Go RTFA. Note the couple of times where the trainee is being judged on whether they should have sighted the civilians or when the hospital was noted as a place you couldn't bomb. Also note how the training advanced when it was noted that the hospital was being used as a comms base. Get permission and use the proper munition to remove the transmitters.
The sims described are in many ways like the "Shoot/Don't Shoot" sims police go through to determine when to pull their gun. What? You don't remember the stories about how the Army accidentially miscalled a situation at a checkpoint and they shot and killed innocent civilians? You don't think this training tool could help? The fact that you and that twit of a parent can't see anything but the fact that this is being used by the military and therefore must be inherently bad just shows your propensity for being reactive.
The execution videos would cut both ways here in the US. Yeah, some people might get so incensed that they would join but I bet a lot more people here would be horrified and demand that we pull out of Iraq.
As for the world, I don't think those videos would ever really play into getting people on our side. Taking a very simplistic and jaded view to it, the extemists would just take it as proof that they can meaningfully stand up to the West. Moderates and liberals will probably be mortified and distance themselves but it's the US so I don't see anything real being demanded unless it starts to blow up in their own backyard. President Bush blew so much of our political clout on Iraq that I don't expect any sympathy. So no, the videos don't mean squat in that context.
And in any event who needs to understand why 9/11 happened when reviewing our failures in Iraq? We're supposed to have a higher moral ground to stand upon and it's our responsibility to owe up when we fail. Be honest, do you really want the baseline we measure ourselves by to be extremist who can only justify themselves by outright perversion of their own religion?
Go back and read the article and note when the officer talks about making sure they present the right stories in the simulations.
The ethics debate about interrogation is very high level and complex. When I was on vacation last week I think there was an article in US News and World Report which discussed the differences in interrogation methodologies used by the FBI and CIA. They are about as 180 degress from each other as you can get. The FBI goes for a hearts and minds stategy and the article made note that in one case they put together a deal with someone where for information they worked it out that his son would get a heart transplant. The CIA is total intimidation. CIA got one suspect and as he was boarding a plane the CIA interrogator threatened to find and rape the suspect's mother.
But what I got most out of the article was that there is no "unequivocal" definition of torture that can be brought down to the common soldier. They really do make individual cases out of every interrogation. This guy is known to have needed and reliable info which is time sensitive and he's not talking. Are we allowed to simulate drowning him (example from article) or do we turn him over to another arabic country which can take measures we won't. Believe it or not, this stuff goes by legal staff to determine whether we are crossing the line or not.
Personally I buy into the FBI's methodology. From the studies I've seen torture is not an effective interrogation tool. But obviously there are those up high who don't subscribe to that philosophy. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill.
If you look at the costs involved in training a soldier it's self-evident that the military has a high regard for human life. A soldier represents a serious investment of time and money into a limited resource - far more limited than any missle/warplane/submarine/etc. Once a soldier is gone all that experience, ability to adapt and make decisions is gone and simply cannot be readily replaced.
I also think that, especially in today's environments, that the military has a healthy respect for human life outside of its own. How one achieves an objective is rapidly becoming just as important as accomplishing it. US policy is being judged on how well a soldier responds to a shoot/don't shoot scenerio or how much collateral damage is inflicted in an operation. Especially now that media organizations around the world can publicise every incident in near real-time.
Yes, as a profession of war, the military must accept a doctrine of kill or be killed when in combat but it is simplistic in the extreme to imply that means the military has no regard for human life.
Sorry, I haven't won the lottery yet and since patent lawsuits cost about $3-4M a pop I'll only get to challenge a handful before my money runs out.
But once I hit that jackpot you'll be the first to know so we can get right on it.
Ok, let's see what it actually says....
on
Microsoft Patents sudo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There are 75 claims to the patent. I almost got to claim 30 before I had the urge to reach for my bhong or pray for a flashback. Skimming through the rest of the claims I did note that they include claims for network connected devices.
Onto the description which is not as sound as commenting on the actual claims but at least provides an idea of what they want to patent. First thing to note is they are once again on the appliance angle. They aren't discussing a PC. They're discussing an XBox or NAS.
Now hitting the Detailed Description, here is where they slide in that the patent can cover general purpose PCs. Lots of discussion about Web-based administration. So it's not just sudo but Webmin+sudo.
If anyone wants to take this to the next level go for it. I did my best to RTFP and this is as far as I think I'm going to take it. It was kinda cute to note how general things were in the patent e.g. "data store" that can cover the registry or a text file but there are other things to read tonight.
Bruce Perens brought this up in a previous patent article and I can't find the post atm. IIRC, it's a criminal offense to knowingly file a false patent. I would assume it falls under perjury. Of course, you don't see anybody actually being prosecuted for this.
