If your programmers make a habit of surfing the web for the purpose of taking other peoples code maybe you should replace the programmers rather than the code. God knows what proprietary stuff they'll end up cut'n'pasting into your programs without checking first.
As soon as you want to use someone elses code, or code even you yourself wrote elsewhere, you'd better make damn well sure you understand exactly what license it is under and exactly what that license means. If you fail in doing that research it damn well is an intentional violation, as far as the legal aspects are concerned.
So, would you feel comfortable having your programmers code get inspected by their previous employers and audit it for code they may have written elsewhere? Those 'little' mistakes are even more likely to put most proprietary shops out of buisness, IMO.
"Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code."
Yeah. Right. Not in any proprietary software design process I've ever seen anywhere. I dont think I've ever even heard of any 'check so our programmers dont use other peoples code' phase.
Frankly, the only kind of projects I've ever heard of even being aware of the issues are open source projects.
Why would there be a problem if the whole industry was based on RedHat? Considering that RedHat has traditionally not tried to create any kind of lock in at all by pushing proprietary software (unlike several other Linux vendors), they would have to compete on being good at what they do. The second their price exceeds the value of their services anyone can pick up and fork the redhat distribution and compete on being cheaper/better.
That is, I believe, the reason that RedHat is doing as well as they are; personally I would not recommend any vendor that wants to create a lock in effect at my company. It's also why I wouldnt touch Caldera with a ten foot pole. Even SuSE's old strategy of not allowing ISO distribution was something I was suspicious of.
Computer history is littered with dead proprietary UNIX vendors who thought they could compete by being oh-so-special (and oh-so-expensive). Neither Linux nor the customers have a pressing need for a repeat of that. Caldera/SCO didnt learn from history and is now rapidly becoming history.
Unless, of course, you have a nuclear plant powered surface to air laser protected by several meters of concrete and steel. In which case it will be as hard as stealing candy from a baby.
In which case you are suddenly faced with the interesting change in warfare that metaphorically slices, dices and chops the US air advantage into a gazillion small sqare metal pieces since no airborne laser will ever be a match, neither in power output, cooling or protection, for a groundbased laser. With good enough targetting you should even be able to take out satellites from the ground.
Laser weapons technology is rather cool, and a great defensive weapon, but the funny thing about it is it will completely kill the current US advantage as it proliferates and turns war back to ground based invasions without air support again.
That's why you cut out a hole for the pupil where you can put your own pupil behind the snapshot.
Problem solved.
Biometrics, as the tech is today, are a joke. As an added measure they're useful (ie, biometric _and_ PIN _and_ card), but alone I'd trust them less than I'd trust my CC number and expiration date as identity verification.
Dont worry, as with most biometrics tech you dont actually need the 'bio' part. Iris scanners you can easily fool by taking a photo of someones iris. Print it out on nice paper, make a hole for the pupil, and hold it up over your own eye. Instant identity.
And for fingerprint scanners even breathing on them can often fool them. The temperature sensor goes off and you have an instant replay of the last guys fingerprint.
Todays biometrics are a congame, full of poor implementations and driven by fear and sci-fi commercials.
Biometrics are not secure. In many cases they're worse than PIN numbers.
When something is not in the interest of society (as the sitting elected officials decide), the individuals right to Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness go out the window pretty quick. In the US, as well as in Europe.
However, you misinterpret me a bit, I think. By society I dont mean socialism, I mean the individual voters together as a whole. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are quite often are in the voters interest, and thus in the interest of society as a whole.
However laws, like patent laws, that take from every individual to give to one certain member of society may not be in the interest of society. Unless they have some really good side effects, which is becoming more and more dubious with patent laws.
Actually, like all laws in a democracy, patents are supposed to be solely for the benefit of society. Laws are only made to benefit individuals and corporations as far as the end result of those laws is a benefit for society (or, rather, the voters).
In the case of patents there is a benefit if allowing patents has a result of inventions being available to society faster and more ubiquitously than they would otherwise be. That's a good idea for things that take a long time to develop and are unlikely to be independently developed by many different inventors. However, when the patent office allows 'trivial' patents, the result instead is that something that would have been freely and ubiquitously available for everyone, due to the ease of which it can be invented as need arises, is instead that society as a whole and other independent inventors are deprived of the use of that invention for a certain time.
