1) How does one express an epic level eye roll in text? 2) I am the only one that thinks that they put this thing in Kentucky because they think that everyone there is an inbred hill billy who won't know any better? (Not saying that everyone from Kentucky *is* an inbred hill billy but that the people who put the museum there think this) 3) Haven't we figured out by now religion and science don't mix? Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, and who knows who else? 4) Umm....the book of Genesis doesn't exactly print out a recipe for world building and population. If it said something like 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of butter.....bake at 350 for 20 minutes, I might be willing to buy this. But the fact of the matter is that it doesn't. Instead it gives us a big allegorical story and makes all sorts of references about the fact that time for God doesn't pass like it does for us humans. I myself see no conflict between evolution and religion. They are answers to separate questions - Why and How. 5) Am I the only one that finds it odd that a bunch of nutballs who don't even bother to read their own holy book swear that the it is the literal word God even though it was originally written in Aramaic, translated in to Hebrew, then to Latin, then to Greek, and the back to Latin, and then to English? And that's a best case scenario for most of the books of the "Bible". 6) Am I the only one who really questions the validity of the King James version, the one that most of the swear is "true and correct"? King James had all sorts of things tucked into his translation that supported his divine right to rule. It was politically motivated and PAID FOR by a King - as in "You didn't do what I said. Off with his head!" kind of a King at that. 7) What about the places where the Bible contradicts itself? Since its the literal word of God, that makes God wrong and since God is infallible, he can't be wrong, therefore - using their own logic - God did not write the Bible OR God isn't God.
Oh, but we can ignore all of the historical facts because we have "faith".
They will either evolve to accomodate their new conditions or they will die. It will be interesting to see if we get new species evolving more rapidly there or if the existing populations just wither and die off. Frankly, I would suspect that most of the animals there have been driven out of habitat elsewhere. That's how Mother Nature works. The looser is always the one that migrates. I'm not complaining much because that's what drove apes out of the forest and on to the plains to become the first hominids.
I've filed my patent for the inert gas we know as air. If they want to be able to breathe, they'll have to license their patent to me in exchange for using my patented product.
Actually, it was well known at the time exactly what was going on the concentration camps. Ask the Jews - they knew well before the camps were discovered. They even tried to tell people but most folks put it down to hysteria. The governments in question knew all too well thanks to their own intelligence.
I have no quarrel with the French resistance. They stood up on their hind legs and fought. I have a serious quarrel with the vichy French government filled with Nazi collaborators many of whom are now powerful old men still running the French government. Somethings are worth fighting for. Better to die a quick clean death on the field of battle than to be slowly tortured and starved in a concentration camp.
I stand by my judgment of them.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
PS: You can mod me as a troll and flame bait all you like. Truth most always SUCKS. It just isn't "politically correct" to come out and say what the truth is because "it might offend someone". Well, now isn't that double plus good.
Let's see, Microsoft bails out Apple financially so that they can continue to rip off the innovations that they don't want to finance themselves. They've been through a lot together. Why wouldn't they chat in a friendly fashion, at least in public?
Ummm....the official French government pretty much did. The German army rolled in to Paris looking more like a parade than a battle.
If I knew that the invading force was going to haul my people off to places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Birkenau, Dachau, and Flossenburg, we'd have fought until the either pushed us into the Atlantic Ocean or killed all of us. It makes me cry just thinking about it. I cannot understand how anyone who considers themselves to be a human being can surrender your populace to such a horrific regime knowing - KNOWING - what they're going to do to them and that their only goal is to eventually exterminate all of you.
I haven't forgotten it at all but it did happen prior to them killing off all of their nobility. It was the French King who decided to help us in order to needle England. The post-revolutionary French government has been...severely lacking in spine in my opinion.
Register a domain. Misspell something and register it. Use something that you can track back specifically to site you signed up with. I caught Best Buy doing exactly this 3 years ago. I ordered on line from their web site and used bestbuy@mydomain.com.
Their claims went in cycles...
