Is this a good time to mention that access to these internal emails was gained illegally?
The sad thing is that throughout this discussion, I have yet to see a single post noting that MediaDefender are employed by Big Media in order to protect their legitimate, legal rights against a whole load of people who routinely break the law without remorse. There are reasons entrapment is frowned upon by most legal systems, but that doesn't excuse the fact that the people being entrapped were deliberately trying to break the law themselves, nor does it excuse the dubious way these e-mails were obtained and circulated in response.
As I've noted on many previous occasions, I have no love for the business practices of Big Media, but the correct answer to this is firstly to ensure they themselves work within the law (e.g., by enforcing competition rather than allowing effective monopoly abuse) and secondly to educate consumers so they can make informed decisions and vote with their wallets. The answer is not for us to support freeloaders who just can't be bothered to pay up like everyone else and who rely on a combination of wishful thinking, economic naivete and outright selfishness to "justify" their actions; nor is it to condone knowingly circulating the personal data of employees at MediaDefender in what is tantamount to inviting vigilante action against them.
I shall now sit back and await the inevitable (-1, Overrated) mods from people who don't like what I have to say, but can't actually present a genuine counter-argument.
You're overstating the case by a large margin. For one thing, I didn't say you couldn't keep any personal data, I just said that was the only safe default and it is the reasonable exceptions that should be spelt out explicitly.
For example, it would certainly be reasonable to codify a general exception that said businesses could store personal data necessary to administer a legitimate transaction with a customer, for as long as is necessary to conduct that transaction. However, it is not necessary for a business to keep my credit card details on file after the transaction has been concluded and they have their money. Nor is it necessary for them to keep my contact details on file for future marketing purposes. Both of these are common practice today but are damaging to society as a whole, and I have no problem with an outright ban on them.
Such a draconian approach to regulation may impose significant extra costs on businesses. I do recognise this. I just don't care. If some over-heavy regulatory framework requires collecting more data than this then the regulation is broken. If you need to store excessive amounts of personal data to conduct your business then your business model is broken. Neither of these is as important as protecting a basic right to privacy, and in doing so limiting the potential for credit card fraud, identity theft, and other crimes that can and do screw up the lives of many people for months at a time.
Oh, and your outlawing all international trade thing is just a straw man. EU data protection legislation already prohibits passing personal data outside the EEA without prior consent, yet strangely we all continue to trade with other countries just fine.
The problem with syntactic whitespace is that it can introduce errors that you can't find without doing a hexdump of the source code,
What's wrong with just mandating that only tab characters may be used for indentation? Or having a smart editor that deals with this problem?
The reality is that in any block-scoped language, people reading and maintaining the code usually only see the indentation anyway. Sure, you can have {} or begin...end or whatever your language calls it. However, if you screw up the indentation so it looks like your inner and outer if...else blocks match up but according to the punctuation they don't, you'll have just as much a bug as the syntactic whitespace guys, because most programmers won't notice and will trust the indentation. The only difference is that in one case, your language rules can force the code to look like exactly what it represents, while in the other, they can't and the best you're likely to find is an editor that is language-aware and forces the indentation to match the block delimiters.
It seems to me that most general purpose programming languages would do best if they did exactly three things in relation to their standard library:
Define frameworks, at a sensible level of abstraction, for using common things such as file systems, user interfaces, network protocols and relational databases.
Have a centralised, ideally peer-reviewed repository for libraries, and tools to make using it trivial.
Implement no more standard library features in a specific, complete way than are essential to support the above.
The art, of course, is in defining the right frameworks for each area. This is not easy. In fact, it's very hard, perhaps the single hardest thing about developing a good new platform for programming. However, as demonstrated by the C and C++ worlds where standard libraries are minimalist but there are several popular cross-platform libraries used in practice, it can usually be done. And if you can do it, and produce good frameworks that are both clean enough to use for most things as they stand and extensible in useful ways where platform-specific features or future developments warrant, then you're backing a winner for sure.
The language itself should then, IMHO, provide solid support for library users and developers in terms of clear interfaces and facilities for whatever version checking, dynamic loading, calling conventions, data marshalling, documentation or other common aspects make sense for that language.
