Microsoft and others should realize this. They can let the educational institutions run rampant with piracy if they want, and it wouldn't make much of an effect. Those who want to pirate will do so. There's not a whole lot stopping them. Those that insist on being in full compliance may do so by investigating alternatives. In the end, it makes no difference to the school. What it makes a difference to is the IP owners of the software being used.
Those students are going to use the software in school then go out into the workforce and use the software that they're familiar with. This means that employers are going to be using the software that most of the workforce is familiar with. And the corporations are much more likely to spend the cash on software than the starving college student is.
You're not going to make the money from the student or even the institution. You're going to make it from that corporation that will be spending the next 20 years buying upgrades. And when that graduate goes home from work, he's going to buy a copy to use at home. You'll lock that person in. To deny yourself that legacy by forcing the first purchase of a potential many, you risk losing all those subsequent sales, a foolish prospect indeed.
LWN's problem, as the market stands today, is that a website by itself is unable to bring in sufficient revenue to support full time employees, let alone multiple full time employees. Even considering the $12K in donations, that will not last more than a month, by their salary standards, and chances are good that will not be a repeating phenomenon as the slashdot link was probably responsible for a good part of it.
Advertising as they've stated won't cover their expenses. And the level of advertising that will probably will be so annoying that it will drive off too many people. I've noticed this problem with my own site. Even a small banner ad would clutter up the page too much, and would probably bring me less than $100 a month anyway.
Subscriptions are a possibility assuming anyone would pay them. $1 a month from every one of the lwn regulars would pay their requested salaries with NO problem. However, most people won't subscribe even if they feel the content is worth it. There is plenty of material out there for free. Being forced to support something doesn't usually win you many fans.
You could always gather personal data and sell it to marketers, but that's just slimy and will piss people off more than subscriptions would.
Then there are donations. While donations are great so long as they're completely unconditional, that's not always the case. I've got people that bitch because I don't have a domain. So every once in a while someone offers to send me $10 so I can get one. Problem is, I won't spend that $10 on a domain, I'll use it to pay my water bill, rent, or something else that's far more important to me than a domain is. That donator would feel shafted, and I would understand that. If his money was going to the site itself, the donation would be justified, but when it goes to pay for my own peronal expenses, it feels more like charity. Donations would certainly help, but the added burden of assumed obligation would create more problems than its worth. In LWN's case, its pretty clear that the donations are going to pay salaries and not much else. But from the tone of their most recent report on the issue, it would seem that some people might not have been aware of that fact.
The only option that *I* have found that would be reasonable to me and my visitors would be merchandising. Either selling site specific novelty items, or selling useful equipment. Profits from these sales could then fund both the site and partially fund my salary, but with sales you open a new can of worms. You have customer relations, ordering, payments, warranty issues, shipment tracking, etc. Its a full time job just maintaining something like that on any significant scale. Which means that a substancial amount of the immediate profit gets churned back into the business of producing, packaging, and selling, which means, if I'm doing it, is a lot less time I'm spending on the site, which was the whole point of searching for extra revenue in the first place. Of course, to make it easy on myself, I could just take payments by check only and offer no warranty whatsoever on what I sell. A lot of people would turn away from this, but at least the cost of bringing in extra revenue would not exceed the revenue itself, and those that wish to "donate" at least get something tangible in return, regardless how I actually choose to spend the money.
He was demonstrating to a county official AND a reporter. That somewhat implies that this wasn't a behind closed doors, tiger team type evaluation on the network. This wasn't just a "hey, I accidently noticed you left your network wide open. Might wanna fix that". If there was a reporter there, someone's toes were probably getting stepped on. The security analyst doesn't deserve to get charges pressed against him, but he should have gotten something in writing from the officials BEFORE demonstrating illegal activity.
Although the metaphors aren't identical, if I reported to the police, or a homeowner that they've been leaving their doors unlocked, someone at some point will probably ask me how I know that. Computer security is taken rather seriously these days. There seems to be no effort in making sure there is any, but they sure like to rake you over the coals for any alleged violation of it. When the "victim" happens to be the government, especially the court system, that will just up the stakes even more.
Its unfortunate that this has to happen. But if your less than legitimate activities happen to result in useful information for somebody, don't think that the simple act of good faith by handing that information over will clear the slate for you. Either do it anonymously or get immunity first. Or just keep your mouth shut.
Yes, I know we always talk about trying to get linux to run on an older computer, but gutting the case and replacing the innards is cheating.:)
As far as appeal goes, consider you're intentionally purchasing a machine with limited upgrade options. In order to minimize the footprint, the boards won't have many PCI slots, and its debatable if they could be used anyway in that case. While old computer cases can probably be picked up for free, or very very cheap, there's still the labor cost of adapting them to fit modern components. That's going to jack the price a bit, not to mention a power supply will still be required, which is typically a good percentage of the case cost.
Of course, people buying one of these are probably doing it for the novelty purposes and not because they're concerned about cost or usability.
Constantly, the money that companies are forced to spend on recovering from various infrastructure attacks are should not always be referred to as "losses". Certainly, if someone broke into your building and stole something, that is a loss. But if your entire corporate network is down for two days while your IT department is working overtime and the rest of the company is not, while getting paid, this is not a loss. This is an operating expense. This is part of the expected cost of using software that has well known vulnerabilities. This is part of that "total cost of ownership" that Microsoft is only so proud to bring up when discussing their software prices when compared with those of competitors.
So for now on, don't suggest that companies LOSE this money whenever they're attacked. This is just part of the total cost of ownership when you run insecure software, and when you hire substandard IT personel, and when you don't have reasonable company policies regarding non-business related applictions.
