I believe the idea is to introduce enough legitimate, conversational text into the email but still hide that text from the receiver so that the filter decides that overall, it's acceptable.
Imagine I read out something like the Bible, but everything hundred words or so, I used an expletive. Now, all in all one might say that the subject matter was "good". However, if I spoke all of the non-swearing as fast as I could, while every time I get to swear I'd scream it out, as long as I could, then you might change your mind.
This is basically how these spam techniques work: the filters only see the words, and overall see a fairly useful email. They don't, however, see the way those words are presented, which is a different story all together.
So yes, these email techniques are all about hiding lots of words, but its the selection of words to hide and highlight that is important.
I guess it's just a form of steganography, when it comes down to it...
But there is no need to agree to anything on installation: the basis of the GPL is that there are no USE limitations. DISTRIBUTION, yes, but just because you didn't read the licence does not make you allowed to distribute, because you need permission to do so in any other case.
The only way you are allowed to distribute the application is by agreeing to the GPL. Don't like it? Don't distribute it, but that will not stop you in ANY way from being allowed to use it.
Orientate is not a word? Tell that to dictionary.reference.com then. While you're at it, tell The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary and WordNet ® 1.6, all of which are quoted as saying that you're incorrect...
I wouldn't consider that "defensive", no. A defensive patent, as far as I can tell, is one that is taken out in an effort to ensure that if another company hits you with a claim of a patent violation, you will be able to hit them back with one of yours.
Hence, that company won't make a claim against you (or you will at least be easily able to talk them around).
Now, if you take out a patent and make it irrevocably royalty-free and public, then you would have no recourse against another company that infringes that patent. That means if they hit you with a claim, you won't be able to hit back with yours, as it's been made public.
So no, an irrevocable royalty-free publicly licensed patent is not a "defensive" patent. Maybe more a "pre-emptive" patent?
Just because the company doesn't sell the list doesn't mean that no-one within the company does (or someone that used to work there). I know of a few people that have taken lists of thousands of email addresses from their work on their last day, just in case they wanted to sell it.
On top of that, I know I've been offered cash more than once to get a list of the addresses in our database. If you were working in a call centre, in a country that you're just visiting, knowing that you'll only be there for a month or two, and knowing you'll never go back, wouldn't it just be too tempting to nap that list for future reference?
Nobody said you had to rely on it. What was said is that it should be supported.
It would be kind of like Microsoft saying "Sorry, we only support Windows if you've installed 14 different pieces of spyware and hand edited your registry."
Obviously, you don't want to use Windows in it's pure state, but it should be supported.
Your choice of browser is your choice. So I have to use IE, so I have to use Windows? There's no IE for Apple anymore, so now the government is telling me that my only "choice" is to use the OS of a company that they ruled was anti-competitive?
I don't know if this is feasible, but could it be possible that if you're spoofing another browser, that for each request sent, two more are sent for the same resource with the true Mozilla identifier?
That way, for each hit representing another browser, you send two more to try and "even the score" for Mozilla.
Maybe even a "Mozilla: Yes It Works, I'm Using It Now" identifying string could be helpful. Maybe they'd get the message if all of a sudden 15% of their visitors (for example) are using this browser that tells them explicitly that it's working...
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
on
Platform Evangelism
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· Score: 1
Although overall I do agree with you, there are a couple of points I'd like to bring up:
1) Assuming the Opera reference is regarding the Hotmail fiasco, I believe the outcome was that there was a bug in Opera that was being accounted for by Hotmail in a specific CSS file. Opera was patched to fix the problem, and so there was a lag between the release and Hotmail being changed to not send the CSS file to the updated browser. If this is the case, and if anyone is to blame, why not look towards the Opera team? I'd have thought that somewhere in a small beta release of the update the issue would have been discovered.
2) You comment that you would have been embarrassed to sell a product with 3000 bugs in it. Maybe if you were selling a normal application that has a standard interface to the computer (eg. the Windows API), I would agree. Windows itself does not have the luxury of a standard interface. Its the bit that provides the interface to begin with.
