From what I've read, many Pizza Huts and other brands owned by Tricon Global Restaurants use SCO-based servers for keeping track of sales and transferring sales data to headquarters. This can result in some rather ancient-looking machines being used for point-of-sale terminals, since it's likely difficult to find similar systems that would work with the chain's existing infrastructure. If you're in Toronto and you want to see what I mean, walk by the KFC in the Eaton Centre and get a look at the fossilized POS systems being used. I've seen them at multiple KFCs in the area, and it's a wonder they still run.
... because by establishing the levy, they'd also be effectively saying that they are not going to pursue the RIAA "shock and awe suing" campaign. Look at it as if they'd be saying, "Download all you want. We believe we're being fairly compensated."
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I remember four years ago, when a couple goons from the Canadian Recording Industry Association showed up to my media business class and handed out one of the more... biased... surveys I've seen. A friend and I did our best to provide answers that were accurate and insightful, as several of the questions were designed to elicit a limited set of answers. We never did find out if our thoughts went anywhere.
But maybe things have changed in five years. Perhaps the head cheeses have seen the light, and recognize that this thing just isn't going away.
Maybe not.
Three years ago, the president of a certain five-letter-acronym Canadian music copyright organization guest-lectured a class I took on media law. I wore my deCSS shirt to class that way, the one with "DVD CCA" with a red circle-slash symbol. The second half of the class involved a mock rights negotiation, in which I took part. When I crossed the room to take my seat prior to the simulation, he noticed my shirt and asked me what problem I had with some other group that has CCA as an acronym. I pointed out the deCSS code on my back, to which he replied, "So you believe in getting a free lunch too?"
"No, I run Linux."
That seemed to shut him up.
However, I've seen signs that it's not all doom and gloom, that pushing for these levies might be the legal equivalent of a last-ditch measure before the big orgs give up and let everyone copy small-scale to their heart's content.
Earlier this year, I had a chance to speak with an employee of said five-letter copyright organization about a certain interpretation of the law regarding the CD media levy. Specifically, I asked her if the interpretation that made copying a friend's CD barely legal was potentially legit. She stunned me by agreeing with me. I don't have any illusions that this is the interpretation the copyright orgs, or even this particular copyright org, base their actions from, but there seems to be recognition among at least a few members of the copyright cartels that information is being freed, and that people are learning how music is really produced under the control of the music cartels.
This will probably cause many small and struggling computer stores to close. The one I work at barely survived Toronto's Summer of SARS, and sales are finally starting to recover. People from outside the province get enough sticker shock when Ontario's 8% tax and the federal 7% tax are stacked on top of the posted price. If an extra 20% gets tacked on storage media, that's a 35% tax, little of which will end up going to the struggling artist, most of which will go to Bryan Fucking Adams and Celine Fucking Dion if most of it doesn't disappear into copyright board and record industry bureaucracy. When a customer mentioned this to me today, I thought he was joking. This is going to help no one, and will likely hurt many, many people who would otherwise be purchasing music and movies. Fewer people will buy storage media, which means less money will be available for businesses to pay rent and employees, which means fewer people using their wages to buy entertainment--if they end up receiving a wage at all. Basic capitalist economics--even a tree-hugging commie like me understands this cause and effect, and it's not as if that 20% will go to serve any common good in the end.
Maybe the copyright board can donate some of that 20% to Employment Insurance, because I can forsee more than a few computer retail jockeys looking for new places of employment. Want to guess how many CDs and DVDs I'll be able to purchase on the dole while I hunt for work in a place that won't get screwed over with massive tax increases that will likely not reach the artists that really need the cash yesterday? Want to guess how many hard drives and burners people, including prospective artists, will purchase? Want to guess how many demo and promo CDs Joe the Band will be able to pump out for distribution now? And when CD sales continue to fall as the homogenization of pop music continues, guess what the industry will come crying for again. I don't intend retail to be a career, but it pays the rent until I can move on to something better. I can already see how this action will harm me and the people I work with.