1) We don't know what you're talking about. 2) We're not sending you anything. We don't sell email addresses. 3) You must have used that email address somewhere else. Yeah, I love your company so much that it's my email address. NOT!
After a lot of persistence and shouting, they finally admitted that one of their employees had sold me out to the spammer.
It would be different if MySpace pulled her profile down and put up a page in it's place that said "KNOWN SEX OFFENDER - PLEASE CALL POLICE IF YOU HAVE HAD CONTACT WITH THIS USER" or something similar. In this case, though, they simply removed her page and flagged her account.
I can understand that she's upset that anyone would think her capable of such a thing. However, it's very easy to say that you took your own page down or that you've moved it elsewhere. Getting harassed by freaks on MySpace is pretty common. Changing your profile to get away from them is pretty common too.
I do think that they handled the situation poorly and that their customer service people need a good tasering.
The French lost their right to have an opinion in world affairs for all time on the day they surrendered to Hitler. The general reason for surrender was that you didn't want your artwork bombed. "Sure, Mr. Hitler, come on in and kill all of our people. Gypsies, Jews, Catholics, who ever you want. Just don't hurt our art. It's waaaay more important than our populace."
Riiiight. Anyone who thinks like that deserves what they get. And, in case you've forgotten, it was the USA who bailed YOU out of WWII, not the other way around.
As for "net neutrality", what has the government ever gotten it's hands on that it handled well? Name one thing....
GoDaddy.com might not be a big improvement. I know that I've not been impressed with them at all. I don't care HOW cheap their hosting gets, I'll certainly never host anything with them again. The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call. By comparison, GoDaddy is about $3 a month and I've spent more time on the phone with GoDaddy than I do with my mother. Our connections to our database keep failing, an issue which GoDaddy is either unwilling or unable to correct. When your entire web site is a dynamic, database driven site that effectively puts us off the air. Spending hours with an outage that my friends in Atlanta, GA; Washington, DC; Portald, OR; Hamburg, Germany; Calcutta, India; Hong Kong; Tiawan; and Nairobi, Kenya can all see but technical support staff at GoDaddy can't seem to spot is flatly unacceptable. Then they have the nerve to tell me that it's my ISP and they can't help me. I've certainly learned my lesson and for less than the cost of a latte every month I can have peace of mind and web site that works.
First off - Anonymous Coward, I at least have the cojones to put my name on what I write. Secondly, your challenge is marketing hoo-ha. And since you sell "actionable information", your company is definitely in the game. You're definitely trying to tell people that you are more secure than the other guys and that your information is worth paying for. Which means that basically the whole first half of your post is...well bull. Yes, I'm tossing the big brown Bull$hit flag. No, you're not the only company that does this. However, you're probably one of the worst paying.
I didn't say that there weren't any more bugs in them. I said that what you're paying doesn't make it worth looking. There's a big difference in those two statements and your deliberate attempt to obfuscate the issue is just patently ridiculous.
As for making a living in the security industry, I do it every day. People hate VeriSign because your company has it's head so far up it's own butt, you look like a mobius strip. You can to www.dictionary.com or to www.wikipedia.com to look that reference up:) How many of your code signing certs have been socially engineered out of your company with names on them like "Microsoft"? It's amazing to me that you're still around.
It sounds like the guys who are too embarrassed to admit that they still live in Mom's basement found somewhere else to go besides the Star Trek convention. I bet if you raided 100 of their houses, you'd find 99 sets of Spock ears. Seriously, how is this news? Any of us can sit around and speculate about what would happen if Carthage had cannons, if Herodotus had a laptop, if the Romans had camcorders, if Galen had an ICU or if Battle Star Galactica had Romulan cloaking devices or of both BSG & ST had SG's star gates. It's still just that - speculation and it's just about as relevant to anything as my toe jam. 2 cents,
* The vulnerability must be remotely exploitable and must allow arbitrary code execution in a typical installation of one of the technologies listed above
Ok, so you pick some of the oldest and most robust technologies around - things that have had a LOT of the bugs worked out of them already and things are you're not that likely to have to pay out on.
