Re:The problem with talking about IP
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AT&T are quite right to claim copyright over that one line...
Um, I think you left out the smiley.;-)
I mean, we're talking about a coyright claim on a blank line here.
A lot of people have wished we could find a company that is sufficiently stupid to attempt to defend such a claim in court. It could make for not just some fun reporting, but also a bit of cash in the settlement.
The main use of an example line the copyright claim in AT&T's/bin/true is to illustrate the concept of a fraudulent copyright claim. Not all copyright claims are legal, and anyone who thinks you must automagically obey any copyright claim is simply a sucker for corporate fraud. It's hard to find a better example than AT&T's attempt to copyright blank lines.
But at least they had the brains to ignore taunts intended to get them to file suit. Too bad they couldn't have taken Fox's path in their recent attempt to enforce their trademark on the phrase "fair and balanced". This lost Fox not just a lot of face, but also a bit of money (and the prospect of even larger losses when they repeat such an offense).
In this case, what Fox did was put Al Franken on the best-seller lists. We've already seen some clues that SCO's attack is doing the same thing to linux. But SCO is sorta small stuff in the commercial world, and most managers still haven't heard of them. What we need now is for Fox to register a phrase like "Open News Source" as its trademark, and then sue the linux gang for infringement. Imagine how that would help our left-wing, commie campaign to conquer the world...
Did SCO inherit AT&T's copyright on blank line
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Back in the 1980's, I was just one of many people who noticed that AT&T claimed to have a copyright on blank lines. You can see one of these claims at http://web.42.net/true.html. Google for/bin/true and you'll find more.
This is the good old "true" program, which on Sys/V was an empty shell script. It works; it does nothing, and then since there were no errors, it exist with a zero status. Some drone at AT&T obviosly wrote a script to run through all their scripts and add an AT&T copyright notice. This also added two blank lines (only one in some later versions), leading to the observation that AT&T really was claiming to own the rights to blank lines.
One fun thing is that their copyrighted version of/bin/true went through many versions, all of which contained only blank lines and a copyright notice.
Another fun thing that I did was to post the code for/bin/true on several newsgroups as responses to discussions, pointing out that I had posted a copyrighted AT&T program in its entirety, and challenging AT&T to prosecute me. For some mysterious reason, I never heard from them.
There was also an AT&T copyright notice in/bin/false, which contained only the command "exit 255", so if you do that in any script, you are also inviolation of AT&T/SCO's claimed copyright.
Anyway, it does seem that the SCO gang considers/bin/true to be part of the IP that they inherited from AT&T. This is presumably the basis of the majority of their claim that there are a million lines of stolen SCO code in linux. When you add in all the lines that contain only/*, */ and//, you can easily get to a million lines.
It could be fun if they actually made the mistake of pressing this claim in court.
Yeah, but you know why this is going to fail? It'll fail because everywhere in the world, in the first few years of schooling, one of the main lessons that every teacher is trying to get into their kiddies' heads is that you should always share your toys.
Now, you may think this is encouraging piracy, socialism, and all those evil things. But the fact is that most pre-school teachers don't see it that way. They see it as necessary socialization of those selfish little monsters. Granted, a tiny minority of their students resist the lesson, and grow up to be CEOs and RIAA spokespeople. But the power of these millions of teachers is likely much greater than the greed of a handful of corporate execs.
In the long term, we will all be sharing our toys. This is especially true for songs we like. They may be able to sue the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire; they may be able to arrest us for walking down the street whistling a copyrighted tune.
But in the end, they can't throw us all in jail. And they ain't gonna stop all those teachers from continuing to instill in the little heads the idea that good people share things with each other. Eventually they'll have to face the fact that most of us become social beings, and we share things that we like with others.
(Yes, it does occur to me that this applies to pornography as well as to music. It probably applies even more to pornographic music. And to software that's better than what the commercial guys sell us.;-)
Perhaps we might note that we have, in fact, had one of those. A small one, perhaps, with only two cities vaporized. But one country has used nnuclear weapons is war, and that same country has recently had serious government discussions of building and testing small "strategic" nuclear weapons. This is the same government whose public policy towards perceived enemies is proactive, preventive attacks based on what those enemies might do in a worst-case scenario.
The "food pill" concept does have a fundamental physical limitation. By "food" we usually mean things like proteins and carbohydrates, not things like vitamins, and "pill" usually means something rather small that can be swallowed with one gulp.