I appreciate the upmods... but +3, and no replies confirming or refuting? Sure, it may seem interesting, but it will just look stupid if it turns out the files are a) still there, or b) disappeared long before now.
WARNING: I'm going to vector some rumours here. Feel free to slap them down if inaccurate, as I'm too damned lazy/tired to investigate myself right now.
There are some rumours floating around the Yahoo SCOX message board that several directories containing Linux source code, such as patches and updates, are now missing from SCO's ftp server. Months ago, many people pointed out that SCO itself continued distributing copies of the kernel in support and updates directories on their ftp server. There is also speculation the strangely internal nature of this so-called DDoS attack may be part of an Ollie North operation to prevent certain evidence from falling into IBM's hands via discovery.
SCO's execs need to read The Boy Who Cried Wolf a few times, and learn the lesson within. Darl, unlike Ken Lay, does not have close friends in the White House, and probably would not escape prosecution for any illegal acts being committed under his watch at SCO.
You assume that the only reason they don't embrace Open Source is personal reluctance, not business realities.
Nope. I fully understand that business contracts and licences can prevent companies from being fully open with their specifications and interfaces. It's the job of people interested in promoting open source to convince manufacturers of any computer technology that embracing open source and freedom of information is not just a good idea, but beneficial for promoting innovation and prosperity. This goes beyond the board manufacturers, reaching to the chipmakers and firmware developers that tend to lock up their own technologies.
Short version: open source advocates need to convince hardware manufacturers that opening code, releasing specs, and issuing royalty-free patent licences when possible is ultimately better for the industry, programmers, and users than playing Can You Top This Patent Portfolio?
Don't you see / understand that to make Linux an OS with great support for a LOT of hardware, you have to convince hardware vendors their drivers will not be part of a GPL-case?
Alternatively, to keep Linux a great, free OS with great support for hardware, we need to convince hardware vendors that fully embracing open source is the way to go. It's a harder path than wimping out and changing the licence to allow binary-only drivers, but I think it would be ultimately a more rewarding one for everyone involved.
Does anyone have a calculator that can "easily" multiply these two numbers...
A pencil and paper seem to do a great job at storing the values for calculation. As for actually carrying out the calculation, that's what your brain cells are for.
I've been a member for a long time, and the content seems to be degenerating into a groupthink zealot factory with its own set of dogmas and censors.
What, you didn't join the Linux Party long ago? I'm going to have to report you to my digit group's Political Adjuster for action, comrade. The re-educators should be at your cubicle soon to take you off to the collective server farm for... maintenance duties.
Seriously, it's like others said--uncheck Caldera from preferences and be done with it. There are many other types of articles where groupthink can be detected, and it developed long ago. If you just noticed it now, you need to work on your powers of observation, or just realize that while many people around here can be described as Linux zealots, there are others that regularly get moderated up who make opposing points--good opposing points. You won't see many in the SCO threads, because Darl's Cabal seems to have done a great job making themselves and their case look like steaming crap. Hell, even the posters over at Yahoo's SCOX stock message board seem, for the most part, to see the writing on the wall.
Darl views compensation as money. Anything else must be Communist or illegal or something bad for him, since he can't leverage it into cash. This is partly due to his limited imagination, partly to his badly flawed interpretations of copyright law and the GPL.
Perhaps a better way of putting this idea is that Darl views copyright law only as a way of keeping code exclusive, instead of a way to set some defaults for handling newly created works while still allowing the author to set different terms.
Darl is saying that all rights for non profit are disabled.
More like he's saying that a code author has no right to restrict their work in such a way that it can be distributed anywhere and modified freely by anyone within the terms of the licence provided by the original author. In Darl's view, copyright law is concerned with restricting works from being distributed without compensation, not with ensuring that authors are allowed to control distribution of their work as they see fit. He can't seem to wrap his head around the fact that many people have chosen to use their rights, as authors, under copyright law, to choose a set of restrictions that promotes copying and changing of their code, as long as anyone else can do the same. He only understands copyright in terms of sales and exclusivity.