Remember that we're talking about working with thousands of different pieces of hardware, in countless combinations, all with slightly different takes on their own standards, no doubt. If you were selling your own operating system, then I apologise and will accept your comment with respect. However, you have to remember that it is Windows that removes the ambiguities of all of the pieces of hardware that are out there, along with the fact that people will be adding hardware that at the time didn't exist, and expecting them to work with generic drivers.
As an experiment, can I suggest that for the next application you write, you access all of the hardware directly (from the motherboard up), and let us know how any bugs you end up with?
Oh, and I need to be able to write my own applications to run within yours, so be ready for some of my dodgy coding practices, too. Thanks.
I think that gold may be an even better purchase. Historically (well, since the US dollar was dissociated with gold) whenever the US dollar drops, gold prices rise, and vice-versa.
I believe the Euro is still a good bet if you're going to stick to currency, as it is partially backed by gold (from what I can remember), but don't discount precious metals. They're a little harder to keep than currency if you want them around your house, but they're also much more impressive if you want to show off:)
"Oh that old thing? Yeah, that's my retirement couch. Made of pure gold. Uncomfortable, yes, but you'll never care if you lose a dollar coin down the back of it...."
That's not true that there was nothing you could do about it. They just made you believe that. We went onto the 12 month contract and 3 or 4 months into it, they introduced the cap.
Straight away, we rang them and demanded a refund. We sent our own emails, to them and the telecommunications ombudsman. We kept ringing, talking to people higher and higher up the chain.
If you were vocal and persistent, you could get something. We ended up with a full refund of the installation, plus our 3 or 4 months refunded too.
And besides, come to think of it, at no time were you made to pay out your contract. If you didn't want the service, all you had to do was ring them up and then send the modem back. Initially they offered to refund a prorata amount of the installation, but about a year later they sent the rest of the installation fee, too.
Possibly that source close to SCO was an ex-employee or a contracter. Just because someone can only say they are close to someone else, doesn't mean that they were never closer...
Let's face it: if I were an ex-employee, I could be a source close to SCO, and I could say that former or current SCO employees had copied code from Linux into System V, knowing full well it was me that did it.
Now there's a reason to try and remove yourself from the situation a bit, especially if someone within the company knew that you were doing it, too.
That's what happens with future versions, yes. However past versions that have this code are now, whether they like it or not, GPLed, too. This means that anyone that currently has a version of UnixWare with Linux support can demand the source code for it.
Unless, as other people have mentioned is happening, they start to use it at work. When you use a tool at work often enough, you grow accustomed to it and look to using it at home.
Also, I see a potential for this in schools. Instead of having a pen friend, or email friend, as schools seem to be encouraging, there's no reason why they couldn't push for IM friends, I guess. The beauty of having the server code open source, and the standard open, is that there's no reason why you couldn't implement a "closed system" of student servers. They could still use it from school or home by connecting to their school's server, but you could still talk to other students connected, too.
I would say that investors' money is more important than customers' money at this point for the simple fact that the investors are the owners of the company.
People seem to think that investors are just these people that are buying and selling some intangible thing on the stock market, when in fact they are buying and selling rights to a portion of a company.
Customers haven't lost money until the "vapourware" is released. On the other hand, competitors can very easily lose money to vapourware, and I'd argue that they have more of a reason to fear these tactics than customers.
The only way a customer could "lose" money to vapourware is by continually upgrading with the false belief that eventually the software they aim to be upgrading to will do something. However, even in this case, they haven't really lost anything: they've been getting upgrades all the way. Maybe they were paying too much for it, but they were not forced to buy into the upgrade path.
A competitor has no choice about how to deal with the vapourware: they just hope that customers don't flock to the promised product.
Investors have less of a choice than the customer, but more than the competition (who are the ones I feel most sorry for).
I think that even the biggest Linux-basher would agree that the Linux OS was in a bootable state before IBM starting submitting code for it.
I would assume, then, that this 80 lines of code is not required for a system boot (unless it pertains to some bizarre IBM setup, in which case the code would have no doubt originated from IBM, and possibly submitted to both the Linux kernel and the SCO Unix kernel independently).
Although I wouldn't say it was malicious code, there's been a little court case going on between SCO and IBM that you may have missed about some alleged confidential code being copied into Linux...