Our daily requirement of protein and carbohydrate is on the order of hundreds of grams. To get 100 grams of carbos, you need at least 100 grams of material, and typically a bit more (unless you're gulping down pure sugar). This would be well beyond the size range of what we would usually call a "pill".
You can put things like vitamins and a few "supplement" materials in pill form, because we only need those in sub-gram amounts. But you're not going to put significant amounts of amino acids or sugars into a pill, not in the quantities that we need them. The universe just doesn't work that way.
Also, we need a significant amount of water per day. Our biochemistry only works in a water medium. If you could reduce the proteins and carbos to a digestible but waterless form for less bulk, you'd just have to consume the water some other way. You might as well leave the water mixed with the proteins and carbos and consume them together. It's a lot more satisfying to the palate than downing pills and drinking large quantities of water.
Well, there is some truth to this, but there's also a major counterexample which has been mentioned here occasionally.
There are now millions of web sites, and according to the Netcraft survey, 2/3 of them are running the apache server. It may be true that not all are the latest version. But still, this is a major monoculture.
Web servers are a major target of attackers, for obvious reasons. But you don't see apache servers going crazy and sending of zillions of spams to every email address it can find. There have been only a few security holes found in apache, and they are generally fixed before anyone builds an exploit. In general, the only apache web servers that have problems turn out to be due to someone installing a CGI program with a hole. And this isn't apache's problem, of course.
Need I point out that apache is an "open source" program, available freely to anyone who can type "apache.org" and make a few mouse clicks?
The fact that MS Windows is a monoculture is a part of its problems. But the big probblem is that it's full of security holes.
To make an agricultural simile, it's as if someone were to breed a strain of wheat or potato that is susceptible to every virus known, and sell it cheaply with a billion-dollar ad campaign so that most of the farmers plant it. Then, when the inevitable happens, you blame the farmers rather than the company and its marketing campaign.
the regulations that show up will all but prohibit free software (at least for commercial purposes, and possibly for anybody who wants to connect to the Internet),...
One problem with this is that, if you eliminate all the free and open software, you will effectively shut down most of the Internet, and that ain't gonna happen.
A huge portion of the Internet uses (variants of) the Berkeley networking software. 2/3 of the web servers are running apache. And so on. This is not going to be replaced by proprietary software any time soon. The companies that now control big chunks of the Internet are not about to pay for the huge development effort it would take to replace two decades of software development that works.
In reading the article, while agreeing with pretty much everything, I found myself getting more and more baffled by why the term "wireless" kept appearing. I couldn't find anything that had anything to do with wireless comms at all. It was all about developing new apps, but there was nothing at all mentioned in which the wireless nature of your machine was relevant.
I mean, I'm sitting here typing this on my Mac Powerbook G4, which has no wires attached at all, and is getting to the Net via the Airport upstairs. But other than the driver for the NIC, I don't see anything anywhere that needs to know that the machine is wireless. It's the Internet, after all; who cares how the bits get to the other machines. Well, yeah, the guy writing the device driver for the NIC cares. But why would anyone else?
Speed? A dial-up phone connection is even slower, so that's not it.
Portability of the machine? Why would a program inside the machine know or care about that?
This guy seems to think you need to develop software differently for "wireless". What the hell is he talking about? I gotta admit I'm clueless.
Yeah, and that's why such virus/worm programs don't send their output to people in the address book. They send the output to fixed address that are created for that purpose and disappear a few days after the virus is released. Or even better: They make a TCP connection to one of a few IP address/port combinations, send the data, and exit. That way you don't even suspect they've been there.
While professional certification seems like it would help, there is a simple reason why historically it hasn't worked.
There have been many attempts to establish such certifications since software arose as a significant part of the world back in the 50's. In almost every case, the same thing has happened: A certification program was established, and the the qualification tests looked for only one thing: Familiarity with the dominant software platforms at the time. From the 50's to the late 80's, this meant one thing: IBM's commercial systems. Since the late 80's, Microsoft has nearly supplanted IBM, but the situation is otherwise the same.
The problem here is that most of the world's computer infrastructure was built on unix and the various small real-time kernels. The people who set up certification programs aren't familiar with these, and don't consider them.
This means that when you are talking about safety and security concerns, existing software certification programs are pretty much considered jokes. If you were building a team to write the software for a secure/safe environment, would you hire someone with certification on MVS or Windows? More likely, you'd know not to ever mention such an idea, because the result would be a permanent "clueless" label, and it would be your last contribution to the discussion.