Short version: in Darl's world, you can choose to restrict your works, but you can't choose to restrict your works into openness. Everything must be proprietary and closed, everyone must view each other as competitors to be fought instead of companions to collaborate with.
This seems to be the only logical way, outside of the obvious "pump 'n dump scheme" guess, to explain Darl's view of FOSS.
I work in the retail wing of the tech world. The very first thing I recommend to people who complain of slow systems is Ad-Aware, even before I ask how much RAM their computer has, or how fast their processor is. Considering how much crap comes bundled with commonly downloaded software, it usually helps a lot just to run the spyware cleaner. A person who can't tell RAM from Rama can be easily instructed to download a helpful program from a certain site, and told in general terms why it will help. Thankfully, Ad-Aware's pretty easy to run--it even pops up a window offering to do a scan when the install is finished.
For a retail dork, I do a surprising amount of tech support on the job. Assheads that write bloated crap like spyware, and their fellow assheads that tell their employees not to help remove it, make me think I should be paid for doing someone else's damn job.
Berkely had a much stronger, classic copright case on the printed manuals for vi, netstat, etc. that would have required AT&T to apologize publicly, and hunt down and destroy all System V based User Guides (i.e ones for AT&T System V, IRIX, HP-UX, etc. etc.)
And in this case, while it appears SCO may toss around rhetoric and "derivative" claims to argue that the BSD-AT&T settlement is void, Berkeley may already have a rock-solid copyright infringement case against SCO.
Anyone remember SCO showing parts of the Berkeley Packet Filter as part of the code SCO claims is illegally part of Linux? With the BSD-required copyright notices stripped?
SCO looking for more lawsuits is like George Bush asking Iraqi insurgents to "bring it on"--a dumb, provocative statement that can cause nothing but more pain for everyone involved.
The bus is the transportation of choice for poor people.
Or for people who don't want to blow thousands of dollars on gas and repairs every year, or for people who can never drive due to disability reasons (raises hand), or for people who don't want to contribute to overpowering car culture, or for people who don't want to contribute to smog. Your post is so narrow-minded, I have to assume you're trolling. The alternative does not reflect well on your intelligence or range of life experiences. Or, to use a Slashdot cliche, "I can't drive a car, you insensitive clod!"
Linux and the BSDs might better be described as the operating systems of choice for people who really know how much Windows is worth, and act accordingly.
This response from "Mark" was obviously almost casual in nature, so it's not a stretch to think that he may have accidentally contradicted himself with his words.
Well, then he went and contradicted himself in the official response as well:
Unfortunately, he's not telling the truth. What is happening is simply attempted extortion. He didn't contact us, never has, and has been harassing us for over a year.
At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file.
So, which is it? Has he never contacted Gamespy, or did they appreciate his bug alerts enough to send him a thank-you letter? And are they bugs, or features?
When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work.
Perhaps he's simply too flustered to get the facts straight, in either his reply to Hunter or in the official reply. I'll hand him that possibility.
Luigi says he never heard from Gamespy, and they never fixed the bugs he alerted them to, including some nasty buffer overflow exploits. Mark replies that they got back to him, even thanked him, but his "bugs" were really information about Gamespy's workings. He tried to extort them, so they had him booted from the company he was supposedly working for. At least, that's what I gather--the timeline presented in the official reply is muddled enough that it's hard to tell whether Luigi was doing both alerting them to bugs that they thanked him for finding and threatening to expose how their system works, or whether he did one after the other, or what.
Which would mean someone from Gamespy would have been reading his site for over a year to know he was "harassing" them, in which case, they would still know about the vulnerabilities, and still haven't moved to fix them.
Much like SCO's public statements, there is no way to spin this without looking worse. The only solution is to actually prove Luigi never, ever contacted Gamespy and that these vulnerabilities were completely unknown to the company's coders--and even then, it makes them look incompetent.
