If an unsecured system on the Internet has been infected by a malicious program, and is now launching it's own attack against your system, your property, denying you the use of bandwidth or resources that you are paying for, I think you're perfectly within your rights to put the attack down, and if necessary, the offending system.
Your analogy is leaky. It seems you define your own system as "your house", whilst defining the offender's system as being "in public".
Surely you don't mean to stretch the concept of self-defense to the point where it encompasses the right to enter someone else's private yard, armed with a monkey-wrench, a hammer and a screwdriver, and have him cease occasionally parking in front of your driveway by messing up his car?
On the other hand, I for one would love to be able to do that...
Back in '99, when we were finally upgrading our 2000+ POS terminals to Warp4 and discovered a bug in the Sendmail implementation, they were a bit slow to respond but after the couple of weeks it took for them to accept our complaint as a bonafide bug (we're in Sweden), it took the various labs around the globe about two weeks to come up with a fix that held water. Once the work started, IBM were very open about communications as well, we had daily correspondence with various developers asking us to test different solutions. The problem was worked on by people in Texas, Israel, India and finally Canada (Calgary, if my memory serves me) wherefrom we finally had our fix. Quite interesting times!
Even the upgrade strategy they're now pursuing is smart. Most OS/2-based machines nowadays are quite dated. They can't run much else than very scalable modern OS'es like Linux, most likely serving as a kind of thin client, leaning heavily towards web-based applications.
Our clients still run Warp 4, and will continue to do so for at least another 2 or 3 years. We're currently running those machines unsupported though. IBM will only support one version of OS/2 at a time nowadays (which is actally a pretty reasonable strategy). That means we'd have to upgrade our (very tweaked and slimmed down) machines to the latest Convenience Pack level at least once a year to be eligible to even purchase the support, and we've decided that's too big a hassle for questionable gain since our environment is pretty stable anyway. (Plus it ain't exactly for free...)
I'll be sorry to see it go though, been developing on that platform since around '93. Back then, there was no other OS that got even close to the stability and versatility that OS/2 provided. Choosing a platform for mission-critical clients back then wasn't very difficult. That actually held true until pretty recently.
"I read through their strategy and I couldn't find any hint of why people should actually use OS/2 over any other solutions"
That might be because IBM is actually not pushing to sell copies of OS/2 anymore. It's regarded as having lived its life to the full, and what IBM is aiming at now is to get their clients to gracefully migrate their installed base to some other OS that IBM supports.
In case you hadn't noticed, IBM is pretty big on Linux these days, hint, hint!
While it is true that the software was developed in another country, it was marketed and sol din the US. Thus, it falls under US law.
And, also, from the Adobe Systems press release, see link in article:
[...]and it was marketed and sold online in the United States.
A redundant point that nevertheless seems to be worth making here is the fact that the terms "online" and "on the internet" can not be qualified further by the subdefinition "in the United States". The addendum is not restrictive but rather contradictive in that it implies a diminished exclusivity rendered invalid by the context of the larger definition.
There is no such jurisdiction as "online in the United States."
Most email accounts receive more wanted mail than unwanted. It follows that most email users are not the slightest bit interested in a cunningly devised system for the prevention of unsolicited email.
A system such as the one proposed would require time and effort invested by everyone possessing an email account. This is a steep ravine to build a bridge over.
A better way to hinder spam would probably be to penalize the parties utlizing the sleezy operators of spam providing services. This could be done easily if the same rules that apply to telemarketing were applied to email marketing.
BUT, that would require an opt-out system to be put in place. You have to be able to put your email address on a list stating that you are not willing to receive unsolicited commercial email. Every company with an email marketing urge would then have to make sure the email addresses receiving their email marketing effort were not on said list or they would be fined.
My country (Sweden) had an opt-out policy effectively in place a year or two ago. It was so heavily criticized by anti-spam lobbyists that it was retracted and replaced with an opt-in policy. Go figure.
Opt-in will never do anything to reduce spam on the simple grounds that it is Impossible To Enforce!
No? Remind me - what were those telemarketing restrictions again?
Could it be that you have some kind of personal problem with the EFF?
Or could it be that you have some kind of personal problem with people not agreeing with positions you agree with?
But seriously, what they do seem to put forth is that it should be up to the end user to protect him- or herself from spam. Moreover, they are dubbing spam an object associated with my liberties as a Netizen. I agree with a lot of other things the EFF are saying, but that I don't agree with!
Slashdot Mirror
The lackluster competition is over.
It turned out to be a MS Word XP-file containing the words: " This a1gorithm is unbreakable."
(Note the "1" replacing the "l" in the second word, thrown in as further enhancement of the VME-protection.)
I didn't win.