Part of the problem has been that the people who organize software certification programs are invariably professional managers, and they consider programmers as interchangable components. The few who have realized that this is dumb generally go to the opposite extreme, and will hire only people with N years experience on one particular release of the chosen OS (and not understand that that release has only been out for N-3 years).
So, as things have stood for the past 40 years or so, no matter how good an idea professional software certification seems, the end result is generally a joke. Successful software managers understand this, and consider certification a negative point on a resume.
A few minor eceptions exist in some very narrow specialties. But overall, software certification can't succeed as long as the result is a program that certifies only IBM and/or MS software experts.
(As a long-time unix/linu/internet geek, I've looked at a lot of certification programs, and I don't think I've ever seen one that I had a chance of qualifying for. But I didn't mind; it was obvious who their market was, and I've never wanted that sort of job.;-)
I wonder if Microsoft would be able to block its sales in the US, as people have mentioned here for other interesting systems developed in Asia.
Let's see; what was the name of that high-reliability open-source OS that that the Japanese are using for things like autos? What ever happened to the notepad computer running linux that was announced over there several years ago, but which is only available in the US with Windows installed?
[S]omeone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that.. work business-ly in the REAL real world.... In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.
Well, as someone whose primary email address ends with ".mit.edu", I can assure you that "steaming shitpile" is a good description of the electronic madhouse that is MIT. And most of MIT is proud of this. It's common to observe that MIT has at least one of every electronic gadget ever made, and most of them are alive and connected to the Net. Much, if not most, of the software is either home-grown or hacked so heavily that the original author(s) wouldn't recognize it. And all in the name of education.
Compared to MIT, the "REAL real world" is full of wimps who mostly can't even install their own OS, much less configure its network attachments.
If you can make it work at MIT, you can make it work anywhere.
(Isn't there a New York saying something like that?;-)
And to decrease the level of apparent chauvinism somewhat, I should note that similar comments apply equally well to many other tech schools around the world. MIT isn't the only school that encourages its students to learn by doing. But you rarely find this sort of attitude in the "REAL" business world, where they expect you to already have done all the learning you'll ever need before they will even schedule an interview.
OTOH, I have noticed a much greated degree of cooperation at MIT that I usually see in any business environment. In academia, people talk competition while collaborating; in business, people talk teamwork while stabbing each other in the back. So maybe what works at tech schools like MIT might not work in the business world.
The fact is, you can make windows as secure as any other OS out there, as long as you know what you're doing.
The fact is, unless you have access to the code, all the way down to the bottom, including microcode, you can't know what you're doing. You're just guessing on the basis of what someone else may have told you (and you may have misunderstood).
Of course, just having the code isn't enough. You need to have a team of people with the time to study it. And those people have to be motivated to tell you about problems. Otherwise you're a sitting duck for any trojan or backdoor that the authors included in the software.
This is, of course, where the "open source" idea comes in. The software is in the hands of a gang of hackers - uh, I mean experienced software developers - who are motivated mostly by a desire for quality software, and also to show off their own expertise in public. Some of them are partisans of one or another vendor, of course, but with a big enough mob, you'll have helpers who don't like any particular vendor, and will try to find that vendor's problems.
With proprietary software, you are at the mercy of a group of people who have that vendor's interests at heart, because that's where their paycheck comes from. They aren't particularly interested in helping you find things that would embarrass the source of their paychecks.
It really doesn't take a great deal of genius to understand which is more likely to give you reliable, secure software.
Even though SCO is pretty scummy for its lawsuit, that does not give us the right to attack it with a DoS.
Um, I haven't been attacking anyone with a DoS or with anything else.
Who's this "us" that you're accusing of making the attack?
(And yes, I do run linux, both at home and at work, though this was types on a Mac. But I don't take credit for things done by other linux folks, and I refuse to take any blame, either.)
.. if i post here including my copyright, and somebody answers cutting out some of my text in his reply, can i sue him for obscene amounts of money...
Even better, you can demand from his ISP information including name, email and home address, phone number, etc., of all their customers. You can then do as you like with this data. It's a real windfall for the spam (uh, I mean marketing) folks. Maybe you could use this info to start your own lucrative spam (uh, I mean marketing) operation.