If his website is being hosted outside the United States of Insanity, he's probably clean. However, he might wish to avoid visiting the US in the near future anyway, lest he suffer Dmitry Sklyarov's fate. ElcomSoft apparently had some kind of web hosting in the US, which may have opened the way for Sklyarov's arrest. I wouldn't put it past GameSpy to argue that Luigi is still subject to US law should he ever visit the country, and that since his code and research could potentially have effects inside the US, he should be liable to prosecution.
I've heard quite a few Americans talk about getting out of the country ASAP. This is one of many reasons why I understand their desire to leave the "land of the free".
Three of the Gamespy files are listed as "contact me via e-mail", they may never have been up in the first place. RogerWilco, which was one of the targeted programs, is still up. I'm looking for any other Gamespy-related stuff that might have been C&D'd for potential future mirroring purposes.
1) Nice to another another justification for moving security research out of the US. So Alan Cox isn't a paranoid raving nut, after all... unfortunately.
2) It doesn't look like he's taken down the stuff, yet. Mirror time?
I wish that some of the accounts offered by victims of prison-rape--particularly those that caused the students so much anxiety--were made public.
I'm kind of staggered that I'm hearing about this research in an article on worst science jobs. Fuck the researchers who had to read this stuff, how about the people who had to live it? I'd say this is about as far from a rehabilitating environment as a person can get.
SCO's whole point is that the GPL is invalid (including this clause), and so they have their own case to make that the code should go to public domain.
Nope. There is no provision in law that I'm aware of allowing a judge to declare a work public domain before the copyright period (life+70 years, currently) expires, or without the explicit permission of the original author. If a judge were to actually grant this to SCO, it would effectively write a new IP law and open a can of worms regarding licences on practically any form of "intellectual property", including SCO's. Indeed, if it turned out there is misappropriated SysV code in Linux, forcing it into the public domain could form the basis of an argument that SCO's own licences on SysV no longer applied, and that code should be forced into the public domain.
SCO needs to fire its legal team, or the execs need to grow brains, before this turns into the kind of IP apocalypse RMS could only dream of.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've read, many Pizza Huts and other brands owned by Tricon Global Restaurants use SCO-based servers for keeping track of sales and transferring sales data to headquarters. This can result in some rather ancient-looking machines being used for point-of-sale terminals, since it's likely difficult to find similar systems that would work with the chain's existing infrastructure. If you're in Toronto and you want to see what I mean, walk by the KFC in the Eaton Centre and get a look at the fossilized POS systems being used. I've seen them at multiple KFCs in the area, and it's a wonder they still run.
It could be worse... but not by much.
OTOH, find me a review that really does say UnixWare rocks the shit out of... well, anything.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I remember four years ago, when a couple goons from the Canadian Recording Industry Association showed up to my media business class and handed out one of the more... biased... surveys I've seen. A friend and I did our best to provide answers that were accurate and insightful, as several of the questions were designed to elicit a limited set of answers. We never did find out if our thoughts went anywhere.
But maybe things have changed in five years. Perhaps the head cheeses have seen the light, and recognize that this thing just isn't going away.
Maybe not.
Three years ago, the president of a certain five-letter-acronym Canadian music copyright organization guest-lectured a class I took on media law. I wore my deCSS shirt to class that way, the one with "DVD CCA" with a red circle-slash symbol. The second half of the class involved a mock rights negotiation, in which I took part. When I crossed the room to take my seat prior to the simulation, he noticed my shirt and asked me what problem I had with some other group that has CCA as an acronym. I pointed out the deCSS code on my back, to which he replied, "So you believe in getting a free lunch too?"
"No, I run Linux."
That seemed to shut him up.
However, I've seen signs that it's not all doom and gloom, that pushing for these levies might be the legal equivalent of a last-ditch measure before the big orgs give up and let everyone copy small-scale to their heart's content.
Earlier this year, I had a chance to speak with an employee of said five-letter copyright organization about a certain interpretation of the law regarding the CD media levy. Specifically, I asked her if the interpretation that made copying a friend's CD barely legal was potentially legit. She stunned me by agreeing with me. I don't have any illusions that this is the interpretation the copyright orgs, or even this particular copyright org, base their actions from, but there seems to be recognition among at least a few members of the copyright cartels that information is being freed, and that people are learning how music is really produced under the control of the music cartels.
