True, but I'm not talking about making it absolutely impossible for data theft to occur. I don't think that can be done, someone will always figure out a way to get data if they want it badly enough. In your example, yes, a motivated thief can recover data, but what are the odds that the average burglar will try that? In most thefts, I'd expect the laptop to end up in a pawn shop, on ebay, or just sold out of the back of a van. We're probably not talking about industrial espionage here, we're talking about basic security to cover the most common threats.
I'll grant that a motivated thief can steal pretty much anything, but for the purposes of liability I'd say it should be a test of what's reasonable. If, for instance, GenericBank was keeping it's servers in an unlocked closet that it shares with a StarBucks franchise, I'd say they were playing pretty damn fast and loose with security, and they could have reasonably predicted that their server could be stolen. If on the other hand, GenericBank was keeping it's server in a secure location, locked, access controlled and guarded, and it was still stolen in some insane Mission Impossible type scheme, then I'd say they did what was reasonable and they probably could not have foreseen the theft. In the case of sensitive data, a company should be protecting that data as if it were their own. In the case of the stolen laptop, I doubt they let contractors wander around holding the company's cash reserves in canvas bags with a big $ on the front, so why did they let them wander around with people's sensitive data?
....has taken a closer look at a case in which a person sued their student loan company after their information -- along with 550,000 other people's -- was leaked when a contractor's laptop was stolen.
What possible reason could there be to have that much, or for that matter any, confidential data on a portable machine?!?!
Maybe the company policy allowed for this kind of thing, but the question should then be 'is this a reasonable policy'. My first thought is that if the employee works remotely and needs this data, it should all be stored on a secure server, and he/she should be working on the files without ever saving any of the data to this laptop's drive, making the company liable in this case. I'll grant there may be a good reason that I'm not aware of that explains why the data was on the laptop, but for the life of me I can't think of what it would be.
The author of TFA, David Sirlin, mentions several times how certain concepts from the game are "alien" to him, where at best some of the things he talks about are exaggerations of things I see all the time (time vs. skill, the clique-ish nature of guilds, etc). I wonder if it's because he has a job/background that would be alien to most people who live/work in less game-oriented environments?
Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home.
Searched his home? For what, burned copies of Spider Man 2 and illicit Metallica albums?
By shutting down Razorback2, the ease with which pirates can obtain illegal content online will slow dramatically.
Two comments about this part....
One, I hate it when they make it seem like the main users of these systems are organized crime lords sitting in their pirate CD distribution warehouses. I guess that image is more dramatic than nerds looking for episodes of StarGate Atlantis though.
Two, slow "piracy" down dramatically? Do they actually believe this? Taking down one ed2k server, however large it is, hardly strangles p2p file sharing....
How about "Drivers who misuse GPS are road hazards".
From the summary:
'One in 10 motorists with navigation systems set off on their journeys without bothering to program their route, and more than half admitted that they then had to take their eyes off the road to input the details while driving.
It's never even occured to me to try doing this. If people insist on doing something dumb with a device in their car, it's not the device's fault, it's the [mis]user's.
....and typically the *exact* same hack doesn't work on both of them. But yes, they probably do. At some level, they're almost certainly both using things like stdio, stdlib and malloc amongst others, so depending on how they're both compiled for the Windows platform, they could conceivably use the exact same libraries, or different versions of them that may ultimately have the same vulnerabilities.
Agreed. I only mentioned hacking in response to the post above mine.
The authentication code is a perfect example, in that all browsers do it, but without infringing on each other's copyrights because they each have their own method of accomplishing it, or by using an existing library (within that library's rules regarding use), such as WinInet for instance.
Again, not really. It seems more likely that the *exact* same hack working on multiple applications (assuming that no code was copied from one to the other) is probably the result of those applications sharing a library, which does not invalidate copyright as long as the library in question is properly licensed (or is free to use). A *similar* hack is possible, but that would suggest that the code is not truly identical. Copyright for source code deals with people reusing someone else's code without permission. Creating similar code that has a similar function is perfectly allowable. Continuing with the web-browser example, if function was the test for a copyright violation, everything after Mosaic would be in violation.
