Re:And this is what's wrong with NASA
on
802.11b Space Suits
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What I remember is we used to dream and we had the focus to pursue those dreams. Then somewhere along the way we went to being snide, pretenious cynics and evolved into apathetic, Nintendo playing couch potatos.
I want to see Americans become synonymous with "visionaries" like it was when I grew up. Currently Americans are synonymous with "self centered" and that is a terrible label to hold during any generation.
Why no super-collider? Why not finish the final mile? Why this unrelenting bent that all research must be practical to rate funds and that pure research isn't worth anybody's time?
See, you may blame NASA but I remember watching people grow blas'e after a few moon landings and then living through the "Me" generation. Your visions of space colonies and progress died by banality and imo NASA's biggest "mistake" during that time was trying to get people fired up over the space program with elaborate projects that could get enough interest for funding. To quote Pogo "I have seen the enemy and he is us." It takes two to tango and NASA isn't leading if you ask me.
Setting -> Prefs -> Mirror Tab. Notice that you can't add a specific mirror to the list. You're going to have to configure your update machine as a Ximian server and at least modify your hosts file to point one of those mirrors to your server.
If your machines are different in any way you run the possiblity of missing updates. The only way around this is to mirror the channels you know that you will need. And then we're back to not using the pay service again. I mean, honestly, would you really be comfortable with your update server having everything and the kitchen sink installed just so you can get the latest updates? From a security standpoint I think that way of doing things is flawed.
If I'm reading Ximian's website correctly that is $120 per year per client. Add to that you aren't getting support just bandwidth for patches and from my perspective this service isn't business friendly.
Not to mention I don't see any guarantee that your downloads will install flawlessly either.
For example, I just used Red Carpet on my RH7.1 machine and tried to update my apache installation. It failed because the new rpms had new dependancies. Instead of searching for and getting those additional rpms Red Carpet just choked on the install.
If Ximian expects me to pay $10/month for a premium service I need more out of it than just a promised amount of bandwidth. I need reliability. That's for the Ximian packages and the RH packages. It's all in the deal.
For large deployments? Are you kidding? I don't want 1000+ machines clogging up my pipe with a 1000+ downloads and consuming tons of redundant bandwidth I'm paying for.
No. What I want is one. Count them. One server getting those downloads and being able to push out the updates to my clients. That way I pay for one download but all my machines get patched.
For large deployments, what I really need is the ability to automagically mirror a Ximian server. And the second I can do that I only need one subscription. Red Carpet, at least for how I've got it configured, is useful at the consumer level and at that level $120/year is pricey for what you are getting. Call me a cheap bastard but I can't consider this service until it costs about a third of what they are currently charging.
I remember reading a translation of Beowulf in high school. Very fun stuff.
Another cool epic is the Nibelungenlied which I haven't completely read but I remember a week in which my dad and I watched Wagner's The Ring on PBS. I'm not a big opera fan but that was definately worth watching.
"We've found an extremely large oblong box with a fanciful star shaped clasp. We're sending the robot down now to retrieve the artifact. Looks like it's going to be a great day!"
Boy, a troll and flamebait all rolled up in one nice little package.
Get a life.
No. Seriously, get a life. Take some time to walk away from Daddy's 'puter and pick up an instrument, join Scouts and go camping, look into learning a sport. Do something but not this. You aren't mature enough for it.
Nobody actually involved in this issue is crying for jihad against the LDP. People in the LDP actually want to try to work this issue out the best they can. And here you come out of left field with a "rant" indicative of someone requiring serious medication.
Yeah, I get pissed too and swear and damned straight I'm opinionated. But I certainly don't trash talk a bunch of people who have given me more useful stuff out of sheer altruism in a day than I'll produce over a lifetime.
I just read the LDP. Seems fairly reasonable to me. Contains a lot of requests so a publisher can get up-to-date documents, make sure that it is known what has been modified in the document and contains a lgpl-like clause so other documentation in a published work doesn't fall under the LDP. Why isn't it "free" enough?