Hmmm... Maybe I should submit this as an AC. Then, rather than just demanding information about me from slashdot, you can send them a subpoena demanding full information on all their users. After all, I did quote your text, copyrighted by default under most countries' laws. This is a clear infringement, so you obviously now have the right to go after anyone who might conceivably have done the infringing.
Possibly the most pertinent is their observation:... every consumer's identity, home address and phone number are now available to anyone who can fill out a one-page form.
Note that "identity" includes email address. If you want to know why you're getting so much spam, you need look no further. The recent court decision about Verizon basically means that I can use copyright claims as grounds to demand from any ISP all the email/home addresses and phone numbers of all their customers. I can then use this information for any purpose, or sell it to anyone.
This decision essentially opens ISP customer records fully to all marketers, and eliminates any traces of internet privacy.
Yeah, and the missile defense system won't even be used, because anyone who has a bomb to deliver is going to realize that FedEx is a much better delivery vehicle than a missile.
(There was an interesting show on American TV a year or so back, about a couple of guys who shipped a container of radioactive waste from one of the former Soviet republics to New York, via a dozen other countries. It was never opened or tested in any way that they could discern, despite the fact that the radiation was detectable by a cheap geiger counter from outside the shipping crate. They followed the trucks and ships, getting a lot of the trip on tape. It was pretty funny. Now if I could remember who did the show...)
To put it in perspective, we might note that there is a long history of this sort of tax on personal things that don't affect others. The general term is "luxury tax".
Some of these taxes have been rather extreme. In several histories, I've read the claim that the biggest documented improvement in human health was in the UK early in the 1800's, when Parliament repealed the luxury tax on soap. Just think about that one for a moment...
"Those people are all so smelly; I don't know how they stand it."
A special tax just for the privelege of having your two computers talk to each other is small stuff in comparison.
Around here, when we were first permitted to get to the Internet via a phone line, there was already a tax on every phone bill. Then the cable folks supplied Internet service, and part of every cable bill is a tax. I've bought a few wires (thin ethernet first, then the hub that the vendors have forced on us for the last few years, all to connect a few home computers, and part of every purchase is a tax.
We need electricity to run our computers, and part of every electric bill is - you guessed it - a tax.
So what they're talking about is a special, higher tax for those of us on the Net. Every little bit of the net has been taxed right from the start; they just want networks taxed even higher than any other sort of comm or power equipment.
...shouldn't it be either gi-ga or ji-ja? After all, in Greek they're both "gamma" [which, I note, is also a hard g]...
Nope; greek started losing that "hard g" (i.e., the back voiced stop) a couple thousand years ago. If you pick up a book on modern Greek, you'll find that gamma no longer represents that sound at all. It's either a/y/, or a back voiced fricative (which English doesn't have). The transition happened gradually, to different words, over many centuries, but it's fairly complete now.
In any case, Greek pronunciation is hardly relevant to English. We have lots of borrowings from Greek, true, but they are generally so thoroughly mangled that a native speaker of Greek wouldn't recognize them at all. And if you could transport a speaker of classical Greek to today (or send back a recording of English), he also wouldn't recognize any of our words of Greek origin. Much of our pronunciation comes from someone transliterating a Greek work into Roman letters, then people who know no Greek attempting to pronounce it using English spelling rules. The result often has few or no phonemes in common with the original Greek.
But it does supply a lot of opportunity for people to flame each other on the basis of no knowledge of Greek (or other lender languages) at all. That can be fun.
So publishing information about a defective product is illegal, but trade secrets trump "free speech". It's obvious what this means.
What the court wants is that, if you have knowledge of a defect in a product like the CSS encoding, you shouldn't publish it openly for the benefit of customers. You should declare it your own trade secret, and sell it only to people willing to pay your price. Then the courts will protect you rather than punishing you.
Who would want to pay you good money for the information? Why, commercial pirates, of course. Just contact them, and contract with them to do the decoding that they need for their business.
This is then a B2B sale, and the US courts will support you against anyone who tries to publicise what you're doing.
That was an attempt to match the subject. Let's face it, Benny Hill was rather pathetic. Of course, he'd probably congratulate you for recognizing the basic nature of his most successful character.
Slashdot Mirror
AT&T are quite right to claim copyright over that one line ...
;-)
/bin/true is to illustrate the concept of a fraudulent copyright claim. Not all copyright claims are legal, and anyone who thinks you must automagically obey any copyright claim is simply a sucker for corporate fraud. It's hard to find a better example than AT&T's attempt to copyright blank lines.
...