Companies can take the cheap way out. They can put Windows boxes in front of every employee of the company, content that everyone can quickly figure out what to do with minimal expense. Hire some just out of college whackjobs with no useful experience to run the network. They're cheap afterall. Nobody to train, nobody to waste money on. No need to spend money on security audits. That's just wasted money. Of course, you'll "lose" all of it the first time someone hits you, but that's the way you've decided to budget your technical department. You get what you pay for.
I don't agree with this policy to ANY extent, but if the limit of the damage they could do was isolated to ONLY the individual host that was causing the infraction, the problem would be minimal. However, this type of action will also affect the ISP, because they have to handle all the additional traffic. If the infringing files are located on a webhosting system, the MPAA would have to take out the entire system to do any good, and I can guarantee you that the owners of that system will NOT be pleased to find out that they can't even legally prosecute the entity that caused them to be down for two days.
My other thought, does this work both ways? If the MPAA so much as even slightly infringes on someone's copyright, we're allowed to DOS them back into the stoneage... right?
How are they connected to the internet? Or more importantly, what resources do they plan to use for these attacks? Unless they're REALLY huge, and I don't think they are, they will have to use an intermediate ISP of some type. That ISP will be FLOODED with abuse complaints. How long do you think they'll go on supporting this? Imagine that any ISP that connects the MPAA loses 50% of their other customers. How long before the MPAA is unable to get an internet connection at all?
The article is somewhat confusing in this matter. It mentions that he was selling pirated games, and the conviction seems to take that into account to some degree, but nothing else is said about the matter. The mod chip issue might be a bit of a grey area, but if he's selling pirated games, that's pretty black and white, and probably what had drawn attention to himself in the first place. I don't know the canadian laws in this matter. I don't even know the US laws regarding mod chips, so I'm going to present two possible scenarios here. Either the possession, sale, installation, or use of mod chips is illegal in and of itself, or sale of these chips with intent to commit another crime in the process (selling pirated games) is the actual crime.
Owning and possessing tools to assist in a burglary is not illegal if you are obeying the law. However, if you break into something or some place while in possession, there are extra charges that can be applied because of your possession of the otherwise legal tools. Same goes with possession of firearms during a robbery. The tools themselves may be legal as long as no crimes are being committed.
I wouldn't worry about it. When your project is at a stage you feel comfortable with the source and the functionality of the program, go ahead and release it, and let others do with it what they will. If they submit patches/features/ideas, use them or don't use them as you see fit. You're more than welcome to contribute source to the masses without any expectations of continued support. Thats the beauty of the open source philosophy. If the original authors don't want to/can't support it, someone else can pick it up and run with it. If it forks, so be it. Obviously the project is for you. Make it into whatever you want it to be. If others have a different vision than yours, they can fork it into a new project with different goals, and in the end, everyone has benefited. Or they can use features from your program in a completely unrelated project. Or you might inspire someone to create something new, even if they don't share your code.
In any event, when the program (and you) are ready, release it to the world, and worry about maintaining the program with submissions from others if and when they come in.
Maybe I missed something. From what I can tell, the police obtained the account name and password, logged in, and removed the offending material from the user's account. No "servers" were shut down in the process, and the hosting company wasn't even aware of it.
I suppose if the account holder later calls back in to complain, there's something. But it WAS his account that was used. If the police were able to find out his password, he should have made better efforts to conceal it. As it stands, no legal action was taken against the hosting company, they weren't even burdened with a request to remove anything.
I guess I'm just not getting TOO excited about this.
I know this is a Troll, and probably has already been mentioned. But just for morbit curiosity's sake, I entered the word CDROM into the search field on slashdot, clicked submit. And what do you know! The duplicate article was #4. FOUR! This took me all of 5 seconds to check. This wasn't something about Microsoft that would be buried 10 pages back, no. This shows up at the upper half of the upper quarter of the list of responses to a simple 10 second (I wonder if we did this before) check.
I know dupes are going to happen from time to time. With several editors, its impossible for all of them to know off the top of their heads if the article has been posted before. Even if it were only one person, I still wouldn't hold it against them that much. But some modicum of effort should be taken to at least avoid looking like a complete moron. This means, make sure its not still on the front page somewhere (this includes the older stuff links), make sure you can't find it in the search list with one or two of the common topics of the article, and perhaps, if possible, do a quick check on the URL to see if its been mentioned before.
The RIAA represents a business model that might not be necessary anymore. As many have stated many times before, the artists make their money from concerts, merchendise, and other outlets, and not so much from the sale of CDs that you buy in the music stores. Those CDs are almost completely for the expressed purpose of marketing the artist so they can make money elsewhere. CDs are the RIAA's baby.
Its possible, we simply don't need them anymore. Distribute everything in mp3 and cut out the recording industry completely. It wouldn't hurt the artists any, and it would completely eliminate the whole piracy issue. Of course, there is a chance that the RIAA DOES provide a useful service, but I find it hard to believe that artists won't be able to get coverage if the RIAA isn't around to support them. Radio will still play the good stuff, and they will actually go looking for the good stuff. People will send in good stuff for them to play. It'll happen. It can work, and the RIAA and the companies it represents simply don't need to exist.
Of course, I'm sure they have a different opinion in the matter, but times change. Industry changes. And they had a good run. But its ending. It might be in their best interests if they realize that now and change to match the way the world is going, or they're going to become the insignificant righteous.
You're partially correct. However, it isn't the amount of the exec salary that is the problem. Its the salary cap. Exec salaries over $1 million can't be deducted. Now you can debate until you're blue in the face what a proper exec salary is, but in the end, it comes down to, whatever the company is willing to pay and whatever the exec is willing to work for. The marketplace at work.