I don't have to patch a single router. We don't use OSPF and it isn't turned on by default. This isn't like there is some hidden service that I'm not expecting the device to be running and now I must absolutely patch.
Today's example comes from/. regular Kenshin with the mighty, mighty low ID of 43036! Here he tries to compare a volunteer software bug hunt with yet another deeply flawed automotive analogy. So let's get started and bring in some contestants from our studio audience to play....
Good Luck. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older but I do remember when the Christian Coalition tried to boycott Disney because their film studios were producing non-family movies. (You are aware that Disney owns quite a few studios.) Well they tried to boycott everything Disney owned.
To make a long story short, they couldn't determine everything Disney had their hands in. The reason their boycott "worked" is because the Christian Coalition is big enough and generated enough publicity that Disney wanted to quiet them down. They in no way, shape or form impacted on Disney's bottom line. I'd even argue that the boycott didn't effectively impact Disney's reputation and that the only reason it worked was due to the culture at Disney which is adverse to anything which would call into question its family-friendly image.
So again good luck. The/. crowd isn't the CC in any aspect. Long ago, I boycotted DVDs because of CSS now I've got three players hooked up to the TVs, a NetFlix subscription, and DeCSS is still illegal. Sometimes I have to wonder if this is how it happened to the Flower* Power generation.
*Btw, fwiw, my handle isn't a 60's reference. I took this handle after a Disney character. The thought of being a cute little stinker online was too much to pass up. I eagerly await the C&D missive from our content owning and distributing Overlords.
Just pass the cost to your customers and make a tidy profit at it over time. If someone complains explain the whole stupid situation for them and they can vote the idiots out of office.
No offense taken. I just couldn't articulate anything more to say and wanted to get the post off before I started getting any more grey in my hair. I felt my points were sufficient at the time:)
For the record, I don't think it's worth fighting patent for patent. I'd rather see prior art established instead. Maybe it would be worth having the creation of a non-profit that would publish these ideas in a dead tree format or in the form of a digital database would be effective. I think it would also be useful to have a defense fund established that could be used to challenge any patent litigation against an opensource project. Kinda like what RH created for the SCO debacle. Finally, I want more studies financed to determine if the issuance of software patents is harmful to the industry. If that data proves what I believe to be correct and it is harmful I want to money spent to litigate against the government that software patents are unconstitutional since they can be proven not to advance the arts and sciences.
There. Thanks for the kick in the ass. Sorry I had to burn your toast in the process.
You'd effectively kill off FOSS. As Bruce mentioned we would need a warchest to effectively wield the proposed portfolio but we'd also need a warchest just to build the portfolio. Software patents require lawyers to go over the claims and work on making them as broad as possible.
So you not only have to pay patent fees but you also have to retain a lawyer and pay legal fees over a couple of years to get the patent pushed through. How many FOSS developers are going to pony up that cash? How many FOSS developers want to hit IRC and spend a night debating which ideas are going to be good ones to patent? Who will track those patents and who is going to make the decision on whether a patent is to be used in litigation? So now we're not just talking about money to create patents or even use patents but now we need money to maintain our patents. Oh and we all have to agree on how we're going to do that.
And who wants to cross-license patents with a GPL project? It seems you'd have to virtually give up your patent to avoid litigation since the GPL requirements are going to force you to free up your "IP." Under the circumstances,it might be worth the risk to blow the $2million and litigate. So unlike what currently happens in the industry the FOSS patent industry would probably always be in litigation instead of cross-licensing. At least that's what I see happening worst-case.
And this has to do with what exactly? Others have ripped your issues with BIND to shreds so I don't need to comment on it. However, nothing in the article discusses BIND and afaik Mr. Kaminsky's hack is going to work with *any* DNS server. If his claims are right and the packet is crafted to look kosher than any DNS server is going to forward it. Even your precious djbdns.
The article was from the friggin sysadmin! It's going to be biased. What? You don't see one mention that he installed spyware on more than one machine, including his wife's. That he may have slagged the firewall by installing unapproved spyware or that the boss was doing his job despite what the sysadmin might think. Vern's contesting his termination. What? You think he's going to tell the complete and utter truth or dare admit that he might have made an error in judgement?
He did his job, documented his case very well, and got screwed.
He installed unapproved spyware on three computers which probably caused a network breach resulting in the meltdown of the organization's firewall. How nice that in all those links and highlighted documents he has there isn't a single mention of those facts.
A jury trial isn't going to save him. There is a lot here that we don't completely know about but after seeing the posts about him not only spying on his boss but his boss' boss and his wife the State is going to skewer him. He wasn't taking the high road and once that comes out it isn't going to be David v. Goliath but some peon with a grudge abusing his position.
