Re:Slashdot's new business model
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... and the next time the man comes to visit the library, he finds the doors boarded up and a sign saying "Unfortunately, due to the lack of support from our users we have had to close".
Would it be annoying to you if Slashdot was shut down because it cost too much money to maintain? If not, then why do you bother coming here? If it would, then how much is it worth to you to keep it around? Because that's what it is about. If it's not worth anything to you, fine, but then you have absolutely no reason to worry about whether Slashdots business plan is worth anything or not. If it is, then pay up. I will.
Guess what: I don't have time to look all over the web, chasing sites I didn't even know existed, to find the one article posted on a particular site that month that I might possibly be interested in, instead of reading Slashdot and getting it all collated on one page (and getting the bonus of interesting comments).
I'd be happy to pay once they get up a non-Paypal payment link, even though I couldn't care less whether or not there are ads on the pages.
Your analogy is fatally flawed. If you borrow a CD from a friend and burn a copy, then you haven't directly cost the record company a thing, as the marginal cost to the record company of you copying a CD is 0. If you under no circumstances would have bought the CD if you couldn't get a copy then you have not caused lost sales for them either.
However, if you view slashdot through an ad blocker, you are costing them in bandwidth, you are costing them in increased load on their servers (which ultimately translated into additional administrative costs, hardware costs, hosting costs, electricity etc.). The marginal cost per page view of a web site (the cost of providing each page view after the first) may be small, but it is certainly real.
A more appropriate analogy would be if you were to view slashdot ad filtered only in the form of cashed copies that you'd gotten from someone viewing the unfiltered pages. In which case there would be no marginal cost for Slashdot if you did it.
I believe what I read when it is backed up by a thorough discussion of method, a discussion of the methods shortcomings, solid data on which devices they have tested, explanations of in which cases their method fails, data that can be easily verified (and which they thus have little incentive to fake), descriptions of a thorough examination of the causes for both the successes and failures, and when the correlation they have investigated seems natural.
If you believe the paper doesn't include enough details for you to believe what they are saying, then it certainly doesn't contain enough details for you to discount what they are saying out of hand either. It does however include enough information for someone to reconstruct their experiment and either prove them right or wrong.
How many people would think about adding extra circuitry to not have a correlation between the led and the actual data being transmitted,
instead of just feeding the signal straight to the led? Just from looking at the leds of a modem configured to run at low bitrates, it seems obvious that there is a data leakage issue.
It may not be serious for you and me - who cares enough about your or mine e-mail? But even knowing that data is being transmitted can be a serious security breach in some settings.
As far as I know this is the first publicly available research on the matter, which does indicate that this is not something people have considered before. I did not consider it an issue before I read the report, though on reading the report it becomes obvious that it may be a risc.
Similarly, much more complex attacks based on various emissions from electronic equipment have been known for ages, including tempest technology.
Where did you see any exagerration of the danger? This is a scientific paper scheduled for publication in a journal read primarily by scientists and engineers, not a hyped up CNN article.
Yes, it was posted on Slashdot, and rightly so, as it does have a great "hack value" - the first thing I thought when I saw the article was "cool, wonder how long it'll take before someone starts discussing how to use the findings to build line of sight networking gear". The first suggestions had already been posted when I read the comments.
As for risc? Probably not very big, but I do know of more than one ISP that have or have had their networking gear and modems in plain view through a window that would have been easily accessible. Breaking in would have sounded an alarm. Pointing a device with a photoreceptor against the window would not. Guess which method I would have chosen if I was a bad guy that wanted access to their data and I'd thought of this attack?
Read the report, it's very thorough, and cover quite a variety of attacks. You are right that most high speed networking equipment was not vulnerable, but the serial port of the Cisco 4000 and Cisco 7000 was, and they did manage to recover error free data from a distance at up to 56kbps.
Apparently you are wrong: Lots of HW manufacturers are stupid enough to flash a LED every time a bit passes, and for some of the equipment the only reason they appeared not to was that they extended the on phase to make it easier to see (a documented "feature" with no mention of security being the reason for a commonly used chip used by some of the equipment they tested).
As for bandwidth, they achieved 56kbps, and estimated a theoretical limit of 10Mbps for typical LEDs.
Why don't you read the article before complaining?
I believe you've misread. FreeBSD people are working on adapting a x86-64 GCC port that
was done by SuSE. AMD does state on the x86-64 website that they are supporting porting work for both Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD, however.