Also, I'm not going anywhere near patents with this post....with the mess of inconsistant applications of the patent process, I don't even want to guess how people will next figure out how to twist the system.
No, it's not the same thing. It's entirely dependant on context. You and MS could *both* use a fourier transform, but the overall software could/would be entirely different.
Google around for sample source files for a socket server, for instance. You'll find many different examples that all accomplish the same task, but in different ways. This is a very basic example, larger applications are far more complex, and therefore there are even more ways to accomplish them without having identical source code. Another example could be web browsers. Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera are all competing pieces of software, with entirely different source code, and they don't automatically trigger copyright battles against each other.
While deep under the covers it all breaks down to numbers, I'm not sure I see how you can compare a Fourier Transform to the source code to Microsoft Word, FireFox or StarCraft. Just because math is involved in creating software, it is not the same as saying that math IS the software.
"You're a goddamned retard." I'll cry myself to sleep over your cutting an witty remark.
"1) If only "Apple fans" were buying iPods and content from iTMS, sales would be much lower."
Really? So you think people who don't like Apple products are buying a lot of iPods? Funny, but I doubt there are many people saying "Hey an iPod is only $300. I don't like them, but I'll get one anyway". I didn't suggest that iPods are not popular, they are, but there are other popular devices that iTunes dosn't support.
"2) To my knowledge, nothing's stopping the production houses from selling their content through another store. They picked iTMS because they liked FairPlay and because of the gigantic installed base."
I really don't know. Maybe they have an exclusive deal, maybe not, but the bottom line is those shows (and a number of others) are not available from any service other than iTunes, and Apple's DRM ties them to the iPod. Yes, there are a lot of iPods around, but they are only a subset of video capable, portable devices. There are a great number of video capable devices (PDAs, PSPs and others) that will not play video from iTunes. Apple may have an interest in tying content to their hardware, but I still contend that the content producers should be trying to make their programs available to other platforms, either through alternate distribution channels, or by convincing Apple to make iTunes video available on non-iPods (the latter seems unlikely at the moment).
This line of thought always tends to make me think that the alternate way of putting it is, "The iPod isn't really all that great, so we have to push people to buy it for the content". I'm not looking to bash the iPod, but if it's as wonderful as so many people say it is, shouldn't it be able to compete with other devices as a great player, without having to lock out competition by making iTunes content iPod-only [as far as small portable devices go]? Yes, I understand that Apple has a vested interest in selling devices, but the content they're selling (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc) is of interest to many people other than Apple fans. I think those content producers should be more interested in widening their potential mobile-audience.
It seems to me the test should be workability. If I say "I'm patenting the warp drive", and that's about all I have to offer, then no patent. If I say "I'm patenting the warp drive, and here are my designs that show how it will work", patent. This way, even though I don't have 15 billion dollars and my own R&D department to build a prototype, my work is protected. If someone builds the warp drive as described in my designs, my rights as the designer are protected. If someone develops a warp drive that has nothing to do with my designs, I get nothing.
Also, I'm only commenting on patents on actual devices, software, etc. This post is not intended to address "process patents", which are a whole differnt bucket of snakes.
Well, the difference being that the prostitutes aren't claiming that the game caused them to be prostitutes, they claim that it's causing violence against prostitutes. Now if the murderers wanted to ban CBS because they think it causes them to get beaten up more often, you'd be on to something.....
(emphasis on claim because I don't agree)
So, this is a scheduled, advertised event, which people are supposed to pay to attend, and it's not clear to the technical staff whether the pipe to the venue is big enough to meet bandwidth needs? wow......
