
The worst part is that if I were forced to put in backdoors, I'd want to leak the details during development to make it absolutely clear that the whole idea is flawed and unworkable before it even rolls out. But by doing so, I'd cut the throat of my own company. What a bind.
Think if the ketchup analogy that business types talk about. If Heinz were, say, double the price of their nearest competitor then people would start to take notice and try the alternatives
This analogy holds only if:
Ketchup was highly volatile and had to be delivered direct to your door and stored in special 3rd party bottles, and all of the bottle manufacters only worked with Heinz to ensure compatability.
Heinz ketchup dissolved any food not fully compatible with it, and Heinz manufactured their own food and aggressively bought out any competing manufacturers, so you had change your entire diet and restock your fridge, freezer and cupboards if you switch brands.
Heinz ketchup came out of the bottle in a different (not better) way than other ketchups, and people have to be re-trained to use other ketchups.
Oh, wait... now that I think about it, Heinz do actually use that last one as a selling point. Perhaps M$ could consider doing something similar: "Windows XP: not as good as Linux, but you won't have to use your brain.";)
In looser language, you maximize profit by raising price until the point where you really are driving some substantial percentage of consumers away
Microsoft have used this argument themselves. They claim that their maximum profit point is (wait for it) $800 per box, and they only price the OS so "low" because they're such nice guys.
I find it interesting that these companies even care
The reason why my company cares is that we buy desktops with Win2K (soon to be WinXP) and then pay again to install NT 4. We resent having to pay twice. What we want is to buy bare boxen, or NT 4 boxen, but we're tied to Dell, and Dell ship Win2K boxen. We have to have warrantied homogenous hardware to minimise support costs, and it would cost us a fortune to switch to another provider, buy white boxen, or (god help us) switch to Another OS. Dell and Microsoft know this, and they know that they don't have to give us what we want, only what we will (barely) accept.
I've seen some graphical representations of Windows penetration and W95 still holds a significant chunk
Yup, and that's not necessarily bad for M$. My employer deploys brand new Win95 laptops and NT 4 desktops. My own desktop has a "Windows 2000 Professional" sticker on the side. It was bought that way and we binned the license and paid for an NT 4 license because we know all the issues, the box works as well as it has need to, and the costs of supporting different OSes is still (just) higher than the cost of buying two licenses and throwing one away.
how many of you out there think moving from Office 2K to Office XP is worth teh cost? Hell Office 97 to 2K wasn't much of an improvement
I haven't even bothered paying $0 to upgrade my pirated copy of Office '97 to a pirated copy of Office 2K. I doubt if I'll bother paying $0 to upgrade to Office XP either. There's just no benefit for me.
Morality question: I had a crisis of conscience over using a warez Office '97, and went to StarOffice for a while. Then I had to wipe my drive when it spat some sand. The only reason that I installed Office '97 on the clean machine was that I didn't have a backup of StarOffice, and it was marginally quicker to reach out and grab a burned warez Office '97 than to download StarOffice again.
Work through the morality of that. Should I burn for using the warez Office '97 before switching to StarOffice? Does switching to StarOffice mitigate the crime? Is switching back worse than doing it in the first place? Does "apathy" count as a defence, considering that Microsoft have already lost the sale, i.e. there is no way that they are getting any money from me? Black, white, or shades of gray?
Frankly, I think all this military buildup was indented primarily to scare Taliban into submission
I agree. I certainly hope that's all it is, anyway.
This way you can have [the Afghan Northern Alliance] running show there, making sure that no terrorist camps are on their soil
And then we release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards^W Northern Alliance. (Simpsons reference)
Actually, it's more likely (based on precedent) that we'll support the Northern Alliance until they have about half the country, then switch back to supplying the Taliban again for a while.
Anyone got info on this Northern Alliance? What are their principles? And what do they actually call themselves? "Northern Alliance" sounds suspiciously spin doctory. ("World War 2 Allies" / "Rebel Alliance")
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Huh, I can upgrade a crappy old Win95 install to the equivelant of WinME by downloading only 500+Mb of files straight from Microsoft, assuming that their site hasn't been virused or DOS'd or DNS hacked or just switched off by mistake. That gives me an OS that's far more stable... not, wait... that looks totally different... no, hang on, that's not it. Something is different though... Ah! It needs twice the memory and runs half as fast. So it must be better, and it didn't cost me a penny to get there, other than the three days out of my life to download each patch one at a time then reboot.
