Wasn't one of the hallmarks of a doomed.com company the fact that they tried to get people to pay for something they usually got for free?
Unfortunately, it's no longer free... unless you consider buying or learning how to install a spam filter free, or wading through 100's of obnoxious emails every day. The major of providers of free web email will probably start charging for unsecure SMTP eventually also, since it costs them; but leave the new secure email protocol free for recipients, since they actually will make money from any postage from a pay protocol, or need less resources due to much less spam from a more secure non-pay protocol.
It won't fly because millions of systems will refuse to pay the "postage" extortion fee in order to be whitelisted.
They will if they want to reach the majority of email recipients after those recipients switch. Most recipients will switch after the new protocoll becomes widespread (all the major ISPs, plus a couple good linux & Mac clients) and gets even 10X less spam. Only law enforcement agencies, rape crisis centers (etc.) and hackers will continue to monitor SMTP email, since it will contain 99% forgeries and spam. If you want to email them, you won't have to switch.
Postal junk mail is good! It pays a large part of the salaries of the people who deliver all the rest of my USPS mail. Spam pays my ISP nothing (but trouble).
and WHO is going to mandate this? SMTP is an ad hoc standard - ie people use it because people use it. If everybody's using it then that's a lot of people using it.
But a standard is only important if people *contintue* to use it. Given a choice of new-MTP which is less than 50% spam and unsecure SMTP which is going to be more than 99% spam, most people will switch after a few months, and SMTP will decline to the status of a mostly historical standard such as gopher. Only hackers and law enforcement agencies will continue to freely receive anonymous and/or mostly forged SMTP email. Mailing list senders will have to switch if they want to reach the majority of recipients.
Or trash the machine; don't just make it unbootable, completely wipe it clean.
You don't need to trash a machine to make it unusable by spammers and DDoS kiddies. Just knock it off the net. Maybe disable and patch the network drivers with something that merely looks like a virus. The less clueful admin's will eventually learn that running anti-virus software is the only easy way to fix their machines and get them back on the net.
Once all/most/many of the relays that they can use without *overtly* breaking the law close up, spammers will simply turn to *overtly* breaking the law, as in creating zombie networks. And as soon as those poorly maintained computers are cleaned up, they will simply use the same virus/worm/exploit to 0wn more poorly maintained computers (These computers will coincedently tend to be crawling with malware already).
Though any such move would doubtlessly be controversial, I suggest writing a "white hat" virus what would:
1) Check if a machine was unpatched/0wned (Probably meaning "it could infect it in the first place")
Zombies are evil. Any machine found exploited or exploitable should be kicked off the net by law until fixed (exceptions for university research honeypots, etc.). Perhaps a fine for repeat offenders to pay for the scans and resultant support calls. The anti-virus and firewall companies should be trying to brib^H^H^H^H lobby for the passage of such anti-nuisance laws ASAP.
I imagine there could be some kind of responsible PC owner rules. Owners of compromised systems would be notified and if they failed to address the problem within, say, 30 days then they are fined or perhaps their IP is just knocked off the net. This would likely generate a massive amount of support calls so a dedicted help desk would need to be created, which wouldn't be cheap.
Owners of compromised systems should have their IP's knocked off the net instantly, before their PC's can be used for criminal activities. The fines would pay for the support desk, perhaps refundable if they can somehow prove their system wasn't really hacked. Researchers and businesses who wish to run systems which potentially act like or actually become compromised (honeypots, etc.) should be required to register their system first, sort of like getting a handgun license.
The lottery (a tax on people who are bad at math) hasn't killed too many people yet. Other stupidity taxes, such as the one on cigarettes, help pay for some small portion of the users medical care as they kill themselves. Maybe a tax on allowing ones home PC to be hacked would help pay for some more efficient anti-spam enforcement.
Computer security is too complicated for end users who barely know the difference between email and internet, let alone anything about anti-virus, firewall, and discretion with attachments.
Thus a fine for having ones PC exploited would mostly be a tax on stupidity. Smarter end users will learn how to lock down their system, buy hardware firewalls, and/or maybe only buy Macs until M$ fixes their security holes. And if M$ starts getting hit in the pocketbook, they will be much more prompt about making sure newly sold boxen are more secure. And the less the number of 0wn3d boxen which are sitting in peoples houses, the easier it becomes to track down the real criminals.