* The vulnerability must exist in the latest version of the affected technology with all available patches and/or upgrades applied
* 'RC' (Release candidate), 'Beta', 'Technology Preview' and similar versions of the listed technologies are not included in this challenge
So you eliminate any upcoming versions, but you forget to exclude the previous versions....
* The vulnerability must be original and not previously disclosed to any party
So if I've already informed the software maker, it's out, further reducing the likelihood of any kind of a payment having to be made.
* The vulnerability cannot be caused by or require any additional third party software installed on the target system
Reasonable, but...and this is a big but....many things are quite secure on their own, but not so much so when you actually start using them. Prime example, Apache. Apache on it's own is fine. Install one of the open source PHP web apps and then see how secure it is. How many people run Apache serving up hand coded HTML?
* The vulnerability must not require any social engineering
This is because we all know that there is no patch for human stupidity...though I've never seen it admitted quite so blatantly.
PHOOEY ON YOUR CHALLENGE
It would take me a lot of man hours to come up with something, more to code an exploit for it and by the time I'm done...I'd be better off financially if I had worked at Wal-Mart for those hours. $16,000 divided by 4 (people on my team) = $4000 each. Let's say we spend 5 weeks on this. That's 200 hours each. That works out to having a chance to get $20/hr. And frankly, I think that 200 hours each is pretty optimistic. We're talking about pouring over their code base, becoming familiar with it, and looking for places that we can try to break it. That's in excess of 89,000 lines of code just for Apache and more than another 70,000 for Sendmail. Then we have to load it up, write some code to test the exploit, and run it to see if works. If it doesn't on the first try, it's rinse and repeat until we give up on that possible exploit and try a different one.
I'm guessing that this is more of a publicity stunt than anything else. Anyone in the industry should know better. This has to be something that the marketing poohbah's have dreamed up. Just more marketing hype so that they can say, "We're more secure than those other guys. We ran our challenge and we didn't get anything. These apps are safe to use."
We recently discovered that several of our laptops have a "smart chip" in the battery that quite effectively prevents the battery from being used AT ALL once the "magic number" of charges has been hit. Let's say that the magic number is 1407. When you go to plug your laptop in for the 1408th time, it becomes a very nice paperweight. I'm just hoping that they don't do this to hybrid cars...
With something like copyright infringement, you have a lot to prove, one of which is intent. The only way to really prove intent is to show that Joe Bob made 4000 copies of whatever. Otherwise, you're just making a backup copy for yourself which you are legally entitled to do. Attempted murder is allowed because you actually went out and tried to kill someone. You actually did something that was illegal - like shooting at someone and missing. That means that you had the gun, loaded it, climbed up on the roof top, took aim, and pulled the trigger.
What they're talking about doing is something like revoking your driver's license because you might be involved in accident.
Considering that the original concept of a GUI comes from Xerox Parc, I fail to see how Microsoft or Apple either one can hold patents on that. Considering that Microsoft totally rips off each new version of Apple's OS, I fail to see how they can hold patents on that too.... I think that the FOSS folks should claim that they, too, ripped off Apple and not Microsoft. Since they're both ripping off the same source, of course they look familiar. As for OpenOffice, I can only imagine that the patents in question are the ones that concern document (data) formatting for the Microsoft proprietary document formats.
Does this mean that the RIAA will quit going after college students who are downloading music for their own use? Does this mean that the RIAA will start going after people who frequent every train and bus stop I see selling home-made compilations of music and movies that are sold on plain jane spindle discs (CD's and DVD's)?
His basic argument is that all the low level patching does is to accelerate the arms race between software makers and black-hats. Frankly, I think his argument is flawed. There are plenty of people out there who know how to exploit all kinds of things. Just because some of us choose not to do so doesn't mean that we don't know how. If *I* can find things and figure it out, I'm sure that other people can as well.