Under the Appendicies, the only one I see a potential problem with is B. But that requires the author specifically state that the document cannot be modified without consent. Why not go after just these documents instead of this mad scramble?
Guess it's time to hunt down some links about this.
Well count me in to go back to the Grunge era then. Here at work we ban attachments with exe extensions and I'm all for it. Goner? Didn't phase our network one bit. E-mail with a.scr attachment gets rejected. As the content filtering is done before the virus checking on the mail server I was safe. Still, as soon as I got word of Goner I updated the signature files asap.
Nobody here, and I mean nobody, outside of IT really needs to receive an executable. If an executable has to be sent via e-mail we can contact whoever is sending it and have them rename the extension or put it in a zip file.
Now if only I was allowed to reject mail containing VB Script or JavaScript I could not only be a lot safer but I could also filter out half of the porn spam we've been getting in one fell swoop.
Re:Where's the proof?
on
Future Of IDS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
From a brief initial read, it seems to be a fair review. It requires more work than the commercial offerings but is more flexible. And for their tests, they got comparable performance to the commercial products. To give a brief quote:
Configured correctly, it also turns in a performance every bit the equal of (and often superior to) commercial products costing many thousands of pounds.
You are right however, the current links are mostly fluff.
Re:Um, details?
on
Future Of IDS
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Go to Snort's website. Note article "One Pig to Rule Them All." Find link directing you to here. Fill in the required info and download 4MB pdf. It's going to take me awhile to digest the nearly 250 pages of this report.
Actually, one thing that I currently like seeing the government doing is creating publications on security best practices. Like what the NSA distributes here.
A lot more useful than any regulation or a thousand laws IMO.
That's cool but what is the government going to about it? Regulate it? Fine any company that cannot produce a patch system that 99 out of a 100 MCSEs can use? A tax incentive for a company that currently doesn't actually pay any real tax?
Quite simply, when it comes to technical implementations the government needs to butt out and scale back. Someone has already posted that he thinks government is too slow to react to the tech sector well, imo, government is too reactionary to regulate it well.
Take one of/.'s favorite whipping boys - the DMCA. When Clinton signed it even he commented that the law would be hashed out in the courts. By most legal analysts accounts it went far beyond what the WIPO treaty called for. IMO, it's simply a bad law.
But it's not just a bad law because of what it does with Fair Use, the 1st Amendment, etc. It's bad law because it allows a vendor to obfuscate their product and stifle commentary on it.
For example, I work for a newspaper. We want to start charging for some content we host on our website. A vendor that provides such a solution would charge us a ton of money to use their product which they claim is secure and has DRM built-in. Well, it uses pdfs.
Now there is a great little tool out there that I could use to evaluate this vendor's product called the Advanced E-book processor. I know from the research a certain Russian programmer did that pdf security sucks but as he's in jail for helping to create AEP I'm loathe to use the program. Even worse, I'm loathe to use any program to test this solution. What happens when I reveal my results and the vendor finds out?
The funny thing is, I work in an industry the DMCA was designed to protect but can't use certain tools to make informed business decisions because the same law makes useful tools illegal. Now where is my ability to say "I cracked your product in 10 seconds using a tool available over the Internet. We're willing to accept that but not at the price you want to charge us for your solution because, obviously, your product doesn't work as advertised. How about we knock a hundred thousand off?"
Yes, I want something better than Windows Update too but not because the government intervened to make it so. I simpy have no faith that they could do so in a timely and thoughtful fashion.
You're misinformed. Plain and simple. The issue with the eBooks was enabling the text to speech feature in the reader. Alice In Wonderland is an example of one eBook which didn't have that option.
Look here. The entire episode was more of a case of bad UI design than wicked digital rights management.
Despite all the bad news we've had recently and my current block on how to fix it I still feel that fighting for what is there now is more useful than speculating on a new creation.
Just to play devil's advocate here.
How would you finance it?
How would you implement the infrastructure?