This combination basically keeps the overhead for learning and portability low, which is the major advantage of having a standard library in the first place, but without committing to writing and maintaining a large standard library from day one. The latter, IME, usually means having to live eternally with the mistakes when the implementation that was driving the library turns out not to be flexible enough a few years down the line; this has happened to most monolithic standard libraries in mainstream programming languages so far.
Down the road when you have, say, 200 cores, do you really want to be dealing with sharing data in memory between tens or hundreds of thousands of threads spread out over them?
I don't know, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. Both shared state and non-shared state concurrency have potential given the right language/environment tools to support them. No-one really knows yet whether shared state will ever scale to many interactions rather than the small numbers typically used in today's research on transactions etc. Nor does anyone really know yet whether unshared state models will ever be viable for general high performance applications where the overheads matter. If I were a betting man, I would wager that non-shared state concurrency will come to dominate "high level concurrency" wherever it's viable, but for the nitty gritty stuff that needs to be fast, shared state will be the only credible choice, though based on a more powerful, more compositional and less error-prone formal model than the manual locking and such we often see in industrial languages today. The one thing that seems pretty certain, though, is that handicapping your entire runtime environment in such a way that one major approach to concurrency is effectively impossible isn't a smart move in the long term.
Surely we should first rename what we've already got to ExParrot, implying that has passed on, is no more, has ceased to be, has gone to meet its maker, etc. Then we'll be free to call its replacement whatever we like.:-)
If you weren't following, Nate Clinton is the leader of the Windows Update team. So the guy who is basically responsible for this update just said that, independent of the selected settings WU installs updates for itself.
The thing is, that's not what he said. If you have Automatic Updates turned off, then no silent updates are done, at all, ever.
However, if you have Automatic Updates turned on and told to check but not download, it seems that's a different matter. There is a genuine concern that the update system patches itself quietly in order to perform that check (which is the analogous behaviour to manually visiting the WU site and having the control update itself before looking for "real" updates). I think it would have been better if the update client had simply popped up the usual "updates available" dialog and said that an update to WU itself was available and needed to be installed before other updates could be checked. This is just the simple principle that if your machine is told to check first, it should never actually change anything without explicit user consent, and that's fair enough.
Still, realistically, anyone who bothers running AU at all is always going to say yes to that. So there's a matter of keeping the user informed — which is good form, to be sure — but anyone who uses this service at all is basically trusting Microsoft not to ship changes to other system components without saying so, so the problem here is mostly illusory. If you don't trust them this far, presumably you never want to install any updates, so you just disable to Automatic Updates service completely (at which point, as noted above, nothing whatsoever is done silently).
Of course, for the rest of us, it would be a problem if Microsoft used this feature to stream anything other than a WU update onto machines without consent. Except that so much FUD has been spread around this story now that anyone who would have cared probably now doesn't. There is certainly a silly PR mistake here for Microsoft, but the practical consequences are near zero for almost everyone, and crying wolf and blowing it out of all proportion doesn't help.
I have long suggested that removing anonymity on the Internet might be a step forward. In practical terms, it offers little protection of free speech in the face of an oppressive government anyway, and supporting such speech is the major argument in favour of it. Meanwhile, all laws basically rely on being able to hold people accountable for their actions. If you allow effectively anonymous use of the Internet, then you allow anyone to break the law without responsibility. And thus we have everything from spamming to identity theft via bot-net extortion going on, with organised crime now behind much of it, and all basically above the law.
Of course, in an ideal society, we could allow anonymous free speech where it's useful, safe in the knowledge that people would view it sceptically. In an ideal society, we'd have some way of signing Internet communications to prove our real identity, so people could trust our material knowing that we are prepared to take responsibility for it. Much of the problem today isn't really with the anonymity, it's with the blind faith that so many people put in things that they shouldn't. But I think we're some way from a society mature enough for this sort of openness to work, so in the meantime, we come back to whether the pragmatic step of requiring accountability is justified.
What, follow the union of laws from both countries, which could be self-contradictory and make doing any business at all impossible?
