The Fox stands up for itself pretty well - it's much better reporting than the AP story, and they got it to air weeks ago. Just because Fox sometimes comes off as a parody of a news service doesn't mean you shouldn't acknowledge when they do something right.
I mean... if you BANK online, what's so bad about voting online? Seriously.
If I bank online with a trojaned computer, and the trojan user electronically transfers money from my account, the bank has a record of where that money went which they and I can see (and investigate) at any time, and which will be investigated as soon as I notice a discrepancy in my balance or review my next bank statement.
If I vote online with a trojaned computer, then the trojan just has to get inbetween me and the voting server once, and if it does so, it's succeeded. I can't check my individual vote against the county tallies; nor will I be receiving a printed statement of my vote in the mail shortly afterward. There's no sure way to discover "Hey, someone screwed up my vote!", and no easy way to trace any discovery to the perpetrator afterward.
And needless to say, there will be lots of trojaned computers. How many internet-sweeping worms and email trojans do we get on the average year? Probably enough to throw a lot of elections.
That was a great quote to leave unchallenged:
on
CNN Reports on Diebold
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the larger voting machine makers, said "the fact of the matter is, there's empirical data to show that not only is electronic voting secure and accurate, but voters embrace it and enjoy the experience of voting that way."
This is the point where a bad reporter starts typing up the story, and a good reporter starts asking about smartcards reporting -16,000 votes. At least the AP is looking at the right story now, so hopefully eventually the right person will be looking at it.
For example, if I polled whether George W. Bush claimed that Iraq's WMDs were an imminent threat before the war, I bet a very high perception of NPR listeners would answer yes, while a very low percentage of Fox watchers would answer yes. Does that mean that Fox watchers are better informed across the board than NPR listeners?
Check out the backpedaling in their responses in the IBM and Red Hat cases. "No, we never threatened Linux users with lawsuits!" "No, we never accused IBM of copying lines of our source code!" As far as SCO is concerned, nothing they say in the media should have any sort of legal weight, and you can bet they wouldn't have any qualms about pulling the same stunt when accused of attempting to add additional restrictions to GPLed software.
Now if they try to use a defense like that against their copyright infringement, IBM and Red Hat (and anyone else who wants to bring suit) don't have to base their case on a bunch of misinterpretable statements quoted by third party reporters; they can quote an official licensing statement straight from SCO's servers to prove infringement.
Considering the wording of this in the GPL (IANAL so please correct me if I'm wrong) this paragraph effectively removes all rights for SCO to distribute ANY GPL software, not just Linux.
IANAL either, but I think that "this license" only refers to the GPL license attached to the Linux kernel. I suspect that legally the GPL license attached to Samba doesn't count as "this license" but rather as "another license with identical wording"; that would make more sense since phrases like "the Program" are also defined to mean different things in the two different licenses.
Modern schemes wouldn't be necessary because quantum cryptography would become the standard and is proven to be unbreakable by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Doesn't quantum cryptography require a point to point optic channel capable of successfully transmitting individual photons without interfering with their polarization (as well as detectors and receivers for such)? Even if people get fiber optic lines to their homes in the next few decades, I'm pretty sure we'll never see anything like that available to home users. If you want unbreakable cryptography today, you can use a one time pad with less inconvenience.
The ABM Treaty specified that unilateral withdrawal required 6 months advance notice (which the USA gave, but only after threatening to withdraw for decades); the Non-Proliferation Treaty required only 3 months (which North Korea gave, but only after they'd been repeatedly violating the treaty for years).
SCO's book value will be either billions of dollars or zero dollars after this case is over, and now we've got law professors calling their case "bizarre and ridiculous" - isn't that the sort of thing SCOX shareholders might find interesting? Yet unless you go into the discussion forums there's not a peep about it on finance.yahoo.com, fool.com... marketwatch.com is the only site I can find that's actually linking to any of these stories.
So I'm throwing out two questions:
Is there anything we can do to make the financial folks more aware of this? Every time a deceitful SCO executive makes another $100,000 stock sale to ignorant traders, Adam Smith does another 360 in his grave.
Is there some better news source I should be using for the stocks I buy? I may sound like I'm mocking the "ignorant traders", but how can I be sure I'm not inadvertently funding some con artist myself?
Each voter after voting would receive a confirmation receipt showing who he voted for (human readable)+ ser no + date etc + nonce + digitally signed (e.g. pgp), with a code for the voter to later verify online who he voted for (the voter not being easily identifiable by the code)....
Sure there are probably flaws with this.
There's one flaw: if you let the voter take a human readable receipt out of the booth, it's no longer a secret ballot, and it becomes possible to bribe, blackmail, or simply pressure someone else into voting the way you want.