That's because allowing streaming from other OSs doesn't hurt Microsofts overall business. On the contrary, making the streaming server widely available makes it MORE likely that Windows Media will get a foothold in the market and treaten open technologies on the client side.
1. Most European countries have some form of hate speech laws already on the books. With the exception of France and Germany they are mostly very strict, only targetting clear incitements to racial hatred, and in many cases they are strict enough that they are practically never used. In France and Germany, they are somewhat more wide ranging, but only with regards to nazi/fascist propaganda.
Many people in Europe find the French and German laws that restrict the sale and distribution of nazi literature and products excessive, so they are unlikely to make it into
any Europe wide treaties, even though they deal with an ideology which glorifies genocide.
2. Most European countries only restrict incitement of racial hatred in the form of distributing such material to the general public,
and would not stop anyone from discussing whatever they please in private communications, or set up organizations where they can discuss what they please in private meetings.
This is an issue of protecting minority groups freedoms.
Someone may claim that the KKK has a free speech right to march publicly in support of discriminating non-white in various ways, but the moment the actions of groups like that take on a character that instill fear in the groups they demonstrate against that it effectively have a chilling effect on speech or the feeling of safety for those groups, most Europeans would agree that freedom is no excuse to intimidate other people.
Freedom is not absolute. You are not allowed to kill other people, because it abridge their freedoms. Similarly, in Europe it is considered abridging other peoples freedoms to take actions intended to intimidate them or encouraging restrictions of their freedoms based on their
race.
To sum it up: This is codifying what is already the law in most European countries into a treaty, and is unlikely to be much stricter than what is already in there. Secondly, there is no need for the "hatemongers" to start using PGP etc. if they don't already do it - private communication isn't the issue, public communication is.
That said, it is something to follow closely, because there are always groups trying to broaden such legislation, and while I believe some basic protections against hate speech can be good, it should be just that: Basic protection against speech that have real effects on other peoples freedoms and safety, not blanket restrictions on anything that offend anyone.
You may dislike the food marking regulations all you want, but from someone that have bought what was sold as "crispy bacon" only to find (after realizing that something was wrong upon tasting it) a tiny mark saying "vegetarian" and on reading what it actually contained finding that it was some horrible soy based thing with spices, I must say I'd welcome even more stringent rules in this area...
The regulations you refer to are there to give similar protections to regions with a traditional ownership of a product name that what a company would get from a trademark.
Do you also complain that Pepsi isn't allowed to call it's product Coca Cola?
Note that nothing is stopping anyone from making a cheese that taste the same as Cheddar cheese, but
only from marketing it as such in cases where the designation traditionally has meant that it came
from the region, and letting anyone use the brand would imply to the consumer that they are buying something they are not.
Food marking regulations are strict in most countries, and typically does include the name of
the product, even in the US.
No, my point is that the license doesn't make any
difference at all. If Intel wanted to engage in a
game of deception they could just as well have done
so with Mono under another license.
If anyone write code that would be covered by any of Intels patents and submit it to the Mono project, or any other open source project, then Intel can sue. Which makes the point of the article completely moot unless Intel specifically contributes code it knows is covered by its patents without granting a license for the patents at the same time.
You'd have to replace any code that violate patent rights if the patent holder goes after you, and that is true regardless of whether the patent holder have contributed any code or not. In fact it would most likely be worse if the patent holder was not the contributor, as if the patent holder actually did contributed code covered by one of their patents without disclosing that it would be very hard for them to try to get damages.
But I agree with you that it's most liekly no big deal. Most likely the worst case you have to reimplement a module. That of course doesn't mean that people shouldn't look out for patents that may pose a problem.
The Tse-Tse is very specialized, very well researched, and very well understood: The primary problem is that it spreads to diseases, nagana in animals and sleeping sickness in humans.
It does not compete much with other insects for resources, and in the areas affected it is one of the worst disease spreaders possible. Of course there could be unintended effect, but in worst case, reintroducing the Tse-Tse should take care of that.
Also keep in mind that the this is not a first - the Tse-Tse has already been exterminated on Zansibar - so there is some experience in the effects.
Regardless, unless the Tse-Tse somehow is keeping down populations of some major undiscovered killer insect, the effects of exterminating it are unlikely to be worse than the hundreds of thousands of human deaths due to the Tse-Tse, and
the poverty caused by millions of cattle dying
on a regular basis.