First off, I generally love mobile technologies.....I check my gmail account on my phone, I use my PDA to get on the web from hotspots, and I'm pretty obsessive about having my cell phone with me. These things give me the kind of connections to friends and family that past generations never dreamed of. When it comes to employers calling "after hours" though, the question is when is it an unfair burden on the employee. If, say about 30 years ago, an employer told you that to do your job you'd need to actually live at the office, nobody would take the job. Now however, wherever you are, you're conceivably "in the office". Companies are under increased pressure to get every billable-second from their employees, and employees are pressured to always be more productive than the guy in the next cube, so where do we go now? Is this just the way things will be for workers going forward, or should a new generation of guilds/unions/advocacy groups/etc be stepping up to work with employers to create the guidelines for how to treat employees in a 24/7 world?
A number of phones now feature "Airplane Mode", which basically shuts off the transmitter part of the phone, and lets you run everything else. As a bonus, I use this when I'm in an area where I know I won't get cellular reception, but I still want to use the MP3 player or camera. The battery life stretches a lot farther, leaving me plenty of power when I turn the transmitter back on.
Did I? I didn't realize that saying that they were "all liberal" meant the same thing as 30%. Or are you just changing your position and pretending that's what you meant all along?
All of them are flamin' libruls, eh? Going to the Clergy Letter Website lists quite a wide variety of endorsements from all sorts of Christian churches, and the list of participating churches, while smaller, seems still to be quite a variety. Or is this a self-fulfilling thing on your part, where only liberal churches could do this so therefore all the churches listed are liberal churches?
In extreme cases, such as people with actual social phobias, being able to better control their disorder with anti-depressants sounds fine, but I hope this doesn't get turned around so that the "treatment" for bullying is to medicate the victim and ignore the actual cause (the actual bully)
TFA's author seems pretty excited, but I'm not sure I see an innovation here to get all breathless over. We already have games based on movies (and movies based on games). Other than the order of release, this is just another game based on a movie.
From TFA: " Movies with game tie-ins have been around since the days of Atari (ATAR ), but the games usually follow the plot."
Doesn't the Star Wars MMOG allow you to explore without sticking plot from the films? I don't play the game, so I don't know for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but I'm not talking about making it absolutely impossible for data theft to occur. I don't think that can be done, someone will always figure out a way to get data if they want it badly enough. In your example, yes, a motivated thief can recover data, but what are the odds that the average burglar will try that? In most thefts, I'd expect the laptop to end up in a pawn shop, on ebay, or just sold out of the back of a van. We're probably not talking about industrial espionage here, we're talking about basic security to cover the most common threats.
I'll grant that a motivated thief can steal pretty much anything, but for the purposes of liability I'd say it should be a test of what's reasonable. If, for instance, GenericBank was keeping it's servers in an unlocked closet that it shares with a StarBucks franchise, I'd say they were playing pretty damn fast and loose with security, and they could have reasonably predicted that their server could be stolen. If on the other hand, GenericBank was keeping it's server in a secure location, locked, access controlled and guarded, and it was still stolen in some insane Mission Impossible type scheme, then I'd say they did what was reasonable and they probably could not have foreseen the theft.
In the case of sensitive data, a company should be protecting that data as if it were their own. In the case of the stolen laptop, I doubt they let contractors wander around holding the company's cash reserves in canvas bags with a big $ on the front, so why did they let them wander around with people's sensitive data?
....has taken a closer look at a case in which a person sued their student loan company after their information -- along with 550,000 other people's -- was leaked when a contractor's laptop was stolen.
What possible reason could there be to have that much, or for that matter any, confidential data on a portable machine?!?!
Maybe the company policy allowed for this kind of thing, but the question should then be 'is this a reasonable policy'. My first thought is that if the employee works remotely and needs this data, it should all be stored on a secure server, and he/she should be working on the files without ever saving any of the data to this laptop's drive, making the company liable in this case. I'll grant there may be a good reason that I'm not aware of that explains why the data was on the laptop, but for the life of me I can't think of what it would be.
The author of TFA, David Sirlin, mentions several times how certain concepts from the game are "alien" to him, where at best some of the things he talks about are exaggerations of things I see all the time (time vs. skill, the clique-ish nature of guilds, etc). I wonder if it's because he has a job/background that would be alien to most people who live/work in less game-oriented environments?
Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home.