If that was the price we had to pay for untamperable elections, I'd willingly pay it; but it's not. Plain old pen-and-paper voting is untamperable within a couple percentage points, which is good enough for me; I don't care too much if someone gets elected by 24% of the voting age public instead of the usual 25%.
Even electronic voting can be made untamperable: now that their website's back up (if it goes down again, check Google's cache) I'd like to post Yet Another Plug for vreceipt.com's white paper on verifiable voting receipts. Basically you give the voter a receipt which:
Lets them verify that their vote was recorded correctly inside the booth, but not outside.
Lets them verify that their (multiply encrypted) vote was included in the final tally, and lets that vote be published instantly so as to prevent any votes from being lost.
Lets them verify (given a trustworthy public random number generator) that the final tally was decrypted correctly.
Then, as long as nobody is adding votes to the final tally (so yes, we still need honest poll workers to make sure that the number of people walking into booths is the number of votes reported by the computers), the election results will be instantly countable, completely verifiable, and perfectly accurate. The only drawback is that it would require lots of expensive custom printers.
Granted, I don't expect to ever see this system in use; I suspect public-key encryption may be next to Condorcet voting on the list of "stuff too complicated to explain to the politicians"... but just reading about the possibilities puts all the "why is my broken smart card sending out negative numbers?" incompetence at Diebold in perspective.
Yes, you can. It's permitted by the reverse engineering for interoperability clause of the DMCA. Granted, there is legal precedent to the contrary, but that precedent exists because a case was brought to trial after DeCSS was written but before the Linux DVD players incorporating it were. The prosecution was lucky enough to find a technologically ignorant judge who thought that fact was important, apparantly believing that software isn't written one component at a time but rather springs fully formed from the head of Zeus.
If Linux users loudly boycott SCO clients, SCO will back down FAST.
No, they won't.
Linux users aren't enough of the population to pull off an effective boycott (except perhaps in some technology sectors where we make a disproportionate amount of purchasing decisions).
The companies you listed purchased something from a company which later got bought by a company which later turned evil. Punishing them for it would be ridiculous.
SCO isn't a technology company any more. They've never made a profit by selling products, and never will. They have enough venture capital now to finish their lawsuit regardless of what happens to their business. If by some freak chance they won these cases then their sales revenue would be a drop in the bucket that they could afford to lose. By the time they lose this case the executives will have all cashed out and won't care what happens to the company afterward.
It's still in this one (and a bunch of their other update directories), though. Not only that, but the file creation dates on some of these postdate the beginning of their attacks on IBM, and include patches from Caldera/SCO engineers.
This goes against a couple centuries of copyright law interpretation which is firmly *against* entry of any copyrighted work into the public domain without the express indication thereof by its author.
What about the AT&T / BSD case? It used to be that if you distributed your own work widely enough without any attached copyright notice, then you were effectively putting it in the public domain and couldn't take that back later. Everything up to Unix 32V is probably in that state.
Granted, this doesn't apply to Linux, which was created after that rule changed and which has always been distributed with an attached license and loads of copyright statements... but perhaps SCO is angry at discovering (from the analysis of their ignorant slide show) how much of their "valuable IP" is actually public domain and they want to try and retaliate in kind?
It's doubtful that SCO intends to let this or any of the rest of their idiotic claims get to court.
I would have thought so, too - most of what they've put out so far in the IBM case (and especially in the Red Hat case) has been backpedaling and denying the statements they've made in the public media...
But not this time. This isn't just Stowell mouthing off to some reporter again, this is a document that got filed in court and will be read by an actual judge. I can't imagine what they're thinking.
Why else would you be burying your information in such paranoid rants, if not to promote the stereotype of privacy advocates as delusional conspiracy theorists? Why else would you be accusing everyone else of being a government shill, if not to throw us off your own scent? The Feds may or may not be able to afford an army of secret Slashdot Operatives who maintain moderator status and vigilantly wait to pounce on any attempts to reveal their tire monitoring schemes, but they can certainly afford to pay one or two of you "anonymous cowards" to pop in here from time to time, planting misinformation for the rest of us.
Of course there are wrong statements in the proof - that's how proof by contradiction works! You start by assuming that what you want to disprove ("If primes are finite") and you eventually come up with a contradiction (that there is a prime which is "bigger than the biggest"). At any step after your false assumption, you may come up with more falsehoods (like "1+2*3*5*7*...*N... is prime"), but those don't make your proof wrong, they're just more consequences of using deductive logic on a false assumption.