However, by implementing a cap on the salary, the corporations are forced to find alternative ways to make up the difference. They're not going to throw money away to the government, so they pay the execs with stock options instead. Now, stock options for the regular employee aren't always a bad thing. It builds company loyalty, and gives the employees an extra reason to go the extra mile. However, with execs, the situation is different. A lowly employee typically would be unable to cause a massive shift in the stock price by anything he/she is able to do. However, execs can. They have full control over the corporation, including what the public finds out about. And since they also have control over how the accounting system works, and their salaries depend on the stock price always going up, they're going to manipulate (to the razor's edge of legality if necessary) the accounting to maximize the value of their options.
There might be another reason why this happened, that didn't have much to do with executive greed. Worldcom screwed up, but its possible that they didn't actually do anything illegal. A lot of expenses CAN legitimately be expensed over 10 years, even labor in some cases. Ultimately, it wouldn't matter, they just pay the expenses over a longer period of time. In the dot com boom, they had a desparate need to expand quickly, so they depreciated the expenses, which is permitted, and wouldn't have had such a dramatic effect, except for one small problem. The bubble burst, and their steadily increasing revenue stream suddenly fell far short of where it should be.
Now, Worldcom isn't in bad shape, they're just deep in debt. Its still a viable corporation with a healthy revenue stream, and given enough time and some responsible financial management, it would recover from this without any problem. However, in the wake of Enron, there was a pressing need to find and disclose all potential problems, and with these new startling revelations, the creditors are suddenly panicing and pulling their lines of credit. Hence their current situation.
What's potentially scary about this, as of yesterday, you could purchase a controlling share of Worldcom for about $10 million. Of course, the low price is due to the impending bankrupcy. However, as daunting as the billions of dollars of debt might seem, Worldcom is still a viable company for someone who might be able to refinance the debt. Know of any large software companies that have that much working cash available?? Who might want to own a significant percentage of the backbone? Think its too far fetched??
And its not worth much, but here goes. I've found, from searching and testing, and trying, that most of the linux desktop/window managers have one thing in common. They tend to focus on eyecandy without as much effort on the useability. I tend to pride myself on the fact that most applications I can sit down and tinker with for 5 minutes and have all figured out. It took me longer than that to figure out how to maximise a window in E the first time. Of course, once I know HOW to do it, its not a problem, but Linux will never make the desktop if the average user has as much trouble as I did. The desktop should not be the most difficult application to figure out. Yes, I know RTMF, and yes, all those helpful popup help windows were there to guide me.
Indeed quite a few window managers are as easy to figure out as Windows, primarily because they look just like it. For better or worse it seems to be a rather intuitive interface. Either that, or everyone's gotten so used to it over the years that its become second nature.
Effort with the intent to spur the Linux desktop should be placed in developing an interface more intuitive than the standard. One that any joe user with half a brain can sit down at for the first time and figure out with a minimum of frustration. At the same time, keep it configurable enough to not be completely ignored by the more advanced crowd.
That someone that won't take the effort to keep his system patched, won't run zonealarm or virus scanners, and happily contributes day after day to the sircams, iloveyou's, melissa's, and others, but THIS someone will take the initiative to run the government's software. How is THAT supposed to happen?
Of course, if they bundle it with Kazza, it might be effective. Heavens only knows, a good percentage of the computers in the world install all the spyware crap, it couldn't really hurt any more. All security aside, I have my own problems with running government software on my personal computers, but thats beside the point.:)
Probably not a NEW idea. The media companies are worried about losing revenue due to fewer people watching commercials. Tell me something, why do people skip through the commercials? Its very simple. THEY DON'T WANT TO WATCH THEM. Yet for some reason, there's a large demographic of people that watch the Superbowl ONLY for the commercials.
What it all rolls down to is this, people watch TV to be entertained. With exception of the Superbowl, commercial breaks are lulls in the entertainment experience. They're a necessary evil, and people are willing to tolerate them as long as they have to, but the second they have an option to skip through them, they don't hesitate.
The secret here, ladies and gentlemen, is to create commercials that are WORTH WATCHING. If your commercial is so entertaining that someone is willing to watch it rather than skip through it, then the entire "PVR commercial theft" issue gets thrown right out the window. If people looked forward to commercials, they would probably also be more interested in the products being advertised.
Seems that this idea might work for other industries as well. Take the music industry for instance. Produce less crap, and more people might buy the music, less money will be wasted on the so called 90% of the content that loses money, and everyone will be happy.
Why does patent law allow this? JPEG has been around for YEARS! This is not something that somebody started using yesterday. This company sat on its hands while it waited for the format to become so entrenched and standardized that the rest of the world would have no choice but to accept some form of licensing agreement.
I say, if you have a patent on something, you have a limited amount of time to claim infringement after the infringement is discovered. This way, the overall damage is minimized and other formats can be adoped or created if necessary. If this company honestly didn't know it had a patent on JPEG, it probably was a waste of money to begin with.
Its one thing to allow the most obvious ideas to be patented, but its quite another to allow someone to take advantage of a patent to fleece entire industries. That's borderline fraud.
We're playing the wrong game here. We need to have microsoft constantly chasing after US to keep up to date with the existing "standards", not the other way around. The open source community as a whole needs to be frontlining new standards. If we can keep Microsoft and other evil empires constantly playing catchup, it will severely limit the damage they can do overall. Sure, they'll play the embrace and extend game, but only if we give them enough time to do so.
If she had trained her dogs to specifically kill someone, the sentence would have been far worse. Had she enticed or commanded the dogs to kill someone, her sentence would have been far worse. This case was negligence, basically leaving a dangerous animal in a position it could cause harm to others, but not intentionally causing that harm. Big difference.