I think that would be more of an issue than malicious code (ie. copying some code that is protected by some other licence into a GPL project)
I guess that all depends on the situation. I work in a relatively small IT company (150 - 200 employees) and we started using an OS project inhouse.
We started to make changes and were wondering about what to do with them. Not a problem, I emailed our department manager and the CEO and told them what we wanted to do.
I now have an email direct from my CEO allowing me to release any code I see fit for that project.
I figured that it would be easier to get permission beforehand than trying to explain it all once someone questioned it...
I don't quite know how you can say that there is no alternative: Optus provide A/DSL wholesale through XYZed and I also believe Comindico do wholesale ADSL.
I couldn't tell you who retail the XYZed service, but there's an entire forum devoted to Comindico resellers on Whirlpool...
That reminds me of a story of some enterprising youths somewhere here in Australia (so I'm sure it's an urban legend, but it's a funny story none the less).
A carload of guys see a cop with a speed camera sitting on the side of the road (well he's not, he's sitting in the car with the camera in front of it). They pull over and start asking him all of these questions about it. He's impressed that they're so interested: he gets out of the car, shows them how it all works, all the bells and whistles. After a while they thank him, and drive off.
During the rest of his stint there, the camera takes another 20 or 30 photos, but when they're all developed, it's the number plate of the police car who was controlling the camera. It wasn't until they asked the officer that they decided that while he was showing the camera off, one of the boys had gone to the back of the police car, took the number plate then stuck it on the back of their car before speeding past the camera for the rest of the afternoon.
Definitely a much nicer anology. I'm not a big fan of them myself, I was just using the parent posts' one in the correct context...
I would have preferred Joe Brown, though: isn't he the kind of judge who would then turn around to IBM and say: "well, because of what you did, SCO can now go and take some of your code and put it into their product"?
Fingers crossed they get him: then at least SCO will have a decent enterprise OS to sell!
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the idea is to introduce enough legitimate, conversational text into the email but still hide that text from the receiver so that the filter decides that overall, it's acceptable.
Imagine I read out something like the Bible, but everything hundred words or so, I used an expletive. Now, all in all one might say that the subject matter was "good". However, if I spoke all of the non-swearing as fast as I could, while every time I get to swear I'd scream it out, as long as I could, then you might change your mind.
This is basically how these spam techniques work: the filters only see the words, and overall see a fairly useful email. They don't, however, see the way those words are presented, which is a different story all together.
So yes, these email techniques are all about hiding lots of words, but its the selection of words to hide and highlight that is important.
I guess it's just a form of steganography, when it comes down to it...
But there is no need to agree to anything on installation: the basis of the GPL is that there are no USE limitations. DISTRIBUTION, yes, but just because you didn't read the licence does not make you allowed to distribute, because you need permission to do so in any other case.
The only way you are allowed to distribute the application is by agreeing to the GPL. Don't like it? Don't distribute it, but that will not stop you in ANY way from being allowed to use it.
Leaving the world without a reliable and secure OS? I think some of the BSD coders would have something to say about that...
Orientate is not a word? Tell that to dictionary.reference.com then. While you're at it, tell The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary and WordNet ® 1.6, all of which are quoted as saying that you're incorrect...
I wouldn't consider that "defensive", no. A defensive patent, as far as I can tell, is one that is taken out in an effort to ensure that if another company hits you with a claim of a patent violation, you will be able to hit them back with one of yours.
Hence, that company won't make a claim against you (or you will at least be easily able to talk them around).
Now, if you take out a patent and make it irrevocably royalty-free and public, then you would have no recourse against another company that infringes that patent. That means if they hit you with a claim, you won't be able to hit back with yours, as it's been made public.
So no, an irrevocable royalty-free publicly licensed patent is not a "defensive" patent. Maybe more a "pre-emptive" patent?
Just because the company doesn't sell the list doesn't mean that no-one within the company does (or someone that used to work there). I know of a few people that have taken lists of thousands of email addresses from their work on their last day, just in case they wanted to sell it.
On top of that, I know I've been offered cash more than once to get a list of the addresses in our database. If you were working in a call centre, in a country that you're just visiting, knowing that you'll only be there for a month or two, and knowing you'll never go back, wouldn't it just be too tempting to nap that list for future reference?
