74% said big companies have too much political influence...
This is the main problem. Corporations have basically been able to buy laws that make "fair use" a thing of the past, and allow trademarks to last for eternity.
Nobody in government appears willing to be a
champion of individual or public rights anymore.
I may not be able to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, but it's sad that free speech has been curtailed to the point that I can't publish some
DeCSS source code. Even though the U.S. had
laws against exporting encryption software for many years, it was still very legal to print out the source code for that software and export that
printout! They seemed to be very careful about the free-speech aspects when they wrote that law,
but nobody seems to care about that any more.
I saw some of those games, and in the ones I didn't, the title alone made it obvious that they were direct ripoffs. I have to side with Hasbro on this one.
If I understand correctly, all of these games are
original works. That is, they don't share any
source code with the "original" games, and they don't violate any trademarked images or titles.
This is a VERY bad precedent. It's not much of a
stretch from writing a clone of a game, to writing
a clone of ANY program!
Thankfully, this appears to have been a settlement
and therefore does not set a legal precedent. Also, I think there are actually contrary legal
precedents (Apply trying to sue Microsoft over the
original Windows interface). I would guess that
these little game companies gave in simply because
they didn't have the money to fight the suit.
The encryption was a trade secret which is more or less fair game once the cat's out of the bag.
No, the encryption was intellectual property, like any copyrighted source code. The code to Windows 2000 isn't a "trade secret," and even if it was, you still violate the law by stealing that trade secret.
No, the encryption was an algorithm that was reverse-engineered. Nobody saw the source code that implemented that algorithm, therefore copyright law does not come into play. The encryption algorithm, to my understanding, was not patented. Therefore, patent law does not come into play. It was merely a trade secret. It is legal to reverse-engineer anything that isn't patented.
Of course the DMCA overrides this, and makes it illegal to reverse engineer encryption schemes. My only point is that copyrighted source code has nothing to do with this case, and that no trade secrets were stolen - they were reverse engineered.
I'm currently using a 486DX2-66 with a couple NE2000 clone cards as a NAT/firewall, and it works wonderfully. You just don't need much processing power to do simple firewalling and routing.
But also, there's probably no reason why you couldn't setup ipchains on your main box. I think either solution would work well. You can simply
tell ipchains to block all incoming tcp connections (except for specific ports that you want), and you'll have a lot more peace-of-mind.
I think it's pretty safe to assume that if they're going to stop people from establishing vpn's to work, that they'll be looking for the most common ones. In a word, they'll be looking for Microsoft PPTP connections.
Just trick them? Use one of the other less well known vpn solutions, like VPND. I've been using vpnd for well over a year now, and it works wonderfully. Just pick a non-standard port, and they'll never even know to look for it.
No one forced them to become cops, this is the job that they chose.
Very true.
Just because they might have to risk their lives (which a vast majority of cops never do)...
No, the vast majority do risk their lives. Every single day.
Try to imagine yourself in the cop's position. Someone's speeding, and you pull them over. You have no idea why they're speeding. They could simply be late for church. They may have just stolen the car. They may have just robbed a store. They may have just committed murder.
You approach the car. The windows are tinted. Is there somebody else in the car? Do they have guns?
That is what it means to put your life at risk every day. If soldiers are told to march through a minefield, it doesn't matter if that minefield contains 1000 mines, 1 mine, or 0 mines. They are still putting their lives at risk, and must approach the job the same way.
...doesn't give them the right to violate the laws of the USA.
Very, very true. But as others have posted, it seems that his rights weren't violated, and that this was a reasonable search under the fourth amendment.
Mozilla - please use tar correctly!!!!
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 5
Mozilla maintainers - please, PLEASE, when you are creating a mozilla tarball, make the top level directory something like "mozilla-M17", or even "mozilla". When I untar that archive, I do NOT expect it to create a directory called "package". Please follow the lead of every other well-behaved program installed from tarballs.
</rant>
Many people thought then, as they do now, that if enough people do it, how can they make it illegal? Well, last I checked, Marijuana is still illegal, despite how many people have used it.,
However, this attitude allowed "drug users" to win America's first war on drugs
You're creating another War on Drugs...
Come now. That's like someone beating up his wife and saying that she made him do it.
I think you're confusing a scam with a hoax. A hoax is meant to be a joke on people that results in no harm, except possibly to the pride of the humor-impaired.
Where, exactly, are you supposed to draw this line? If play a prank that results in someone's death, you can be convicted for manslaughter, and if you run a hoax that results in someone losing money, you should be prosecuted for fraud.