If you don't know that they're being exploited because you're customers don't know to look for it. That's like saying your security is good because you've never been hacked.
Speaking as a dyslexic, I can see where this would certainly be of great benefit to anyone with a reading disability. What an awesome way to help people. I wonder if they'd license this to groups like OpenOffice so that one can produce documents in this format.
I have to second this. It's not about removing someone for "making a mistake." It's about recognizing unscrupulous and unethical behavior and removing that type of person from a position of power and influence in your organization. Keeping him in an equally important and probably well paid spot sends a dangerous message to the rest of the staff at IDG. "You can sell out all you want. If you get busted the only thing you'll get is a new job title."
I don't know about you, but I were running what I wanted to be a well respected publication, he'd have been gone so quick he'd have left a hole in the air in his office. Not just tastefully reassigned to another place with out any real punishment for his actions.
Sadly enough, this is an extension of the credit bureau philosophy. It goes something like this, "I have collected data on and about you. Even though the data regards you, I - as the collector and aggregator - own the data and can do with it as I please." This means that it can be sold, rented, leased, loaned, published, correlated with other data from other vendors of data.
Basically Verzion is stating that "I've collected this data about you, Mr. Verizon Customer, I can sell it or give it to whomever I please and there's not a thing in the world you can do about it." Now considering that these guys are one of only 10 Tier-1 ISP's in the planet, that means they have data on 1/10 or more of the world's population flowing across their networks at any given moment.
Doesn't seeing this give me the warm fuzzy feeling? (That's sarcastic for you dee-de-deeee's).
Slashdot Mirror
1) How does one express an epic level eye roll in text?
2) I am the only one that thinks that they put this thing in Kentucky because they think that everyone there is an inbred hill billy who won't know any better? (Not saying that everyone from Kentucky *is* an inbred hill billy but that the people who put the museum there think this)
3) Haven't we figured out by now religion and science don't mix? Copernicus, Galileo, Da Vinci, and who knows who else?
4) Umm....the book of Genesis doesn't exactly print out a recipe for world building and population. If it said something like 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of butter.....bake at 350 for 20 minutes, I might be willing to buy this. But the fact of the matter is that it doesn't. Instead it gives us a big allegorical story and makes all sorts of references about the fact that time for God doesn't pass like it does for us humans. I myself see no conflict between evolution and religion. They are answers to separate questions - Why and How.
5) Am I the only one that finds it odd that a bunch of nutballs who don't even bother to read their own holy book swear that the it is the literal word God even though it was originally written in Aramaic, translated in to Hebrew, then to Latin, then to Greek, and the back to Latin, and then to English? And that's a best case scenario for most of the books of the "Bible".
6) Am I the only one who really questions the validity of the King James version, the one that most of the swear is "true and correct"? King James had all sorts of things tucked into his translation that supported his divine right to rule. It was politically motivated and PAID FOR by a King - as in "You didn't do what I said. Off with his head!" kind of a King at that.
7) What about the places where the Bible contradicts itself? Since its the literal word of God, that makes God wrong and since God is infallible, he can't be wrong, therefore - using their own logic - God did not write the Bible OR God isn't God.
Oh, but we can ignore all of the historical facts because we have "faith".
2 cents,
QueenB.
They will either evolve to accomodate their new conditions or they will die. It will be interesting to see if we get new species evolving more rapidly there or if the existing populations just wither and die off. Frankly, I would suspect that most of the animals there have been driven out of habitat elsewhere. That's how Mother Nature works. The looser is always the one that migrates. I'm not complaining much because that's what drove apes out of the forest and on to the plains to become the first hominids.
2 cents,
QueenB.
I've filed my patent for the inert gas we know as air. If they want to be able to breathe, they'll have to license their patent to me in exchange for using my patented product.
2 cents,
QueenB.
Actually, it was well known at the time exactly what was going on the concentration camps. Ask the Jews - they knew well before the camps were discovered. They even tried to tell people but most folks put it down to hysteria. The governments in question knew all too well thanks to their own intelligence.