There's the thought that its almost an absolute certainty that intellegent life has evolved elsewhere, and probably in vast numbers of individual civilizations.
On the other hand, the theory goes that within a few hundred years, we'll have the ability to (and therefore probably will) send generation ships to other solar systems. If we are to assume that 500 years after each colony is settled, it launches its own generation ship to the next solar system, the entire galaxy could be colonized in a matter of a few million years. This is of course assuming that most of the colonies don't manage to kill themselves off.
The point being, since a few million years is a cosmic blink of the eye, if any intellegent life DID exist, either it should be everywhere already, or all previous incarnations have wiped themselves out before they've had a chance to travel beyond their home world. Either that, or they're leaving us alone. After all, we ARE rather far away from anything. Its possible that a 4.3 lightyear stretch is too far to consider useful. And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.
So, to recap this rant. Assuming there IS intellegent life, its already everywhere it wants to be, and either we're a part of it, or it's decided to completely leave us alone.
I still download the shows I like to watch, but I find that the small amount of trouble I go through to obtain the various episodes online is worth the effort to 1: avoid all commercials, and 2: get a clear picture. I don't have cable/sat, and from the amount of TV I watch, there's clearly no reason to waste my money on either.
Remember, advertising is only effective so long as its not annoying. People are used to the typical commercial break. Those are annoying in their own way, but they do give people the opportunity to hit the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Popups will probably be about as well received as they are on websites. I've found myself consciously avoiding sites that have popup ads, or even worse those ads that obstruct the page content. Yes, I realize there are browsers that eliminate both these "features", but I'd rather vote with my eyeballs by denying those sites the hits.
Nobody is obligated to do with their money what YOU feel is the best thing. How many of the qualities of life you take for granted today would not exist if someone hadn't "wasted" a lot of time, money, and effort on things that have "no relevance"?
I personally have no desire to float 25 miles up into the atmosphere in temperatures over a hundred degrees below freezing just so I can fall faster than the speed of sound. But if this guy wants to do it, more power to him. As long as SOMEONE is reaching higher for what nobody in their right mind would ever want to do, the rest of the world will benefit as a result, even if indirectly.
I'm not saying that funding medical research is bad. Its just as noble an endevour as any other. But to say that other reasearch does no good for the world simply because the immediate results do not, is very short sighted and reeks very badly of the "everything's already been invented" mentality. And besides, consider the fact that since he has partially funded this effort of his, the experiments he's carrying out will benefit agencies that otherwise would have to spend their own money to carry out similar experiments anyway. That means that money will be saved.. which means it might be available elsewhere, including your own personal preferred pet projects. And that's just looking at things from an immediate economic point of view.
Lets say the worst case scenario is realized and they discontinue maintaining the 2.0 kernel and someone using it in a production environment is not in a position to upgrade, and a dangerous flaw is discovered, or a driver desparately needs to be backported.
The good news is, even though its no longer supported, you STILL have all the source available. You can if you're desparate enough, either fix the code yourself or hire someone to do so. Certainly, it would probably be easier to just upgrade, but if for some reason that choice is not feasible, there's no huge company in Redmond telling you to go fuck yourself.
While some issues of patent law makes sense... the very fact that a company can sit on their hands for 10 years while waiting for a product to achieve worldwide appeal, THEN reveal that they own a patent on that product and pick up the market without doing any of the gruntwork to promote it, is just atrocious.
Microsoft knows about OpenGL. They know what it does, they know what features it supports. If it takes them 10 years to figure out they have a patent which OpenGL infringes on, then that patent was probably a waste of money, since its pretty clearly not getting a whole lot of use, or someone would have noticed it before now. Unless, of course, they wanted to wait awhile first. Unfortunately, the law lets them do just that.
I don't know about you, but if I paid $20,000 for a patent on something, and some company was going to town marketing an infringing product, you better believe I would be publically screaming about it, sending letters to cease and desist, filing motions in court. There would be none of this sitting around waiting crap. If I put forth the risk to secure the guarantee on the exclusive nature of my product, you can bet I wouldn't want another company stealing my thunder in that regard.
Now, I don't buy into patents in that manner, especially when it comes to software. yes, I can patent my mousetrap, but if someone makes a better mousetrap, they have that right, free and clear, and I'm not guaranteed anything from there. You can't patent ideas. So you wrote a vertex shader. Good for you. Unless I'm copying your source code, its not a legal issue. And even if I am, its a copyright issue. The ability to patent algorithms is all but silly.
However, as it stands, that's the way the law wants to work. Fine. But if you've patented some silly algorithm, you better not sit on your hands while someone else does a lot of hard work to develop it in parallel, promotes it, perhaps even patents it (a patent office that allows you to patent the wheel and swing motions cannot be trusted to catch duplicate patents), and sells it, only to step in later and tell them to hand it all over. There needs to be a time limit on making claims once knowledge of the product is discovered. Not knowledge of your own patents, you're already supposed to know about those. That's what legal departments are for. Wait longer than 6 months, you forfeit the right to claim infringement later.
What about after the conference is over? At least at the conference the actions aren't malicious, they're just demonstrated to prove a point. Implementing proper procedures to the employees and making sure they're followed EXACTLY would go a long way toward preventing social engineering. This is NOT a new problem, and it also underscores the simple fact that the least secure part of any network is the user.
It doesn't take very long to realize you're getting slashdotted if you're paying attention. If he were properly motivated (and I'm sure he was), he could have the "slashdot friendly" webpage version prepared in under 5 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and others should realize this. They can let the educational institutions run rampant with piracy if they want, and it wouldn't make much of an effect. Those who want to pirate will do so. There's not a whole lot stopping them. Those that insist on being in full compliance may do so by investigating alternatives. In the end, it makes no difference to the school. What it makes a difference to is the IP owners of the software being used.