They could be contradictory. But realistically, it would be relatively easy to achieve harmony on the basis that the default position was everyone having privacy and no personal data collection being allowed without explicit consent, and then codifying some reasonable exceptions. Much bigger differences have been worked around when building international agreements in the past.
The only realistic down-side to harmonising in this way is that a lot of companies whose business models are based on collecting personal data under ethically questionable conditions would lose out to some degree, possibly even going bust. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I think the individual's quality of life and in practical terms the need to prevent nasty crimes like identity theft far outweigh the need to allow dubious business practices.
Can you cite a source for that? None of the sources I found that claimed to reproduce this seemed to specify either way, and both articles mentioned before were overflowing with comments from people saying the same thing about what actually happens.
The problem with the update, from what I've read, is that it happened regardless of whether or not you set WU to ask before installing updates. It isn't a question of what they updated, it is a question of how they are able to simply bypass that configuration option.
Visiting the Windows Update site manually and using the corresponding control in a web browser, is nothing to do with the automatic updating system within the last few versions of Windows. There is no bypassing involved: we're talking about two fundamentally separate mechanisms, which happen to have the same end result.
As far as I'm aware, it has always been the case that when you visit the Windows Update site — a conscious, active decision by the user — and load up the corresponding control, the first thing the control does is make sure it is itself up to date in order to use the site. This is not done stealthily. In fact, the last time this happened to me, it told me in big letters what was going on.
There is no story here. If Microsoft were pushing code onto machines quietly, behind the scenes, against the user's explicit preferences, there would be a story. But that simply isn't what's happening here.
This whole discussion, and the one before it, are kinda sad, actually. After years of OSS fans here on Slashdot criticising Microsoft for spreading FUD about Linux, it turns out that dozens, maybe even hundreds by now, of people here are also willing to propagate FUD about Windows. That is no way to win a grown-up debate about the benefits and risks of using different operating systems.
AFIAK, even in Europe you still do not have the rights to demand that a company delete personal data about you or to prevent them from collecting it in the first place. You only have the right to see (for a fee) what they're holding about you, and to require them to correct it if it's wrong. Some countries impose more restrictions than this, but they're not universal. This is a major part of the privacy problem, IMHO.
The problem with this whole debate is that it is often presupposed that supporting commercial interests is a good enough reason to allow the arbitrary collection of personal data in the first place, and the question asked is only to what extent this should be regulated. I submit that by the time you get that far, you've already made an irrecoverable error: the only long-term safe position is that by default everyone has a basic right to privacy and collection of any personal data is illegal, and then you codify the exceptions to this principle. Unfortunately, even the EC legislation currently makes this mistake — which might explain the numerous unsavoury business practices based on involuntarily collection and profiling of personal data that are fast becoming commonplace here, and the consequent reduction in general quality of life for everyone affected (except those who own the businesses concerned, of course).
The problem with international standards for privacy is that some cultures have to give up the privacy rights
Sorry, but I disagree. If you think carefully, I believe you'll realise there is another remarkably simple solution, and one that is almost certainly in the interests of private citizens everywhere at that. It's just not the solution Google wants.
The anti-Microsoft FUD was thoroughly debunked by numerous Slashdot posters. It was also thoroughly debunked by numerous comments in reply to the various external sources cited in the older Slashdot article.
They updated Windows Update, when people explicitly visited the Windows Update site. That is all. They are not pushing out updates to critical system files without any user intervention.
Last time, several posters asked whether Slashdot would at least have the decency to correct the blatantly Microsoft-bashing headline/article. They didn't, they posted it again. <sigh> Go Zonk!
I don't care whether "my" hurt feelings (you assume it was me who was hurt) are acceptable to you. You are irrelevant. What matters is what the law said at the time "I" posted the material on-line, just as that is what matters in the case we are discussing now.
There are many insidious things about modern copyright legislation in various jurisdictions, but I don't think immediate take-down notices are among them. Such notices are a natural consequence of the need to protect copyright in a world of effectively instant, effectively free transmission of copies with widespread abuse. The notices are just a legal tool, and like all tools, the mechanism itself is neutral and it's how it's used that matters.
(Please don't challenge that "need" now: it's how the law works today, and I don't think this is an appropriate article for the wider discussion.)