Um, I think you left out the smiley.
I mean, we're talking about a coyright claim on a blank line here.
A lot of people have wished we could find a company that is sufficiently stupid to attempt to defend such a claim in court. It could make for not just some fun reporting, but also a bit of cash in the settlement.
The main use of an example line the copyright claim in AT&T's
But at least they had the brains to ignore taunts intended to get them to file suit. Too bad they couldn't have taken Fox's path in their recent attempt to enforce their trademark on the phrase "fair and balanced". This lost Fox not just a lot of face, but also a bit of money (and the prospect of even larger losses when they repeat such an offense).
In this case, what Fox did was put Al Franken on the best-seller lists. We've already seen some clues that SCO's attack is doing the same thing to linux. But SCO is sorta small stuff in the commercial world, and most managers still haven't heard of them. What we need now is for Fox to register a phrase like "Open News Source" as its trademark, and then sue the linux gang for infringement. Imagine how that would help our left-wing, commie campaign to conquer the world
Back in the 1980's, I was just one of many people who noticed that AT&T claimed to have a copyright on blank lines. You can see one of these claims at http://web.42.net/true.html. Google for /bin/true and you'll find more.
/bin/true went through many versions, all of which contained only blank lines and a copyright notice.
/bin/true on several newsgroups as responses to discussions, pointing out that I had posted a copyrighted AT&T program in its entirety, and challenging AT&T to prosecute me. For some mysterious reason, I never heard from them.
/bin/false, which contained only the command "exit 255", so if you do that in any script, you are also inviolation of AT&T/SCO's claimed copyright.
/bin/true to be part of the IP that they inherited from AT&T. This is presumably the basis of the majority of their claim that there are a million lines of stolen SCO code in linux. When you add in all the lines that contain only /*, */ and //, you can easily get to a million lines.
This is the good old "true" program, which on Sys/V was an empty shell script. It works; it does nothing, and then since there were no errors, it exist with a zero status. Some drone at AT&T obviosly wrote a script to run through all their scripts and add an AT&T copyright notice. This also added two blank lines (only one in some later versions), leading to the observation that AT&T really was claiming to own the rights to blank lines.
One fun thing is that their copyrighted version of
Another fun thing that I did was to post the code for
There was also an AT&T copyright notice in
Anyway, it does seem that the SCO gang considers
It could be fun if they actually made the mistake of pressing this claim in court.
Actually, there's a really good compression scheme for code that isn't even lossy: Remove all comments and unnecessary white space.
...
Of course, some code doesn't compress very much this way
Yeah, but you know why this is going to fail? It'll fail because everywhere in the world, in the first few years of schooling, one of the main lessons that every teacher is trying to get into their kiddies' heads is that you should always share your toys.
;-)
Now, you may think this is encouraging piracy, socialism, and all those evil things. But the fact is that most pre-school teachers don't see it that way. They see it as necessary socialization of those selfish little monsters. Granted, a tiny minority of their students resist the lesson, and grow up to be CEOs and RIAA spokespeople. But the power of these millions of teachers is likely much greater than the greed of a handful of corporate execs.
In the long term, we will all be sharing our toys. This is especially true for songs we like. They may be able to sue the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire; they may be able to arrest us for walking down the street whistling a copyrighted tune.
But in the end, they can't throw us all in jail. And they ain't gonna stop all those teachers from continuing to instill in the little heads the idea that good people share things with each other. Eventually they'll have to face the fact that most of us become social beings, and we share things that we like with others.
(Yes, it does occur to me that this applies to pornography as well as to music. It probably applies even more to pornographic music. And to software that's better than what the commercial guys sell us.
Nah; it's from Dune.
Hey, thanks for pointing that out.
...
But it's getting to be time for a new sig anyway. Let's see; I know I've got some good ones lying about somewhere
Perhaps we might note that we have, in fact, had one of those. A small one, perhaps, with only two cities vaporized. But one country has used nnuclear weapons is war, and that same country has recently had serious government discussions of building and testing small "strategic" nuclear weapons. This is the same government whose public policy towards perceived enemies is proactive, preventive attacks based on what those enemies might do in a worst-case scenario.
We're not out of danger on this one yet.
The "food pill" concept does have a fundamental physical limitation. By "food" we usually mean things like proteins and carbohydrates, not things like vitamins, and "pill" usually means something rather small
that can be swallowed with one gulp.