So if the case is just dismissed then SCO will just be allowed to keep talking trash and be able to send invoices to people for nothing.
No, if the case is dismissed then SCO will still be left defending against IBM's counterclaims and Red Hat's request for a declaratory judgement. And, if SCO ever sends out invoices they will just have to defend themselves against prosecution for mail fraud as well.
It would be possible for them to own it but still have contractual limitations on how they use it, without the amendments that would probably be the case.
Even without the amendments, SCO would still have to defend it's ridiculous idea of what a "derivative work" is. Their whole case for contract violations seems to rely on the theory that IBM-written code is a derivative work of System V because parts of it were once distributed along with System V code.
If this theory were to be applied to anything other than computer code, it wouldn't pass the giggle test. Imagine if one author in a short story anthology tried to claim that all the other stories were "derivative works" of his story, or if a television producer claimed that a movie was a "derivative work" of his show because the movie producer had run a trailer during one of the TV show's commercials.
derogatory comments about the quality of Microsoft code and products
So, it's sort of like what Ballmer just did, except that it's done by frustrated users of the denigrated products instead of by someone selling the competition?
conspiracy theories about the true motives behind Microsofts intentions (always)
The true motives behind Microsoft's intentions are profit. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's capitalism, and IIRC a requirement for a publically traded company.
the slashdot crowd would eventually learn the productive and elevated response is to
A> Shrug.
And if 99% of Slashdot users take your advice, how many thousands does that leave to post in these threads?
Besides, "shrugging" is metaphorically an antonym for productive. Making snide jokes and ranting isn't any more productive, but it's more fun.
And this is the forum for it. Try deelevating yourself for a second, and look around the website. This isn't the KDE or kernel mailing lists, it's not some project's bugzilla site, and there's pretty much no work being done here that could possibly be interrupted or impeded by "Microsoft wants to charge for every reboot" jokes. It's a weblog, not a place for free software developers to change the world. It's a webpage people read for fun.
I'm sick of it, so what, everyone seems to love it, I'll just go now and click a preference and never look at the borg crap again.
Good plan. Not everybody will find the same things fun, and it's okay to accept that. I ran across a frighteningly thorough "Facts of Life" fansite the other day; that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on the comments board and tell everyone how they should enjoy their free time.
Slashdot Mirror
AC posts standing up for poor, maligned Fox News?
The Fox stands up for itself pretty well - it's much better reporting than the AP story, and they got it to air weeks ago. Just because Fox sometimes comes off as a parody of a news service doesn't mean you shouldn't acknowledge when they do something right.
I mean... if you BANK online, what's so bad about voting online? Seriously.
If I bank online with a trojaned computer, and the trojan user electronically transfers money from my account, the bank has a record of where that money went which they and I can see (and investigate) at any time, and which will be investigated as soon as I notice a discrepancy in my balance or review my next bank statement.
If I vote online with a trojaned computer, then the trojan just has to get inbetween me and the voting server once, and if it does so, it's succeeded. I can't check my individual vote against the county tallies; nor will I be receiving a printed statement of my vote in the mail shortly afterward. There's no sure way to discover "Hey, someone screwed up my vote!", and no easy way to trace any discovery to the perpetrator afterward.
And needless to say, there will be lots of trojaned computers. How many internet-sweeping worms and email trojans do we get on the average year? Probably enough to throw a lot of elections.
David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the larger voting machine makers, said "the fact of the matter is, there's empirical data to show that not only is electronic voting secure and accurate, but voters embrace it and enjoy the experience of voting that way."
This is the point where a bad reporter starts typing up the story, and a good reporter starts asking about smartcards reporting -16,000 votes. At least the AP is looking at the right story now, so hopefully eventually the right person will be looking at it.
Clearly the mods think your comment is as good as it was when someone else posted it last week.
The sound waves could easily pulverize a human's skeleton if he was unlucky enough to be within a mile of the launch pad.
Ummm... they do know the Saturn V launched manned missions, right?
For example, if I polled whether George W. Bush claimed that Iraq's WMDs were an imminent threat before the war, I bet a very high perception of NPR listeners would answer yes, while a very low percentage of Fox watchers would answer yes. Does that mean that Fox watchers are better informed across the board than NPR listeners?
No, it means that Fox watchers are better at revisionist history.
Check out the backpedaling in their responses in the IBM and Red Hat cases. "No, we never threatened Linux users with lawsuits!" "No, we never accused IBM of copying lines of our source code!" As far as SCO is concerned, nothing they say in the media should have any sort of legal weight, and you can bet they wouldn't have any qualms about pulling the same stunt when accused of attempting to add additional restrictions to GPLed software.