How would you avoid the laws already in place in whatever country you hosted a site from?
How would you determine who gets in and who stays out?
The closest thing I can think of that approximates a GeekNet would be Internet2 and even that has corporate and government ties to it.
FreeNet, the program, might be of use but again...
I have a problem with not knowing what junk is on my server. Even if I never know someone is hosting a single jpeg of child pornography on my machine, the thought that someone could is enough to turn me off on the idea. Just as trolls on/. make me reticient from browsing at 0, unethical participants on FreeNet would ultimately defeat adoption of this solution.
Once FreeNet becomes stigmatized how do you prevent countries from passing even more draconian laws to squelch the system?
IMO, the fight is for a fair Internet not one for a select technically elite few and not one owned by corporations. How we get there I don't know. But I do know that I'm interested in how the issue is shaping up and it's a big reason why I asked for this book for Xmas.
When you buy a CD you do own the physical medium which gives you your fair use rights. In the latest report from the copyright office re: the DMCA they harp on this point over and over again. Fair use is dependant upon owning the physical medium.
The way things are going currently, you are never going to own a purely digital work. Ever. Bits over a wire are considered distributing the work and those rights belong to the copyright owner. And with the latest decision from the 2600 case, giving permission to decrypt a digital work is also a right that belongs to the owner of the copyright.
So even if you have a fair use right to back up the bits contained on your harddrive, it doesn't mean you have the right to access the work.
I don't have an easy answer for how to change this situation or how to debate this line of reasoning that I'm seeing in the reports and decisions currently from the government. After reading the latest decisions in the 2600 and Felton cases, I'm convinced that the courtroom is an unwinnable arena. It's obvious that the courts are creating sharp distinctions between the digital and "real" world and currently there are no pressing needs to assert fair use. That leaves changing the law which is also an untenable position. Most politicians believe the DMCA is working and, for the more cynical among us, Big Media pays them off.
IMO, for fair use proponents to "win" any concessions Big Media would have to totally screw up and so far they haven't. I'm not pleased with the situation but I'm stumped on where to go from here.
The main problem about merging seperate aplications into one common is teh lack of flexibility. I like to use a calendar aplication and a mailprogram but I see lite good in melting it alltogether in a single program.
Well, you're definately not an end user. They like staying in one app with one consistent interface to do multiple, related tasks in a common environment. They keep one screen up and get e-mail and meeting requests. E-mail serves as as a communication medium, a way to update status on a project and as a workflow solution to replace dead tree forms and streamline the approval process for purchases. And while I haven't seen it used for anything more useful than "where do we go for lunch?" it is also used to poll people for in-house surveys.
The "small sharp tools" mindset is great if you are an admin or a real power user but, from my experience with end users, it is a hinderance to the rest of the PC using community. Well integrated, monolithic applications like Office, Outlook and MSIE are much easier to work with.
This isn't saying MS does everything right but most people, including more than a few of my fellow IT staff, would cringe at a series of commands like grep | cut -f 2 | sort | uniq to get some info out of a log file. And IMHO, for the most part, "small sharp tools" doesn't translate well into a GUI environment. For most end users, stuff like Evolution is exactly what linux needs to become more widely adopted as a desktop OS.
Therefor the open source movement are just asking for the same problems as we today see in outlook/exchange/ISS -systems...
I disagree. Where MS failed is not looking at the 30 years worth of lessons mature OSes like *nix have learned the hard way. You don't enable tons of options/programs/etc. by default. You don't allow untrusted executables elevated permissions. Sometimes you do sacrifice adding a feature because it isn't a safe thing to do.
From the limited amount of reading I've done in regards to Evolution, it seems they've taken those considerations into account. We'll have to see how it pans out in the real world.
I'll just hide behind this metal shipping container. That'll block the phaser!
Nononononono. The best was in the Final Frontier when Kirk calls in the photon torpedo arclight on the gang and "god" and they survive by jumping behind "big rocks."