Our daily requirement of protein and carbohydrate is on the order of hundreds of grams. To get 100 grams of carbos, you need at least 100 grams of material, and typically a bit more (unless you're gulping down pure sugar). This would be well beyond the size range of what we would usually call a "pill".
You can put things like vitamins and a few "supplement" materials in pill form, because we only need those in sub-gram amounts. But you're not going to put significant amounts of amino acids or sugars into a pill, not in the quantities that we need them. The universe just doesn't work that way.
Also, we need a significant amount of water per day. Our biochemistry only works in a water medium. If you could reduce the proteins and carbos to a digestible but waterless form for less bulk, you'd just have to consume the water some other way. You might as well leave the water mixed with the proteins and carbos and consume them together. It's a lot more satisfying to the palate than downing pills and drinking large quantities of water.
Well, there is some truth to this, but there's also a major counterexample which has been mentioned here occasionally.
;-)
There are now millions of web sites, and according to the Netcraft survey, 2/3 of them are running the apache server. It may be true that not all are the latest version. But still, this is a major monoculture.
Web servers are a major target of attackers, for obvious reasons. But you don't see apache servers going crazy and sending of zillions of spams to every email address it can find. There have been only a few security holes found in apache, and they are generally fixed before anyone builds an exploit. In general, the only apache web servers that have problems turn out to be due to someone installing a CGI program with a hole. And this isn't apache's problem, of course.
Need I point out that apache is an "open source" program, available freely to anyone who can type "apache.org" and make a few mouse clicks?
The fact that MS Windows is a monoculture is a part of its problems. But the big probblem is that it's full of security holes.
To make an agricultural simile, it's as if someone were to breed a strain of wheat or potato that is susceptible to every virus known, and sell it cheaply with a billion-dollar ad campaign so that most of the farmers plant it. Then, when the inevitable happens, you blame the farmers rather than the company and its marketing campaign.
(Yes, the computer industry is this stupid.
the regulations that show up will all but prohibit free software (at least for commercial purposes, and possibly for anybody who wants to connect to the Internet), ...
One problem with this is that, if you eliminate all the free and open software, you will effectively shut down most of the Internet, and that ain't gonna happen.
A huge portion of the Internet uses (variants of) the Berkeley networking software. 2/3 of the web servers are running apache. And so on. This is not going to be replaced by proprietary software any time soon. The companies that now control big chunks of the Internet are not about to pay for the huge development effort it would take to replace two decades of software development that works.
In reading the article, while agreeing with pretty much everything, I found myself getting more and more baffled by why the term "wireless" kept appearing. I couldn't find anything that had anything to do with wireless comms at all. It was all about developing new apps, but there was nothing at all mentioned in which the wireless nature of your machine was relevant.
I mean, I'm sitting here typing this on my Mac Powerbook G4, which has no wires attached at all, and is getting to the Net via the Airport upstairs. But other than the driver for the NIC, I don't see anything anywhere that needs to know that the machine is wireless. It's the Internet, after all; who cares how the bits get to the other machines. Well, yeah, the guy writing the device driver for the NIC cares. But why would anyone else?
Speed? A dial-up phone connection is even slower, so that's not it.
Portability of the machine? Why would a program inside the machine know or care about that?
This guy seems to think you need to develop software differently for "wireless". What the hell is he talking about? I gotta admit I'm clueless.
Yeah, and that's why such virus/worm programs don't send their output to people in the address book. They send the output to fixed address that are created for that purpose and disappear a few days after the virus is released. Or even better: They make a TCP connection to one
of a few IP address/port combinations, send the data, and exit. That way you don't even suspect they've been there.
While professional certification seems like it would help, there is a simple reason why historically it hasn't worked.
;-)
There have been many attempts to establish such certifications since software arose as a significant part of the world back in the 50's. In almost every case, the same thing has happened: A certification program was established, and the the qualification tests looked for only one thing: Familiarity with the dominant software platforms at the time. From the 50's to the late 80's, this meant one thing: IBM's commercial systems. Since the late 80's, Microsoft has nearly supplanted IBM, but the situation is otherwise the same.
The problem here is that most of the world's computer infrastructure was built on unix and the various small real-time kernels. The people who set up certification programs aren't familiar with these, and don't consider them.
This means that when you are talking about safety and security concerns, existing software certification programs are pretty much considered jokes. If you were building a team to write the software for a secure/safe environment, would you hire someone with certification on MVS or Windows? More likely, you'd know not to ever
mention such an idea, because the result would be a permanent "clueless" label, and it would be your last contribution to the discussion.