Apple could learn a lesson from this.
Or maybe they already did. ;)
Well, she is a lead character's love interest, we just don't get to see her in the book.
Eowen? If Minis Tirith falls, what's anybody coming home to? Actually, when I heard that Kate Blanchett was featured, I thought "Wow, great casting for Eowen!". When I found out she's playing Galadriel, I had a bit of a think, and came up with "Wow, great casting for Galadriel!". I love when films feature actual actors rather than stars.
Yup, and in response to the poster below who points out Homer, I'd have to say that Lord of the Rings is much closer to the Norse sagas in terms of setting, character, language and ambience. Gutteral lyricism, cleaving and hewing. You never feel that the characters are safe, and when [spoiler deleted] is killed, it feels grim and right. Oooh, I have to go and read it again! ;)
Hear hear. As long as you're sure that your employer actually owns the equipment, and that you're not going to get paid what you're owed or have been promised (written or verbal, and your immediate boss does in fact represent the company, so her bullshit promises are binding*), then I have no problem with swiping hardware.
The way that I'd prefer to do it is to agree to take hardware at a reasonable price, below retail but way above fire sale, in lieu of wages, bonuses or benefits. But I have no illusions that the survivors in my company will have the basic shred of common sense to agree to that, as they refuse to do it right now for obsoleted hardware. It's (confidentially expressed) company policy to retire hardware through theft, as it's easier than selling it on to employees!
This isn't an abstract issue for me. It looks like my reward for finishing my current project will be to have my office closed as being surplus to requirements. We're already training our (younger, cheaper, more gullible) replacements. Meanwhile, management exhorts us to work harder to deal with the problems of moving more and move responsibility and control to the parent office. People are putting in 80 hour weeks, and many of them are in denial that we're going to get cut. The decision will be made by accountants in a board room 3000 miles away, and it won't involve anyone we can impress with our hard work and dedication. This isn't a dot-com, it's an established tech company that's screwed up big time and has grasped further than it can reach.
My response? Work the 40 hours a week that I'm paid for, goof and surf for 20, and keep track of where the good toys are, for when the "We regret to inform you" announcement comes. While everyone else is wailing and gnashing in betrayed anguish, I'll be slipping a Sony Viao and hard drive into the bag I keep ready under my desk, then I'll scoop up a flat panel monitor and an 802.11b access point while I wait for the 200 copies of my resume to finish printing**.
I have no illusions that this is theft. But, you know what? I really don't give a fuck. I trusted my employer, and they've already screwed me over with impossible demands, tortuous contracts, and farcically worthless stock options. If they make the final betrayal, I'll loot the office without hesitation then sleep very soundly in my bed, believe me.
* I live in a jurisdiction where verbal contracts are legally binding. You should try it, it's very refreshing.
** If you think this is the actual list, or that I'm going to store my loot anywhere findable, dream on. Find another point of idiocy to deride.
Strong words. How about offering to take assets at near-cost prices in lieu of wages instead? Formalise the arrangement.
That said, if they work anything like my employer, they'll be too dumb to take the offer. I've actually been told that the fact of obsolete laptops being taken out of service through theft is tacit company policy. It's easier than Facilities and Information Services fighting it out to avoid administrating an employee purchase scheme.
I personally have been stopped and searched by security as I carried an obsoleted desktop to my car. It took me and my friendly local IS boss half an hour to convince them that it was going to be thrown in a dumpster if I didn't take it (along with the half dozen identical boxen already in there), and they actually made me write and sign a statement to this effect.
This is the kind of mentality that we're dealing with here. Assets left gathering dust or fire saled for peanets because nobody wants to be responsible for doing something sensible with them.
I'd answer that, but by doing so, I'd leave myself and /. open to prosecution on the same grounds.
We badly need a "scary" mod to use instead of "funny"
Sure, and while we're at it, let's do away with all those confusing "assault", "aggravated assault", "manslaughter" and "murder" distinctions, and just have one charge of "violence" with a maximum sentence of life. After all, it's far too hard for elected legislators to have to deal with these issues. Far better to leave it to unelected judges who don't have to whore for votes every four years.
