Summary: Man penetrates corporate network with hot credentials, man copies software from illegally penetrated network, man complains when law enforcement gets involved.
Not only that, but he was let into the network to recommend his company become a preferred partner of Cisco. Why he decided to d/l software he was not authorized to possess is beyond me, but you would think he would realize that was likely to piss off Cisco.
There is more to this story than meets the eye; Cisco would not bother to do this unless there was something else at stake. My guess is there was some concern about how he planned to use the information he had gotten; or over the initial establishment of his company.
Of course, at/. big corporation bad is the general response...
That reminds me of a case I saw where the two attorney's argued over what something in a photograph represented and whether the area was in a uniform color or not. They argued for hours until they noticed that the former first year associate of one of them (the one, incidentally, that wanted to use the picture and claimed that it was not uniform in color) was shaking his head at his desk. The judge asked him why he was shaking his head and he responded that it was obviously a JPEG artifact caused by bad compression. The judge looked a little perplexed and asked to to explain it again. He did by analogy to a fax machine. The judge threw out the picture as not the best evidence AFTER HE LOOKED AND COMPARED A FAXED DOCUMENT TO THE ORIGINAL.
While yeah, Google does all the grunt-work on the back-end, you still have all the hazards that any SaaS has... and it's not like GMail hasn't had its share of embarrassing security bombs or occasional outages (however brief they may have been) due to either the back-end, or the ISP you use to connect to it.
True - but you can download and remove from the server your mail so at least you can limit the damage while still having the benefits of letting GMail do the grunt work; unless of course Google caches all your mail somewhere else as well.
Much easier is a distributed system. Send all the meters a common ramp profile: from $0.1500/kWh at 19:50 to $0.1600/kWh at 20:10. Each meter could randomly pick a time during the ramp up period (between 19:50 and 20:10) when they would set their price to $0.1600. That way you send only one message, and it's the same message to all meters at the same time, and yet you still achieve a slow and predictable shedding of demand. Management of rates is much simpler. You don't even need feedback from the meters, you simply trust they're listening. For more reliability, you continually broadcast the current rate schedule, and if a particular meter misses the message at 19:49:50 they'll get it again at 19:49:51. Of course there's more to it than that, there are different classes of service and rate schedules would be a large set of meter classes, but the idea's the same for all.
I wish I knew how they were really implemented. But that's how I'd design it.
I'd even go a step further - design smarts into the chargers for cars that can be interrupted so that a utility could load shed as needed as well.
yea I will hold my breath for that to happen, in the meantime who is going to beefing up this enormous nationwide grid? thats right a team of workers pouring out of a 2 ton quad cab V8 Chevy
Them's fightin' words, son. Any self-respecting lineman drives a Ford. And we sure as shit don't carpool.
Ha. What's yellow and sleeps 4? An utility bucket truck.
The big question that seemed/seems lost in all this "The electric car is gonna save the world!" hype is how an energy grid that can barely handle our energy needs AS IT IS is supposed to function when a significant portion of the population replaces their evil petroleum cars with electricity-draining electrics. When I've asked that question in the past to my usual suspect lineup of hippie friends (who also think that organic food and wind turbines are going to save us all too), the only answer I ever got was a vague "Well, most of that'll be happening at night, when the power demand is down anyway." But we're talking HUGE power usage spikes with those cars. Think of how much our system is already taxed when HVAC units have to cool a 10-degree-higher heat wave. Now imagine half the population plugging cars into the gird every night that draw WAY more power than any consumer HVAC unit.
The issue is not capacity but peaking - as you say "spikes." Adding a huge load, beyond spinning reserves, taxes the system since you cannot handle the load so you have to load shed. So who do you shed? It's not like daytime where big industrial users can be dropped quickly (and are often paid for the ability to do this); it's a bunch of home users who more than likely are the culprit. Plus, it's only temporary since you probably have the capacity just not "right now!"- if you have a nuke with available capacity you can ramp it out real fast - or a gas turbine (but that's expensive peaking power) - if you have to do a cold start you'll never get there.