This is an awful idea. You are shifting the blame from the culprits (spam trojan writers) to the victims, and encouraging the culprits to continue their abusive activities.
The victims are the ones getting spammed and DDoS'd by all those exploited PCs. The blame should be shared between the criminals, and those negligent individuals who do the network equivalent of leaving loaded guns sitting unsecured on their back porch's. The equivalent of a traffic citation would be letting them get off easy. Just the publicity about the threat of getting cited would clean up a ton of home PC's during the time it would take the law to go into effect.
Comcast has a HUGE problem right now with hundreds (if not more) of virus-compromised systems, run by the clue-deprived who have not the slightest inkling about the most basic Internet security.
These machines have long since been compromised, and turned into spammer 'zombies.'
Is there an easy way for an ISP to prove if a PC has been compromised in one of the more common ways, and it working as a zombie relay?
If so there is a great opportunity here to help solve the govenment budget crisis. Amend the various "attractive nuisance" laws to allow the city or state to cite people for running a compromised system (similar to a traffic ticket). ISP's might be glad to turn in these customers to reduce the load on thier networks. Smart customers (the kind who fasten their seatbelt for a short trip to the corner landromat) will have firewalls and/or virus scanners installed, so this will mostly be a tax on stupidity. Anyone councilman/representative who trys to fight the passing of a law like this can be labeled as a spam supporter.
Any moron who works at a company and opens said attachment should be fired anyway.
Said by someone who hasn't worked in many real companies. You can't fire the moron because he's the boss, your boss, the top saleperson, or one of their golf partners. Furthermore, you have a few hundred Wintel system in the company because the only CAD, VAR and CRM software packages for your companies industry run on Windows systems (except for the art department, which has Macs of course, and your web servers). The virus contains a backdoor, used by some invader to install root kits on an unknown number of Windows boxes. The company is profitable, which means all those widget designers and sales guys on average earn the company more than their salary per hour, but only if their computers are up and disinfected.
How many hours will they be idle while you isolate, image, and reinstall each system, all business apps, and restore their data from backups? Multiply the hours by the dollars by the number of employees with potentially affected PCs. One leak through or around the firewall, and the company can easily run up thousands of $ in lost opportunity costs.
If I use a pen to write a novel, does that mean that my novel is unoriginal because it's obviously a derived work of Bic or Uniball or Pilot? After all, without that pen, I couldn't have written the novel.
Of course you could have written the novel, using a pencil, stick in the sand or typewriter instead for instance. But you couldn't have taken out a copyright on it for the English version, if you didn't speak English and there wasn't anyone (or other resources) around to teach it to you, because you wouldn't have fixed the work in a language you knew nothing about. And the only reason you would be writing about stuff nobody has invented yet is that your novel would be a work of fiction.
You seem to be using RMS's version of "derivative" which varies depending on whether you're linking dynamically or statically to a library. ie. a completely made up version of the concept, which doesn't have any basis in reality.
In fact, one interpretation of his version would render any any software shipped in ROM on a machine without an MMU as derivative.
They're not trying to copyright the language. They're not trying to copyright the functions the program uses. They're not trying to copyright the CPU or the compiler that the program runs under. They're not trying to copyright the storage medium.
They are copyrighting the code that they wrote.
I can't imagine why you didn't understand this from the get-go. It's plainly obvious.
It's plainly unobvious. How can they even say they alone wrote the code, when they wouldn't have written anything or wouldn't have fixed it in that form had not the language and technology they used existed. Most great scientists say they stood on the shoulders of giants.
While that statement is correct for adding components in series, it is not correct when applied to adding components for redundancy (i.e. in parallel). Adding another CPU in parallel increases the redundancy, and therefore decreases the risk of failure statistically.
Even in parallel, if all the chopping and grinding required to make the redundant components weigh half as much then multiplies their failure rate, then you might well end up with an increased risk of failure anyway (especially once you include the additional parallel switchover stuff). Either that, or you've got to a more expensive launcher, filled with more explosive stuff (fuel) to push it out of our gravity well because of the duplicated weights.