Simple. It's exactly as you've stated - you draw the line at causing harm!
This little hoax did not cause you any harm, now did it? What, are you upset that you fell for it? Are you mad that you wasted several hours trying to order one?
Do you just think that all deception needs to be outlawed? Are you really that humor-impaired???
Can you stop talking about hypothetical MLM schemes and failed S&L's and tell me exactly how this particular little hoax caused you harm?
It seems all people have for me these days is personal attacks...
Ok. Hoaxers and people with twisted, sadistic senses of humor. Fair enough?
That's a bit hipocritical.
I've seen plenty of hoaxes that had all the credibility in the world (I did plenty of research) until the hoaxers revealed the hoax.
But this wasn't one of them, now was it?
I think you're confusing a scam with a hoax. A hoax is meant to be a joke on people that results in no harm, except possibly to the pride of the humor-impaired.
A scam is meant to trick people into doing something, and usually results in financial loss for the victim.
Yes, your honor, the S&L did take all my money and not return any of it.
Sorry, but S&L's were not hoaxes. They were either scams or simply bad businesses.
I said the spirit of the GPL - not the Stallmanesque propaganda.
Sorry, but the GPL is a document, not some spiritual being. And if you go and read the document, you'll see that it is absolutely, positively NOT against selling the software for money.
I know that RMS would disagree with me, and that's fine. He disagrees with a lot of rational arguements.
Perhaps, but how you can invoke the "spirit" of the GPL, and then call your argument "rational", is beyond me.
In motor mode, the force is the cross product of field direction and current flow, in other words east/west along the orbital path...
If the object attached to the tether has significantly more mass than the tether itself, wouldn't this force simply cause the tether to be moved from an up-down position into an east-west position? Unless it is rigid or much more massive than the spacecraft, how could it ever be used to provide acceleration to a spacecraft?
The force acts on any charged particle moving through a magnetic field (including electrons moving in a wire), in a direction perpendicular to both the direction of current flow and the magnetic field vector.
This doesn't sound right. If the tether is hanging up or down (and thus the current flow is up-down), the magnetic field is north-south (assuming we're above the equator), then according to this, the force would be in an east or west direction, right?
It's been a while since I've had a physics class, but the force is perpendicular to the magnetic field and the velocity, right? If the magnetic field is north-south, and the velocity is east-west (assuming orbit above the equator), then the force (and electron flow) would be up-down.
But also, this means I have to be moving in relation to the magnetic field. So at what speed is the magnetic field "rotating"? Same as the Earth's rotation? If so, then this technology would not work for satellites in geosynchronous orbit, right?
The entire body of main is the entire source file.
I think you are mistaking vpnd for some other program. If you take a look at the source code, I think you'll agree that it is a fairly well-organized program, and that there is a lot more to it than just a single main() function.
Again, the bottleneck here is the 486-66 I'm using as my vpnd server. It takes some serious horsepower to do 576-bit blowfish encryption in a reasonable timeframe. I've simply decided that I'd rather have strong encryption on my link rather than high speed.
Simply accessing the internet without using the encrypted channel from either site is blindingly fast, I assure you. The 486 is plenty quick enough for simply firewall/masquerading duty.
You have 486's doing 576 bit blowfish bidirectional WHILE handling forwarding/routing/firewalling (probably chains)?
Yes, but only on the one end. The other has a snappy Pentium III.
Hard to believe that you could get anything more than ~128Kb/s out of that puppy if even that.
Quick informal test of ftp'ing a 5MB file over that connection, in the middle of the day (ie, high internet traffic), gives:
5319157 bytes received in 656 secs (7.9 Kbytes/sec)
Which works out to be 63 kb/s.
I have a cable modem at home and a dsl connection at work. It's a bit slow for remote X sessions, but it's ok for telnet traffic. I don't do much in the way of file transfers.
Maybe a DX4133 or something...
Just a lowly 486DX2-66. It probably would be a good bit faster with a Pentium, though. I should probably just knock the key size down to 128 or 256, but it just sounds so much cooler to say "I use 576-bit blowfish encryption".
Originally Blowfish was designed without the initial and final XOR-ing, so in 16-round Blowfish there were 14 entries in the P-box, totaling 56 bytes. Naturally. this was the limit for key length, and it was this number that went into the paper.
Later on, the size of the P-box was increased by 4 entries, so that now the total size of the P-box is 72 bytes, but the paper was not revised.