I think it turns out that the "free" market does actually have a price tag on it, it's just that no-one used to be able to afford it...
Nobody said you had to rely on it. What was said is that it should be supported.
It would be kind of like Microsoft saying "Sorry, we only support Windows if you've installed 14 different pieces of spyware and hand edited your registry."
Obviously, you don't want to use Windows in it's pure state, but it should be supported.
Your choice of browser is your choice. So I have to use IE, so I have to use Windows? There's no IE for Apple anymore, so now the government is telling me that my only "choice" is to use the OS of a company that they ruled was anti-competitive?
Interesting...
I don't know if this is feasible, but could it be possible that if you're spoofing another browser, that for each request sent, two more are sent for the same resource with the true Mozilla identifier?
That way, for each hit representing another browser, you send two more to try and "even the score" for Mozilla.
Maybe even a "Mozilla: Yes It Works, I'm Using It Now" identifying string could be helpful. Maybe they'd get the message if all of a sudden 15% of their visitors (for example) are using this browser that tells them explicitly that it's working...
Although overall I do agree with you, there are a couple of points I'd like to bring up:
1) Assuming the Opera reference is regarding the Hotmail fiasco, I believe the outcome was that there was a bug in Opera that was being accounted for by Hotmail in a specific CSS file. Opera was patched to fix the problem, and so there was a lag between the release and Hotmail being changed to not send the CSS file to the updated browser. If this is the case, and if anyone is to blame, why not look towards the Opera team? I'd have thought that somewhere in a small beta release of the update the issue would have been discovered.
2) You comment that you would have been embarrassed to sell a product with 3000 bugs in it. Maybe if you were selling a normal application that has a standard interface to the computer (eg. the Windows API), I would agree. Windows itself does not have the luxury of a standard interface. Its the bit that provides the interface to begin with.
Remember that we're talking about working with thousands of different pieces of hardware, in countless combinations, all with slightly different takes on their own standards, no doubt. If you were selling your own operating system, then I apologise and will accept your comment with respect. However, you have to remember that it is Windows that removes the ambiguities of all of the pieces of hardware that are out there, along with the fact that people will be adding hardware that at the time didn't exist, and expecting them to work with generic drivers.
As an experiment, can I suggest that for the next application you write, you access all of the hardware directly (from the motherboard up), and let us know how any bugs you end up with?
Oh, and I need to be able to write my own applications to run within yours, so be ready for some of my dodgy coding practices, too. Thanks.
I think that gold may be an even better purchase. Historically (well, since the US dollar was dissociated with gold) whenever the US dollar drops, gold prices rise, and vice-versa.
:)
I believe the Euro is still a good bet if you're going to stick to currency, as it is partially backed by gold (from what I can remember), but don't discount precious metals. They're a little harder to keep than currency if you want them around your house, but they're also much more impressive if you want to show off
"Oh that old thing? Yeah, that's my retirement couch. Made of pure gold. Uncomfortable, yes, but you'll never care if you lose a dollar coin down the back of it...."
That's not true that there was nothing you could do about it. They just made you believe that. We went onto the 12 month contract and 3 or 4 months into it, they introduced the cap.
Straight away, we rang them and demanded a refund. We sent our own emails, to them and the telecommunications ombudsman. We kept ringing, talking to people higher and higher up the chain.
If you were vocal and persistent, you could get something. We ended up with a full refund of the installation, plus our 3 or 4 months refunded too.
And besides, come to think of it, at no time were you made to pay out your contract. If you didn't want the service, all you had to do was ring them up and then send the modem back. Initially they offered to refund a prorata amount of the installation, but about a year later they sent the rest of the installation fee, too.
Possibly that source close to SCO was an ex-employee or a contracter. Just because someone can only say they are close to someone else, doesn't mean that they were never closer...
Let's face it: if I were an ex-employee, I could be a source close to SCO, and I could say that former or current SCO employees had copied code from Linux into System V, knowing full well it was me that did it.
Now there's a reason to try and remove yourself from the situation a bit, especially if someone within the company knew that you were doing it, too.