Under US law, creators of art and technology do not own their work. They are granted, through authority of the US government a temporary monopoly on the work they produced as an incentive to continue making similiar works.
And, very on topic here, Congress can change copyright law if it feels its current use isn't working "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"... or if RIAA/MPAA (etc.) lobbyists donate enough soft money.:-(
Could copyright law be changed in some manner to remove the teeth from the GPL for this reason?
It merely states that the GPLed source code must be available to be seen if any changes are made to the GPLed code.
only if the resulting application has been distributed. Otherwise, one can keep their changes private. In addition, the GPL may require your source code to be made available even if zero changes were made to previously GPL'd code (for instance, if you merely linked them on the command line and distributed the result).
The Copyright Code explictly allows for the trading of copyrighted works as an incentive. The GPL is essentially a license utilizing this incentive.
"trading" is not the correct word here. An end-user (someone incapable of modifications or additions) my use, trade, and/or distribute unmodified GPL'd works without providing any of his/her own copyrighted works in trade.
[GPL] It's a licencing agreement. Read it. Nothing in it is illegal.
True. But not all license contracts are enforceable. For instance, some of Microsoft's OEM software licenses were held to be in violation of US trade laws, IIRC.
To have the privilage to build onto Linux, you agree to let others build onto what you added.
Only if you distribute the results. Otherwise you can keep what you added a trade secret (something about a privacy clause).
You see, they're still free to comply with the GPL OR they may negotiate a different license/contract.
But then where's the (supposedly advertised for purposes of this hypothetical situation) "free" (using non-Stallmanesque definitions since this is probably how the FTC interprets the language) product?
To use your analogy: it's $10 for the paperback edition and $20 for the hardback
Some forms of this might also be considered "bait and switch", which possibly could be illegal is certain kinds of situations.
The company can still use the free version, but they must comply with the GPL.
But it's not a "free" version if it cost them money to comply. They might have to pay for source code rights to whatever code is being demanded for distribution "compliance". If it's not really free, than could that be considered false advertising of some form? What are the penalties for false advertising?
If you own the copyright, it's your right to profit from it or to give it away, however you see fit.
Agreed.
If you call it free and still choose to also profit from it...
And how is this different from false advertising? Aren't there legal penalties for a store advertising a book for $10, and then demanding $20 from customers? A store might lose its ability to sell their stock of that book for over $10 under some circumstances (maybe even if they own the copyright to the book?). Could the same happen if you advertise a product (software) as free?
You can, at your option, also make alternative arrangements with them to grant them permission to distribute without the source in exchange for some compensation that you specify.
If you prevously labeled your work as "free software", could the above commercial offer cause problems of being charged with attempting to profit from misleading advertisement, which might in some way hinder ones standing to sue for copyright infringement?
Maybe it's better to not bring up either of the terms "GPL" or "Free Software"...
The amount that can be legally copied without requiring permission depends upon the purpose of the derived work. If it is for personal use, the amount can be quite high (often even extending to the entire work), but if it is for redistribution or some other commercial endeavor, you can't copy anything.
What about quoting a literary work for news, commentary or parody? Are there any circumstances where a certain amount is allowed even for some commercial endeavors?
Theoretically, it should be possible to take the statistical database generated by working Bayesian email filters (maybe stolen off of zillions of hacked windows boxen), and reverse engineer the statistics to generate email text that these filters can't tell from non-spam, unless one has a highly individualized and weird corpus.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's no longer free... unless you consider buying or learning how to install a spam filter free, or wading through 100's of obnoxious emails every day. The major of providers of free web email will probably start charging for unsecure SMTP eventually also, since it costs them; but leave the new secure email protocol free for recipients, since they actually will make money from any postage from a pay protocol, or need less resources due to much less spam from a more secure non-pay protocol.
They will if they want to reach the majority of email recipients after those recipients switch. Most recipients will switch after the new protocoll becomes widespread (all the major ISPs, plus a couple good linux & Mac clients) and gets even 10X less spam. Only law enforcement agencies, rape crisis centers (etc.) and hackers will continue to monitor SMTP email, since it will contain 99% forgeries and spam. If you want to email them, you won't have to switch.