Those students are going to use the software in school then go out into the workforce and use the software that they're familiar with. This means that employers are going to be using the software that most of the workforce is familiar with. And the corporations are much more likely to spend the cash on software than the starving college student is.
You're not going to make the money from the student or even the institution. You're going to make it from that corporation that will be spending the next 20 years buying upgrades. And when that graduate goes home from work, he's going to buy a copy to use at home. You'll lock that person in. To deny yourself that legacy by forcing the first purchase of a potential many, you risk losing all those subsequent sales, a foolish prospect indeed.
-Restil
LWN's problem, as the market stands today, is that a website by itself is unable to bring in sufficient revenue to support full time employees, let alone multiple full time employees. Even considering the $12K in donations, that will not last more than a month, by their salary standards, and chances are good that will not be a repeating phenomenon as the slashdot link was probably responsible for a good part of it.
Advertising as they've stated won't cover their expenses. And the level of advertising that will probably will be so annoying that it will drive off too many people. I've noticed this problem with my own site. Even a small banner ad would clutter up the page too much, and would probably bring me less than $100 a month anyway.
Subscriptions are a possibility assuming anyone would pay them. $1 a month from every one of the lwn regulars would pay their requested salaries with NO problem. However, most people won't subscribe even if they feel the content is worth it. There is plenty of material out there for free. Being forced to support something doesn't usually win you many fans.
You could always gather personal data and sell it to marketers, but that's just slimy and will piss people off more than subscriptions would.
Then there are donations. While donations are great so long as they're completely unconditional, that's not always the case. I've got people that bitch because I don't have a domain. So every once in a while someone offers to send me $10 so I can get one. Problem is, I won't spend that $10 on a domain, I'll use it to pay my water bill, rent, or something else that's far more important to me than a domain is. That donator would feel shafted, and I would understand that. If his money was going to the site itself, the donation would be justified, but when it goes to pay for my own peronal expenses, it feels more like charity. Donations would certainly help, but the added burden of assumed obligation would create more problems than its worth. In LWN's case, its pretty clear that the donations are going to pay salaries and not much else. But from the tone of their most recent report on the issue, it would seem that some people might not have been aware of that fact.
The only option that *I* have found that would be reasonable to me and my visitors would be merchandising. Either selling site specific novelty items, or selling useful equipment. Profits from these sales could then fund both the
site and partially fund my salary, but with sales you open a new can of worms. You have customer relations, ordering, payments, warranty issues, shipment tracking, etc. Its a full time job just maintaining something like that on any significant scale. Which means that a substancial amount of the immediate profit gets churned back into the business of producing, packaging, and selling, which means, if I'm doing it, is a lot less time I'm spending on the site, which was the whole point of searching for extra revenue in the first place. Of course, to make it easy on myself, I could just take payments by check only and offer no warranty whatsoever on what I sell. A lot of people would turn away from this, but at least the cost of bringing in extra revenue would not exceed the revenue itself, and those that wish to "donate" at least get something tangible in return, regardless how I actually choose to spend the money.
-Restil
He was demonstrating to a county official AND a reporter. That somewhat implies that this wasn't a behind closed doors, tiger team type evaluation on the network. This wasn't just a "hey, I accidently noticed you left your network wide open. Might wanna fix that". If there was a reporter there, someone's toes were probably getting stepped on. The security analyst doesn't deserve to get charges pressed against him, but he should have gotten something in writing from the officials BEFORE demonstrating illegal activity.
Although the metaphors aren't identical, if I reported to the police, or a homeowner that they've been leaving their doors unlocked, someone at some point will probably ask me how I know that. Computer security is taken rather seriously these days. There seems to be no effort in making sure there is any, but they sure like to rake you over the coals for any alleged violation of it. When the "victim" happens to be the government, especially the court system, that will just up the stakes even more.
Its unfortunate that this has to happen. But if your less than legitimate activities happen to result in useful information for somebody, don't think that the simple act of good faith by handing that information over will clear the slate for you. Either do it anonymously or get immunity first. Or just keep your mouth shut.
-Restil
Yes, I know we always talk about trying to get linux to run on an older computer, but gutting the case and replacing the innards is cheating. :)
As far as appeal goes, consider you're intentionally purchasing a machine with limited upgrade options. In order to minimize the footprint, the boards won't have many PCI slots, and its debatable if they could be used anyway in that case. While old computer cases can probably be picked up for free, or very very cheap, there's still the labor cost of adapting them to fit modern components. That's going to jack the price a bit, not to mention a power supply will still be required, which is typically a good percentage of the case cost.
Of course, people buying one of these are probably doing it for the novelty purposes and not because they're concerned about cost or usability.
-Restil
Constantly, the money that companies are forced to spend on recovering from various infrastructure attacks are should not always be referred to as "losses". Certainly, if someone broke into your building and stole something, that is a loss. But if your entire corporate network is down for two days while your IT department is working overtime and the rest of the company is not, while getting paid, this is not a loss. This is an operating expense. This is part of the expected cost of using software that has well known vulnerabilities. This is part of that "total cost of ownership" that Microsoft is only so proud to bring up when discussing their software prices when compared with those of competitors.
So for now on, don't suggest that companies LOSE this money whenever they're attacked. This is just part of the total cost of ownership when you run insecure software, and when you hire substandard IT personel, and when you don't have reasonable company policies regarding non-business related applictions.
Companies can take the cheap way out. They can put Windows boxes in front of every employee of the company, content that everyone can quickly figure out what to do with minimal expense. Hire some just out of college whackjobs with no useful experience to run the network. They're cheap afterall. Nobody to train, nobody to waste money on. No need to spend money on security audits. That's just wasted money. Of course, you'll "lose" all of it the first time someone hits you, but that's the way you've decided to budget your technical department. You get what you pay for.