I believe case precedent allows companies to count cleanup and consultancy costs as "loss" for damage purposes, not just physical damage and loss of income. $5000 is chump change at specialist consultant rates, and this bill covers any machine that's sent or received a packet across state lines.
It is as bad as it looks. Why pass a bad law then rely on the courts to apply it reasonably? There's no need for it.
Yes, yes, because things are always in black and white.
I see a security hole in a military site that potentially leaves military details exposed. I mail the admin providing full details of the exploit, and get no response. I mail the NSA/CIA and get no response. I tell a newspaper, but without them trying the exploit, there's no story, and they know that the 1st Amendment is no protection in these cases. Weeks pass. I genuinely worry that Joe Terrorist is rooting the box and threatening uniformed lives.
So, I crack the site to demonstrate that it can be done, and again send full details of the exploit to the admin.
You're going to jail me for life? I willfully and deliberately damaged the site, and there is no provision in this bill for intent. Why not? Why do I have to trust the government to not overreact? Why do I have to be afraid of being an active patriot?
But heck, I don't even have to debunk your extreme example. If I crack any machine that is used in interstate communication (read: any internet connected machine), I go to jail for life. Amazon, Hotmail, a mail server in my old college, my friend's open Win98 box. Go to jail.
To go back to the murder analogy, we don't have one charge that says "Committing violence" with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. We have different charges with clear definitions, and scales of punishment.
Any reason why we can't do the same for computer crime?
Since when was terrorism defined by action against a government? The American Revolution was terrorism? The coup in Panama was terrorism? Attacking goverment targets in Iraq (without a formal declaration of war) was terrorism?
Where are you going to draw the line? Burning draft papers was terrorism? They're government property, and you argue for no distinction.
By allowing any government to define terrorism as "Action against us!", you're removing all meaning from the word. You might as well just let them pass bills that say "evil is bad".
That's an interesting point. I'll take it up with our IS people. Do you have a reference for that, or is it one of these nod-and-a-wink, "We probably won't have you prosecuted" things?
- I were forced to put in backdoors, I'd want to leak the details during development. But by doing so, I'd cut the throat of my own company
Wouldn't your company deserve to have its throat cut, for kowtowing to the feds?It's rarely so black and white, especially when you've got kids and a mortgage. Commercial vendors will have to comply, but if there's any doubt over the security of their product, the customers will go to a rival, or even (gasp) to "illegal" open source alternatives.
Either way, it's a big old nasty mess, and nobody wins out of it. :(
Maybe. After RIPA and super-DMCA, nothing is unthinkable. Compromise? License it. Corporate UK gets to use it so the French and US can't intercept and undercut them, gubmint collects license fees, and Joe Public doesn't matter , because only criminals (*cough* business *cough*) have anything to hide.
I'll reiterate: under David Blunkett, anything is possible in the UK. He's a scary, hard nosed fucker. This is a guy that frightens P.E. teachers.
I wonder if you could build a different sort of "quantum computer" as (yet another) good way to get a warrant:
Why bother even hiding it? Just encrypt your plaintext with any old pre-backdoor package, then backdoor encrypt that, and send it. To even look inside the backdoor encrypted version, the gubmint needs to get a court order, and if it's come to that, you're already in a world of shit.
Mind you, they could just claim that they got a FISA warrant, and how are you going to prove otherwise? Erk. OK, your idea has a fair bit of merit after all.
Unlikely. A better response would be to increase the penalties under RIPA for not disclosing your encrpytion keys, to 20 years or so. That way, you have a targetted weapon to use against people who you genuinely believe are Really Bad.
By the way, I think RIPA is vile and reprehensible, I'm just saying that it's slightly less vile - and more useful as the tool of a still slightly honest government - than a blanket ban.
As opposed to manufacturing quotes falsely and deliberately? They'd have to get some integrity before this would become an issue.
That said... I blindly trusted that the letter above is from Phil. More fool me.
To pass information, opinions and political speech around or into and out of oppressive regimes (e.g. China, Afghanistan) without being prosecuted for the content. For example, in China, any criticism of the government is punishable, while in Afghanistan, you can be locked up for the heinous crime of organising a makeover for a female friend.