Postal junk mail is good! It pays a large part of the salaries of the people who deliver all the rest of my USPS mail. Spam pays my ISP nothing (but trouble).
But a standard is only important if people *contintue* to use it. Given a choice of new-MTP which is less than 50% spam and unsecure SMTP which is going to be more than 99% spam, most people will switch after a few months, and SMTP will decline to the status of a mostly historical standard such as gopher. Only hackers and law enforcement agencies will continue to freely receive anonymous and/or mostly forged SMTP email. Mailing list senders will have to switch if they want to reach the majority of recipients.
You don't need to trash a machine to make it unusable by spammers and DDoS kiddies. Just knock it off the net. Maybe disable and patch the network drivers with something that merely looks like a virus. The less clueful admin's will eventually learn that running anti-virus software is the only easy way to fix their machines and get them back on the net.
Though any such move would doubtlessly be controversial, I suggest writing a "white hat" virus what would:
1) Check if a machine was unpatched/0wned (Probably meaning "it could infect it in the first place")
Zombies are evil. Any machine found exploited or exploitable should be kicked off the net by law until fixed (exceptions for university research honeypots, etc.). Perhaps a fine for repeat offenders to pay for the scans and resultant support calls. The anti-virus and firewall companies should be trying to brib^H^H^H^H lobby for the passage of such anti-nuisance laws ASAP.
Owners of compromised systems should have their IP's knocked off the net instantly, before their PC's can be used for criminal activities. The fines would pay for the support desk, perhaps refundable if they can somehow prove their system wasn't really hacked. Researchers and businesses who wish to run systems which potentially act like or actually become compromised (honeypots, etc.) should be required to register their system first, sort of like getting a handgun license.
The lottery (a tax on people who are bad at math) hasn't killed too many people yet. Other stupidity taxes, such as the one on cigarettes, help pay for some small portion of the users medical care as they kill themselves. Maybe a tax on allowing ones home PC to be hacked would help pay for some more efficient anti-spam enforcement.
Thus a fine for having ones PC exploited would mostly be a tax on stupidity. Smarter end users will learn how to lock down their system, buy hardware firewalls, and/or maybe only buy Macs until M$ fixes their security holes. And if M$ starts getting hit in the pocketbook, they will be much more prompt about making sure newly sold boxen are more secure. And the less the number of 0wn3d boxen which are sitting in peoples houses, the easier it becomes to track down the real criminals.
The victims are the ones getting spammed and DDoS'd by all those exploited PCs. The blame should be shared between the criminals, and those negligent individuals who do the network equivalent of leaving loaded guns sitting unsecured on their back porch's. The equivalent of a traffic citation would be letting them get off easy. Just the publicity about the threat of getting cited would clean up a ton of home PC's during the time it would take the law to go into effect.
These machines have long since been compromised, and turned into spammer 'zombies.'
Is there an easy way for an ISP to prove if a PC has been compromised in one of the more common ways, and it working as a zombie relay?
If so there is a great opportunity here to help solve the govenment budget crisis. Amend the various "attractive nuisance" laws to allow the city or state to cite people for running a compromised system (similar to a traffic ticket). ISP's might be glad to turn in these customers to reduce the load on thier networks. Smart customers (the kind who fasten their seatbelt for a short trip to the corner landromat) will have firewalls and/or virus scanners installed, so this will mostly be a tax on stupidity. Anyone councilman/representative who trys to fight the passing of a law like this can be labeled as a spam supporter.
Said by someone who hasn't worked in many real companies. You can't fire the moron because he's the boss, your boss, the top saleperson, or one of their golf partners. Furthermore, you have a few hundred Wintel system in the company because the only CAD, VAR and CRM software packages for your companies industry run on Windows systems (except for the art department, which has Macs of course, and your web servers). The virus contains a backdoor, used by some invader to install root kits on an unknown number of Windows boxes. The company is profitable, which means all those widget designers and sales guys on average earn the company more than their salary per hour, but only if their computers are up and disinfected.