The problem is not so much a grid problem - the same issue occurs if a plant trips off line as well - but, as TFA points out, the way smart meters will be used to buy power. Rather than do an all at once buy - equipment should be allowed to lock in a price and the grid tell it when to start drawing power - and bring stuff online at a ramp rate that is below the grid's rate. The same thing should be done for dropping off - if everyone drops off at once it causes problems as well - which could happen if the price all of a sudden jumped due to demand and the running of a peaker.
It's not that a smart grid is too smart - it's not quite smart enough, yet.
...Internet Explorer users, on average, fell for the hoax the most, with IE6 users most likely to believe it was real and IE8 users being somewhat less gullible. Firefox, Chrome and Safari users fared somewhat better as they tended to not believe it as much as the IE users. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino users almost never believed the hoax, while Opera users immediately new it not to be true.
Assume it is China. Why is it that when transnational attacks occur on a scale this large against our nations infrastructure, financial sectors, and defense systems the politicians shrug it off or turn a blind eye, but when citizen schmoe downloads some files or leaks some dox the entire system goes full assault on their asses with ICE raids, take down notices, special committees on intellectual property, etc. etc.
Simple - Citizen Schmoe doesn't control minerals, oil, access to SLOCs, etc that you need - so you play the diplomacy game since both sides don't really want to alienate the other; they just want an upper hand. OTOH, you have nothing to lose by smacking Citizen Schmoe to deter others so they don't drain resources while you play the diplomacy game.
Remember - today's enemy may be tomorrow's friend, because countries have permanent interests, not permanent friends or enemies.
If they were concerned about national security, they would denounce the culprit (they know what country they're coming from), and work on hardening security. But it is not about national security. It is about corporate security and defending the status quo. That is why the US seeks to extradite file sharers, hell, link sharers, from other countries, but when massive ddos attacks are directed at us by governments that we trade with, nothing is generally done.
Denouncing does nothing but cause a public fight. Instead, you harden your networks and work behind the scenes to let them know you are pissed off. In addition, watching what they do gains insights into hat the are doing and want; as well as the opportunity to plant information as well. Or, why not let them give you to add selected payloads as part of the info they d/l to make it easier to tap their systems? Plus, if they think their current tools are effective they may not try to develop better ones. If you let your enemy think they are smarter than they are and you are dumber than you really are you can win a lot of battles or make a whole lot of money.
'I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. I have no way of knowing if my user, Clem Kadiddlehopper is the same person as Willy Lump Lump and Bolivar Shagnasty on other sites That costs me money, money I deserve. If I can correlate the information about users across sites I can build up an even more valuable trove of information to sell. It's time for this quaint notion of privacy and an individual's right to it to go away; after all it is pre-internet thinking and we're in a new economy. It's money we're talking about, real money.'
While they got 100,000 d/ls that doesn't mean they lost 100,000 sales - many people, myself included, will take a shot with a free app to see if it's worth anything. More on this later. What will be interesting is how many people continue their use after a few weeks of months? That is a better indicator of "lost" sales than the initial download.
Since "free" means "just garb it and see if I like it cause it has no cost to me if I don't" to many people a developer should weigh the increased support and fixed costs (more servers if the app is an online service as was the case here) against the value of getting their name out and building awareness of other apps. It also means it will be harder to go back to a higher price if many of your potential customers grab the free one. In many cases, you'd be better off dropping the price to $.99 - it's still at the impulse purchase point (hey, it's not even a buck so no big loss if it sucks) and you get some cash for each d/l. When you rais eteh price again, people are more likely to think - "I missed my chance to grab it cheap" than "WTF - this was free and now you want $?" Plus, when people pay for something, even a small amount, they tend to value it more and are more likely to think it was a good choice and pay in the future as well.