Searched his home? For what, burned copies of Spider Man 2 and illicit Metallica albums?
By shutting down Razorback2, the ease with which pirates can obtain illegal content online will slow dramatically.
Two comments about this part....
One, I hate it when they make it seem like the main users of these systems are organized crime lords sitting in their pirate CD distribution warehouses. I guess that image is more dramatic than nerds looking for episodes of StarGate Atlantis though.
Two, slow "piracy" down dramatically? Do they actually believe this? Taking down one ed2k server, however large it is, hardly strangles p2p file sharing....
How about "Drivers who misuse GPS are road hazards".
From the summary:
'One in 10 motorists with navigation systems set off on their journeys without bothering to program their route, and more than half admitted that they then had to take their eyes off the road to input the details while driving.
It's never even occured to me to try doing this. If people insist on doing something dumb with a device in their car, it's not the device's fault, it's the [mis]user's.
....and typically the *exact* same hack doesn't work on both of them. But yes, they probably do. At some level, they're almost certainly both using things like stdio, stdlib and malloc amongst others, so depending on how they're both compiled for the Windows platform, they could conceivably use the exact same libraries, or different versions of them that may ultimately have the same vulnerabilities.
Agreed. I only mentioned hacking in response to the post above mine.
The authentication code is a perfect example, in that all browsers do it, but without infringing on each other's copyrights because they each have their own method of accomplishing it, or by using an existing library (within that library's rules regarding use), such as WinInet for instance.
Again, not really. It seems more likely that the *exact* same hack working on multiple applications (assuming that no code was copied from one to the other) is probably the result of those applications sharing a library, which does not invalidate copyright as long as the library in question is properly licensed (or is free to use). A *similar* hack is possible, but that would suggest that the code is not truly identical. Copyright for source code deals with people reusing someone else's code without permission. Creating similar code that has a similar function is perfectly allowable. Continuing with the web-browser example, if function was the test for a copyright violation, everything after Mosaic would be in violation.
Also, I'm not going anywhere near patents with this post....with the mess of inconsistant applications of the patent process, I don't even want to guess how people will next figure out how to twist the system.
No, it's not the same thing. It's entirely dependant on context. You and MS could *both* use a fourier transform, but the overall software could/would be entirely different.
Google around for sample source files for a socket server, for instance. You'll find many different examples that all accomplish the same task, but in different ways. This is a very basic example, larger applications are far more complex, and therefore there are even more ways to accomplish them without having identical source code. Another example could be web browsers. Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera are all competing pieces of software, with entirely different source code, and they don't automatically trigger copyright battles against each other.
While deep under the covers it all breaks down to numbers, I'm not sure I see how you can compare a Fourier Transform to the source code to Microsoft Word, FireFox or StarCraft. Just because math is involved in creating software, it is not the same as saying that math IS the software.
Would someone be so kind as to tell me how what I said is flamebait? If there's an actual reason, I'd really like to know.....
"You're a goddamned retard."
I'll cry myself to sleep over your cutting an witty remark.
"1) If only "Apple fans" were buying iPods and content from iTMS, sales would be much lower."
Really? So you think people who don't like Apple products are buying a lot of iPods? Funny, but I doubt there are many people saying "Hey an iPod is only $300. I don't like them, but I'll get one anyway". I didn't suggest that iPods are not popular, they are, but there are other popular devices that iTunes dosn't support.
"2) To my knowledge, nothing's stopping the production houses from selling their content through another store. They picked iTMS because they liked FairPlay and because of the gigantic installed base."
I really don't know. Maybe they have an exclusive deal, maybe not, but the bottom line is those shows (and a number of others) are not available from any service other than iTunes, and Apple's DRM ties them to the iPod. Yes, there are a lot of iPods around, but they are only a subset of video capable, portable devices. There are a great number of video capable devices (PDAs, PSPs and others) that will not play video from iTunes. Apple may have an interest in tying content to their hardware, but I still contend that the content producers should be trying to make their programs available to other platforms, either through alternate distribution channels, or by convincing Apple to make iTunes video available on non-iPods (the latter seems unlikely at the moment).