The biggest problem with the current/. story is every link is from the sysadmin's position. I've gone over them and as a fellow sysadmin I think his stance is extremely flawed. It is disturbing to see the extremes this guy went through to "gather evidence" and how far he reaches to justify it. We also don't have a clue as to what management was actually doing in regards to the supervisor and quite honestly there's no reason for the sysadmin to know either. For all we know management was preparing the proverbial D-ring binder of Doom on the boss.
No. Call me whatever. But I don't think this guy's case is as good as you make it out to be.
Explain to me how he will win. The state will bring up the issue that he wasn't authorized to install the software. If the state has a privacy law that will be brought up. The final nail will be the state getting an expert on the stand detailing the alternatives to grabbing screen captures and how what he did was the antithesis of industry best practice. By the time they're done with him a paper MCSE will look good by comparison. And all over a boss playing solitaire. Not bilking the taxpayer out of millions, not over fondling an intern, no drug charges, no kickbacks for shoddy contractors. Just someone wasting time playing a computer game and not even a pornographic one at that. WhooHoo! What a whistleblower this sysadmin is!
Slashdot Mirror
As long as it isn't the royal wee he's talking about. Gotta draw the line somewhere.
The sims described are in many ways like the "Shoot/Don't Shoot" sims police go through to determine when to pull their gun. What? You don't remember the stories about how the Army accidentially miscalled a situation at a checkpoint and they shot and killed innocent civilians? You don't think this training tool could help? The fact that you and that twit of a parent can't see anything but the fact that this is being used by the military and therefore must be inherently bad just shows your propensity for being reactive.
As for the world, I don't think those videos would ever really play into getting people on our side. Taking a very simplistic and jaded view to it, the extemists would just take it as proof that they can meaningfully stand up to the West. Moderates and liberals will probably be mortified and distance themselves but it's the US so I don't see anything real being demanded unless it starts to blow up in their own backyard. President Bush blew so much of our political clout on Iraq that I don't expect any sympathy. So no, the videos don't mean squat in that context.
And in any event who needs to understand why 9/11 happened when reviewing our failures in Iraq? We're supposed to have a higher moral ground to stand upon and it's our responsibility to owe up when we fail. Be honest, do you really want the baseline we measure ourselves by to be extremist who can only justify themselves by outright perversion of their own religion?
Now, now. There is a big difference between a preference and pejorative. :)
The ethics debate about interrogation is very high level and complex. When I was on vacation last week I think there was an article in US News and World Report which discussed the differences in interrogation methodologies used by the FBI and CIA. They are about as 180 degress from each other as you can get. The FBI goes for a hearts and minds stategy and the article made note that in one case they put together a deal with someone where for information they worked it out that his son would get a heart transplant. The CIA is total intimidation. CIA got one suspect and as he was boarding a plane the CIA interrogator threatened to find and rape the suspect's mother.
But what I got most out of the article was that there is no "unequivocal" definition of torture that can be brought down to the common soldier. They really do make individual cases out of every interrogation. This guy is known to have needed and reliable info which is time sensitive and he's not talking. Are we allowed to simulate drowning him (example from article) or do we turn him over to another arabic country which can take measures we won't. Believe it or not, this stuff goes by legal staff to determine whether we are crossing the line or not.
Personally I buy into the FBI's methodology. From the studies I've seen torture is not an effective interrogation tool. But obviously there are those up high who don't subscribe to that philosophy. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill.
I also think that, especially in today's environments, that the military has a healthy respect for human life outside of its own. How one achieves an objective is rapidly becoming just as important as accomplishing it. US policy is being judged on how well a soldier responds to a shoot/don't shoot scenerio or how much collateral damage is inflicted in an operation. Especially now that media organizations around the world can publicise every incident in near real-time.
Yes, as a profession of war, the military must accept a doctrine of kill or be killed when in combat but it is simplistic in the extreme to imply that means the military has no regard for human life.
Great point. But the real question should be is it SNMPv3 monitorable?
But once I hit that jackpot you'll be the first to know so we can get right on it.
Onto the description which is not as sound as commenting on the actual claims but at least provides an idea of what they want to patent. First thing to note is they are once again on the appliance angle. They aren't discussing a PC. They're discussing an XBox or NAS.
Now hitting the Detailed Description, here is where they slide in that the patent can cover general purpose PCs. Lots of discussion about Web-based administration. So it's not just sudo but Webmin+sudo.
If anyone wants to take this to the next level go for it. I did my best to RTFP and this is as far as I think I'm going to take it. It was kinda cute to note how general things were in the patent e.g. "data store" that can cover the registry or a text file but there are other things to read tonight.