The artificial restrictions are a definite merit as far as shareholder value and suitability for media from the perspective of the MAFIAA is concerned.
It's ironic that Apple should buy this unsubstantiated ranting by Big Media, though, considering that they are the single most successful example of doing something Big Media basically claimed couldn't be done for years: making a lot of money by selling legal downloads cheaply.
Most MAFIAA members are making funny noises about going elsewhere with their wares.
The MAFIAA have been making funny noises about a lot of things for a long time. But realistically, Apple should be their best friend right now, and they should be aggressively promoting similar services as a new distribution channel. Their luck with the courts is going to run out, sooner rather than later I suspect. Who knows, it could even backfire spectacularly if someone finds a legal hole that allows all the people coerced into unreasonably expensive settlements to sue. Their luck with DRM ran out a long time ago, and they all know it but can't admit it. Before long, possibly as a direct result of concerns with iPods and the like and the negative PR surrounding Vista, hardware and software companies are going to view DRM as the same kind of liability that informed customers already do. And the RIAA and their international counterparts just need to realise that in an age of on-line downloads, the filler-filled album is dead. It might be their favourite cash cow, but it was always screwing the market, and sooner or later, markets who are being screwed find alternatives.
Bottom line: Apple are in at least as powerful a bargaining position as Big Media. If Big Media threaten to pull out en masse then there are clear anti-competitive concerns. If Big Media companies are forced to compete as they should be, then those who continue to do business with Apple and those like them will surely come out on top pretty quickly. Either way, it's in their interests to work with companies like Apple, not against them.
It's funny. A while ago, probably not long after Google bought out Deja News, there was some bad feeling from Usenet contributors who felt that their content had been sold, and others were basically profiteering on the back of their work. A few custom services were also popping up, which reproduced the content on certain Usenet groups but splatted those irritating ad-links all over key words in the content. When I suggested that this was inappropriate in a discussion here, a whole load of people basically told me to STFU because once I'd posted the content on Usenet I should have known that was going to happen.
I pointed out that at the time Deja started keeping its archive, I (and many others) would not necessarily have been aware of it, and might reasonably have expected articles to expire after a few days (as they did at the time on pretty much all ISPs' Usenet servers). I was directed to the relevant RFCs and told that they said content could be kept effectively indefinitely, and that this was more important than the industry standard practice at the time that users would actually have experienced.
I pointed out that the only licence anyone had to copy my and others' copyrighted content from Usenet was the implicit one granted by posting in the first place, and that it was questionable whether this covered commercial use or for that matter the RFC-sanctioned archival if most people using the system didn't know that could happen. This, too was our problem, I was told.
I pointed out that splatting the hyperlink ads all over the content degraded the content and certainly would not be expected on a normal Usenet system. This, apparently, was just fair use, and the fact that US-style fair use doesn't even apply in my country (where some of the material was being posted) didn't matter.
The critics' conclusion: Too bad, get over it, you have no legal rights.
My conclusion #1: Don't ask Slashdot about legal rights, ask a lawyer.
My conclusion #2: Expect to get screwed by unethical/illegal business practices if you put your content on-line anywhere but you don't have big enough legal guns to defend it afterwards. But you should take what steps you can to minimise the effort required to defend your rights: including the non-commercial clause that applies here, for example.
My prediction: In the current, Web 2.0-ish world full of community-made content, there's going to be a lot of bad feeling sooner or later, as the numerous businesses who basically just host discussion facilities but then claim rights over the content start profiteering, potentially at the expense of those who wrote the material in the first place. The so-called "you write all the content, they keep all the money" model is a great deal for businesses but a lousy deal for the contributors, who tend to suffer from some idealistic illusion that their content is safe and the service they are supporting will continue to operate for their benefit even if it's not making enough money. A lot of people's feelings are going to get hurt as this happens more often, and this case is just the start.