Part of the problem has been that the people who organize software certification programs are invariably professional managers, and they consider programmers as interchangable components. The few who have realized that this is dumb generally go to the opposite extreme, and will hire only people with N years experience on one particular release of the chosen OS (and not understand that that release has only been out for N-3 years).
So, as things have stood for the past 40 years or so, no matter how good an idea professional software certification seems, the end result is generally a joke. Successful software managers understand this, and consider certification a negative point on a resume.
A few minor eceptions exist in some very narrow specialties. But overall, software certification can't succeed as long as the result is a program that certifies only IBM and/or MS software experts.
(As a long-time unix/linu/internet geek, I've looked at a lot of certification programs, and I don't think I've ever seen one that I had a chance of qualifying for. But I didn't mind; it was obvious who their market was, and I've never wanted that sort of job.
I wonder if Microsoft would be able to block its sales in the US, as people have mentioned here for other interesting systems developed in Asia.
;-)
Let's see; what was the name of that high-reliability open-source OS that that the Japanese are using for things like autos? What ever happened to the notepad computer running linux that was announced over there several years ago, but which is only available in the US with Windows installed?
(What, me paranoid?
[S]omeone is going to have to do some seed projects like Roofnet, that .. work business-ly in the REAL real world. ... In other words, it has to work in the steaming shitpile that the world outside of college often turns out to be.
;-)
Well, as someone whose primary email address ends with ".mit.edu", I can assure you that "steaming shitpile" is a good description of the electronic madhouse that is MIT. And most of MIT is proud of this. It's common to observe that MIT has at least one of every electronic gadget ever made, and most of them are alive and connected to the Net. Much, if not most, of the software is either home-grown or hacked so heavily that the original author(s) wouldn't recognize it. And all in the name of education.
Compared to MIT, the "REAL real world" is full of wimps who mostly can't even install their own OS, much less configure its network attachments.
If you can make it work at MIT, you can make it work anywhere.
(Isn't there a New York saying something like that?
And to decrease the level of apparent chauvinism somewhat, I should note that similar comments apply equally well to many other tech schools around the world. MIT isn't the only school that encourages its students to learn by doing. But you rarely find this sort of attitude in the "REAL" business world, where they expect you to already have done all the learning you'll ever need before they will even schedule an interview.
OTOH, I have noticed a much greated degree of cooperation at MIT that I usually see in any business environment. In academia, people talk competition while collaborating; in business, people talk teamwork while stabbing each other in the back. So maybe what works at tech schools like MIT might not work in the business world.
The fact is, you can make windows as secure as any other OS out there, as long as you know what you're doing.
The fact is, unless you have access to the code, all the way down to the bottom, including microcode, you can't know what you're doing. You're just guessing on the basis of what someone else may have told you (and you may have misunderstood).
Of course, just having the code isn't enough. You need to have a team of people with the time to study it. And those people have to be motivated to tell you about problems. Otherwise you're a sitting duck for any trojan or backdoor that the authors included in the software.
This is, of course, where the "open source" idea comes in. The software is in the hands of a gang of hackers - uh, I mean experienced software developers - who are motivated mostly by a desire for quality software, and also to show off their own expertise in public. Some of them are partisans of one or another vendor, of course, but with a big enough mob, you'll have helpers who don't like any particular vendor, and will try to find that vendor's problems.
With proprietary software, you are at the mercy of a group of people who have that vendor's interests at heart, because that's where their paycheck comes from. They aren't particularly interested in helping you find things that would embarrass the source of their paychecks.
It really doesn't take a great deal of genius to understand which is more likely to give you reliable, secure software.
Even though SCO is pretty scummy for its lawsuit, that does not give us the right to attack it with a DoS.
Um, I haven't been attacking anyone with a DoS or with anything else.
Who's this "us" that you're accusing of making the attack?
(And yes, I do run linux, both at home and at work, though this was types on a Mac. But I don't take credit for things done by other linux folks, and I refuse to take any blame, either.)
.. if i post here including my copyright, and somebody answers cutting out some of my text in his reply, can i sue him for obscene amounts of money ...
... Maybe I should submit this as an AC. Then, rather than just demanding information about me from slashdot, you can send them a subpoena demanding full information on all their users. After all, I did quote your text, copyrighted by default under most countries' laws. This is a clear infringement, so you obviously now have the right to go after anyone who might conceivably have done the infringing.