-Restil
I don't agree with this policy to ANY extent, but if the limit of the damage they could do was isolated to ONLY the individual host that was causing the infraction, the problem would be minimal. However, this type of action will also affect the ISP, because they have to handle all the additional traffic. If the infringing files are located on a webhosting system, the MPAA would have to take out the entire system to do any good, and I can guarantee you that the owners of that system will NOT be pleased to find out that they can't even legally prosecute the entity that caused them to be down for two days.
My other thought, does this work both ways? If the MPAA so much as even slightly infringes on someone's copyright, we're allowed to DOS them back into the stoneage... right?
How are they connected to the internet? Or more importantly, what resources do they plan to use for these attacks? Unless they're REALLY huge, and I don't think they are, they will have to use an intermediate ISP of some type. That ISP will be FLOODED with abuse complaints. How long do you think they'll go on supporting this? Imagine that any ISP that connects the MPAA loses 50% of their other customers. How long before the MPAA is unable to get an internet connection at all?
-Restil
The article is somewhat confusing in this matter. It mentions that he was selling pirated games, and the conviction seems to take that into account to some degree, but nothing else is said about the matter. The mod chip issue might be a bit of a grey area, but if he's selling pirated games, that's pretty black and white, and probably what had drawn attention to himself in the first place. I don't know the canadian laws in this matter. I don't even know the US laws regarding mod chips, so I'm going to present two possible scenarios here. Either the possession, sale, installation, or use of mod chips is illegal in and of itself, or sale of these chips with intent to commit another crime in the process (selling pirated games) is the actual crime.
Owning and possessing tools to assist in a burglary is not illegal if you are obeying the law. However, if you break into something or some place while in possession, there are extra charges that can be applied because of your possession of the otherwise legal tools. Same goes with possession of firearms during a robbery. The tools themselves may be legal as long as no crimes are being committed.
Just a thought
-Restil
I wouldn't worry about it. When your project is at a stage you feel comfortable with the source and the functionality of the program, go ahead and release it, and let others do with it what they will. If they submit patches/features/ideas, use them or don't use them as you see fit. You're more than welcome to contribute source to the masses without any expectations of continued support. Thats the beauty of the open source philosophy. If the original authors don't want to/can't support it, someone else can pick it up and run with it. If it forks, so be it. Obviously the project is for you. Make it into whatever you want it to be. If others have a different vision than yours, they can fork it into a new project with different goals, and in the end, everyone has benefited. Or they can use features from your program in a completely unrelated project. Or you might inspire someone to create something new, even if they don't share your code.
In any event, when the program (and you) are ready, release it to the world, and worry about maintaining the program with submissions from others if and when they come in.
-Restil
Maybe I missed something. From what I can tell, the police obtained the account name and password, logged in, and removed the offending material from the user's account. No "servers" were shut down in the process, and the hosting company wasn't even aware of it.
I suppose if the account holder later calls back in to complain, there's something. But it WAS his account that was used. If the police were able to find out his password, he should have made better efforts to conceal it. As it stands, no legal action was taken against the hosting company, they weren't even burdened with a request to remove anything.
I guess I'm just not getting TOO excited about this.
-Restil
I know this is a Troll, and probably has already been mentioned. But just for morbit curiosity's sake, I entered the word CDROM into the search field on slashdot, clicked submit. And what do you know! The duplicate article was #4. FOUR!
This took me all of 5 seconds to check. This
wasn't something about Microsoft that would be buried 10 pages back, no. This shows up at the upper half of the upper quarter of the list of responses to a simple 10 second (I wonder if we did this before) check.
I know dupes are going to happen from time to time. With several editors, its impossible for all of them to know off the top of their heads if the article has been posted before. Even if it were only one person, I still wouldn't hold it against them that much. But some modicum of effort should be taken to at least avoid looking like a complete moron. This means, make sure its not still on the front page somewhere (this includes the older stuff links), make sure you can't find it in the search list with one or two
of the common topics of the article, and perhaps,
if possible, do a quick check on the URL to see if its been mentioned before.
-Restil
The RIAA represents a business model that might not be necessary anymore. As many have stated many times before, the artists make their money from concerts, merchendise, and other outlets, and not so much from the sale of CDs that you buy in the music stores. Those CDs are almost completely for the expressed purpose of marketing the artist so they can make money elsewhere. CDs are the RIAA's baby.
Its possible, we simply don't need them anymore. Distribute everything in mp3 and cut out the recording industry completely. It wouldn't hurt the artists any, and it would completely eliminate the whole piracy issue. Of course, there is a chance that the RIAA DOES provide a useful service, but I find it hard to believe that artists won't be able to get coverage if the RIAA isn't around to support them. Radio will still play the good stuff, and they will actually go looking for the good stuff. People will send in good stuff for them to play. It'll happen. It can work, and the RIAA and the companies it represents simply don't need to exist.
Of course, I'm sure they have a different opinion in the matter, but times change. Industry changes. And they had a good run. But its ending. It might be in their best interests if they realize that now and change to match the way the world is going, or they're going to become the insignificant righteous.
-Restil
You're partially correct. However, it isn't the amount of the exec salary that is the problem. Its the salary cap. Exec salaries over $1 million can't be deducted. Now you can debate until you're blue in the face what a proper exec salary is, but in the end, it comes down to, whatever the company is willing to pay and whatever the exec is willing to work for. The marketplace at work.