What I'd like to see in the patent system would be a kind of brainstorming. When a patent is applied for, the problem the patent is intended to solve has to be posed (in engineering terms). A group of 5-10 engineers who are well versed in the field of the patent gets a day each (or in a group) to figure out possible solutions to the problem. If anyone comes up with a solution close to the patent the invention is declared trivial and unpatentable, and the solution and any other ideas the engineers have are entered in a database as prior unpatentable art, against which any further patent applications are compared for triviality.
Such a solution would probably be rather personell intensive in the beginning, but as the database evolves and more one-click shopping solutions get dumped on application there would probably be a sharp drop in frivolous patent applications and the system could go back to what it was supposed to be in the first place.
Actually, according to some theories, the evolutionary pressure would keep them at a certain length. The existence of telomers (or, rather, the cell divisions reducing them) stops mutated cells from runaway divisions for example. There are indications that cancer cells replenish their telomers with certain enzymes (as do stem cells and reproductive cells). A longer telomer, or replenishing telomer, and you might get several orders of magnitude more cancers instead as cells would now only require a mutation for rapid division to create a cancer since no cell strains would have a natural 'stop'.
Of course, if you're going around cloning things then it might be a good idea to re-set the telomer on the clone cell.
... and I bet that various hacker groups as well as terrorists will be queueing to apply for.iq domain names to set up honeypots. Maybe the US military will be able to suggest new ideas for holes, worms and viruses to exploit.
Or maybe set up a neat firewall which port forwards electricity-grid.iq to powersupply.whitehouse.gov.
Cyberwarfare is far too easy to turn the tables with.
Tell that to the 60 security/lawyer guys knocking on your door, accompanied by the nice policeman who'll place you under arrest if you refuse to let them in.
It happens every day. Dont ask me how they get the rights or the warrants, but they do and so far I havent heard of anyone successfully shutting a BSA raid team out.
Actually, a picture of an eyeball will fool a biometrics system. With some you may need to poke a hole in the picture and hold it in front of your own eye because they have those high tech thermal sensors.
State of the art biometrics suck. Hard. If someone tries to tell you differently they're probably trying to sell you biometrics systems. Most of them are about as secure as indoors doors. The kind you have a key for... but you can use a bent nail or a screwdriver or pretty much anyting that fits in the hole to open them.
So, the dismemberment would be extraneous. Take a picture of them instead, or use a piece of scotch tape to grab their fingerprint off a glass. Etc.
As an aside, anyone with a disassembler and reverse compiler as well as ordinary debugging tools have as much access to Windows source code as they need.
So, that would be the NSA and several thousand competent virus writers.
Freely distributed source code is only an advantage for the 'good' guys. The 'bad' guys can get what they need anyway.
Yes! If I couldnt put the schematics posted in a book on the front porch then how the hell can I trust the security system? The guys installing the security system will sure know how to crack it if it's possible to crack it, as would the designers and their cousins and their cousins neighbours aunts little dog and anyone else buying the same security system. If it needs to be secret to be secure it isnt secure.
In secure software there are no loop holes. Binaries without source arent that much harder to find holes in, if there are any. The information is broken down and mass distributed _today_.
This has nothing to do with RDRAM. This is about DDR SDRAM. If Rambus wins these cases they can freely cash in royalties off DDR SDRAM. Which means you're gonna pay as much for DDR SDRAM as you do for RDRAM.
Re:Linux games vs. shareware stuff for Win
on
25 Best Linux Games
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· Score: 1
You havent? With games like crossfire and freeciv I've wasted months playing. They're easily on par with any bought games I've played for sheer 'fun-ness'.
Ever hear of the _dis_advantages of flatscreens, like they're a PITA to watch if you sit close to them due to color variations that even the difference in angle between the eyes cause, pixels getting screwed up when people touch it (god forbid you have children who will rapidly discover the neatness of color changes when they drag pointy sharp objects across them), etc.
The disadvantages of LCD's as it is today are enough so that I dont want one even if I got it cheaper than my CRT monitors.
