(BTW, go here if you want to see what your speeds are... It's a test site to see if your connection speed supports VOIP. Mine BARELY could.)
I have 3Mbit down/384k up service (and was getting 3Mbit down and 360k up on their test, and it still told me I couldn't use VoIP with good QoS, yet I use VoIP all the time on my network and get quality equal to or better than my cell phone. It's not clear to me that their test is all that useful - or their metrics are screwed up. If they consider 33 ms ping times bad, I'd like to know where they can find a better residential connection.
Really though, this whole story is a non-issue. I have yet to see an ad for any residential serviice that doesn't say "speed not guaranteed". The speeds they quote you are always "up to this number", not "you always get this number". For cable it's a shared medium between other users on your head end, so unless you're the only user, you're not going to be able to max out the line. 802.11b is supposed to be 11 Mbit per second, but I rarely get that, because it's divided among the other users of the access point. It doesn't mean Avaya and Enterasys are scamming consumers because their access points don't always give 11Mbit/sec. DSL is very sensitive to your distance from the CO and quality of the wiring, so of course it's not guaranteed. Even a LAN is not guaranteed. For short and medium transfers, I rarely get 100 Mbits out of my local network. These "connection testers" are mostly useless - a better test is to download large amounts of data (BitTorrent, for example) and look at the average throughput.
This is analogous to a bank requiring your SS number to open an account, despite the fact that that number was meant soley for government use, and never designed for that sort of application. When asked why a SS number is required, when in fact, this requirement is illegal, bank managers invariably reply, "oh...you have every right to refuse to divulge your SS number...as we have every right to decline your account application
I agree with most of your arguments, but that's a poor comparison. The SSN is your Tax Identification Number (and if you're a business opening a bank account, they require your company's TIN). Interest on bank accounts has to be reported to the IRS, and banks need your SSN to do it. They're one of the few places (along with any potential employer) that has a legitimate reason to ask for your SSN.
Better examples of places that have no good reason to ask for it are your cell phone provider, electric company, cable company, etc. Yes, in some states, they can't require it and can force you to pay a deposit instead, but other states have no such protection. Even some supermarkets are asking for it for their "rewards" or "coupon" keychain tags.
Still haven't gotten access to much of anything that I'm not supposed to. Heck, there are plenty of websites offering e-mail through SquirrelMail. Whatever...
That's precisely the point of a Honeypot. It's something that looks like it might be a vulnerability, but isn't. SquirrelMail had a bunch of vulnerabilities, including an SQL injection vulnerability. These sites get themselves added to Google, and thus get pulled up when someone searches for a site to exploit, but they can't actually be exploited. However, the Honeypot site now has the remote IP address, browser being used, and whatever info it feels like collecting on the bad guys.
He mentions the AirPort in the first sentence of the actual review (yes, I realize it's/. and you're not supposed to read the article), but points out (correctly) that this is much smaller. It's also cheaper (about $40) and the design of the airport does not lend itself to portability - I tried lugging one around a bit to do dialup without the hassle of a phone cord, and it did not easily fit in a standard laptop bag. That, and the Airport wallwart sucks. At least, the early Airport Extreme (grey) wall wart sucks, perhaps it sucks less now.
The Airport Express is about the same size as this device, but it doesn't have a modem.
The title of your post suggests that you're likening this to someone leaving their front door open and someone else wandering in. While that may be a fair analogy, it's still illegal. If I leave the front door to my house open, and someone else comes in and makes some phone calls or uses my bathroom, I may be a moron, but the intruder still did something illegal. And because of that I may, for example, lose my insurance coverage, but the intruder will still receive some legal punishment - probably less than if he had broken in, but still.
In this case, the guy was charged with unauthorized access to a computer network. Which is precisely what he did. He wasn't charged under the DMCA, he wasn't charged with cyber-terrorism. Even if the network was open, he still didn't have permission to use it. Now, you can argue that unauthorized access to a computer network should be a misdemeanor, not a 3rd degree felony, but that's a different debate.