Now if they try to use a defense like that against their copyright infringement, IBM and Red Hat (and anyone else who wants to bring suit) don't have to base their case on a bunch of misinterpretable statements quoted by third party reporters; they can quote an official licensing statement straight from SCO's servers to prove infringement.
Considering the wording of this in the GPL (IANAL so please correct me if I'm wrong) this paragraph effectively removes all rights for SCO to distribute ANY GPL software, not just Linux.
IANAL either, but I think that "this license" only refers to the GPL license attached to the Linux kernel. I suspect that legally the GPL license attached to Samba doesn't count as "this license" but rather as "another license with identical wording"; that would make more sense since phrases like "the Program" are also defined to mean different things in the two different licenses.
Modern schemes wouldn't be necessary because quantum cryptography would become the standard and is proven to be unbreakable by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Doesn't quantum cryptography require a point to point optic channel capable of successfully transmitting individual photons without interfering with their polarization (as well as detectors and receivers for such)? Even if people get fiber optic lines to their homes in the next few decades, I'm pretty sure we'll never see anything like that available to home users. If you want unbreakable cryptography today, you can use a one time pad with less inconvenience.
What is the difference?
The ABM Treaty specified that unilateral withdrawal required 6 months advance notice (which the USA gave, but only after threatening to withdraw for decades); the Non-Proliferation Treaty required only 3 months (which North Korea gave, but only after they'd been repeatedly violating the treaty for years).
SCO's book value will be either billions of dollars or zero dollars after this case is over, and now we've got law professors calling their case "bizarre and ridiculous" - isn't that the sort of thing SCOX shareholders might find interesting? Yet unless you go into the discussion forums there's not a peep about it on finance.yahoo.com, fool.com... marketwatch.com is the only site I can find that's actually linking to any of these stories.
So I'm throwing out two questions:
Is there anything we can do to make the financial folks more aware of this? Every time a deceitful SCO executive makes another $100,000 stock sale to ignorant traders, Adam Smith does another 360 in his grave.
Is there some better news source I should be using for the stocks I buy? I may sound like I'm mocking the "ignorant traders", but how can I be sure I'm not inadvertently funding some con artist myself?
Sure there are probably flaws with this.
There's one flaw: if you let the voter take a human readable receipt out of the booth, it's no longer a secret ballot, and it becomes possible to bribe, blackmail, or simply pressure someone else into voting the way you want.
If that was the price we had to pay for untamperable elections, I'd willingly pay it; but it's not. Plain old pen-and-paper voting is untamperable within a couple percentage points, which is good enough for me; I don't care too much if someone gets elected by 24% of the voting age public instead of the usual 25%.
Even electronic voting can be made untamperable: now that their website's back up (if it goes down again, check Google's cache) I'd like to post Yet Another Plug for vreceipt.com's white paper on verifiable voting receipts. Basically you give the voter a receipt which:
Then, as long as nobody is adding votes to the final tally (so yes, we still need honest poll workers to make sure that the number of people walking into booths is the number of votes reported by the computers), the election results will be instantly countable, completely verifiable, and perfectly accurate. The only drawback is that it would require lots of expensive custom printers.
Granted, I don't expect to ever see this system in use; I suspect public-key encryption may be next to Condorcet voting on the list of "stuff too complicated to explain to the politicians"... but just reading about the possibilities puts all the "why is my broken smart card sending out negative numbers?" incompetence at Diebold in perspective.
So I can't watch DVD's in my Mandrake box?
Yes, you can. It's permitted by the reverse engineering for interoperability clause of the DMCA. Granted, there is legal precedent to the contrary, but that precedent exists because a case was brought to trial after DeCSS was written but before the Linux DVD players incorporating it were. The prosecution was lucky enough to find a technologically ignorant judge who thought that fact was important, apparantly believing that software isn't written one component at a time but rather springs fully formed from the head of Zeus.
If Linux users loudly boycott SCO clients, SCO will back down FAST.
No, they won't.
Linux users aren't enough of the population to pull off an effective boycott (except perhaps in some technology sectors where we make a disproportionate amount of purchasing decisions).
The companies you listed purchased something from a company which later got bought by a company which later turned evil. Punishing them for it would be ridiculous.
SCO isn't a technology company any more. They've never made a profit by selling products, and never will. They have enough venture capital now to finish their lawsuit regardless of what happens to their business. If by some freak chance they won these cases then their sales revenue would be a drop in the bucket that they could afford to lose. By the time they lose this case the executives will have all cashed out and won't care what happens to the company afterward.
What would IBM want with SCO?
Blood.
We're talking hostile takeover here.