This will probably cause many small and struggling computer stores to close. The one I work at barely survived Toronto's Summer of SARS, and sales are finally starting to recover. People from outside the province get enough sticker shock when Ontario's 8% tax and the federal 7% tax are stacked on top of the posted price. If an extra 20% gets tacked on storage media, that's a 35% tax, little of which will end up going to the struggling artist, most of which will go to Bryan Fucking Adams and Celine Fucking Dion if most of it doesn't disappear into copyright board and record industry bureaucracy. When a customer mentioned this to me today, I thought he was joking. This is going to help no one, and will likely hurt many, many people who would otherwise be purchasing music and movies. Fewer people will buy storage media, which means less money will be available for businesses to pay rent and employees, which means fewer people using their wages to buy entertainment--if they end up receiving a wage at all. Basic capitalist economics--even a tree-hugging commie like me understands this cause and effect, and it's not as if that 20% will go to serve any common good in the end.
Maybe the copyright board can donate some of that 20% to Employment Insurance, because I can forsee more than a few computer retail jockeys looking for new places of employment. Want to guess how many CDs and DVDs I'll be able to purchase on the dole while I hunt for work in a place that won't get screwed over with massive tax increases that will likely not reach the artists that really need the cash yesterday? Want to guess how many hard drives and burners people, including prospective artists, will purchase? Want to guess how many demo and promo CDs Joe the Band will be able to pump out for distribution now? And when CD sales continue to fall as the homogenization of pop music continues, guess what the industry will come crying for again. I don't intend retail to be a career, but it pays the rent until I can move on to something better. I can already see how this action will harm me and the people I work with.
Thanks for nothing.
I appreciate the upmods... but +3, and no replies confirming or refuting? Sure, it may seem interesting, but it will just look stupid if it turns out the files are a) still there, or b) disappeared long before now.
WARNING: I'm going to vector some rumours here. Feel free to slap them down if inaccurate, as I'm too damned lazy/tired to investigate myself right now.
There are some rumours floating around the Yahoo SCOX message board that several directories containing Linux source code, such as patches and updates, are now missing from SCO's ftp server. Months ago, many people pointed out that SCO itself continued distributing copies of the kernel in support and updates directories on their ftp server. There is also speculation the strangely internal nature of this so-called DDoS attack may be part of an Ollie North operation to prevent certain evidence from falling into IBM's hands via discovery.
SCO's execs need to read The Boy Who Cried Wolf a few times, and learn the lesson within. Darl, unlike Ken Lay, does not have close friends in the White House, and probably would not escape prosecution for any illegal acts being committed under his watch at SCO.
You assume that the only reason they don't embrace Open Source is personal reluctance, not business realities.
Nope. I fully understand that business contracts and licences can prevent companies from being fully open with their specifications and interfaces. It's the job of people interested in promoting open source to convince manufacturers of any computer technology that embracing open source and freedom of information is not just a good idea, but beneficial for promoting innovation and prosperity. This goes beyond the board manufacturers, reaching to the chipmakers and firmware developers that tend to lock up their own technologies.
Short version: open source advocates need to convince hardware manufacturers that opening code, releasing specs, and issuing royalty-free patent licences when possible is ultimately better for the industry, programmers, and users than playing Can You Top This Patent Portfolio?
Don't you see / understand that to make Linux an OS with great support for a LOT of hardware, you have to convince hardware vendors their drivers will not be part of a GPL-case?
Alternatively, to keep Linux a great, free OS with great support for hardware, we need to convince hardware vendors that fully embracing open source is the way to go. It's a harder path than wimping out and changing the licence to allow binary-only drivers, but I think it would be ultimately a more rewarding one for everyone involved.
Does anyone have a calculator that can "easily" multiply these two numbers...
:-)
A pencil and paper seem to do a great job at storing the values for calculation. As for actually carrying out the calculation, that's what your brain cells are for.
They said "easily". They didn't say "quickly".