"But we here on Slashdot are not normal people"
:)
Ohhhh, so many possible comments, so little time
This line of thought always tends to make me think that the alternate way of putting it is, "The iPod isn't really all that great, so we have to push people to buy it for the content". I'm not looking to bash the iPod, but if it's as wonderful as so many people say it is, shouldn't it be able to compete with other devices as a great player, without having to lock out competition by making iTunes content iPod-only [as far as small portable devices go]? Yes, I understand that Apple has a vested interest in selling devices, but the content they're selling (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc) is of interest to many people other than Apple fans. I think those content producers should be more interested in widening their potential mobile-audience.
It seems to me the test should be workability. If I say "I'm patenting the warp drive", and that's about all I have to offer, then no patent. If I say "I'm patenting the warp drive, and here are my designs that show how it will work", patent. This way, even though I don't have 15 billion dollars and my own R&D department to build a prototype, my work is protected. If someone builds the warp drive as described in my designs, my rights as the designer are protected. If someone develops a warp drive that has nothing to do with my designs, I get nothing.
Also, I'm only commenting on patents on actual devices, software, etc. This post is not intended to address "process patents", which are a whole differnt bucket of snakes.
Well, the difference being that the prostitutes aren't claiming that the game caused them to be prostitutes, they claim that it's causing violence against prostitutes. Now if the murderers wanted to ban CBS because they think it causes them to get beaten up more often, you'd be on to something.....
(emphasis on claim because I don't agree)
So, this is a scheduled, advertised event, which people are supposed to pay to attend, and it's not clear to the technical staff whether the pipe to the venue is big enough to meet bandwidth needs? wow......
First off, I generally love mobile technologies.....I check my gmail account on my phone, I use my PDA to get on the web from hotspots, and I'm pretty obsessive about having my cell phone with me. These things give me the kind of connections to friends and family that past generations never dreamed of. When it comes to employers calling "after hours" though, the question is when is it an unfair burden on the employee. If, say about 30 years ago, an employer told you that to do your job you'd need to actually live at the office, nobody would take the job. Now however, wherever you are, you're conceivably "in the office". Companies are under increased pressure to get every billable-second from their employees, and employees are pressured to always be more productive than the guy in the next cube, so where do we go now? Is this just the way things will be for workers going forward, or should a new generation of guilds/unions/advocacy groups/etc be stepping up to work with employers to create the guidelines for how to treat employees in a 24/7 world?
A number of phones now feature "Airplane Mode", which basically shuts off the transmitter part of the phone, and lets you run everything else. As a bonus, I use this when I'm in an area where I know I won't get cellular reception, but I still want to use the MP3 player or camera. The battery life stretches a lot farther, leaving me plenty of power when I turn the transmitter back on.
Did I? I didn't realize that saying that they were "all liberal" meant the same thing as 30%. Or are you just changing your position and pretending that's what you meant all along?
All of them are flamin' libruls, eh? Going to the Clergy Letter Website lists quite a wide variety of endorsements from all sorts of Christian churches, and the list of participating churches, while smaller, seems still to be quite a variety. Or is this a self-fulfilling thing on your part, where only liberal churches could do this so therefore all the churches listed are liberal churches?
In extreme cases, such as people with actual social phobias, being able to better control their disorder with anti-depressants sounds fine, but I hope this doesn't get turned around so that the "treatment" for bullying is to medicate the victim and ignore the actual cause (the actual bully)
awwwe, our Lil' Jimmy is just growing up so fast.....seems like his last birthday was just yesterday.
TFA's author seems pretty excited, but I'm not sure I see an innovation here to get all breathless over. We already have games based on movies (and movies based on games). Other than the order of release, this is just another game based on a movie.
From TFA:
" Movies with game tie-ins have been around since the days of Atari (ATAR ), but the games usually follow the plot."
Doesn't the Star Wars MMOG allow you to explore without sticking plot from the films? I don't play the game, so I don't know for sure.