What you are describing is completely different. In this case it is the Tse-Tse fly which is the problem, as it is normally occuring in high volumes in Africa, and is causes a high number of deaths.
Introducing sterilized Tse-Tse flies isn't introducing an animal in a place it doesn't belong, it is introducing "handicapped" insects of a type that already exists and cause signficant problems.
Yes, but if Sega approves then it makes the case even more ridiculous, and a powerful argument against the DMCA.
If US Customs is attempting to "protec" a companys interests via the DMCA by preventing import of a device that enables activity the company explicitly approve of, that should be a real eye opener for corporate friendly politicians.
This is not an accurate description of the preemtive kernel patch. The patch has nothing to do with scheduling of kernel threads, but with allowing user processes to be preemted while they're executing kernel code.
In a typical Linux program a process keeps transitioning in and out of the kernel. Whenever you use a syscall (for instance by reading from a device), the process executes kernel code. Without the preempt patch, whenever the code enters the kernel it can't be preempted until it exits. It can loose the CPU, but only where someone explicitly have made the kernel code yield the CPU .
What the preempt patch does, is making it possible for the kernel to preempt a process at any time,
including within the kernel, except when executing code where the kernel is explicitly being stopped
from doing so (by locks, by turning off interrupts, etc.). The reason this doesn't break too much stuff is that there's aready a lot of locking in place in order to ensure the kernel works on SMP systems.
There is scarcity of goods in the game. And presumably a reasonable part of production in the game is done because it can be used to aquire items or services in or out of the game.
Now, if the game users produce a surplus, then economic theory dictates that prices will drop, as supply exceeds demand (as presumably there is no demand for Everquest items from non-players, so that even when real world money is involved all items invariably stay in the Everquest economy)
If prices drop, either demand will increase (people want to aquire previously expensive items that are now within their reach), or supply will decrease (there is less reason to produce if your money lasts longer).
In other words, just as in the real world, as long as supply of items is based on production by users, their economy is self regulating.
Of course that doesn't mean it will be a stable economy.
Re:Is everquest productive, in an economic sense?
on
EverQuest and the UN
·
· Score: 2
To put this into perspective: Artists frequently make prints. Prints are typically made in a limited, numbered series, and since they thus are relatively scarce, their price is higher. Just as with your virtual sword, the resource is abundant in a sense (the marginal cost of reproducing the print is ridiculously low compared to what a good artist can charge), but the artist choose to limit the number of prints produced, and choose to number them.
Where is the macroeconomic value in that?
In both cases it is artifical scarcity that drive up the cost, not the marginal cost of producing the item.
And contrary to what you may think, producing a virtual sword in the game is not free
even for the operator of the game. It may have a marginal cost very close to zero, but it is not free: There need to be some form of virtual representation of the sword, which drives up memory usage, and CPU power when the item needs to be accounted for in gameplay, as well as the administrative overhead of actually creating the iteam and assigning it a location or a player.
Obviously the marginal cost of a single virtual sword in Everquest would be extremely small - however mentioning the above is important to show that the analogy between an artists prints and a virtual sword is representative: The virtual sword
has all the same elements, including marginal cost.
Even in your book example artifical scarcity drive up the cost, though on a lesser level (as it is in the interest of the publisher to sell as many as possible) - copyright creates artificial scarcity by allowing a single publisher to set the price instead of allowing competition in the sale of the same work to drive
prices to distributors and resellers down.
Artificial scarcity can have a huge macroeconomic impact - surely noone with claim that copyright restrictions have little or no impact on economy?
Again, to return to virtual vs real. What attaches value to real world objects is often virtual: It is knowledge of something which makes the object desirable, not objective assessment of the utility
or quality of an object.
If you buy an original painting, you pay a premium for knowing it's an original, even if you'd be unable to ever distinguish it from a well done fake. Even if the object would be a perfect, down to the atom replica, human nature would still mean that the value of the original would be higher.
This is virtual value. It is quantified only by the price tag people are willing to attach to it.
Why should a virtual sword in a game be less worthy a proper economic treatment than virtual qualities of real objects?
What it's saying is that by using real world transactions to establish an exchange rate (if you can buy an item for X units of game currency, and sell it for Y US dollars, then X units of game currency is worth Y US dollars), then the real world value of the virtual wealth would place it at 77th place.
Of course, as with any other currency, if you try to exchange everything, or even large quantities, either directly or indirectly by buying and selling items, the currency would be weakened due to supply and demand.