I've been a member for a long time, and the content seems to be degenerating into a groupthink zealot factory with its own set of dogmas and censors.
What, you didn't join the Linux Party long ago? I'm going to have to report you to my digit group's Political Adjuster for action, comrade. The re-educators should be at your cubicle soon to take you off to the collective server farm for... maintenance duties.
Seriously, it's like others said--uncheck Caldera from preferences and be done with it. There are many other types of articles where groupthink can be detected, and it developed long ago. If you just noticed it now, you need to work on your powers of observation, or just realize that while many people around here can be described as Linux zealots, there are others that regularly get moderated up who make opposing points--good opposing points. You won't see many in the SCO threads, because Darl's Cabal seems to have done a great job making themselves and their case look like steaming crap. Hell, even the posters over at Yahoo's SCOX stock message board seem, for the most part, to see the writing on the wall.
That thought occurred to me after I posted it.
Darl views compensation as money. Anything else must be Communist or illegal or something bad for him, since he can't leverage it into cash. This is partly due to his limited imagination, partly to his badly flawed interpretations of copyright law and the GPL.
Perhaps a better way of putting this idea is that Darl views copyright law only as a way of keeping code exclusive, instead of a way to set some defaults for handling newly created works while still allowing the author to set different terms.
Darl is saying that all rights for non profit are disabled.
More like he's saying that a code author has no right to restrict their work in such a way that it can be distributed anywhere and modified freely by anyone within the terms of the licence provided by the original author. In Darl's view, copyright law is concerned with restricting works from being distributed without compensation, not with ensuring that authors are allowed to control distribution of their work as they see fit. He can't seem to wrap his head around the fact that many people have chosen to use their rights, as authors, under copyright law, to choose a set of restrictions that promotes copying and changing of their code, as long as anyone else can do the same. He only understands copyright in terms of sales and exclusivity.
Short version: in Darl's world, you can choose to restrict your works, but you can't choose to restrict your works into openness. Everything must be proprietary and closed, everyone must view each other as competitors to be fought instead of companions to collaborate with.
This seems to be the only logical way, outside of the obvious "pump 'n dump scheme" guess, to explain Darl's view of FOSS.
I work in the retail wing of the tech world. The very first thing I recommend to people who complain of slow systems is Ad-Aware, even before I ask how much RAM their computer has, or how fast their processor is. Considering how much crap comes bundled with commonly downloaded software, it usually helps a lot just to run the spyware cleaner. A person who can't tell RAM from Rama can be easily instructed to download a helpful program from a certain site, and told in general terms why it will help. Thankfully, Ad-Aware's pretty easy to run--it even pops up a window offering to do a scan when the install is finished.
For a retail dork, I do a surprising amount of tech support on the job. Assheads that write bloated crap like spyware, and their fellow assheads that tell their employees not to help remove it, make me think I should be paid for doing someone else's damn job.
Berkely had a much stronger, classic copright case on the printed manuals for vi, netstat, etc. that would have required AT&T to apologize publicly, and hunt down and destroy all System V based User Guides (i.e ones for AT&T System V, IRIX, HP-UX, etc. etc.)
And in this case, while it appears SCO may toss around rhetoric and "derivative" claims to argue that the BSD-AT&T settlement is void, Berkeley may already have a rock-solid copyright infringement case against SCO.
Anyone remember SCO showing parts of the Berkeley Packet Filter as part of the code SCO claims is illegally part of Linux? With the BSD-required copyright notices stripped?
SCO looking for more lawsuits is like George Bush asking Iraqi insurgents to "bring it on"--a dumb, provocative statement that can cause nothing but more pain for everyone involved.
The bus is the transportation of choice for poor people.
Or for people who don't want to blow thousands of dollars on gas and repairs every year, or for people who can never drive due to disability reasons (raises hand), or for people who don't want to contribute to overpowering car culture, or for people who don't want to contribute to smog. Your post is so narrow-minded, I have to assume you're trolling. The alternative does not reflect well on your intelligence or range of life experiences. Or, to use a Slashdot cliche, "I can't drive a car, you insensitive clod!"