How many hours will they be idle while you isolate, image, and reinstall each system, all business apps, and restore their data from backups? Multiply the hours by the dollars by the number of employees with potentially affected PCs. One leak through or around the firewall, and the company can easily run up thousands of $ in lost opportunity costs.
Of course you could have written the novel, using a pencil, stick in the sand or typewriter instead for instance. But you couldn't have taken out a copyright on it for the English version, if you didn't speak English and there wasn't anyone (or other resources) around to teach it to you, because you wouldn't have fixed the work in a language you knew nothing about. And the only reason you would be writing about stuff nobody has invented yet is that your novel would be a work of fiction.
You seem to be using RMS's version of "derivative" which varies depending on whether you're linking dynamically or statically to a library. ie. a completely made up version of the concept, which doesn't have any basis in reality.
In fact, one interpretation of his version would render any any software shipped in ROM on a machine without an MMU as derivative.
They're not trying to copyright the language.
They're not trying to copyright the functions the program uses.
They're not trying to copyright the CPU or the compiler that the program runs under.
They're not trying to copyright the storage medium.
They are copyrighting the code that they wrote.
I can't imagine why you didn't understand this from the get-go. It's plainly obvious.
It's plainly unobvious. How can they even say they alone wrote the code, when they wouldn't have written anything or wouldn't have fixed it in that form had not the language and technology they used existed. Most great scientists say they stood on the shoulders of giants.
Even in parallel, if all the chopping and grinding required to make the redundant components weigh half as much then multiplies their failure rate, then you might well end up with an increased risk of failure anyway (especially once you include the additional parallel switchover stuff). Either that, or you've got to a more expensive launcher, filled with more explosive stuff (fuel) to push it out of our gravity well because of the duplicated weights.
And, very on topic here, Congress can change copyright law if it feels its current use isn't working "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"... or if RIAA/MPAA (etc.) lobbyists donate enough soft money. :-(
Could copyright law be changed in some manner to remove the teeth from the GPL for this reason?
only if the resulting application has been distributed. Otherwise, one can keep their changes private. In addition, the GPL may require your source code to be made available even if zero changes were made to previously GPL'd code (for instance, if you merely linked them on the command line and distributed the result).
"trading" is not the correct word here. An end-user (someone incapable of modifications or additions) my use, trade, and/or distribute unmodified GPL'd works without providing any of his/her own copyrighted works in trade.
It's a licencing agreement. Read it. Nothing in it is illegal.
True. But not all license contracts are enforceable. For instance, some of Microsoft's OEM software licenses were held to be in violation of US trade laws, IIRC.
To have the privilage to build onto Linux, you agree to let others build onto what you added.
Only if you distribute the results. Otherwise you can keep what you added a trade secret (something about a privacy clause).
But then where's the (supposedly advertised for purposes of this hypothetical situation) "free" (using non-Stallmanesque definitions since this is probably how the FTC interprets the language) product?
Some forms of this might also be considered "bait and switch", which possibly could be illegal is certain kinds of situations.
The company can still use the free version, but they must comply with the GPL.
But it's not a "free" version if it cost them money to comply. They might have to pay for source code rights to whatever code is being demanded for distribution "compliance". If it's not really free, than could that be considered false advertising of some form? What are the penalties for false advertising?
Agreed.
If you call it free and still choose to also profit from it...
And how is this different from false advertising? Aren't there legal penalties for a store advertising a book for $10, and then demanding $20 from customers? A store might lose its ability to sell their stock of that book for over $10 under some circumstances (maybe even if they own the copyright to the book?). Could the same happen if you advertise a product (software) as free?
If you prevously labeled your work as "free software", could the above commercial offer cause problems of being charged with attempting to profit from misleading advertisement, which might in some way hinder ones standing to sue for copyright infringement?
Maybe it's better to not bring up either of the terms "GPL" or "Free Software"...
What about quoting a literary work for news, commentary or parody? Are there any circumstances where a certain amount is allowed even for some commercial endeavors?
Theoretically, it should be possible to take the statistical database generated by working Bayesian email filters (maybe stolen off of zillions of hacked windows boxen), and reverse engineer the statistics to generate email text that these filters can't tell from non-spam, unless one has a highly individualized and weird corpus.