Even better, you can demand from his ISP information including name, email and home address, phone number, etc., of all their customers. You can then do as you like with this data. It's a real windfall for the spam (uh, I mean marketing) folks. Maybe you could use this info to start your own lucrative spam (uh, I mean marketing) operation.
Hmmm
Possibly the most pertinent is their observation: ... every consumer's identity, home address and phone number are now available to anyone who can fill out a one-page form.
Note that "identity" includes email address. If you want to know why you're getting so much spam, you need look no further. The recent court decision about Verizon basically means that I can use copyright claims as grounds to demand from any ISP all the email/home addresses and phone numbers of all their customers. I can then use this information for any purpose, or sell it to anyone.
This decision essentially opens ISP customer records fully to all marketers, and eliminates any traces of internet privacy.
We have all been opted in to everything.
Yeah, and the missile defense system won't even be used, because anyone who has a bomb to deliver is going to realize that FedEx is a much better delivery vehicle than a missile.
...)
(There was an interesting show on American TV a year or so back, about a couple of guys who shipped a container of radioactive waste from one of the former Soviet republics to New York, via a dozen other countries. It was never opened or tested in any way that they could discern, despite the fact that the radiation was detectable by a cheap geiger counter from outside the shipping crate. They followed the trucks and ships, getting a lot of the trip on tape. It was pretty funny. Now if I could remember who did the show
To put it in perspective, we might note that there is a long history of this sort of tax on personal things that don't affect others. The general term is "luxury tax".
...
Some of these taxes have been rather extreme. In several histories, I've read the claim that the biggest documented improvement in human health was in the UK early in the 1800's, when Parliament repealed the luxury tax on soap. Just think about that one for a moment
"Those people are all so smelly; I don't know how they stand it."
A special tax just for the privelege of having your two computers talk to each other is small stuff in comparison.
Because it wasn't taxed yet
Where do you live?
Around here, when we were first permitted to get to the Internet via a phone line, there was already a tax on every phone bill. Then the cable folks supplied Internet service, and part of every cable bill is a tax. I've bought a few wires (thin ethernet first, then the hub that the vendors have forced on us for the last few years, all to connect a few home computers, and part of every purchase is a tax.
We need electricity to run our computers, and part of every electric bill is - you guessed it - a tax.
So what they're talking about is a special, higher tax for those of us on the Net. Every little bit of the net has been taxed right from the start; they just want networks taxed even higher than any other sort of comm or power equipment.
...shouldn't it be either gi-ga or ji-ja? After all, in Greek they're both "gamma" [which, I note, is also a hard g] ...
/y/, or a back voiced fricative (which English doesn't have). The transition happened gradually, to different words, over many centuries, but it's fairly complete now.
Nope; greek started losing that "hard g" (i.e., the back voiced stop) a couple thousand years ago. If you pick up a book on modern Greek, you'll find that gamma no longer represents that sound at all. It's either a
In any case, Greek pronunciation is hardly relevant to English. We have lots of borrowings from Greek, true, but they are generally so thoroughly mangled that a native speaker of Greek wouldn't recognize them at all. And if you could transport a speaker of classical Greek to today (or send back a recording of English), he also wouldn't recognize any of our words of Greek origin. Much of our pronunciation comes from someone transliterating a Greek work into Roman letters, then people who know no Greek attempting to pronounce it using English spelling rules. The result often has few or no phonemes in common with the original Greek.
But it does supply a lot of opportunity for people to flame each other on the basis of no knowledge of Greek (or other lender languages) at all. That can be fun.
So publishing information about a defective product is illegal, but trade secrets trump "free speech". It's obvious what this means.
...
What the court wants is that, if you have knowledge of a defect in a product like the CSS encoding, you shouldn't publish it openly for the benefit of customers. You should declare it your own trade secret, and sell it only to people willing to pay your price. Then the courts will protect you rather than punishing you.
Who would want to pay you good money for the information? Why, commercial pirates, of course. Just contact them, and contract with them to do the decoding that they need for their business.
This is then a B2B sale, and the US courts will support you against anyone who tries to publicise what you're doing.
What, me cynical? Nah
Your attempt at sarcasm was pathetic.
That was an attempt to match the subject. Let's face it, Benny Hill was rather pathetic. Of course, he'd probably congratulate you for recognizing the basic nature of his most successful character.