Lastly, why did he act so suspiciously? Why was he sitting there in the dark in the back of an SUV for several hours? I mean, if someone behaved like that even somewhere with explicitly free wireless, like a coffee shop, I'd be a little suspicious. There are lots of legitimate reasons to be using a laptop in your car that people wouldn't think twice about - he could have claimed to be working for NavTeq, or even the Census Bureau, as was suggested, and no one would have been suspicious, but in this case, he didn't act like an innocent guy sending some e-mails to Grandma.
Seriously. If you buy it, and then hack it, Verizon will (at best) think it's ok to sell crippled phones or (at worst) use the DMCA to send your "cyber-terrorist" ass to Guantanamo.
If instead you go to a Verizon store, return your phone, cancel your service, and say "Sorry, I'm switching to {Cingular|Sprint|T-Mobile|any other provider that doesn't cripple phones} because I feel consumers shouldn't get screwed" then maybe, just maybe they'll get the message. It's bad enough that phones are vendor-locked so you can't use whatever provider you want - there's no need to send a message to the CEOs that it's ok to screw over consumers to increase profits.
Not really. Google sued people who were artificially inflating their clicks. Now, someone is saying Google does nothing about click inflation. Who knows the specific of this individual case, but clearly Google has done *something* about click inflation.
Actually, in lots of places, the utility company owns the streetlights, and the municipality has to pay not only for the electricity, but also to lease the lights. In New England, cities and towns are gradually buying the lights back from the utility companies, but it's not that cut-and-dried.
Re:Well, let's take a look at the highest profile
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McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
Open Office = MS Office knockoff
Not quite. OpenOffice is an Open Source version of StarOffice, which before Sun started caring about it, was produced by Star Division, a for-profit company in Germany. Yes, it's an MS Office knockoff, but by a commercial company, not OSS developers. I think this proves that on both sides of the fence there both innovation and reverse engineering on both sides of the fence.
GAO investigators were able to pick up Wi-Fi signals from outside all of the six agencies they tested
In other news, your computer may be broadcasting an IP address that hackers could use to attack you.
I mean if government agencies have fully open networks, and people can connect, get an IP (or find out enough about the netblock to make one up), and see data, sure that's bad. But then say that, don't waste time with stupid stuff like this. "Unauthorized activity" could mean a ping (seriously, I have dealt with network administators who accused me of "hacking" when I attempted to ping a server - 5 pings, not ping -f or anything), or it could mean terrorists are editing the no-fly list we speak. But this article is ~useless.
When are they gonna learn to adopt a new distribution system rather than beat it with fancy lawyers.
They have one. I, for one, am happy to pay $29.95 to get a whole season's worth of, say The Simpsons, (yes, they start out at $45, but they go down after a while), or Futurama, without commercials, with deleted scenes, and often interesting directors commentary. In fact, you get a better deal than the torrents, because with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Futurama, when they're shown in syndication, they often cut 3-5 minutes of the episodes, and sometimes cut funny scenes. Most of the torrents still have the commercials in them, and are the syndication versions. Or, they have "ads" for all the warez kiddies who distribute them. I don't want to see that any more than I want to see ads for Pepsi when I pay $10 for a movie ticket.
The MPAA is definitely the lesser of two evils at the moment. They know how to sell a product at a reasonable price and provide added value. Example: Most DVDs cost anywhere from $4.99 (the B-movie rack at Target) to $19.99 for the latest releases, with the average being around $12-$15. I get the movie, the trailer, and often deleted scenes or other extra footage. Compare to, say, CDs, which go from $7.99 (the cheapest I've ever seen) to $24.99, and you only get 60 minutes of music (maybe 80), liner notes if you're lucky, and that's it. And you can't tell me producing the latest big-screen Hollywood blockbuster movie is *cheaper* than a recording studio session, even with digital special effects and all that.
This is not to say the MPAA is the way and the light, we all know about their crusade to kill the VCR, and Jack Valenti comparing it to the Boston Strangler, but at this particular point in time, I think they have just a little bit more clue than the RIAA.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
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Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 1
They release one patch that has tons of changes instead of one change per patch.