Oh the pain. The pain. As Dr. Smith would say. I managed to tenuously suspend disbelief for over an hour and then it shattered like a glass goblin. Just proved to me that another thing William Shatner can't do is direct.
Have a good time with your two square feet of personal "land." I just would feel too comfortable living in a "country" that would be gone after being hit by a single daisy cutter.
Microsoft has 35+ billion cash on hand. If they want to give back to society let them spend that paltry 1 billion and take a tax credit on it.
Better yet, create an independent foundation for the purpose of advancing computers in poor school districts and have MS pump some steady cash into it over a period of a few years. The goal being that the foundation would have a perpetual flow of funds for years to come.
A one time charge on some soon to be out-dated equipment is a crock and cheap for MS. If all this anti-trust BS is going to come down to money let's make sure we as consumers and taxpayers get some return on it.
As for Dmitri himself as a scientist or whatnot, I don't know--did he publish papers? I honestly don't know--I hadn't heard the issue of him as a research scientist come up.
Dmitry Sklyarov is a PhD candidate doing his doctoral thesis on e-book security. I think he qualifies as a computer scientist.
And I don't think whether he made a commercial product out of his research is pertinent in any way, shape or form. Considering the situation behind the RSA patent and subsequent 17 year encryption monopoly that ensued from "pure" research why can't Dmitry and some fellow programmer make some money?
I don't know how people with sight disabilities are supposed to access an Adobe E-book? Maybe they should have bought a largeprint version instead, or complained to adobe or the bookmaker about this. this is a VALID complaint. Unfortuantely, I think both you and I know that 99% of the uses of a programs such as the one Dmitri wrote would not be for such valid reasons. SHOULD e-books be available for ppl with such disabilities as you cite? Yes. Should a GENERAL purprose warez type cracking tool be marketed for just this reason? I personally don't think so.
Such a utility is legal in Russia. That's all that matters. The Russian company sold it on a server in the US. That was illegal under the DMCA. This is a business matter that should have been settled in civil court. Not by some malicious, trumped up criminal charges.
And you may categorize it as a warez tool but I see it as an extremely useful tool to evaluate a vendor's product. The company I work for wants to sell content on the Internet using secured documents. A vendor wants to charge us nearly a quarter to half a million dollars for a solution that is based on using "secure" pdfs. My CIO was unaware of how bad the security is with pdfs and with the Advanced E-book processor we can verify the vendor's claims and determine how much this security they are charging us a premium for is actually worth.
Patents are granted by the patent office. They are not Valid until tested in a law court.
Flatout wrong and uninformed. The burden of proving a patent is invalid isn't on the patent holder. Never has been, never will be. Once that patent has been issued the holder can charge licensing fees, stop you from making a product that violates the patent, etc.. Saying that these rights of the patent holder aren't there until tested in the courts is sophistry. Nothing more.
I've been flamed royal here before for suggesting that Microsoft might actually have committed acts that are not immoral, unethical or illegal. As everyone keeps telling me, "they're a monopoly so they operate under a different set of laws than everyone else".
Yes, I would assume some things they have done are normal business practices. Yes, they are a monopoly and yes, now that they have been found to have illegally used that power, certain things that would be normal business practices for a competitor is now off-limits. It's the way anti-trust laws works or at least supposed to work. It doens't matter that MS is doing some things ethically. They're supposed to do that.
That said, there is nothing in this missive that would warrant scrutiny. It's a pep talk and a reminder that a linux installation is a potential sale lost. (And despite what the/. crowd feels about potential sales in the business world they mean something.) There is no explict "When you find a company considering linux give them the X Document with the funny numbers and falsified endorsements for our new.Net server."
Of course, the law doesn't actually say what these new rules are that monopolies must adhere to. Thus we get subjective and arbitrary law, the very antithesis of civilization. Oh joy...