The only option left to the regime is to then make it illegal to use unbreakable encryption at all, so they can just assume guilt and lock you up for that. Horribly, the UK has already done that, and now (potentially) the USA is going to join them. Sure, if you just prove your innocence, you probably won't currently be punished for the content of the message, but before the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, nobody expected that they'd ever be locked up for discussing lipstick.
A truly benevolent government will go out of its way to protect against excesses by a future corrupt government, c.f. the US Constitution. That begs the question of whether the current UK and US governments are already corrupt, or whether they're just astonishingly stupid. Either way, it's not good news.
Same way that they protected against 'phone calls, letters, dead letter drops, personals ads, and face to face meetings. By using intelligence services. Specifically, by having real people working on the inside. The CIA has been tied up in red tape in this regards since 1995, and we've just seen the results of that. The tools have changed, but the solution is the same.
Only the people working on or selling versions in a jurisdiction that mandates it.
Hmm. If I develop PGP-ish code (i.e. do the typing) inside the USA, but it's stored entirely on servers outside the USA ((barely) workable with current technology), and sold and marketed entirely outside the USA, will I still go to jail under the proposed legislation? Or if I go outside of the US to work on it, then re-enter the country, do I get Sklyarov'd? Questions to ask of any proposed bill.
The worst part is that if I were forced to put in backdoors, I'd want to leak the details during development to make it absolutely clear that the whole idea is flawed and unworkable before it even rolls out. But by doing so, I'd cut the throat of my own company. What a bind.
This analogy holds only if:
Oh, wait... now that I think about it, Heinz do actually use that last one as a selling point. Perhaps M$ could consider doing something similar: "Windows XP: not as good as Linux, but you won't have to use your brain." ;)
- Whatever their marketing department is smoking
$100 bills, I think...Uh, no, that's what they use to snort coke out of the ass cracks of the Bangkok ladyboys they keep busy fellating their bought politicians...
Microsoft have used this argument themselves. They claim that their maximum profit point is (wait for it) $800 per box, and they only price the OS so "low" because they're such nice guys.
The reason why my company cares is that we buy desktops with Win2K (soon to be WinXP) and then pay again to install NT 4. We resent having to pay twice. What we want is to buy bare boxen, or NT 4 boxen, but we're tied to Dell, and Dell ship Win2K boxen. We have to have warrantied homogenous hardware to minimise support costs, and it would cost us a fortune to switch to another provider, buy white boxen, or (god help us) switch to Another OS. Dell and Microsoft know this, and they know that they don't have to give us what we want, only what we will (barely) accept.
Free market my auntie's hairy arse.
Yup, and that's not necessarily bad for M$. My employer deploys brand new Win95 laptops and NT 4 desktops. My own desktop has a "Windows 2000 Professional" sticker on the side. It was bought that way and we binned the license and paid for an NT 4 license because we know all the issues, the box works as well as it has need to, and the costs of supporting different OSes is still (just) higher than the cost of buying two licenses and throwing one away.
I haven't even bothered paying $0 to upgrade my pirated copy of Office '97 to a pirated copy of Office 2K. I doubt if I'll bother paying $0 to upgrade to Office XP either. There's just no benefit for me.
Morality question: I had a crisis of conscience over using a warez Office '97, and went to StarOffice for a while. Then I had to wipe my drive when it spat some sand. The only reason that I installed Office '97 on the clean machine was that I didn't have a backup of StarOffice, and it was marginally quicker to reach out and grab a burned warez Office '97 than to download StarOffice again.
Work through the morality of that. Should I burn for using the warez Office '97 before switching to StarOffice? Does switching to StarOffice mitigate the crime? Is switching back worse than doing it in the first place? Does "apathy" count as a defence, considering that Microsoft have already lost the sale, i.e. there is no way that they are getting any money from me? Black, white, or shades of gray?
I agree. I certainly hope that's all it is, anyway.
And then we release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards^W Northern Alliance. (Simpsons reference)
Actually, it's more likely (based on precedent) that we'll support the Northern Alliance until they have about half the country, then switch back to supplying the Taliban again for a while.
Anyone got info on this Northern Alliance? What are their principles? And what do they actually call themselves? "Northern Alliance" sounds suspiciously spin doctory. ("World War 2 Allies" / "Rebel Alliance")