Has anyone actually sat down and had a constructive conversation with someone at Apple about this? The initial article had some handwaving about Apple not being able to open their CVS repository due to IP concerns (which makes sense), but it anyone take it beyond that? Did anyone from KDE say "Look, ok, we understand you can't open up your CVS repository, but this monolithic patch really kills us and breaks our tests and makes us devote time to understanding the patch that could otherwise be used to code new features. Is there anything we can do about it?
I think OSS projects that work closely with large corporations should look into getting some conflict resolution staff or mediators onboard. Posting a rant on your project's blog or on Slashdot often won't do much, because a) the company won't see it; b) it'll get a bunch of Slashdotters riled up who will send hate mail to some poor support tech at $BIG_COMPANY who doesn't even have any power to escalate the problem to upper management, let alone to fix it.
A large part of working with anyone is negotation, and it becomes even more important when one of the parties is a management-laden corporation (all corporations are). 90% of all issues when working a project stem from communication breakdowns or not talking to the right people. I'm not saying KHTML is wrong and Apple is right, but from the articles available to me, I don't think either side put enough effort into negotiation on this.
Of course, this assumes they *want* to solve the problem. If the goal is simply to prove that big corporations obey the letter of the law and not the spirit, well, that's been demonstrated.
But challenge our freedom? Time to stop this crap once and for all.
Voting Public: Hey, you can't establish national ID card! I don't want to have to show my papers everywhere I go. What happened to States Rights? What slimy politician tacked this on to a bill guaranteed to pass anyway? WTF does RealID have to do with troops in Iraq? What is this, Nazi Germany?
Bush & Co: *clears throat* Terrorism.
Voting Public: Jawohl, Mein Fuhrer! *sound of goosestepping and sheep falling into line*
In a March 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
So, has that Time Traveler's Convention that was announced earlier happened yet? If not (or even if it has), someone needs to go to the convention, announce to all the time travelers that they should go back to March 1999, and tell Al to say "funding" instead of "creating". Then all this can go away.
But I'm sure they'd screw it up, and instead CmdrTaco would end up taking his mother to a school dance in 1955, or something.
My guess is that Nikons definition of 'bona fide software companies' is 'software companies able to pay a lot for their proprietary SDK'.
The article appears to disagree with you:
Once approved, the SDK is provided to the developer at no charge and they are authorized to use it.
Really, this is much ado about nothing. You have to get "approved" for a PalmOS SDK too. And for an Amazon developer token. Heck, to be hosted on Sourceforge, your project has to be "approved".
In all reality, I suspect the approval process really just makes sure you're a developer and not just some fly-by-nite company that's a front for Kodak and Canon market research. And possibly also checking that you're not Kim Jong Il trying to bring top secret Nikon encryption to the Axis of Evil. When The GIMP or Debian or Mandrake or SuSE or Redhat is turned down for an SDK for no good reason, then I'll believe it's a conspiracy. For now, I'll chalk this whole debate up to uninformed wanking.
No DRM of any form is ever okay: I should be able to do anything with items I obtain, including sharing them with others;
I agree. I shelled out $5 for Debian on CD. I should be able to do whatever I want with it, including redistribute only the binaries to people, without any source code. Or modify the source code, build binaries, and ship only those binaries to people. Why not? I paid for it. Who the hell is this Stallman guy who thinks he can tell me what I get to do with something I bought? Sounds like another Jack Valenti to me.
Seriously, the "It's mine I paid for it, fuck you" attitude doesn't work in civilized society. There is a concept of "fair use" - sure, it's gone out the window in recent years, but it was called "fair use" for a reason. It wasn't called "fuck you, mr. artist".
"About a year and a half ago, I brought in some source code that I had worked on prior to working here; after receiving verbal OKs that the code would remain mine.
You should have gotten written OKs. Not necessarily a signed notarized document written in blood, but at least an e-mail from your supervisor or something.
Given that you signed the IP agreement, regardless of the verbal OKs, I think technically you probably lose, at least on the parts you wrote. But I am not a lawyer, you should find one and ask them.
Now, my employer is trying to lay claim to this software and has filed at least one patent on it that I know of. They have also distributed it but refuse to make the source public. They claim that because of my IP agreement, they have full rights to this source code.