The goal of anti-trust laws is to restore competition in the industry under the assumption that competition is always good for the consumer. What you see as subjective and arbitrary law I see as being capable of providing for flexible and thoughful remedies. Some penalty written in stone may work for a train company 100 years ago but would be useless in dealing with a software company, automobile maker or publisher.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to see Americans become synonymous with "visionaries" like it was when I grew up. Currently Americans are synonymous with "self centered" and that is a terrible label to hold during any generation.
Why no super-collider? Why not finish the final mile? Why this unrelenting bent that all research must be practical to rate funds and that pure research isn't worth anybody's time?
See, you may blame NASA but I remember watching people grow blas'e after a few moon landings and then living through the "Me" generation. Your visions of space colonies and progress died by banality and imo NASA's biggest "mistake" during that time was trying to get people fired up over the space program with elaborate projects that could get enough interest for funding. To quote Pogo "I have seen the enemy and he is us." It takes two to tango and NASA isn't leading if you ask me.
Not to mention I don't see any guarantee that your downloads will install flawlessly either.
For example, I just used Red Carpet on my RH7.1 machine and tried to update my apache installation. It failed because the new rpms had new dependancies. Instead of searching for and getting those additional rpms Red Carpet just choked on the install.
If Ximian expects me to pay $10/month for a premium service I need more out of it than just a promised amount of bandwidth. I need reliability. That's for the Ximian packages and the RH packages. It's all in the deal.
No. What I want is one. Count them. One server getting those downloads and being able to push out the updates to my clients. That way I pay for one download but all my machines get patched.
For large deployments, what I really need is the ability to automagically mirror a Ximian server. And the second I can do that I only need one subscription. Red Carpet, at least for how I've got it configured, is useful at the consumer level and at that level $120/year is pricey for what you are getting. Call me a cheap bastard but I can't consider this service until it costs about a third of what they are currently charging.
Another cool epic is the Nibelungenlied which I haven't completely read but I remember a week in which my dad and I watched Wagner's The Ring on PBS. I'm not a big opera fan but that was definately worth watching.
Just my 00000010 cents.
"We've found an extremely large oblong box with a fanciful star shaped clasp. We're sending the robot down now to retrieve the artifact. Looks like it's going to be a great day!"
Get a life.
No. Seriously, get a life. Take some time to walk away from Daddy's 'puter and pick up an instrument, join Scouts and go camping, look into learning a sport. Do something but not this. You aren't mature enough for it.
Nobody actually involved in this issue is crying for jihad against the LDP. People in the LDP actually want to try to work this issue out the best they can. And here you come out of left field with a "rant" indicative of someone requiring serious medication.
Yeah, I get pissed too and swear and damned straight I'm opinionated. But I certainly don't trash talk a bunch of people who have given me more useful stuff out of sheer altruism in a day than I'll produce over a lifetime.
Go get a life.
Guess it's time to hunt down some links about this.
Nobody here, and I mean nobody, outside of IT really needs to receive an executable. If an executable has to be sent via e-mail we can contact whoever is sending it and have them rename the extension or put it in a zip file.
Now if only I was allowed to reject mail containing VB Script or JavaScript I could not only be a lot safer but I could also filter out half of the porn spam we've been getting in one fell swoop.
From a brief initial read, it seems to be a fair review. It requires more work than the commercial offerings but is more flexible. And for their tests, they got comparable performance to the commercial products. To give a brief quote:
You are right however, the current links are mostly fluff.
Go to Snort's website. Note article "One Pig to Rule Them All." Find link directing you to here. Fill in the required info and download 4MB pdf. It's going to take me awhile to digest the nearly 250 pages of this report.
A lot more useful than any regulation or a thousand laws IMO.
Quite simply, when it comes to technical implementations the government needs to butt out and scale back. Someone has already posted that he thinks government is too slow to react to the tech sector well, imo, government is too reactionary to regulate it well.
Take one of /.'s favorite whipping boys - the DMCA. When Clinton signed it even he commented that the law would be hashed out in the courts. By most legal analysts accounts it went far beyond what the WIPO treaty called for. IMO, it's simply a bad law.