I've tried them. I dont want them. In 5 years maybe when they actually start reaching the quality of CRT's today.
And funnily enough, it's the artists who pay for a large part of it. The money spent on production, marketing, videos, etc usually comes out of the artists part of the revenue.
Which is why you'll usually make more money working at McDonalds, wether you pay for production yourself or get a major contract. At least at McDonalds you dont end up owing money and without having the right to quit.
The 'coming up with' part is more expensive than firing the researchers. With patent protection you dont have to worry about competition and with unlimited time patent protection you could maximize profitability by increasing prices indefinitely.
Research only pays off if it's successful. If it isnt, you've wasted the money spent. When your patents will expire you have to develop new things or your company will be in trouble when they do, but if patents dont expire a CEO would have to love taking risks to spend a dime on research.
Why? If future profits are already guaranteed there is no reason to spend money on potentially unprofitable research. Since a patent is a legal monopoly there is no risk of competition and no need to improve. The highest profit would be obtained by firing all researchers and merely jacking up the price of existing patent protected drugs to what the market can bear.
Indeed. The ROI on drug research would be far lower than the ROI on patent extension lobbying. Extend the patents for medicines indefinitely and nobody will ever have to do any more medical research! If the pharm industry can further lobby the patent office to grant them the same kind of patents that they grant software companies they can patent 'cure for headache', 'cure for cancer' etc and forbid anyone else to engage in those buisness areas by any method at all.
That depends on how you reconstruct them. Reconstruction by taping it together would probably be near impossible... but imagine if you could dump all those little wee bits onto a wee conveyor belt that runs them over an automated scanner and then proceeds to try to assemble them in digital form.
The problem doesnt become easy, but it does become a lot easier. And compared to cracking crypto it becomes downright simple.
Not that I've ever seen such a device, but I'd be rather surprised if some government agencies did not have something like that.
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If your programmers make a habit of surfing the web for the purpose of taking other peoples code maybe you should replace the programmers rather than the code. God knows what proprietary stuff they'll end up cut'n'pasting into your programs without checking first.
As soon as you want to use someone elses code, or code even you yourself wrote elsewhere, you'd better make damn well sure you understand exactly what license it is under and exactly what that license means. If you fail in doing that research it damn well is an intentional violation, as far as the legal aspects are concerned.
So, would you feel comfortable having your programmers code get inspected by their previous employers and audit it for code they may have written elsewhere? Those 'little' mistakes are even more likely to put most proprietary shops out of buisness, IMO.
Rather likely, indeed.
From SCO's letter:
"Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code."
Yeah. Right. Not in any proprietary software design process I've ever seen anywhere. I dont think I've ever even heard of any 'check so our programmers dont use other peoples code' phase.
Frankly, the only kind of projects I've ever heard of even being aware of the issues are open source projects.
Why would there be a problem if the whole industry was based on RedHat? Considering that RedHat has traditionally not tried to create any kind of lock in at all by pushing proprietary software (unlike several other Linux vendors), they would have to compete on being good at what they do. The second their price exceeds the value of their services anyone can pick up and fork the redhat distribution and compete on being cheaper/better.
That is, I believe, the reason that RedHat is doing as well as they are; personally I would not recommend any vendor that wants to create a lock in effect at my company. It's also why I wouldnt touch Caldera with a ten foot pole. Even SuSE's old strategy of not allowing ISO distribution was something I was suspicious of.
Computer history is littered with dead proprietary UNIX vendors who thought they could compete by being oh-so-special (and oh-so-expensive). Neither Linux nor the customers have a pressing need for a repeat of that. Caldera/SCO didnt learn from history and is now rapidly becoming history.
Unless, of course, you have a nuclear plant powered surface to air laser protected by several meters of concrete and steel. In which case it will be as hard as stealing candy from a baby.
In which case you are suddenly faced with the interesting change in warfare that metaphorically slices, dices and chops the US air advantage into a gazillion small sqare metal pieces since no airborne laser will ever be a match, neither in power output, cooling or protection, for a groundbased laser. With good enough targetting you should even be able to take out satellites from the ground.