Again, not a lawyer, but that seems broken. The GPL is a license. Surely if they paid and licensed code from, say, Intel/IBM/Sun/*insert big company here*, regardless of license, they don't get to patent it or claim full rights to it.
I think you want to find an IP lawyer, preferably one who has dealt with the GPL. Calling the EFF might be a good place to start.
But wait, I'm confused. I thought "theft" was actually depriving someone else of the use of something by taking it. I mean, that's why everyone says downloading music isn't stealing, right? So this shouldn't be stealing either. Or is it only theft when it applies to the GPL?
What that says is "Prevent any user agent from indexing anything below the root hierarchy, unless it's Googlebot, and then only allow the root level and/support/"
So, no other search engines should ever be seeing this page. Basically, Google is using their own search engine to also index their own support information. And this is a problem because.... why?
In case it's not inherently obvious, that means no other search engines will even see the page. So that means that Google's results are being skewed by.... (wait for it) Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I have 3Mbit down/384k up service (and was getting 3Mbit down and 360k up on their test, and it still told me I couldn't use VoIP with good QoS, yet I use VoIP all the time on my network and get quality equal to or better than my cell phone. It's not clear to me that their test is all that useful - or their metrics are screwed up. If they consider 33 ms ping times bad, I'd like to know where they can find a better residential connection.
Really though, this whole story is a non-issue. I have yet to see an ad for any residential serviice that doesn't say "speed not guaranteed". The speeds they quote you are always "up to this number", not "you always get this number". For cable it's a shared medium between other users on your head end, so unless you're the only user, you're not going to be able to max out the line. 802.11b is supposed to be 11 Mbit per second, but I rarely get that, because it's divided among the other users of the access point. It doesn't mean Avaya and Enterasys are scamming consumers because their access points don't always give 11Mbit/sec. DSL is very sensitive to your distance from the CO and quality of the wiring, so of course it's not guaranteed. Even a LAN is not guaranteed. For short and medium transfers, I rarely get 100 Mbits out of my local network. These "connection testers" are mostly useless - a better test is to download large amounts of data (BitTorrent, for example) and look at the average throughput.
I agree with most of your arguments, but that's a poor comparison. The SSN is your Tax Identification Number (and if you're a business opening a bank account, they require your company's TIN). Interest on bank accounts has to be reported to the IRS, and banks need your SSN to do it. They're one of the few places (along with any potential employer) that has a legitimate reason to ask for your SSN.
Better examples of places that have no good reason to ask for it are your cell phone provider, electric company, cable company, etc. Yes, in some states, they can't require it and can force you to pay a deposit instead, but other states have no such protection. Even some supermarkets are asking for it for their "rewards" or "coupon" keychain tags.
Uh, I don't know what kind of stuff you're doing with your laptop...
That's precisely the point of a Honeypot. It's something that looks like it might be a vulnerability, but isn't. SquirrelMail had a bunch of vulnerabilities, including an SQL injection vulnerability. These sites get themselves added to Google, and thus get pulled up when someone searches for a site to exploit, but they can't actually be exploited. However, the Honeypot site now has the remote IP address, browser being used, and whatever info it feels like collecting on the bad guys.
Read the FAQ, it explains a lot.
The Airport Express is about the same size as this device, but it doesn't have a modem.
They may have been floppy, but they were 8 inches long! Not like these puny kids with their 3.5" ones...
In this case, the guy was charged with unauthorized access to a computer network. Which is precisely what he did. He wasn't charged under the DMCA, he wasn't charged with cyber-terrorism. Even if the network was open, he still didn't have permission to use it. Now, you can argue that unauthorized access to a computer network should be a misdemeanor, not a 3rd degree felony, but that's a different debate.
Lastly, why did he act so suspiciously? Why was he sitting there in the dark in the back of an SUV for several hours? I mean, if someone behaved like that even somewhere with explicitly free wireless, like a coffee shop, I'd be a little suspicious. There are lots of legitimate reasons to be using a laptop in your car that people wouldn't think twice about - he could have claimed to be working for NavTeq, or even the Census Bureau, as was suggested, and no one would have been suspicious, but in this case, he didn't act like an innocent guy sending some e-mails to Grandma.