I have no quarrel with the French resistance. They stood up on their hind legs and fought. I have a serious quarrel with the vichy French government filled with Nazi collaborators many of whom are now powerful old men still running the French government. Somethings are worth fighting for. Better to die a quick clean death on the field of battle than to be slowly tortured and starved in a concentration camp.
I stand by my judgment of them.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
PS: You can mod me as a troll and flame bait all you like. Truth most always SUCKS. It just isn't "politically correct" to come out and say what the truth is because "it might offend someone". Well, now isn't that double plus good.
Let's see, Microsoft bails out Apple financially so that they can continue to rip off the innovations that they don't want to finance themselves. They've been through a lot together. Why wouldn't they chat in a friendly fashion, at least in public?
2 cents,
QueenB.
Does about 1/3 as much as my MacBook and costs as much as a cheap laptop at Fry's....
2 cents,
QueenB.
Ummm....the official French government pretty much did. The German army rolled in to Paris looking more like a parade than a battle.
If I knew that the invading force was going to haul my people off to places like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Birkenau, Dachau, and Flossenburg, we'd have fought until the either pushed us into the Atlantic Ocean or killed all of us. It makes me cry just thinking about it. I cannot understand how anyone who considers themselves to be a human being can surrender your populace to such a horrific regime knowing - KNOWING - what they're going to do to them and that their only goal is to eventually exterminate all of you.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
I haven't forgotten it at all but it did happen prior to them killing off all of their nobility. It was the French King who decided to help us in order to needle England. The post-revolutionary French government has been...severely lacking in spine in my opinion.
2 more cents,
QueenB.
Register a domain. Misspell something and register it. Use something that you can track back specifically to site you signed up with. I caught Best Buy doing exactly this 3 years ago. I ordered on line from their web site and used bestbuy@mydomain.com.
Their claims went in cycles...
1) We don't know what you're talking about.
2) We're not sending you anything. We don't sell email addresses.
3) You must have used that email address somewhere else. Yeah, I love your company so much that it's my email address. NOT!
After a lot of persistence and shouting, they finally admitted that one of their employees had sold me out to the spammer.
2 cents,
QueenB.
It would be different if MySpace pulled her profile down and put up a page in it's place that said "KNOWN SEX OFFENDER - PLEASE CALL POLICE IF YOU HAVE HAD CONTACT WITH THIS USER" or something similar. In this case, though, they simply removed her page and flagged her account.
I can understand that she's upset that anyone would think her capable of such a thing. However, it's very easy to say that you took your own page down or that you've moved it elsewhere. Getting harassed by freaks on MySpace is pretty common. Changing your profile to get away from them is pretty common too.
I do think that they handled the situation poorly and that their customer service people need a good tasering.
2 cents,
QueenB.
The French lost their right to have an opinion in world affairs for all time on the day they surrendered to Hitler. The general reason for surrender was that you didn't want your artwork bombed. "Sure, Mr. Hitler, come on in and kill all of our people. Gypsies, Jews, Catholics, who ever you want. Just don't hurt our art. It's waaaay more important than our populace."
Riiiight. Anyone who thinks like that deserves what they get. And, in case you've forgotten, it was the USA who bailed YOU out of WWII, not the other way around.
As for "net neutrality", what has the government ever gotten it's hands on that it handled well? Name one thing....
2 cents,
QueenB.
In an age where Brittany Spear's hair (regardless of which end of her it is or isn't on) is considered to be "newsworthy", we are all dooomed!
2 cents
QueenB.