If an unsecured system on the Internet has been infected by a malicious program, and is now launching it's own attack against your system, your property, denying you the use of bandwidth or resources that you are paying for, I think you're perfectly within your rights to put the attack down, and if necessary, the offending system.
Your analogy is leaky. It seems you define your own system as "your house", whilst defining the offender's system as being "in public".
Surely you don't mean to stretch the concept of self-defense to the point where it encompasses the right to enter someone else's private yard, armed with a monkey-wrench, a hammer and a screwdriver, and have him cease occasionally parking in front of your driveway by messing up his car?
On the other hand, I for one would love to be able to do that...
Yes, the support has been good.
Back in '99, when we were finally upgrading our 2000+ POS terminals to Warp4 and discovered a bug in the Sendmail implementation, they were a bit slow to respond but after the couple of weeks it took for them to accept our complaint as a bonafide bug (we're in Sweden), it took the various labs around the globe about two weeks to come up with a fix that held water. Once the work started, IBM were very open about communications as well, we had daily correspondence with various developers asking us to test different solutions. The problem was worked on by people in Texas, Israel, India and finally Canada (Calgary, if my memory serves me) wherefrom we finally had our fix. Quite interesting times!
Even the upgrade strategy they're now pursuing is smart. Most OS/2-based machines nowadays are quite dated. They can't run much else than very scalable modern OS'es like Linux, most likely serving as a kind of thin client, leaning heavily towards web-based applications.
Our clients still run Warp 4, and will continue to do so for at least another 2 or 3 years. We're currently running those machines unsupported though. IBM will only support one version of OS/2 at a time nowadays (which is actally a pretty reasonable strategy). That means we'd have to upgrade our (very tweaked and slimmed down) machines to the latest Convenience Pack level at least once a year to be eligible to even purchase the support, and we've decided that's too big a hassle for questionable gain since our environment is pretty stable anyway. (Plus it ain't exactly for free...)
I'll be sorry to see it go though, been developing on that platform since around '93. Back then, there was no other OS that got even close to the stability and versatility that OS/2 provided. Choosing a platform for mission-critical clients back then wasn't very difficult. That actually held true until pretty recently.
"I read through their strategy and I couldn't find any hint of why people should actually use OS/2 over any other solutions"
That might be because IBM is actually not pushing to sell copies of OS/2 anymore. It's regarded as having lived its life to the full, and what IBM is aiming at now is to get their clients to gracefully migrate their installed base to some other OS that IBM supports.
In case you hadn't noticed, IBM is pretty big on Linux these days, hint, hint!
While it is true that the software was developed in another country, it was marketed and sol din the US. Thus, it falls under US law.
And, also, from the Adobe Systems press release, see link in article:
[...]and it was marketed and sold online in the United States.
A redundant point that nevertheless seems to be worth making here is the fact that the terms "online" and "on the internet" can not be qualified further by the subdefinition "in the United States". The addendum is not restrictive but rather contradictive in that it implies a diminished exclusivity rendered invalid by the context of the larger definition.
There is no such jurisdiction as "online in the United States."
Most email accounts receive more wanted mail than unwanted. It follows that most email users are not the slightest bit interested in a cunningly devised system for the prevention of unsolicited email.
A system such as the one proposed would require time and effort invested by everyone possessing an email account. This is a steep ravine to build a bridge over.
A better way to hinder spam would probably be to penalize the parties utlizing the sleezy operators of spam providing services. This could be done easily if the same rules that apply to telemarketing were applied to email marketing.
BUT, that would require an opt-out system to be put in place. You have to be able to put your email address on a list stating that you are not willing to receive unsolicited commercial email. Every company with an email marketing urge would then have to make sure the email addresses receiving their email marketing effort were not on said list or they would be fined.
My country (Sweden) had an opt-out policy effectively in place a year or two ago. It was so heavily criticized by anti-spam lobbyists that it was retracted and replaced with an opt-in policy. Go figure.
Opt-in will never do anything to reduce spam on the simple grounds that it is Impossible To Enforce!
No? Remind me - what were those telemarketing restrictions again?
Sig? - No thanks, I'm trying to quit.
Or could it be that you have some kind of personal problem with people not agreeing with positions you agree with?
But seriously, what they do seem to put forth is that it should be up to the end user to protect him- or herself from spam. Moreover, they are dubbing spam an object associated with my liberties as a Netizen. I agree with a lot of other things the EFF are saying, but that I don't agree with!
The distance from source to target is around three miles, give or take. The beam is horizontal, some 50+ meters above ground.
No no no, he refers to the God the machine. The Deus Ex... ah, you'll figure it out.
Has it been as bad for Hoover vacuum cleaners?