Seriously. If you buy it, and then hack it, Verizon will (at best) think it's ok to sell crippled phones or (at worst) use the DMCA to send your "cyber-terrorist" ass to Guantanamo.
If instead you go to a Verizon store, return your phone, cancel your service, and say "Sorry, I'm switching to {Cingular|Sprint|T-Mobile|any other provider that doesn't cripple phones} because I feel consumers shouldn't get screwed" then maybe, just maybe they'll get the message. It's bad enough that phones are vendor-locked so you can't use whatever provider you want - there's no need to send a message to the CEOs that it's ok to screw over consumers to increase profits.
Not really. Google sued people who were artificially inflating their clicks. Now, someone is saying Google does nothing about click inflation. Who knows the specific of this individual case, but clearly Google has done *something* about click inflation.
Actually, in lots of places, the utility company owns the streetlights, and the municipality has to pay not only for the electricity, but also to lease the lights. In New England, cities and towns are gradually buying the lights back from the utility companies, but it's not that cut-and-dried.
Not quite. OpenOffice is an Open Source version of StarOffice, which before Sun started caring about it, was produced by Star Division, a for-profit company in Germany. Yes, it's an MS Office knockoff, but by a commercial company, not OSS developers. I think this proves that on both sides of the fence there both innovation and reverse engineering on both sides of the fence.
This sentence made me stop caring:
In other news, your computer may be broadcasting an IP address that hackers could use to attack you.
I mean if government agencies have fully open networks, and people can connect, get an IP (or find out enough about the netblock to make one up), and see data, sure that's bad. But then say that, don't waste time with stupid stuff like this. "Unauthorized activity" could mean a ping (seriously, I have dealt with network administators who accused me of "hacking" when I attempted to ping a server - 5 pings, not ping -f or anything), or it could mean terrorists are editing the no-fly list we speak. But this article is ~useless.
They have one. I, for one, am happy to pay $29.95 to get a whole season's worth of, say The Simpsons, (yes, they start out at $45, but they go down after a while), or Futurama, without commercials, with deleted scenes, and often interesting directors commentary. In fact, you get a better deal than the torrents, because with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Futurama, when they're shown in syndication, they often cut 3-5 minutes of the episodes, and sometimes cut funny scenes. Most of the torrents still have the commercials in them, and are the syndication versions. Or, they have "ads" for all the warez kiddies who distribute them. I don't want to see that any more than I want to see ads for Pepsi when I pay $10 for a movie ticket.
The MPAA is definitely the lesser of two evils at the moment. They know how to sell a product at a reasonable price and provide added value. Example: Most DVDs cost anywhere from $4.99 (the B-movie rack at Target) to $19.99 for the latest releases, with the average being around $12-$15. I get the movie, the trailer, and often deleted scenes or other extra footage. Compare to, say, CDs, which go from $7.99 (the cheapest I've ever seen) to $24.99, and you only get 60 minutes of music (maybe 80), liner notes if you're lucky, and that's it. And you can't tell me producing the latest big-screen Hollywood blockbuster movie is *cheaper* than a recording studio session, even with digital special effects and all that.
This is not to say the MPAA is the way and the light, we all know about their crusade to kill the VCR, and Jack Valenti comparing it to the Boston Strangler, but at this particular point in time, I think they have just a little bit more clue than the RIAA.
Has anyone actually sat down and had a constructive conversation with someone at Apple about this? The initial article had some handwaving about Apple not being able to open their CVS repository due to IP concerns (which makes sense), but it anyone take it beyond that? Did anyone from KDE say "Look, ok, we understand you can't open up your CVS repository, but this monolithic patch really kills us and breaks our tests and makes us devote time to understanding the patch that could otherwise be used to code new features. Is there anything we can do about it?
I think OSS projects that work closely with large corporations should look into getting some conflict resolution staff or mediators onboard. Posting a rant on your project's blog or on Slashdot often won't do much, because a) the company won't see it; b) it'll get a bunch of Slashdotters riled up who will send hate mail to some poor support tech at $BIG_COMPANY who doesn't even have any power to escalate the problem to upper management, let alone to fix it.