Bruce Perens brought this up in a previous patent article and I can't find the post atm. IIRC, it's a criminal offense to knowingly file a false patent. I would assume it falls under perjury. Of course, you don't see anybody actually being prosecuted for this.
I don't have to patch a single router. We don't use OSPF and it isn't turned on by default. This isn't like there is some hidden service that I'm not expecting the device to be running and now I must absolutely patch.
Today's example comes from /. regular Kenshin with the mighty, mighty low ID of 43036! Here he tries to compare a volunteer software bug hunt with yet another deeply flawed automotive analogy. So let's get started and bring in some contestants from our studio audience to play....
FIND! THE! FALLACY!!!! <cue to commercial>
Good Luck. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older but I do remember when the Christian Coalition tried to boycott Disney because their film studios were producing non-family movies. (You are aware that Disney owns quite a few studios.) Well they tried to boycott everything Disney owned.
To make a long story short, they couldn't determine everything Disney had their hands in. The reason their boycott "worked" is because the Christian Coalition is big enough and generated enough publicity that Disney wanted to quiet them down. They in no way, shape or form impacted on Disney's bottom line. I'd even argue that the boycott didn't effectively impact Disney's reputation and that the only reason it worked was due to the culture at Disney which is adverse to anything which would call into question its family-friendly image.
So again good luck. The /. crowd isn't the CC in any aspect. Long ago, I boycotted DVDs because of CSS now I've got three players hooked up to the TVs, a NetFlix subscription, and DeCSS is still illegal. Sometimes I have to wonder if this is how it happened to the Flower* Power generation.
*Btw, fwiw, my handle isn't a 60's reference. I took this handle after a Disney character. The thought of being a cute little stinker online was too much to pass up. I eagerly await the C&D missive from our content owning and distributing Overlords.
Like this isn't what will happen anyway.
Admit it. You're new here. There is no "apparently" about it.
More than one way to be useful.
For the record, I don't think it's worth fighting patent for patent. I'd rather see prior art established instead. Maybe it would be worth having the creation of a non-profit that would publish these ideas in a dead tree format or in the form of a digital database would be effective. I think it would also be useful to have a defense fund established that could be used to challenge any patent litigation against an opensource project. Kinda like what RH created for the SCO debacle. Finally, I want more studies financed to determine if the issuance of software patents is harmful to the industry. If that data proves what I believe to be correct and it is harmful I want to money spent to litigate against the government that software patents are unconstitutional since they can be proven not to advance the arts and sciences.
There. Thanks for the kick in the ass. Sorry I had to burn your toast in the process.
The question is where do you publish it so it becomes prior art that the USPTO will consider when examining a patent.
So you not only have to pay patent fees but you also have to retain a lawyer and pay legal fees over a couple of years to get the patent pushed through. How many FOSS developers are going to pony up that cash? How many FOSS developers want to hit IRC and spend a night debating which ideas are going to be good ones to patent? Who will track those patents and who is going to make the decision on whether a patent is to be used in litigation? So now we're not just talking about money to create patents or even use patents but now we need money to maintain our patents. Oh and we all have to agree on how we're going to do that.
And who wants to cross-license patents with a GPL project? It seems you'd have to virtually give up your patent to avoid litigation since the GPL requirements are going to force you to free up your "IP." Under the circumstances,it might be worth the risk to blow the $2million and litigate. So unlike what currently happens in the industry the FOSS patent industry would probably always be in litigation instead of cross-licensing. At least that's what I see happening worst-case.
And this has to do with what exactly? Others have ripped your issues with BIND to shreds so I don't need to comment on it. However, nothing in the article discusses BIND and afaik Mr. Kaminsky's hack is going to work with *any* DNS server. If his claims are right and the packet is crafted to look kosher than any DNS server is going to forward it. Even your precious djbdns.
Now who's being a sheep?
He installed unapproved spyware on three computers which probably caused a network breach resulting in the meltdown of the organization's firewall. How nice that in all those links and highlighted documents he has there isn't a single mention of those facts.
Yeah he did a job all right.
The biggest problem with the current /. story is every link is from the sysadmin's position. I've gone over them and as a fellow sysadmin I think his stance is extremely flawed. It is disturbing to see the extremes this guy went through to "gather evidence" and how far he reaches to justify it. We also don't have a clue as to what management was actually doing in regards to the supervisor and quite honestly there's no reason for the sysadmin to know either. For all we know management was preparing the proverbial D-ring binder of Doom on the boss.
No. Call me whatever. But I don't think this guy's case is as good as you make it out to be.
He may scare the hell out of you but he probably scares the shit out of his boss.
He's sunk.