That's what happens with future versions, yes. However past versions that have this code are now, whether they like it or not, GPLed, too. This means that anyone that currently has a version of UnixWare with Linux support can demand the source code for it.
Unless, as other people have mentioned is happening, they start to use it at work. When you use a tool at work often enough, you grow accustomed to it and look to using it at home.
Also, I see a potential for this in schools. Instead of having a pen friend, or email friend, as schools seem to be encouraging, there's no reason why they couldn't push for IM friends, I guess. The beauty of having the server code open source, and the standard open, is that there's no reason why you couldn't implement a "closed system" of student servers. They could still use it from school or home by connecting to their school's server, but you could still talk to other students connected, too.
I would say that investors' money is more important than customers' money at this point for the simple fact that the investors are the owners of the company.
People seem to think that investors are just these people that are buying and selling some intangible thing on the stock market, when in fact they are buying and selling rights to a portion of a company.
Customers haven't lost money until the "vapourware" is released. On the other hand, competitors can very easily lose money to vapourware, and I'd argue that they have more of a reason to fear these tactics than customers.
The only way a customer could "lose" money to vapourware is by continually upgrading with the false belief that eventually the software they aim to be upgrading to will do something. However, even in this case, they haven't really lost anything: they've been getting upgrades all the way. Maybe they were paying too much for it, but they were not forced to buy into the upgrade path.
A competitor has no choice about how to deal with the vapourware: they just hope that customers don't flock to the promised product.
Investors have less of a choice than the customer, but more than the competition (who are the ones I feel most sorry for).
And you would be surprised as to how to spell 'surprised'. Seriously, what's the use of even pointing out someone's mistake like that?
Are you so useless that you can't work out what they were trying to say? Of course not, because otherwise you could not have corrected the error.
So what, then, is the real reason for all these people correcting everyone else's little mistakes, besides just maybe wanting to stir people up?
I think that even the biggest Linux-basher would agree that the Linux OS was in a bootable state before IBM starting submitting code for it.
I would assume, then, that this 80 lines of code is not required for a system boot (unless it pertains to some bizarre IBM setup, in which case the code would have no doubt originated from IBM, and possibly submitted to both the Linux kernel and the SCO Unix kernel independently).
Although I wouldn't say it was malicious code, there's been a little court case going on between SCO and IBM that you may have missed about some alleged confidential code being copied into Linux...
I think that would be more of an issue than malicious code (ie. copying some code that is protected by some other licence into a GPL project)
I guess that all depends on the situation. I work in a relatively small IT company (150 - 200 employees) and we started using an OS project inhouse.
We started to make changes and were wondering about what to do with them. Not a problem, I emailed our department manager and the CEO and told them what we wanted to do.
I now have an email direct from my CEO allowing me to release any code I see fit for that project.
I figured that it would be easier to get permission beforehand than trying to explain it all once someone questioned it...
FWIW, this answer is supported here in the FAQ about GPL on the GNU website. It also seems to generally cover contract staff, too.
I couldn't tell you who retail the XYZed service, but there's an entire forum devoted to Comindico resellers on Whirlpool...
That reminds me of a story of some enterprising youths somewhere here in Australia (so I'm sure it's an urban legend, but it's a funny story none the less).
A carload of guys see a cop with a speed camera sitting on the side of the road (well he's not, he's sitting in the car with the camera in front of it). They pull over and start asking him all of these questions about it. He's impressed that they're so interested: he gets out of the car, shows them how it all works, all the bells and whistles. After a while they thank him, and drive off.
During the rest of his stint there, the camera takes another 20 or 30 photos, but when they're all developed, it's the number plate of the police car who was controlling the camera. It wasn't until they asked the officer that they decided that while he was showing the camera off, one of the boys had gone to the back of the police car, took the number plate then stuck it on the back of their car before speeding past the camera for the rest of the afternoon.
Definitely a much nicer anology. I'm not a big fan of them myself, I was just using the parent posts' one in the correct context...
I would have preferred Joe Brown, though: isn't he the kind of judge who would then turn around to IBM and say: "well, because of what you did, SCO can now go and take some of your code and put it into their product"?
Fingers crossed they get him: then at least SCO will have a decent enterprise OS to sell!