Laser weapons technology is rather cool, and a great defensive weapon, but the funny thing about it is it will completely kill the current US advantage as it proliferates and turns war back to ground based invasions without air support again.
That's why you cut out a hole for the pupil where you can put your own pupil behind the snapshot.
Problem solved.
Biometrics, as the tech is today, are a joke. As an added measure they're useful (ie, biometric _and_ PIN _and_ card), but alone I'd trust them less than I'd trust my CC number and expiration date as identity verification.
Dont worry, as with most biometrics tech you dont actually need the 'bio' part. Iris scanners you can easily fool by taking a photo of someones iris. Print it out on nice paper, make a hole for the pupil, and hold it up over your own eye. Instant identity.
And for fingerprint scanners even breathing on them can often fool them. The temperature sensor goes off and you have an instant replay of the last guys fingerprint.
Todays biometrics are a congame, full of poor implementations and driven by fear and sci-fi commercials.
Biometrics are not secure. In many cases they're worse than PIN numbers.
Then again, some 50K people in the US died as the result of traffic accidents in 2001.
Better hope Osama doesnt get his hands on a car manufacturing plant.
When something is not in the interest of society (as the sitting elected officials decide), the individuals right to Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness go out the window pretty quick. In the US, as well as in Europe.
However, you misinterpret me a bit, I think. By society I dont mean socialism, I mean the individual voters together as a whole. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are quite often are in the voters interest, and thus in the interest of society as a whole.
However laws, like patent laws, that take from every individual to give to one certain member of society may not be in the interest of society. Unless they have some really good side effects, which is becoming more and more dubious with patent laws.
Actually, like all laws in a democracy, patents are supposed to be solely for the benefit of society. Laws are only made to benefit individuals and corporations as far as the end result of those laws is a benefit for society (or, rather, the voters).
In the case of patents there is a benefit if allowing patents has a result of inventions being available to society faster and more ubiquitously than they would otherwise be. That's a good idea for things that take a long time to develop and are unlikely to be independently developed by many different inventors. However, when the patent office allows 'trivial' patents, the result instead is that something that would have been freely and ubiquitously available for everyone, due to the ease of which it can be invented as need arises, is instead that society as a whole and other independent inventors are deprived of the use of that invention for a certain time.
What I'd like to see in the patent system would be a kind of brainstorming. When a patent is applied for, the problem the patent is intended to solve has to be posed (in engineering terms). A group of 5-10 engineers who are well versed in the field of the patent gets a day each (or in a group) to figure out possible solutions to the problem. If anyone comes up with a solution close to the patent the invention is declared trivial and unpatentable, and the solution and any other ideas the engineers have are entered in a database as prior unpatentable art, against which any further patent applications are compared for triviality.
Such a solution would probably be rather personell intensive in the beginning, but as the database evolves and more one-click shopping solutions get dumped on application there would probably be a sharp drop in frivolous patent applications and the system could go back to what it was supposed to be in the first place.
Actually, according to some theories, the evolutionary pressure would keep them at a certain length. The existence of telomers (or, rather, the cell divisions reducing them) stops mutated cells from runaway divisions for example. There are indications that cancer cells replenish their telomers with certain enzymes (as do stem cells and reproductive cells). A longer telomer, or replenishing telomer, and you might get several orders of magnitude more cancers instead as cells would now only require a mutation for rapid division to create a cancer since no cell strains would have a natural 'stop'.
Of course, if you're going around cloning things then it might be a good idea to re-set the telomer on the clone cell.
... and I bet that various hacker groups as well as terrorists will be queueing to apply for .iq domain names to set up honeypots. Maybe the US military will be able to suggest new ideas for holes, worms and viruses to exploit.
Or maybe set up a neat firewall which port forwards electricity-grid.iq to powersupply.whitehouse.gov.
Cyberwarfare is far too easy to turn the tables with.
My SO's company got BSA raided. And yes, it happened pretty much that way.
If you doubt it, go to www.google.com and search for BSA raid. You'll find it's not exactly uncommon.
Tell that to the 60 security/lawyer guys knocking on your door, accompanied by the nice policeman who'll place you under arrest if you refuse to let them in.