So what to do with the 100k free apps out there? After a while, come out with a paid upgrade to v2. Give it away to paying customers for free to get them, charge the free ones an upgrade fee, and end the v1 service. That way, you've converted the customers that value your product and lowered your costs while getting some cash flowing in as well. If you promised some duration of availability keep that promise; but wen you can work to migrate customers to a paying mode.
Know how I know that? It's four pages long, yet doesn't say anything.
"As perceptive CIOs seek to transform their rigid, legacy ridden infrastructures into agile, efficient, service-driven delivery mechanisms, they must adopt a pragmatic approach to managing the risks of consumer IT while embracing the benefits.
I stopped reading right there.
Upper management? Nope. Some lucky consultant got a high paying gig that probably only cost him a decent meal for a buddy.
l Slashdot logic which predicts that giving away something for free is "free advertising" that somehow generates sales didn't happen in this situation. Fail all around.
Unless its addictive the only thing you get by giving something away for free is that the receiver values it zero and expects you to continue to provide it for free.
I've gotten the "We're a big name so do the work for free and you'll be able to say you did x for us" to which I reply "How about you give all of your products for free and I'll tell everyone I know I use them?"
He could - and wind up in a lot of expensive legal hot water as a result, such as perjury charges and civil damages.
Oh shit. Here for a minute I thought we were talking about the DMCA!
Even if he sent a blatantly false takedown notice, he will face nothing. In fact, I don't think there is anything the recipient of a DMCA notice can do except issue the counter-notice. There's really not many provisions to dissuade people from issuing false claims.
Not quite - see Online Policy Group vs. Diebold as an example. (http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/)
I meant to add:
Q: How can we bring jobs back home?
A: By directly -- and heavily -- taxing companies that outsource labor and manufacturing. This avoids the pitfalls of tariffs: we would not be blocking trade from coming into or going out of the country. However, we would be demanding compensation for our economy, from the companies that have been so harming it by their practices. That's about as fair as it gets.
(It's also not a subsidy by the government... so it avoids those problems, too. Instead, it is a source of revenue TO the government.)
All that does is add a "tax" on every product made in the US. It would essentially raise the cost of goods produced in the US to an artificially high level since now US labor and production is "competitive" to out sourced labor and production. As a result, the cost of goods increases and less people are able to buy them. You don't magically create more wealth, you just inflate the costs of goods - less people buy and the workers you helped are out of a job again.
The key is productivity - if you can make more, even at a higher labor cost, it's worth producing it here. Trying to keep jobs by tax policy is counterproductive.
How about DMCA takedown notices sent to their ISP? I don't live in the US but my understanding is that you could probably get their web site taken offline without needed any expensive proof or legalese - just copy/paste one of the many examples and guides you can find with Google.
He could - and wind up in a lot of expensive legal hot water as a result, such as perjury charges and civil damages. Not a good idea unless you clearly are the copyright holder.
As per someone noting below: if you want to know your legal rights and what you can do, talk to a lawyer. What you'll get here is a bunch of IANALs telling you bullshit, and IAALbInYl (I Am A Lawyer, but I'm not YOUR lawyer) telling you generic advice that possibly doesn't apply, and that you need to speak to a lawyer who represents your interests.
Sanest advice in the entire thread. Only your lawyer represents your interest and that's whose advice you should seek and listen to.
It has been a long time since I've signed a contract, but the last one I saw had something about the company owning everything you create - whether on company time or not. If the submitter has a similar clause in his contract, he's probably fucked, because it would therefore not be his code to GPL.
That depends - even if it is his employers (who can create a proprietary version as well assuming all the code is original work); forking the GPL'd code may still be a viable option. If they knew it was released under the GPL (and ideally OK'd it) then they've licensed their code and the GPLd codebase is still under the GPL. He acted as their agent and so his actions were enough to GPL the code. They can modify it without restriction - since they own the copyright (as could he if he owns the copyright) as well without being bound by the GPL. No where in the GPL does it prevent you from releasing your own code under multiple licenses.