But it's not just a bad law because of what it does with Fair Use, the 1st Amendment, etc. It's bad law because it allows a vendor to obfuscate their product and stifle commentary on it.
For example, I work for a newspaper. We want to start charging for some content we host on our website. A vendor that provides such a solution would charge us a ton of money to use their product which they claim is secure and has DRM built-in. Well, it uses pdfs.
Now there is a great little tool out there that I could use to evaluate this vendor's product called the Advanced E-book processor. I know from the research a certain Russian programmer did that pdf security sucks but as he's in jail for helping to create AEP I'm loathe to use the program. Even worse, I'm loathe to use any program to test this solution. What happens when I reveal my results and the vendor finds out?
The funny thing is, I work in an industry the DMCA was designed to protect but can't use certain tools to make informed business decisions because the same law makes useful tools illegal. Now where is my ability to say "I cracked your product in 10 seconds using a tool available over the Internet. We're willing to accept that but not at the price you want to charge us for your solution because, obviously, your product doesn't work as advertised. How about we knock a hundred thousand off?"
Yes, I want something better than Windows Update too but not because the government intervened to make it so. I simpy have no faith that they could do so in a timely and thoughtful fashion.
Look here. The entire episode was more of a case of bad UI design than wicked digital rights management.
Just to play devil's advocate here.
The closest thing I can think of that approximates a GeekNet would be Internet2 and even that has corporate and government ties to it.
FreeNet, the program, might be of use but again...
IMO, the fight is for a fair Internet not one for a select technically elite few and not one owned by corporations. How we get there I don't know. But I do know that I'm interested in how the issue is shaping up and it's a big reason why I asked for this book for Xmas.
The way things are going currently, you are never going to own a purely digital work. Ever. Bits over a wire are considered distributing the work and those rights belong to the copyright owner. And with the latest decision from the 2600 case, giving permission to decrypt a digital work is also a right that belongs to the owner of the copyright.
So even if you have a fair use right to back up the bits contained on your harddrive, it doesn't mean you have the right to access the work.
I don't have an easy answer for how to change this situation or how to debate this line of reasoning that I'm seeing in the reports and decisions currently from the government. After reading the latest decisions in the 2600 and Felton cases, I'm convinced that the courtroom is an unwinnable arena. It's obvious that the courts are creating sharp distinctions between the digital and "real" world and currently there are no pressing needs to assert fair use. That leaves changing the law which is also an untenable position. Most politicians believe the DMCA is working and, for the more cynical among us, Big Media pays them off.
IMO, for fair use proponents to "win" any concessions Big Media would have to totally screw up and so far they haven't. I'm not pleased with the situation but I'm stumped on where to go from here.
Well, you're definately not an end user. They like staying in one app with one consistent interface to do multiple, related tasks in a common environment. They keep one screen up and get e-mail and meeting requests. E-mail serves as as a communication medium, a way to update status on a project and as a workflow solution to replace dead tree forms and streamline the approval process for purchases. And while I haven't seen it used for anything more useful than "where do we go for lunch?" it is also used to poll people for in-house surveys.
The "small sharp tools" mindset is great if you are an admin or a real power user but, from my experience with end users, it is a hinderance to the rest of the PC using community. Well integrated, monolithic applications like Office, Outlook and MSIE are much easier to work with.
This isn't saying MS does everything right but most people, including more than a few of my fellow IT staff, would cringe at a series of commands like grep | cut -f 2 | sort | uniq to get some info out of a log file. And IMHO, for the most part, "small sharp tools" doesn't translate well into a GUI environment. For most end users, stuff like Evolution is exactly what linux needs to become more widely adopted as a desktop OS.
Therefor the open source movement are just asking for the same problems as we today see in outlook/exchange/ISS -systems...
I disagree. Where MS failed is not looking at the 30 years worth of lessons mature OSes like *nix have learned the hard way. You don't enable tons of options/programs/etc. by default. You don't allow untrusted executables elevated permissions. Sometimes you do sacrifice adding a feature because it isn't a safe thing to do.