Linux and the BSDs might better be described as the operating systems of choice for people who really know how much Windows is worth, and act accordingly.
This response from "Mark" was obviously almost casual in nature, so it's not a stretch to think that he may have accidentally contradicted himself with his words.
Well, then he went and contradicted himself in the official response as well:
Unfortunately, he's not telling the truth. What is happening is simply attempted extortion. He didn't contact us, never has, and has been harassing us for over a year.
At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file.
So, which is it? Has he never contacted Gamespy, or did they appreciate his bug alerts enough to send him a thank-you letter? And are they bugs, or features?
When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work.
Perhaps he's simply too flustered to get the facts straight, in either his reply to Hunter or in the official reply. I'll hand him that possibility.
Luigi says he never heard from Gamespy, and they never fixed the bugs he alerted them to, including some nasty buffer overflow exploits. Mark replies that they got back to him, even thanked him, but his "bugs" were really information about Gamespy's workings. He tried to extort them, so they had him booted from the company he was supposedly working for. At least, that's what I gather--the timeline presented in the official reply is muddled enough that it's hard to tell whether Luigi was doing both alerting them to bugs that they thanked him for finding and threatening to expose how their system works, or whether he did one after the other, or what.
Try again?
I've been following the Red Hill Valley battle for some time now.
Wild prediction for the future: Another Oka is in the offing.
Which would mean someone from Gamespy would have been reading his site for over a year to know he was "harassing" them, in which case, they would still know about the vulnerabilities, and still haven't moved to fix them.
Much like SCO's public statements, there is no way to spin this without looking worse. The only solution is to actually prove Luigi never, ever contacted Gamespy and that these vulnerabilities were completely unknown to the company's coders--and even then, it makes them look incompetent.
Woops.
If his website is being hosted outside the United States of Insanity, he's probably clean. However, he might wish to avoid visiting the US in the near future anyway, lest he suffer Dmitry Sklyarov's fate. ElcomSoft apparently had some kind of web hosting in the US, which may have opened the way for Sklyarov's arrest. I wouldn't put it past GameSpy to argue that Luigi is still subject to US law should he ever visit the country, and that since his code and research could potentially have effects inside the US, he should be liable to prosecution.
I've heard quite a few Americans talk about getting out of the country ASAP. This is one of many reasons why I understand their desire to leave the "land of the free".
I'm guessing you live in Hamilton, Ontario?
So it would be a very good idea for him to avoid visiting the US in the near future, lest he suffer Dmitry Sklyarov's fate.
Three of the Gamespy files are listed as "contact me via e-mail", they may never have been up in the first place. RogerWilco, which was one of the targeted programs, is still up. I'm looking for any other Gamespy-related stuff that might have been C&D'd for potential future mirroring purposes.
1) Nice to another another justification for moving security research out of the US. So Alan Cox isn't a paranoid raving nut, after all... unfortunately.
2) It doesn't look like he's taken down the stuff, yet. Mirror time?
I wish that some of the accounts offered by victims of prison-rape--particularly those that caused the students so much anxiety--were made public.
I'm kind of staggered that I'm hearing about this research in an article on worst science jobs. Fuck the researchers who had to read this stuff, how about the people who had to live it? I'd say this is about as far from a rehabilitating environment as a person can get.
SCO's whole point is that the GPL is invalid (including this clause), and so they have their own case to make that the code should go to public domain.
Nope. There is no provision in law that I'm aware of allowing a judge to declare a work public domain before the copyright period (life+70 years, currently) expires, or without the explicit permission of the original author. If a judge were to actually grant this to SCO, it would effectively write a new IP law and open a can of worms regarding licences on practically any form of "intellectual property", including SCO's. Indeed, if it turned out there is misappropriated SysV code in Linux, forcing it into the public domain could form the basis of an argument that SCO's own licences on SysV no longer applied, and that code should be forced into the public domain.
SCO needs to fire its legal team, or the execs need to grow brains, before this turns into the kind of IP apocalypse RMS could only dream of.