I dont think where he wrote the code plays a big a role as people think it does. Rather what matters more is whether he was in an employer-employee relationship with them and if this was work that was part of that. Even though it appears he was freelance, if he worked onsite on company equipment for 6 years they may very well be enough to show an employer-employee relationship. Especially if this code was a part of one of their projects. It sucks, but now he knows what he needs to do legally next time.
All the more reason to talk to a lawyer who is good at employment law. If the employer claims an employer - employee relationship existed there are many things beyond "who owns the code" that come into play; including benefits, social security payments, etc.
Even if he worked onsite for many years it could still be his, depending on the contract terms; or it could belong to his employer.
So you worked for them and where paid by them. You decided to release something as GPL (your post doesn't say if this was sanctioned by the powers that be), but considering your termination, one would think you stepped out of line?
But, the fact is, you where working for them, earning money producing something *they* own. If they decide to revoke a license on something *they* own, they are squarely in their rights to do so.
Depends on teh employment situation and agreement. I work as a contractor so what I create is mine, per my contract.
Never rent out a property you are emotional invested in, and never get emotionally invested in rental property. If you do, even normal wear and tear becomes troubling - because "you would have been more careful since it's yours..."
While most renters are decent people, things get broken, disappear - it's part of the rental business. Sometimes, it;s just down right funny - I had a renter take a $2 shower curtain from a vacation rental. As long as they didn't trash the place (beyond the deposit) and paid on time I was happy. This poor lady's case illustrates the danger of renting property you also use regularly. It 's not her fault, but unless you kno and trust a renter don't leave any of your stuff their and don't violate rule 1 at any time.
Seems kinda like shooting you the chest with a.22 to show how vulnerable you are to lead bullets.
No, I'd say it's more alike shooting a 22 into a gel target with a cheap ballistic nylon shirt to show how much damage it can do in an effort to ducat people who think that they are safe from a 22 bullet because they wear a "ballistic" nylon shirt.
A product such as this, even if only used as a proof of concept, is quite dangerous, and I'd like nothing more than to shoot it down with a Stinger, and destroy all the R&D material.
The beauty of it is tab a Stinger would probably never hit - no IR signature of note.
I find it interesting that they label this as a black-hat project, with malicious intentions, which it clearly is. They could have had a better public reception if it was pitched as a military tool to enable battlefield communications by the drone claiming to be a cell-phone carrier tower, like a temp cell tower.
It's not so much malicious as a way to show that communications are more vulnerable than we realize - and that with some ingenuity people can do some pretty good snooping. If they really were malicious they'd never tell anyone about it - and they seem to be pretty careful about how they go about it to avoid legal or ethical problems as well.
China wants^H^H^H^H^H has told the hot spot operators to keep the logs, the U.S. government wants the ISP's to do the same thing. Where is the outrage?
US ISPs, (and most other democratic countries as well) can refuse and go to court to fight the requirement. ultimately, the supreme Court can rule and the government must comply. Despite what many people think, the SCOTUS is a pretty independent minded bunch who do what they want, despite the wishes of those who appointed them. So while the idea is pretty outrages, at least we have real legal protections vs. living under a government that believes it can rule by edict and where there is no recourse but to lay low and hope you get ignored or missed.
The Dongcheng Public Security Bureau did not respond to requests for comment on Monday, but according to its publicly issued circular, the measure is designed to thwart criminals who use the Internet to “conduct blackmail, traffic goods, gamble, propagate damaging information and spread computer viruses.” Such nefarious activity, the notice says, “not only hurts the interests of the country and the masses, but has also caused some businesses to suffer economic losses.”
the measure is designed to thwart citizens who use the Internet to “propagate damaging information that could piss them off and threaten our cushy party jobs and lives.” Such nefarious activity, the notice says, “not only hurts the interests of the country's ruling party party members, but has also caused some of them and their families and cabals to suffer economic losses.”
There. No need to use Babelfish
Seriously, they may keep a lid on dissent for a while, but when it starts, look out.
Slashdot Mirror
Summary: Man penetrates corporate network with hot credentials, man copies software from illegally penetrated network, man complains when law enforcement gets involved.