However, by implementing a cap on the salary, the corporations are forced to find alternative ways to make up the difference. They're not going to throw money away to the government, so they pay the execs with stock options instead. Now, stock options for the regular employee aren't always a bad thing. It builds company loyalty, and gives the employees an extra reason to go the extra mile. However, with execs, the situation is different. A lowly employee typically would be unable to cause a massive shift in the stock price by anything he/she is able to do. However, execs can. They have full control over the corporation, including what the public finds out about. And since they also have control over how the accounting system works, and their salaries depend on the stock price always going up, they're going to manipulate (to the razor's edge of legality if necessary) the accounting to maximize the value of their options.
There might be another reason why this happened, that didn't have much to do with executive greed. Worldcom screwed up, but its possible that they didn't actually do anything illegal. A lot of expenses CAN legitimately be expensed over 10 years, even labor in some cases. Ultimately, it wouldn't matter, they just pay the expenses over a longer period of time. In the dot com boom, they had a desparate need to expand quickly, so they depreciated the expenses, which is permitted, and wouldn't have had such a dramatic effect, except for one small problem. The bubble burst, and their steadily increasing revenue stream suddenly fell far short of where it should be.
Now, Worldcom isn't in bad shape, they're just deep in debt. Its still a viable corporation with a healthy revenue stream, and given enough time and some responsible financial management, it would recover from this without any problem. However, in the wake of Enron, there was a pressing need to find and disclose all potential problems, and with these new startling revelations, the creditors are suddenly panicing and pulling their lines of credit. Hence their
current situation.
What's potentially scary about this, as of yesterday, you could purchase a controlling share of Worldcom for about $10 million. Of course, the low price is due to the impending bankrupcy. However, as daunting as the billions of dollars of debt might seem, Worldcom is still a viable company for someone who might be able to refinance the debt. Know of any large software companies that have that much working cash available?? Who might want to own a significant percentage of the backbone? Think its too far fetched??
-Restil
And its not worth much, but here goes. I've found, from searching and testing, and trying, that most of the linux desktop/window managers have one thing in common. They tend to focus on eyecandy without as much effort on the useability. I tend to pride myself on the fact that most applications I can sit down and tinker with for 5 minutes and have all figured out. It took me longer than that to figure out how to maximise a window in E the first time. Of course, once I know HOW to do it, its not a problem, but Linux will never make the desktop if the average user has as much trouble as I did. The desktop should not be the most difficult application to figure out. Yes, I know RTMF, and yes, all those helpful popup help windows were there to guide me.
Indeed quite a few window managers are as easy to figure out as Windows, primarily because they look just like it. For better or worse it seems to be a rather intuitive interface. Either that, or everyone's gotten so used to it over the years that its become second nature.
Effort with the intent to spur the Linux desktop should be placed in developing an interface more intuitive than the standard. One that any joe user with half a brain can sit down at for the first time and figure out with a minimum of frustration. At the same time, keep it configurable enough to not be completely ignored by the more advanced crowd.
-Restil
That someone that won't take the effort to keep his system patched, won't run zonealarm or virus scanners, and happily contributes day after day to the sircams, iloveyou's, melissa's, and others, but THIS someone will take the initiative to run the government's software. How is THAT supposed to happen?
:)
Of course, if they bundle it with Kazza, it might be effective. Heavens only knows, a good percentage of the computers in the world install all the spyware crap, it couldn't really hurt any more. All security aside, I have my own problems with running government software on my personal computers, but thats beside the point.
-Restil
Probably not a NEW idea. The media companies are worried about losing revenue due to fewer people watching commercials. Tell me something, why do people skip through the commercials? Its very simple. THEY DON'T WANT TO WATCH THEM. Yet for some reason, there's a large demographic of people that watch the Superbowl ONLY for the commercials.
What it all rolls down to is this, people watch TV to be entertained. With exception of the Superbowl, commercial breaks are lulls in the entertainment experience. They're a necessary evil, and people are willing to tolerate them as long as they have to, but the second they have an option to skip through them, they don't hesitate.
The secret here, ladies and gentlemen, is to create commercials that are WORTH WATCHING. If your commercial is so entertaining that someone is willing to watch it rather than skip through it, then the entire "PVR commercial theft" issue gets thrown right out the window. If people looked forward to commercials, they would probably also be more interested in the products being advertised.
Seems that this idea might work for other industries as well. Take the music industry for instance. Produce less crap, and more people might buy the music, less money will be wasted on the so called 90% of the content that loses money, and everyone will be happy.
Or maybe I'm just out of my tree.
-Restil
Why does patent law allow this? JPEG has been around for YEARS! This is not something that somebody started using yesterday. This company sat on its hands while it waited for the format to become so entrenched and standardized that the rest of the world would have no choice but to accept some form of licensing agreement.
I say, if you have a patent on something, you have a limited amount of time to claim infringement after the infringement is discovered. This way, the overall damage is minimized and other formats can be adoped or created if necessary. If this company honestly didn't know it had a patent on JPEG, it probably was a waste of money to begin with.
Its one thing to allow the most obvious ideas to be patented, but its quite another to allow someone to take advantage of a patent to fleece entire industries. That's borderline fraud.
-Restil
We're playing the wrong game here. We need to have microsoft constantly chasing after US to keep up to date with the existing "standards", not the other way around. The open source community as a whole needs to be frontlining new standards. If we can keep Microsoft and other evil empires constantly playing catchup, it will severely limit the damage they can do overall. Sure, they'll play the embrace and extend game, but only if we give them enough time to do so.
-Restil
If she had trained her dogs to specifically kill someone, the sentence would have been far worse. Had she enticed or commanded the dogs to kill someone, her sentence would have been far worse. This case was negligence, basically leaving a dangerous animal in a position it could cause harm to others, but not intentionally causing that harm. Big difference.