It happens every day. Dont ask me how they get the rights or the warrants, but they do and so far I havent heard of anyone successfully shutting a BSA raid team out.
Actually, a picture of an eyeball will fool a biometrics system. With some you may need to poke a hole in the picture and hold it in front of your own eye because they have those high tech thermal sensors.
State of the art biometrics suck. Hard. If someone tries to tell you differently they're probably trying to sell you biometrics systems. Most of them are about as secure as indoors doors. The kind you have a key for... but you can use a bent nail or a screwdriver or pretty much anyting that fits in the hole to open them.
So, the dismemberment would be extraneous. Take a picture of them instead, or use a piece of scotch tape to grab their fingerprint off a glass. Etc.
As an aside, anyone with a disassembler and reverse compiler as well as ordinary debugging tools have as much access to Windows source code as they need.
So, that would be the NSA and several thousand competent virus writers.
Freely distributed source code is only an advantage for the 'good' guys. The 'bad' guys can get what they need anyway.
Yes! If I couldnt put the schematics posted in a book on the front porch then how the hell can I trust the security system? The guys installing the security system will sure know how to crack it if it's possible to crack it, as would the designers and their cousins and their cousins neighbours aunts little dog and anyone else buying the same security system. If it needs to be secret to be secure it isnt secure.
In secure software there are no loop holes. Binaries without source arent that much harder to find holes in, if there are any. The information is broken down and mass distributed _today_.
Security through obscurity is no security at all.
This has nothing to do with RDRAM. This is about DDR SDRAM. If Rambus wins these cases they can freely cash in royalties off DDR SDRAM. Which means you're gonna pay as much for DDR SDRAM as you do for RDRAM.
You havent? With games like crossfire and freeciv I've wasted months playing. They're easily on par with any bought games I've played for sheer 'fun-ness'.
Indeed. That's why people use autoconf and automake instead.
Ever hear of the _dis_advantages of flatscreens, like they're a PITA to watch if you sit close to them due to color variations that even the difference in angle between the eyes cause, pixels getting screwed up when people touch it (god forbid you have children who will rapidly discover the neatness of color changes when they drag pointy sharp objects across them), etc.
The disadvantages of LCD's as it is today are enough so that I dont want one even if I got it cheaper than my CRT monitors.
I've tried them. I dont want them. In 5 years maybe when they actually start reaching the quality of CRT's today.
And funnily enough, it's the artists who pay for a large part of it. The money spent on production, marketing, videos, etc usually comes out of the artists part of the revenue.
Which is why you'll usually make more money working at McDonalds, wether you pay for production yourself or get a major contract. At least at McDonalds you dont end up owing money and without having the right to quit.
The 'coming up with' part is more expensive than firing the researchers. With patent protection you dont have to worry about competition and with unlimited time patent protection you could maximize profitability by increasing prices indefinitely.
Research only pays off if it's successful. If it isnt, you've wasted the money spent. When your patents will expire you have to develop new things or your company will be in trouble when they do, but if patents dont expire a CEO would have to love taking risks to spend a dime on research.
Why? If future profits are already guaranteed there is no reason to spend money on potentially unprofitable research. Since a patent is a legal monopoly there is no risk of competition and no need to improve. The highest profit would be obtained by firing all researchers and merely jacking up the price of existing patent protected drugs to what the market can bear.
Indeed. The ROI on drug research would be far lower than the ROI on patent extension lobbying. Extend the patents for medicines indefinitely and nobody will ever have to do any more medical research! If the pharm industry can further lobby the patent office to grant them the same kind of patents that they grant software companies they can patent 'cure for headache', 'cure for cancer' etc and forbid anyone else to engage in those buisness areas by any method at all.
That depends on how you reconstruct them. Reconstruction by taping it together would probably be near impossible... but imagine if you could dump all those little wee bits onto a wee conveyor belt that runs them over an automated scanner and then proceeds to try to assemble them in digital form.
The problem doesnt become easy, but it does become a lot easier. And compared to cracking crypto it becomes downright simple.
Not that I've ever seen such a device, but I'd be rather surprised if some government agencies did not have something like that.