Not only that, but he was let into the network to recommend his company become a preferred partner of Cisco. Why he decided to d/l software he was not authorized to possess is beyond me, but you would think he would realize that was likely to piss off Cisco.
There is more to this story than meets the eye; Cisco would not bother to do this unless there was something else at stake. My guess is there was some concern about how he planned to use the information he had gotten; or over the initial establishment of his company.
Of course, at /. big corporation bad is the general response...
How's that faith in Hopenchange working out for you?
Great. Thanks for asking. I'm way better off. I take it your not? Oh well...
That reminds me of a case I saw where the two attorney's argued over what something in a photograph represented and whether the area was in a uniform color or not. They argued for hours until they noticed that the former first year associate of one of them (the one, incidentally, that wanted to use the picture and claimed that it was not uniform in color) was shaking his head at his desk. The judge asked him why he was shaking his head and he responded that it was obviously a JPEG artifact caused by bad compression. The judge looked a little perplexed and asked to to explain it again. He did by analogy to a fax machine. The judge threw out the picture as not the best evidence AFTER HE LOOKED AND COMPARED A FAXED DOCUMENT TO THE ORIGINAL.
There. Fixed that for you.
Depends.
While yeah, Google does all the grunt-work on the back-end, you still have all the hazards that any SaaS has... and it's not like GMail hasn't had its share of embarrassing security bombs or occasional outages (however brief they may have been) due to either the back-end, or the ISP you use to connect to it.
True - but you can download and remove from the server your mail so at least you can limit the damage while still having the benefits of letting GMail do the grunt work; unless of course Google caches all your mail somewhere else as well.
Much easier is a distributed system. Send all the meters a common ramp profile: from $0.1500/kWh at 19:50 to $0.1600/kWh at 20:10. Each meter could randomly pick a time during the ramp up period (between 19:50 and 20:10) when they would set their price to $0.1600. That way you send only one message, and it's the same message to all meters at the same time, and yet you still achieve a slow and predictable shedding of demand. Management of rates is much simpler. You don't even need feedback from the meters, you simply trust they're listening. For more reliability, you continually broadcast the current rate schedule, and if a particular meter misses the message at 19:49:50 they'll get it again at 19:49:51. Of course there's more to it than that, there are different classes of service and rate schedules would be a large set of meter classes, but the idea's the same for all.
I wish I knew how they were really implemented. But that's how I'd design it.
I'd even go a step further - design smarts into the chargers for cars that can be interrupted so that a utility could load shed as needed as well.
yea I will hold my breath for that to happen, in the meantime who is going to beefing up this enormous nationwide grid? thats right a team of workers pouring out of a 2 ton quad cab V8 Chevy
Them's fightin' words, son. Any self-respecting lineman drives a Ford. And we sure as shit don't carpool.
Ha. What's yellow and sleeps 4? An utility bucket truck.
The big question that seemed/seems lost in all this "The electric car is gonna save the world!" hype is how an energy grid that can barely handle our energy needs AS IT IS is supposed to function when a significant portion of the population replaces their evil petroleum cars with electricity-draining electrics. When I've asked that question in the past to my usual suspect lineup of hippie friends (who also think that organic food and wind turbines are going to save us all too), the only answer I ever got was a vague "Well, most of that'll be happening at night, when the power demand is down anyway." But we're talking HUGE power usage spikes with those cars. Think of how much our system is already taxed when HVAC units have to cool a 10-degree-higher heat wave. Now imagine half the population plugging cars into the gird every night that draw WAY more power than any consumer HVAC unit.
The issue is not capacity but peaking - as you say "spikes." Adding a huge load, beyond spinning reserves, taxes the system since you cannot handle the load so you have to load shed. So who do you shed? It's not like daytime where big industrial users can be dropped quickly (and are often paid for the ability to do this); it's a bunch of home users who more than likely are the culprit. Plus, it's only temporary since you probably have the capacity just not "right now!"- if you have a nuke with available capacity you can ramp it out real fast - or a gas turbine (but that's expensive peaking power) - if you have to do a cold start you'll never get there.