It's still in this one (and a bunch of their other update directories), though. Not only that, but the file creation dates on some of these postdate the beginning of their attacks on IBM, and include patches from Caldera/SCO engineers.
This goes against a couple centuries of copyright law interpretation which is firmly *against* entry of any copyrighted work into the public domain without the express indication thereof by its author.
What about the AT&T / BSD case? It used to be that if you distributed your own work widely enough without any attached copyright notice, then you were effectively putting it in the public domain and couldn't take that back later. Everything up to Unix 32V is probably in that state.
Granted, this doesn't apply to Linux, which was created after that rule changed and which has always been distributed with an attached license and loads of copyright statements... but perhaps SCO is angry at discovering (from the analysis of their ignorant slide show) how much of their "valuable IP" is actually public domain and they want to try and retaliate in kind?
It's doubtful that SCO intends to let this or any of the rest of their idiotic claims get to court.
I would have thought so, too - most of what they've put out so far in the IBM case (and especially in the Red Hat case) has been backpedaling and denying the statements they've made in the public media...
But not this time. This isn't just Stowell mouthing off to some reporter again, this is a document that got filed in court and will be read by an actual judge. I can't imagine what they're thinking.
Why else would you be burying your information in such paranoid rants, if not to promote the stereotype of privacy advocates as delusional conspiracy theorists? Why else would you be accusing everyone else of being a government shill, if not to throw us off your own scent? The Feds may or may not be able to afford an army of secret Slashdot Operatives who maintain moderator status and vigilantly wait to pounce on any attempts to reveal their tire monitoring schemes, but they can certainly afford to pay one or two of you "anonymous cowards" to pop in here from time to time, planting misinformation for the rest of us.
Of course there are wrong statements in the proof - that's how proof by contradiction works! You start by assuming that what you want to disprove ("If primes are finite") and you eventually come up with a contradiction (that there is a prime which is "bigger than the biggest"). At any step after your false assumption, you may come up with more falsehoods (like "1+2*3*5*7*...*N ... is prime"), but those don't make your proof wrong, they're just more consequences of using deductive logic on a false assumption.
So if the case is just dismissed then SCO will just be allowed to keep talking trash and be able to send invoices to people for nothing.
No, if the case is dismissed then SCO will still be left defending against IBM's counterclaims and Red Hat's request for a declaratory judgement. And, if SCO ever sends out invoices they will just have to defend themselves against prosecution for mail fraud as well.
Why does SCO keep getting away with talking nonsense in both press and court?
Because reporters tend to trust the people they interview, and court actions are slow.
It would be possible for them to own it but still have contractual limitations on how they use it, without the amendments that would probably be the case.
Even without the amendments, SCO would still have to defend it's ridiculous idea of what a "derivative work" is. Their whole case for contract violations seems to rely on the theory that IBM-written code is a derivative work of System V because parts of it were once distributed along with System V code.
If this theory were to be applied to anything other than computer code, it wouldn't pass the giggle test. Imagine if one author in a short story anthology tried to claim that all the other stories were "derivative works" of his story, or if a television producer claimed that a movie was a "derivative work" of his show because the movie producer had run a trailer during one of the TV show's commercials.
derogatory comments about the quality of Microsoft code and products
So, it's sort of like what Ballmer just did, except that it's done by frustrated users of the denigrated products instead of by someone selling the competition?
conspiracy theories about the true motives behind Microsofts intentions (always)
The true motives behind Microsoft's intentions are profit. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's capitalism, and IIRC a requirement for a publically traded company.
the slashdot crowd would eventually learn the productive and elevated response is to
A> Shrug.
And if 99% of Slashdot users take your advice, how many thousands does that leave to post in these threads?
Besides, "shrugging" is metaphorically an antonym for productive. Making snide jokes and ranting isn't any more productive, but it's more fun.
And this is the forum for it. Try deelevating yourself for a second, and look around the website. This isn't the KDE or kernel mailing lists, it's not some project's bugzilla site, and there's pretty much no work being done here that could possibly be interrupted or impeded by "Microsoft wants to charge for every reboot" jokes. It's a weblog, not a place for free software developers to change the world. It's a webpage people read for fun.
I'm sick of it, so what, everyone seems to love it, I'll just go now and click a preference and never look at the borg crap again.
Good plan. Not everybody will find the same things fun, and it's okay to accept that. I ran across a frighteningly thorough "Facts of Life" fansite the other day; that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on the comments board and tell everyone how they should enjoy their free time.
The correct term, according to Gator, is 'adware.'
And hillbillies prefer to be called 'sons of the soil'. But it ain't gonna happen.