If Microsoft takes Mono code and incorporates it
in.Net, that would be great. And I'm a big Microsoft hater. The reason it would be great is that the more code Microsoft.Net and Mono shares, the more likely it would be that Mono would actually manage to be fully compatible with.Net.
If Microsoft wants to take advantage of the Mono project by incorporating code from it in.Net, then that benefits Mono too.
Excuse me? This is cut and paste from Mozilla.org's licensing policy document:
"If you're adding a new Mozilla source file then you must license it under an MPL/GPL/LGPL "triple license," unless the new file contains code taken from a file under another license. (In the latter case you may need to talk to mozilla.org staff before adding the new file.)"
And if you go to their license information page, you'll find:
"At the moment, parts of the source are available under either the Netscape Public License (NPL) or the Mozilla Public License (MPL), often in combination with either the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), or both. mozilla.org is working towards having all the code in the tree licensed under a MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license; for more information, see the Relicensing FAQ. Any code checked into our CVS tree needs to comply with the licensing policy"
So no, they haven't transitioned to a GPL license - but they're trying to unify their licensing on MPL/LGL/GPL instead of (N or M)PL/(L)GPL. A simplification to what they had, but they're certainly not transitioning away from multiple licenses.
Or they could simply stop restricting it on purpose.
This is what annoys me with this - a court is denying a company to sell a product that takes away restrictions placed on the customer for no reason except to reduce competition by making it impractical for customers to import games from abroad.
Someone else have already commented on New Zealands move to outlaw region coding of movies as an unfair restraint of trade...
Slashdot Mirror
... and the next time the man comes to visit the library, he finds the doors boarded up and a sign saying "Unfortunately, due to the lack of support from our users we have had to close".
Would it be annoying to you if Slashdot was shut down because it cost too much money to maintain? If not, then why do you bother coming here? If it would, then how much is it worth to you to keep it around? Because that's what it is about. If it's not worth anything to you, fine, but then you have absolutely no reason to worry about whether Slashdots business plan is worth anything or not. If it is, then pay up. I will.
I'd be happy to pay once they get up a non-Paypal payment link, even though I couldn't care less whether or not there are ads on the pages.
However, if you view slashdot through an ad blocker, you are costing them in bandwidth, you are costing them in increased load on their servers (which ultimately translated into additional administrative costs, hardware costs, hosting costs, electricity etc.). The marginal cost per page view of a web site (the cost of providing each page view after the first) may be small, but it is certainly real.
A more appropriate analogy would be if you were to view slashdot ad filtered only in the form of cashed copies that you'd gotten from someone viewing the unfiltered pages. In which case there would be no marginal cost for Slashdot if you did it.
If you believe the paper doesn't include enough details for you to believe what they are saying, then it certainly doesn't contain enough details for you to discount what they are saying out of hand either. It does however include enough information for someone to reconstruct their experiment and either prove them right or wrong.
How many people would think about adding extra circuitry to not have a correlation between the led and the actual data being transmitted, instead of just feeding the signal straight to the led? Just from looking at the leds of a modem configured to run at low bitrates, it seems obvious that there is a data leakage issue.
It may not be serious for you and me - who cares enough about your or mine e-mail? But even knowing that data is being transmitted can be a serious security breach in some settings.
As far as I know this is the first publicly available research on the matter, which does indicate that this is not something people have considered before. I did not consider it an issue before I read the report, though on reading the report it becomes obvious that it may be a risc.
Similarly, much more complex attacks based on various emissions from electronic equipment have been known for ages, including tempest technology.
Where did you see any exagerration of the danger? This is a scientific paper scheduled for publication in a journal read primarily by scientists and engineers, not a hyped up CNN article.
Yes, it was posted on Slashdot, and rightly so, as it does have a great "hack value" - the first thing I thought when I saw the article was "cool, wonder how long it'll take before someone starts discussing how to use the findings to build line of sight networking gear". The first suggestions had already been posted when I read the comments.
As for risc? Probably not very big, but I do know of more than one ISP that have or have had their networking gear and modems in plain view through a window that would have been easily accessible. Breaking in would have sounded an alarm. Pointing a device with a photoreceptor against the window would not. Guess which method I would have chosen if I was a bad guy that wanted access to their data and I'd thought of this attack?