A large part of working with anyone is negotation, and it becomes even more important when one of the parties is a management-laden corporation (all corporations are). 90% of all issues when working a project stem from communication breakdowns or not talking to the right people. I'm not saying KHTML is wrong and Apple is right, but from the articles available to me, I don't think either side put enough effort into negotiation on this.
Of course, this assumes they *want* to solve the problem. If the goal is simply to prove that big corporations obey the letter of the law and not the spirit, well, that's been demonstrated.
Voting Public: Hey, you can't establish national ID card! I don't want to have to show my papers everywhere I go. What happened to States Rights? What slimy politician tacked this on to a bill guaranteed to pass anyway? WTF does RealID have to do with troops in Iraq? What is this, Nazi Germany?
Bush & Co: *clears throat* Terrorism.
Voting Public: Jawohl, Mein Fuhrer! *sound of goosestepping and sheep falling into line*
So, has that Time Traveler's Convention that was announced earlier happened yet? If not (or even if it has), someone needs to go to the convention, announce to all the time travelers that they should go back to March 1999, and tell Al to say "funding" instead of "creating". Then all this can go away.
But I'm sure they'd screw it up, and instead CmdrTaco would end up taking his mother to a school dance in 1955, or something.
The article appears to disagree with you:
Really, this is much ado about nothing. You have to get "approved" for a PalmOS SDK too. And for an Amazon developer token. Heck, to be hosted on Sourceforge, your project has to be "approved".
In all reality, I suspect the approval process really just makes sure you're a developer and not just some fly-by-nite company that's a front for Kodak and Canon market research. And possibly also checking that you're not Kim Jong Il trying to bring top secret Nikon encryption to the Axis of Evil. When The GIMP or Debian or Mandrake or SuSE or Redhat is turned down for an SDK for no good reason, then I'll believe it's a conspiracy. For now, I'll chalk this whole debate up to uninformed wanking.
That's right, it's how Bill Gates tracks your e-mails to give you that Walt Disney World vacation when you send it to enough of your friends.
That could never happen to me, as my voice is my passport. Please verify me.
Obligatory Simpsons Quote: "My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"
I agree. I shelled out $5 for Debian on CD. I should be able to do whatever I want with it, including redistribute only the binaries to people, without any source code. Or modify the source code, build binaries, and ship only those binaries to people. Why not? I paid for it. Who the hell is this Stallman guy who thinks he can tell me what I get to do with something I bought? Sounds like another Jack Valenti to me.
Seriously, the "It's mine I paid for it, fuck you" attitude doesn't work in civilized society. There is a concept of "fair use" - sure, it's gone out the window in recent years, but it was called "fair use" for a reason. It wasn't called "fuck you, mr. artist".
You should have gotten written OKs. Not necessarily a signed notarized document written in blood, but at least an e-mail from your supervisor or something.
Given that you signed the IP agreement, regardless of the verbal OKs, I think technically you probably lose, at least on the parts you wrote. But I am not a lawyer, you should find one and ask them.
Now, my employer is trying to lay claim to this software and has filed at least one patent on it that I know of. They have also distributed it but refuse to make the source public. They claim that because of my IP agreement, they have full rights to this source code.
Again, not a lawyer, but that seems broken. The GPL is a license. Surely if they paid and licensed code from, say, Intel/IBM/Sun/*insert big company here*, regardless of license, they don't get to patent it or claim full rights to it.
I think you want to find an IP lawyer, preferably one who has dealt with the GPL. Calling the EFF might be a good place to start.
But wait, I'm confused. I thought "theft" was actually depriving someone else of the use of something by taking it. I mean, that's why everyone says downloading music isn't stealing, right? So this shouldn't be stealing either. Or is it only theft when it applies to the GPL?
(Try it yourself if you don't believe me)
What that says is "Prevent any user agent from indexing anything below the root hierarchy, unless it's Googlebot, and then only allow the root level and /support/"
So, no other search engines should ever be seeing this page. Basically, Google is using their own search engine to also index their own support information. And this is a problem because.... why?
In case it's not inherently obvious, that means no other search engines will even see the page. So that means that Google's results are being skewed by.... (wait for it) Google.