The problem is not so much a grid problem - the same issue occurs if a plant trips off line as well - but, as TFA points out, the way smart meters will be used to buy power. Rather than do an all at once buy - equipment should be allowed to lock in a price and the grid tell it when to start drawing power - and bring stuff online at a ramp rate that is below the grid's rate. The same thing should be done for dropping off - if everyone drops off at once it causes problems as well - which could happen if the price all of a sudden jumped due to demand and the running of a peaker.
It's not that a smart grid is too smart - it's not quite smart enough, yet.
...Internet Explorer users, on average, fell for the hoax the most, with IE6 users most likely to believe it was real and IE8 users being somewhat less gullible. Firefox, Chrome and Safari users fared somewhat better as they tended to not believe it as much as the IE users. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino users almost never believed the hoax, while Opera users immediately new it not to be true.
Assume it is China. Why is it that when transnational attacks occur on a scale this large against our nations infrastructure, financial sectors, and defense systems the politicians shrug it off or turn a blind eye, but when citizen schmoe downloads some files or leaks some dox the entire system goes full assault on their asses with ICE raids, take down notices, special committees on intellectual property, etc. etc.
Simple - Citizen Schmoe doesn't control minerals, oil, access to SLOCs, etc that you need - so you play the diplomacy game since both sides don't really want to alienate the other; they just want an upper hand. OTOH, you have nothing to lose by smacking Citizen Schmoe to deter others so they don't drain resources while you play the diplomacy game.
Remember - today's enemy may be tomorrow's friend, because countries have permanent interests, not permanent friends or enemies.
If they were concerned about national security, they would denounce the culprit (they know what country they're coming from), and work on hardening security. But it is not about national security. It is about corporate security and defending the status quo. That is why the US seeks to extradite file sharers, hell, link sharers, from other countries, but when massive ddos attacks are directed at us by governments that we trade with, nothing is generally done.
Denouncing does nothing but cause a public fight. Instead, you harden your networks and work behind the scenes to let them know you are pissed off. In addition, watching what they do gains insights into hat the are doing and want; as well as the opportunity to plant information as well. Or, why not let them give you to add selected payloads as part of the info they d/l to make it easier to tap their systems? Plus, if they think their current tools are effective they may not try to develop better ones. If you let your enemy think they are smarter than they are and you are dumber than you really are you can win a lot of battles or make a whole lot of money.
'I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. I have no way of knowing if my user, Clem Kadiddlehopper is the same person as Willy Lump Lump and Bolivar Shagnasty on other sites That costs me money, money I deserve. If I can correlate the information about users across sites I can build up an even more valuable trove of information to sell. It's time for this quaint notion of privacy and an individual's right to it to go away; after all it is pre-internet thinking and we're in a new economy. It's money we're talking about, real money.'
As deep throat said, "Follow the money."
While they got 100,000 d/ls that doesn't mean they lost 100,000 sales - many people, myself included, will take a shot with a free app to see if it's worth anything. More on this later. What will be interesting is how many people continue their use after a few weeks of months? That is a better indicator of "lost" sales than the initial download.
Since "free" means "just garb it and see if I like it cause it has no cost to me if I don't" to many people a developer should weigh the increased support and fixed costs (more servers if the app is an online service as was the case here) against the value of getting their name out and building awareness of other apps. It also means it will be harder to go back to a higher price if many of your potential customers grab the free one. In many cases, you'd be better off dropping the price to $.99 - it's still at the impulse purchase point (hey, it's not even a buck so no big loss if it sucks) and you get some cash for each d/l. When you rais eteh price again, people are more likely to think - "I missed my chance to grab it cheap" than "WTF - this was free and now you want $?" Plus, when people pay for something, even a small amount, they tend to value it more and are more likely to think it was a good choice and pay in the future as well.