GoDaddy.com might not be a big improvement. I know that I've not been impressed with them at all. I don't care HOW cheap their hosting gets, I'll certainly never host anything with them again. The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call. By comparison, GoDaddy is about $3 a month and I've spent more time on the phone with GoDaddy than I do with my mother. Our connections to our database keep failing, an issue which GoDaddy is either unwilling or unable to correct. When your entire web site is a dynamic, database driven site that effectively puts us off the air. Spending hours with an outage that my friends in Atlanta, GA; Washington, DC; Portald, OR; Hamburg, Germany; Calcutta, India; Hong Kong; Tiawan; and Nairobi, Kenya can all see but technical support staff at GoDaddy can't seem to spot is flatly unacceptable. Then they have the nerve to tell me that it's my ISP and they can't help me. I've certainly learned my lesson and for less than the cost of a latte every month I can have peace of mind and web site that works.
2 cents,
Queen B.
First off - Anonymous Coward, I at least have the cojones to put my name on what I write. Secondly, your challenge is marketing hoo-ha. And since you sell "actionable information", your company is definitely in the game. You're definitely trying to tell people that you are more secure than the other guys and that your information is worth paying for. Which means that basically the whole first half of your post is...well bull. Yes, I'm tossing the big brown Bull$hit flag. No, you're not the only company that does this. However, you're probably one of the worst paying.
:) How many of your code signing certs have been socially engineered out of your company with names on them like "Microsoft"? It's amazing to me that you're still around.
I didn't say that there weren't any more bugs in them. I said that what you're paying doesn't make it worth looking. There's a big difference in those two statements and your deliberate attempt to obfuscate the issue is just patently ridiculous.
As for making a living in the security industry, I do it every day. People hate VeriSign because your company has it's head so far up it's own butt, you look like a mobius strip. You can to www.dictionary.com or to www.wikipedia.com to look that reference up
It sounds like the guys who are too embarrassed to admit that they still live in Mom's basement found somewhere else to go besides the Star Trek convention. I bet if you raided 100 of their houses, you'd find 99 sets of Spock ears. Seriously, how is this news? Any of us can sit around and speculate about what would happen if Carthage had cannons, if Herodotus had a laptop, if the Romans had camcorders, if Galen had an ICU or if Battle Star Galactica had Romulan cloaking devices or of both BSG & ST had SG's star gates. It's still just that - speculation and it's just about as relevant to anything as my toe jam.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Here are the terms of the challenge -
* The vulnerability must be remotely exploitable and must allow arbitrary code execution in a typical installation of one of the technologies listed above
Ok, so you pick some of the oldest and most robust technologies around - things that have had a LOT of the bugs worked out of them already and things are you're not that likely to have to pay out on.
* The vulnerability must exist in the latest version of the affected technology with all available patches and/or upgrades applied
* 'RC' (Release candidate), 'Beta', 'Technology Preview' and similar versions of the listed technologies are not included in this challenge
So you eliminate any upcoming versions, but you forget to exclude the previous versions....
* The vulnerability must be original and not previously disclosed to any party
So if I've already informed the software maker, it's out, further reducing the likelihood of any kind of a payment having to be made.
* The vulnerability cannot be caused by or require any additional third party software installed on the target system
Reasonable, but...and this is a big but....many things are quite secure on their own, but not so much so when you actually start using them. Prime example, Apache. Apache on it's own is fine. Install one of the open source PHP web apps and then see how secure it is. How many people run Apache serving up hand coded HTML?
* The vulnerability must not require any social engineering
This is because we all know that there is no patch for human stupidity...though I've never seen it admitted quite so blatantly.
PHOOEY ON YOUR CHALLENGE
It would take me a lot of man hours to come up with something, more to code an exploit for it and by the time I'm done...I'd be better off financially if I had worked at Wal-Mart for those hours. $16,000 divided by 4 (people on my team) = $4000 each. Let's say we spend 5 weeks on this. That's 200 hours each. That works out to having a chance to get $20/hr. And frankly, I think that 200 hours each is pretty optimistic. We're talking about pouring over their code base, becoming familiar with it, and looking for places that we can try to break it. That's in excess of 89,000 lines of code just for Apache and more than another 70,000 for Sendmail. Then we have to load it up, write some code to test the exploit, and run it to see if works. If it doesn't on the first try, it's rinse and repeat until we give up on that possible exploit and try a different one.