So the 56-byte limit may be regarded as an uncorrected typo, the extra 16 bytes are mixed with the same thoroughness as the rest of the crowd, and are in no sense easier to attack.
So the total maximum length of Blowfish key is 72 bytes (576 bits). Period, end of story.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody in government appears willing to be a champion of individual or public rights anymore.
I may not be able to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, but it's sad that free speech has been curtailed to the point that I can't publish some DeCSS source code. Even though the U.S. had laws against exporting encryption software for many years, it was still very legal to print out the source code for that software and export that printout! They seemed to be very careful about the free-speech aspects when they wrote that law, but nobody seems to care about that any more.
This is a VERY bad precedent. It's not much of a stretch from writing a clone of a game, to writing a clone of ANY program!
Thankfully, this appears to have been a settlement and therefore does not set a legal precedent. Also, I think there are actually contrary legal precedents (Apply trying to sue Microsoft over the original Windows interface). I would guess that these little game companies gave in simply because they didn't have the money to fight the suit.
Making money while I sleep...
Sounds like a nice idea.
I guess dates in the update section don't get changed for my timezone like dates on stories and comments?
Of course the DMCA overrides this, and makes it illegal to reverse engineer encryption schemes. My only point is that copyrighted source code has nothing to do with this case, and that no trade secrets were stolen - they were reverse engineered.
But also, there's probably no reason why you couldn't setup ipchains on your main box. I think either solution would work well. You can simply tell ipchains to block all incoming tcp connections (except for specific ports that you want), and you'll have a lot more peace-of-mind.
Just trick them? Use one of the other less well known vpn solutions, like VPND. I've been using vpnd for well over a year now, and it works wonderfully. Just pick a non-standard port, and they'll never even know to look for it.
Try to imagine yourself in the cop's position. Someone's speeding, and you pull them over. You have no idea why they're speeding. They could simply be late for church. They may have just stolen the car. They may have just robbed a store. They may have just committed murder.
You approach the car. The windows are tinted. Is there somebody else in the car? Do they have guns?
That is what it means to put your life at risk every day. If soldiers are told to march through a minefield, it doesn't matter if that minefield contains 1000 mines, 1 mine, or 0 mines. They are still putting their lives at risk, and must approach the job the same way.
Very, very true. But as others have posted, it seems that his rights weren't violated, and that this was a reasonable search under the fourth amendment.Mozilla maintainers - please, PLEASE, when you are creating a mozilla tarball, make the top level directory something like "mozilla-M17", or even "mozilla". When I untar that archive, I do NOT expect it to create a directory called "package". Please follow the lead of every other well-behaved program installed from tarballs.
</rant>
Now I'm curious. Can anyone post a list of some of the typo sites (preferably with links)?
That means no light goes through it...
Um, that makes for a pretty bad window.
This little hoax did not cause you any harm, now did it? What, are you upset that you fell for it? Are you mad that you wasted several hours trying to order one?
Do you just think that all deception needs to be outlawed? Are you really that humor-impaired???
Can you stop talking about hypothetical MLM schemes and failed S&L's and tell me exactly how this particular little hoax caused you harm?
I think you're confusing a scam with a hoax. A hoax is meant to be a joke on people that results in no harm, except possibly to the pride of the humor-impaired.
A scam is meant to trick people into doing something, and usually results in financial loss for the victim.
Sorry, but S&L's were not hoaxes. They were either scams or simply bad businesses.And now everyone is amazed that Linux can fit on an LS120.
It's been a while since I've had a physics class, but the force is perpendicular to the magnetic field and the velocity, right? If the magnetic field is north-south, and the velocity is east-west (assuming orbit above the equator), then the force (and electron flow) would be up-down.
But also, this means I have to be moving in relation to the magnetic field. So at what speed is the magnetic field "rotating"? Same as the Earth's rotation? If so, then this technology would not work for satellites in geosynchronous orbit, right?
Simply accessing the internet without using the encrypted channel from either site is blindingly fast, I assure you. The 486 is plenty quick enough for simply firewall/masquerading duty.
5319157 bytes received in 656 secs (7.9 Kbytes/sec)
Which works out to be 63 kb/s.
I have a cable modem at home and a dsl connection at work. It's a bit slow for remote X sessions, but it's ok for telnet traffic. I don't do much in the way of file transfers.
Just a lowly 486DX2-66. It probably would be a good bit faster with a Pentium, though. I should probably just knock the key size down to 128 or 256, but it just sounds so much cooler to say "I use 576-bit blowfish encryption".