So what to do with the 100k free apps out there? After a while, come out with a paid upgrade to v2. Give it away to paying customers for free to get them, charge the free ones an upgrade fee, and end the v1 service. That way, you've converted the customers that value your product and lowered your costs while getting some cash flowing in as well. If you promised some duration of availability keep that promise; but wen you can work to migrate customers to a paying mode.
Know how I know that? It's four pages long, yet doesn't say anything.
"As perceptive CIOs seek to transform their rigid, legacy ridden infrastructures into agile, efficient, service-driven delivery mechanisms, they must adopt a pragmatic approach to managing the risks of consumer IT while embracing the benefits.
I stopped reading right there.
Upper management? Nope. Some lucky consultant got a high paying gig that probably only cost him a decent meal for a buddy.
l Slashdot logic which predicts that giving away something for free is "free advertising" that somehow generates sales didn't happen in this situation. Fail all around.
Unless its addictive the only thing you get by giving something away for free is that the receiver values it zero and expects you to continue to provide it for free.
I've gotten the "We're a big name so do the work for free and you'll be able to say you did x for us" to which I reply "How about you give all of your products for free and I'll tell everyone I know I use them?"
He could - and wind up in a lot of expensive legal hot water as a result, such as perjury charges and civil damages.
Oh shit. Here for a minute I thought we were talking about the DMCA!
Even if he sent a blatantly false takedown notice, he will face nothing. In fact, I don't think there is anything the recipient of a DMCA notice can do except issue the counter-notice. There's really not many provisions to dissuade people from issuing false claims.
Not quite - see Online Policy Group vs. Diebold as an example. (http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/)
I meant to add: Q: How can we bring jobs back home? A: By directly -- and heavily -- taxing companies that outsource labor and manufacturing. This avoids the pitfalls of tariffs: we would not be blocking trade from coming into or going out of the country. However, we would be demanding compensation for our economy, from the companies that have been so harming it by their practices. That's about as fair as it gets. (It's also not a subsidy by the government... so it avoids those problems, too. Instead, it is a source of revenue TO the government.)
All that does is add a "tax" on every product made in the US. It would essentially raise the cost of goods produced in the US to an artificially high level since now US labor and production is "competitive" to out sourced labor and production. As a result, the cost of goods increases and less people are able to buy them. You don't magically create more wealth, you just inflate the costs of goods - less people buy and the workers you helped are out of a job again.
The key is productivity - if you can make more, even at a higher labor cost, it's worth producing it here. Trying to keep jobs by tax policy is counterproductive.
How about DMCA takedown notices sent to their ISP? I don't live in the US but my understanding is that you could probably get their web site taken offline without needed any expensive proof or legalese - just copy/paste one of the many examples and guides you can find with Google.
He could - and wind up in a lot of expensive legal hot water as a result, such as perjury charges and civil damages. Not a good idea unless you clearly are the copyright holder.
As per someone noting below: if you want to know your legal rights and what you can do, talk to a lawyer. What you'll get here is a bunch of IANALs telling you bullshit, and IAALbInYl (I Am A Lawyer, but I'm not YOUR lawyer) telling you generic advice that possibly doesn't apply, and that you need to speak to a lawyer who represents your interests.
Sanest advice in the entire thread. Only your lawyer represents your interest and that's whose advice you should seek and listen to.
It has been a long time since I've signed a contract, but the last one I saw had something about the company owning everything you create - whether on company time or not. If the submitter has a similar clause in his contract, he's probably fucked, because it would therefore not be his code to GPL.
That depends - even if it is his employers (who can create a proprietary version as well assuming all the code is original work); forking the GPL'd code may still be a viable option. If they knew it was released under the GPL (and ideally OK'd it) then they've licensed their code and the GPLd codebase is still under the GPL. He acted as their agent and so his actions were enough to GPL the code. They can modify it without restriction - since they own the copyright (as could he if he owns the copyright) as well without being bound by the GPL. No where in the GPL does it prevent you from releasing your own code under multiple licenses.