Apparently you are wrong: Lots of HW manufacturers are stupid enough to flash a LED every time a bit passes, and for some of the equipment the only reason they appeared not to was that they extended the on phase to make it easier to see (a documented "feature" with no mention of security being the reason for a commonly used chip used by some of the equipment they tested).
As for bandwidth, they achieved 56kbps, and estimated a theoretical limit of 10Mbps for typical LEDs.
Why don't you read the article before complaining?
In "only two" Cisco routers that happens to have been two of the most popular routers on the market for years for mid- to large sized networks...
I believe you've misread. FreeBSD people are working on adapting a x86-64 GCC port that was done by SuSE. AMD does state on the x86-64 website that they are supporting porting work for both Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD, however.
That's because allowing streaming from other OSs doesn't hurt Microsofts overall business. On the contrary, making the streaming server widely available makes it MORE likely that Windows Media will get a foothold in the market and treaten open technologies on the client side.
1. Most European countries have some form of hate speech laws already on the books. With the exception of France and Germany they are mostly very strict, only targetting clear incitements to racial hatred, and in many cases they are strict enough that they are practically never used. In France and Germany, they are somewhat more wide ranging, but only with regards to nazi/fascist propaganda.
Many people in Europe find the French and German laws that restrict the sale and distribution of nazi literature and products excessive, so they are unlikely to make it into any Europe wide treaties, even though they deal with an ideology which glorifies genocide.
2. Most European countries only restrict incitement of racial hatred in the form of distributing such material to the general public, and would not stop anyone from discussing whatever they please in private communications, or set up organizations where they can discuss what they please in private meetings.
This is an issue of protecting minority groups freedoms.
Someone may claim that the KKK has a free speech right to march publicly in support of discriminating non-white in various ways, but the moment the actions of groups like that take on a character that instill fear in the groups they demonstrate against that it effectively have a chilling effect on speech or the feeling of safety for those groups, most Europeans would agree that freedom is no excuse to intimidate other people.
Freedom is not absolute. You are not allowed to kill other people, because it abridge their freedoms. Similarly, in Europe it is considered abridging other peoples freedoms to take actions intended to intimidate them or encouraging restrictions of their freedoms based on their race.
To sum it up: This is codifying what is already the law in most European countries into a treaty, and is unlikely to be much stricter than what is already in there. Secondly, there is no need for the "hatemongers" to start using PGP etc. if they don't already do it - private communication isn't the issue, public communication is.
That said, it is something to follow closely, because there are always groups trying to broaden such legislation, and while I believe some basic protections against hate speech can be good, it should be just that: Basic protection against speech that have real effects on other peoples freedoms and safety, not blanket restrictions on anything that offend anyone.
The regulations you refer to are there to give similar protections to regions with a traditional ownership of a product name that what a company would get from a trademark.
Do you also complain that Pepsi isn't allowed to call it's product Coca Cola?
Note that nothing is stopping anyone from making a cheese that taste the same as Cheddar cheese, but only from marketing it as such in cases where the designation traditionally has meant that it came from the region, and letting anyone use the brand would imply to the consumer that they are buying something they are not.
Food marking regulations are strict in most countries, and typically does include the name of the product, even in the US.
No, my point is that the license doesn't make any difference at all. If Intel wanted to engage in a game of deception they could just as well have done so with Mono under another license.
You'd have to replace any code that violate patent rights if the patent holder goes after you, and that is true regardless of whether the patent holder have contributed any code or not. In fact it would most likely be worse if the patent holder was not the contributor, as if the patent holder actually did contributed code covered by one of their patents without disclosing that it would be very hard for them to try to get damages.
But I agree with you that it's most liekly no big deal. Most likely the worst case you have to reimplement a module. That of course doesn't mean that people shouldn't look out for patents that may pose a problem.
It does not compete much with other insects for resources, and in the areas affected it is one of the worst disease spreaders possible. Of course there could be unintended effect, but in worst case, reintroducing the Tse-Tse should take care of that.
Also keep in mind that the this is not a first - the Tse-Tse has already been exterminated on Zansibar - so there is some experience in the effects.
Regardless, unless the Tse-Tse somehow is keeping down populations of some major undiscovered killer insect, the effects of exterminating it are unlikely to be worse than the hundreds of thousands of human deaths due to the Tse-Tse, and the poverty caused by millions of cattle dying on a regular basis.
Introducing sterilized Tse-Tse flies isn't introducing an animal in a place it doesn't belong, it is introducing "handicapped" insects of a type that already exists and cause signficant problems.