I'm guessing that this is more of a publicity stunt than anything else. Anyone in the industry should know better. This has to be something that the marketing poohbah's have dreamed up. Just more marketing hype so that they can say, "We're more secure than those other guys. We ran our challenge and we didn't get anything. These apps are safe to use."
2 cents,
Queen B.
We recently discovered that several of our laptops have a "smart chip" in the battery that quite effectively prevents the battery from being used AT ALL once the "magic number" of charges has been hit. Let's say that the magic number is 1407. When you go to plug your laptop in for the 1408th time, it becomes a very nice paperweight. I'm just hoping that they don't do this to hybrid cars...
2 cents,
Queen B.
With something like copyright infringement, you have a lot to prove, one of which is intent. The only way to really prove intent is to show that Joe Bob made 4000 copies of whatever. Otherwise, you're just making a backup copy for yourself which you are legally entitled to do. Attempted murder is allowed because you actually went out and tried to kill someone. You actually did something that was illegal - like shooting at someone and missing. That means that you had the gun, loaded it, climbed up on the roof top, took aim, and pulled the trigger.
What they're talking about doing is something like revoking your driver's license because you might be involved in accident.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Considering that the original concept of a GUI comes from Xerox Parc, I fail to see how Microsoft or Apple either one can hold patents on that. Considering that Microsoft totally rips off each new version of Apple's OS, I fail to see how they can hold patents on that too.... I think that the FOSS folks should claim that they, too, ripped off Apple and not Microsoft. Since they're both ripping off the same source, of course they look familiar. As for OpenOffice, I can only imagine that the patents in question are the ones that concern document (data) formatting for the Microsoft proprietary document formats.
2 cents,
Queen B.
We can give birth so learning a computer programming language is nothing by comparison....
2 cents,
Queen B.
Does this mean that the RIAA will quit going after college students who are downloading music for their own use? Does this mean that the RIAA will start going after people who frequent every train and bus stop I see selling home-made compilations of music and movies that are sold on plain jane spindle discs (CD's and DVD's)?
2 cents,
Queen B.
His basic argument is that all the low level patching does is to accelerate the arms race between software makers and black-hats. Frankly, I think his argument is flawed. There are plenty of people out there who know how to exploit all kinds of things. Just because some of us choose not to do so doesn't mean that we don't know how. If *I* can find things and figure it out, I'm sure that other people can as well.
If you don't know that they're being exploited because you're customers don't know to look for it. That's like saying your security is good because you've never been hacked.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Speaking as a dyslexic, I can see where this would certainly be of great benefit to anyone with a reading disability. What an awesome way to help people. I wonder if they'd license this to groups like OpenOffice so that one can produce documents in this format.
2 cents,
Queen B.
I have to second this. It's not about removing someone for "making a mistake." It's about recognizing unscrupulous and unethical behavior and removing that type of person from a position of power and influence in your organization. Keeping him in an equally important and probably well paid spot sends a dangerous message to the rest of the staff at IDG. "You can sell out all you want. If you get busted the only thing you'll get is a new job title."
I don't know about you, but I were running what I wanted to be a well respected publication, he'd have been gone so quick he'd have left a hole in the air in his office. Not just tastefully reassigned to another place with out any real punishment for his actions.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Sadly enough, this is an extension of the credit bureau philosophy. It goes something like this, "I have collected data on and about you. Even though the data regards you, I - as the collector and aggregator - own the data and can do with it as I please." This means that it can be sold, rented, leased, loaned, published, correlated with other data from other vendors of data.
Basically Verzion is stating that "I've collected this data about you, Mr. Verizon Customer, I can sell it or give it to whomever I please and there's not a thing in the world you can do about it." Now considering that these guys are one of only 10 Tier-1 ISP's in the planet, that means they have data on 1/10 or more of the world's population flowing across their networks at any given moment.
Doesn't seeing this give me the warm fuzzy feeling? (That's sarcastic for you dee-de-deeee's).
2 cents,
Queen B.