-Restil
When it comes to Drake related wonderings.
There's the thought that its almost an absolute certainty that intellegent life has evolved elsewhere, and probably in vast numbers of individual civilizations.
On the other hand, the theory goes that within a few hundred years, we'll have the ability to (and therefore probably will) send generation ships to other solar systems. If we are to assume that 500 years after each colony is settled, it launches its own generation ship to the next solar system, the entire galaxy could be colonized in a matter of a few million years. This is of course assuming that most of the colonies don't manage to kill themselves off.
The point being, since a few million years is a cosmic blink of the eye, if any intellegent life DID exist, either it should be everywhere already, or all previous incarnations have wiped themselves out before they've had a chance to travel beyond their home world. Either that, or they're leaving us alone. After all, we ARE rather far away from anything. Its possible that a 4.3 lightyear stretch is too far to consider useful. And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.
So, to recap this rant. Assuming there IS intellegent life, its already everywhere it wants to be, and either we're a part of it, or it's decided to completely leave us alone.
-Restil
I still download the shows I like to watch, but I find that the small amount of trouble I go through to obtain the various episodes online is worth the effort to 1: avoid all commercials, and 2: get a clear picture. I don't have cable/sat, and from the amount of TV I watch, there's clearly no reason to waste my money on either.
Remember, advertising is only effective so long as its not annoying. People are used to the typical commercial break. Those are annoying in their own way, but they do give people the opportunity to hit the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Popups will probably be about as well received as they are on websites. I've found myself consciously avoiding sites that have popup ads, or even worse those ads that obstruct the page content. Yes, I realize there are browsers that eliminate both these "features", but I'd rather vote with my eyeballs by denying those sites the hits.
-Restil
Nobody is obligated to do with their money what YOU feel is the best thing. How many of the qualities of life you take for granted today would not exist if someone hadn't "wasted" a lot of time, money, and effort on things that have "no relevance"?
I personally have no desire to float 25 miles up into the atmosphere in temperatures over a hundred degrees below freezing just so I can fall faster than the speed of sound. But if this guy wants to do it, more power to him. As long as SOMEONE is reaching higher for what nobody in their right mind would ever want to do, the rest of the world will benefit as a result, even if indirectly.
I'm not saying that funding medical research is bad. Its just as noble an endevour as any other. But to say that other reasearch does no good for the world simply because the immediate results do not, is very short sighted and reeks very badly of the "everything's already been invented" mentality. And besides, consider the fact that since he has partially funded this effort of his, the experiments he's carrying out will benefit agencies that otherwise would have to spend their own money to carry out similar experiments anyway. That means that money will be saved.. which means it might be available elsewhere, including your own personal preferred pet projects. And that's just looking at things from an immediate economic point of view.
-Restil
Lets say the worst case scenario is realized and they discontinue maintaining the 2.0 kernel and someone using it in a production environment is not in a position to upgrade, and a dangerous flaw is discovered, or a driver desparately needs to be backported.
The good news is, even though its no longer supported, you STILL have all the source available. You can if you're desparate enough, either fix the code yourself or hire someone to do so. Certainly, it would probably be easier to just upgrade, but if for some reason that choice is not feasible, there's no huge company in Redmond telling you to go fuck yourself.
-Restil
While some issues of patent law makes sense... the very fact that a company can sit on their hands for 10 years while waiting for a product to achieve worldwide appeal, THEN reveal that they own a patent on that product and pick up the market without doing any of the gruntwork to promote it, is just atrocious.
Microsoft knows about OpenGL. They know what it does, they know what features it supports. If it takes them 10 years to figure out they have a patent which OpenGL infringes on, then that patent was probably a waste of money, since its pretty clearly not getting a whole lot of use, or someone would have noticed it before now. Unless, of course, they wanted to wait awhile first. Unfortunately, the law lets them do just that.
I don't know about you, but if I paid $20,000 for a patent on something, and some company was going to town marketing an infringing product, you better believe I would be publically screaming about it, sending letters to cease and desist, filing motions in court. There would be none of this sitting around waiting crap. If I put forth the risk to secure the guarantee on the exclusive nature of my product, you can bet I wouldn't want another company stealing my thunder in that regard.
Now, I don't buy into patents in that manner, especially when it comes to software. yes, I can patent my mousetrap, but if someone makes a better mousetrap, they have that right, free and clear, and I'm not guaranteed anything from there. You can't patent ideas. So you wrote a vertex shader. Good for you. Unless I'm copying your source code, its not a legal issue. And even if I am, its a copyright issue. The ability
to patent algorithms is all but silly.
However, as it stands, that's the way the law wants to work. Fine. But if you've patented some silly algorithm, you better not sit on your hands while someone else does a lot of hard work to develop it in parallel, promotes it, perhaps even patents it (a patent office that allows you to patent the wheel and swing motions cannot be
trusted to catch duplicate patents), and sells it, only to step in later and tell them to hand it all over. There needs to be a time limit on making claims once knowledge of the product is discovered. Not knowledge of your own patents, you're already supposed to know about those. That's what legal departments are for. Wait longer than 6 months, you forfeit the right to claim infringement later.
At least, that's how it should be.
-Restil
What about after the conference is over? At least at the conference the actions aren't malicious, they're just demonstrated to prove a point. Implementing proper procedures to the employees and making sure they're followed EXACTLY would go a long way toward preventing social engineering. This is NOT a new problem, and it also underscores the simple fact that the least secure part of any network is the user.
-Restil
It doesn't take very long to realize you're getting slashdotted if you're paying attention.
If he were properly motivated (and I'm sure he was), he could have the "slashdot friendly" webpage version prepared in under 5 minutes.
-Restil