I dont think where he wrote the code plays a big a role as people think it does. Rather what matters more is whether he was in an employer-employee relationship with them and if this was work that was part of that. Even though it appears he was freelance, if he worked onsite on company equipment for 6 years they may very well be enough to show an employer-employee relationship. Especially if this code was a part of one of their projects. It sucks, but now he knows what he needs to do legally next time.
All the more reason to talk to a lawyer who is good at employment law. If the employer claims an employer - employee relationship existed there are many things beyond "who owns the code" that come into play; including benefits, social security payments, etc.
Even if he worked onsite for many years it could still be his, depending on the contract terms; or it could belong to his employer.
So you worked for them and where paid by them. You decided to release something as GPL (your post doesn't say if this was sanctioned by the powers that be), but considering your termination, one would think you stepped out of line?
But, the fact is, you where working for them, earning money producing something *they* own. If they decide to revoke a license on something *they* own, they are squarely in their rights to do so.
Depends on teh employment situation and agreement. I work as a contractor so what I create is mine, per my contract.
Never rent out a property you are emotional invested in, and never get emotionally invested in rental property. If you do, even normal wear and tear becomes troubling - because "you would have been more careful since it's yours..."
While most renters are decent people, things get broken, disappear - it's part of the rental business. Sometimes, it;s just down right funny - I had a renter take a $2 shower curtain from a vacation rental. As long as they didn't trash the place (beyond the deposit) and paid on time I was happy. This poor lady's case illustrates the danger of renting property you also use regularly. It 's not her fault, but unless you kno and trust a renter don't leave any of your stuff their and don't violate rule 1 at any time.
Seems kinda like shooting you the chest with a .22 to show how vulnerable you are to lead bullets.
No, I'd say it's more alike shooting a 22 into a gel target with a cheap ballistic nylon shirt to show how much damage it can do in an effort to ducat people who think that they are safe from a 22 bullet because they wear a "ballistic" nylon shirt.
A product such as this, even if only used as a proof of concept, is quite dangerous, and I'd like nothing more than to shoot it down with a Stinger, and destroy all the R&D material.
The beauty of it is tab a Stinger would probably never hit - no IR signature of note.
I find it interesting that they label this as a black-hat project, with malicious intentions, which it clearly is. They could have had a better public reception if it was pitched as a military tool to enable battlefield communications by the drone claiming to be a cell-phone carrier tower, like a temp cell tower.
It's not so much malicious as a way to show that communications are more vulnerable than we realize - and that with some ingenuity people can do some pretty good snooping. If they really were malicious they'd never tell anyone about it - and they seem to be pretty careful about how they go about it to avoid legal or ethical problems as well.
China wants^H^H^H^H^H has told the hot spot operators to keep the logs, the U.S. government wants the ISP's to do the same thing. Where is the outrage?
US ISPs, (and most other democratic countries as well) can refuse and go to court to fight the requirement. ultimately, the supreme Court can rule and the government must comply. Despite what many people think, the SCOTUS is a pretty independent minded bunch who do what they want, despite the wishes of those who appointed them. So while the idea is pretty outrages, at least we have real legal protections vs. living under a government that believes it can rule by edict and where there is no recourse but to lay low and hope you get ignored or missed.
The Dongcheng Public Security Bureau did not respond to requests for comment on Monday, but according to its publicly issued circular, the measure is designed to thwart criminals who use the Internet to “conduct blackmail, traffic goods, gamble, propagate damaging information and spread computer viruses.” Such nefarious activity, the notice says, “not only hurts the interests of the country and the masses, but has also caused some businesses to suffer economic losses.”
the measure is designed to thwart citizens who use the Internet to “propagate damaging information that could piss them off and threaten our cushy party jobs and lives.” Such nefarious activity, the notice says, “not only hurts the interests of the country's ruling party party members, but has also caused some of them and their families and cabals to suffer economic losses.”
There. No need to use Babelfish
Seriously, they may keep a lid on dissent for a while, but when it starts, look out.