If US Customs is attempting to "protec" a companys interests via the DMCA by preventing import of a device that enables activity the company explicitly approve of, that should be a real eye opener for corporate friendly politicians.
In a typical Linux program a process keeps transitioning in and out of the kernel. Whenever you use a syscall (for instance by reading from a device), the process executes kernel code. Without the preempt patch, whenever the code enters the kernel it can't be preempted until it exits. It can loose the CPU, but only where someone explicitly have made the kernel code yield the CPU .
What the preempt patch does, is making it possible for the kernel to preempt a process at any time, including within the kernel, except when executing code where the kernel is explicitly being stopped from doing so (by locks, by turning off interrupts, etc.). The reason this doesn't break too much stuff is that there's aready a lot of locking in place in order to ensure the kernel works on SMP systems.
So you'd make a patch set with the provided tools, tar it up, and upload it to any server you have write access to, or attach it to your e-mail.
Now, if the game users produce a surplus, then economic theory dictates that prices will drop, as supply exceeds demand (as presumably there is no demand for Everquest items from non-players, so that even when real world money is involved all items invariably stay in the Everquest economy)
If prices drop, either demand will increase (people want to aquire previously expensive items that are now within their reach), or supply will decrease (there is less reason to produce if your money lasts longer).
In other words, just as in the real world, as long as supply of items is based on production by users, their economy is self regulating.
Of course that doesn't mean it will be a stable economy.
Where is the macroeconomic value in that?
In both cases it is artifical scarcity that drive up the cost, not the marginal cost of producing the item.
And contrary to what you may think, producing a virtual sword in the game is not free even for the operator of the game. It may have a marginal cost very close to zero, but it is not free: There need to be some form of virtual representation of the sword, which drives up memory usage, and CPU power when the item needs to be accounted for in gameplay, as well as the administrative overhead of actually creating the iteam and assigning it a location or a player.
Obviously the marginal cost of a single virtual sword in Everquest would be extremely small - however mentioning the above is important to show that the analogy between an artists prints and a virtual sword is representative: The virtual sword has all the same elements, including marginal cost.
Even in your book example artifical scarcity drive up the cost, though on a lesser level (as it is in the interest of the publisher to sell as many as possible) - copyright creates artificial scarcity by allowing a single publisher to set the price instead of allowing competition in the sale of the same work to drive prices to distributors and resellers down.
Artificial scarcity can have a huge macroeconomic impact - surely noone with claim that copyright restrictions have little or no impact on economy?
Again, to return to virtual vs real. What attaches value to real world objects is often virtual: It is knowledge of something which makes the object desirable, not objective assessment of the utility or quality of an object.
If you buy an original painting, you pay a premium for knowing it's an original, even if you'd be unable to ever distinguish it from a well done fake. Even if the object would be a perfect, down to the atom replica, human nature would still mean that the value of the original would be higher.
This is virtual value. It is quantified only by the price tag people are willing to attach to it.
Why should a virtual sword in a game be less worthy a proper economic treatment than virtual qualities of real objects?
Of course, as with any other currency, if you try to exchange everything, or even large quantities, either directly or indirectly by buying and selling items, the currency would be weakened due to supply and demand.
If Microsoft wants to take advantage of the Mono project by incorporating code from it in .Net, then that benefits Mono too.
"If you're adding a new Mozilla source file then you must license it under an MPL/GPL/LGPL "triple license," unless the new file contains code taken from a file under another license. (In the latter case you may need to talk to mozilla.org staff before adding the new file.)"
And if you go to their license information page, you'll find:
"At the moment, parts of the source are available under either the Netscape Public License (NPL) or the Mozilla Public License (MPL), often in combination with either the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), or both. mozilla.org is working towards having all the code in the tree licensed under a MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license; for more information, see the Relicensing FAQ. Any code checked into our CVS tree needs to comply with the licensing policy"
So no, they haven't transitioned to a GPL license - but they're trying to unify their licensing on MPL/LGL/GPL instead of (N or M)PL/(L)GPL. A simplification to what they had, but they're certainly not transitioning away from multiple licenses.
The comment about aluminium is a reference to Star Trek.
This is what annoys me with this - a court is denying a company to sell a product that takes away restrictions placed on the customer for no reason except to reduce competition by making it impractical for customers to import games from abroad.
Someone else have already commented on New Zealands move to outlaw region coding of movies as an unfair restraint of trade...