From the limited amount of reading I've done in regards to Evolution, it seems they've taken those considerations into account. We'll have to see how it pans out in the real world.
Nononononono. The best was in the Final Frontier when Kirk calls in the photon torpedo arclight on the gang and "god" and they survive by jumping behind "big rocks."
Oh the pain. The pain. As Dr. Smith would say. I managed to tenuously suspend disbelief for over an hour and then it shattered like a glass goblin. Just proved to me that another thing William Shatner can't do is direct.
Debatable
Have a good time with your two square feet of personal "land." I just would feel too comfortable living in a "country" that would be gone after being hit by a single daisy cutter.
Better yet, create an independent foundation for the purpose of advancing computers in poor school districts and have MS pump some steady cash into it over a period of a few years. The goal being that the foundation would have a perpetual flow of funds for years to come.
A one time charge on some soon to be out-dated equipment is a crock and cheap for MS. If all this anti-trust BS is going to come down to money let's make sure we as consumers and taxpayers get some return on it.
Dmitry Sklyarov is a PhD candidate doing his doctoral thesis on e-book security. I think he qualifies as a computer scientist.
And I don't think whether he made a commercial product out of his research is pertinent in any way, shape or form. Considering the situation behind the RSA patent and subsequent 17 year encryption monopoly that ensued from "pure" research why can't Dmitry and some fellow programmer make some money?
I don't know how people with sight disabilities are supposed to access an Adobe E-book? Maybe they should have bought a largeprint version instead, or complained to adobe or the bookmaker about this. this is a VALID complaint. Unfortuantely, I think both you and I know that 99% of the uses of a programs such as the one Dmitri wrote would not be for such valid reasons. SHOULD e-books be available for ppl with such disabilities as you cite? Yes. Should a GENERAL purprose warez type cracking tool be marketed for just this reason? I personally don't think so.
Such a utility is legal in Russia. That's all that matters. The Russian company sold it on a server in the US. That was illegal under the DMCA. This is a business matter that should have been settled in civil court. Not by some malicious, trumped up criminal charges.
And you may categorize it as a warez tool but I see it as an extremely useful tool to evaluate a vendor's product. The company I work for wants to sell content on the Internet using secured documents. A vendor wants to charge us nearly a quarter to half a million dollars for a solution that is based on using "secure" pdfs. My CIO was unaware of how bad the security is with pdfs and with the Advanced E-book processor we can verify the vendor's claims and determine how much this security they are charging us a premium for is actually worth.
Does atr stand for anti-trust or atrocity? You decide! Send your e-mail votes in now.
Flatout wrong and uninformed. The burden of proving a patent is invalid isn't on the patent holder. Never has been, never will be. Once that patent has been issued the holder can charge licensing fees, stop you from making a product that violates the patent, etc.. Saying that these rights of the patent holder aren't there until tested in the courts is sophistry. Nothing more.
Yes, I would assume some things they have done are normal business practices. Yes, they are a monopoly and yes, now that they have been found to have illegally used that power, certain things that would be normal business practices for a competitor is now off-limits. It's the way anti-trust laws works or at least supposed to work. It doens't matter that MS is doing some things ethically. They're supposed to do that.
That said, there is nothing in this missive that would warrant scrutiny. It's a pep talk and a reminder that a linux installation is a potential sale lost. (And despite what the /. crowd feels about potential sales in the business world they mean something.) There is no explict "When you find a company considering linux give them the X Document with the funny numbers and falsified endorsements for our new .Net server."
Of course, the law doesn't actually say what these new rules are that monopolies must adhere to. Thus we get subjective and arbitrary law, the very antithesis of civilization. Oh joy...
The goal of anti-trust laws is to restore competition in the industry under the assumption that competition is always good for the consumer. What you see as subjective and arbitrary law I see as being capable of providing for flexible and thoughful remedies. Some penalty written in stone may work for a train company 100 years ago but would be useless in dealing with a software company, automobile maker or publisher.