My answer: If you want to share content on-line, always host it on your own terms. Don't use a commercial service for your blog, set up your own. It's almost as cheap and easy these days, and then there's no ambiguity about the ongoing hosting, the rights to the material, or the privacy implications of someone else holding potentially substantial amounts of personal data. If you want to set up a community site with friends, get a friendly geek to help you do so with your own web host, for the same reasons.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but further reading suggests this isn't nearly as bad as TFSummary makes out. If you follow the links to the stories on the other sites, and read the comments and links given there, a lot of people are suggesting that this is only updating Windows Update files when you visit the Windows Update site, and not in fact a push of arbitrary changes at all. There's so much hype and FUD flying around this discussion that it's hard to see the wood for the trees.
This is actually pretty disturbing. One of the major reasons I have completely avoided Vista is that I was aware the system was set up so changes could be pushed. But XP wasn't supposed to be that way if you switched off automatic updates. The fact that Microsoft have done this is pretty bad. The fact that it was even technically possible for them to do it after all the assurances is unforgivable. The privacy concerns, security concerns, and even cost and performance concerns (not everyone has broadband and flat-rate Internet access!) are pretty serious.
It's lightweight, it opens word document, and it doesn't have a load of autobullshit.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have a load of basic WP features, either. If you don't need those, then great, but AbiWord isn't competing with OO Writer and MS Word for the same market.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a good time to mention that access to these internal emails was gained illegally?
The sad thing is that throughout this discussion, I have yet to see a single post noting that MediaDefender are employed by Big Media in order to protect their legitimate, legal rights against a whole load of people who routinely break the law without remorse. There are reasons entrapment is frowned upon by most legal systems, but that doesn't excuse the fact that the people being entrapped were deliberately trying to break the law themselves, nor does it excuse the dubious way these e-mails were obtained and circulated in response.
As I've noted on many previous occasions, I have no love for the business practices of Big Media, but the correct answer to this is firstly to ensure they themselves work within the law (e.g., by enforcing competition rather than allowing effective monopoly abuse) and secondly to educate consumers so they can make informed decisions and vote with their wallets. The answer is not for us to support freeloaders who just can't be bothered to pay up like everyone else and who rely on a combination of wishful thinking, economic naivete and outright selfishness to "justify" their actions; nor is it to condone knowingly circulating the personal data of employees at MediaDefender in what is tantamount to inviting vigilante action against them.
I shall now sit back and await the inevitable (-1, Overrated) mods from people who don't like what I have to say, but can't actually present a genuine counter-argument.
You're overstating the case by a large margin. For one thing, I didn't say you couldn't keep any personal data, I just said that was the only safe default and it is the reasonable exceptions that should be spelt out explicitly.
For example, it would certainly be reasonable to codify a general exception that said businesses could store personal data necessary to administer a legitimate transaction with a customer, for as long as is necessary to conduct that transaction. However, it is not necessary for a business to keep my credit card details on file after the transaction has been concluded and they have their money. Nor is it necessary for them to keep my contact details on file for future marketing purposes. Both of these are common practice today but are damaging to society as a whole, and I have no problem with an outright ban on them.
Such a draconian approach to regulation may impose significant extra costs on businesses. I do recognise this. I just don't care. If some over-heavy regulatory framework requires collecting more data than this then the regulation is broken. If you need to store excessive amounts of personal data to conduct your business then your business model is broken. Neither of these is as important as protecting a basic right to privacy, and in doing so limiting the potential for credit card fraud, identity theft, and other crimes that can and do screw up the lives of many people for months at a time.
Oh, and your outlawing all international trade thing is just a straw man. EU data protection legislation already prohibits passing personal data outside the EEA without prior consent, yet strangely we all continue to trade with other countries just fine.
The problem with syntactic whitespace is that it can introduce errors that you can't find without doing a hexdump of the source code,
What's wrong with just mandating that only tab characters may be used for indentation? Or having a smart editor that deals with this problem?
The reality is that in any block-scoped language, people reading and maintaining the code usually only see the indentation anyway. Sure, you can have {} or begin...end or whatever your language calls it. However, if you screw up the indentation so it looks like your inner and outer if...else blocks match up but according to the punctuation they don't, you'll have just as much a bug as the syntactic whitespace guys, because most programmers won't notice and will trust the indentation. The only difference is that in one case, your language rules can force the code to look like exactly what it represents, while in the other, they can't and the best you're likely to find is an editor that is language-aware and forces the indentation to match the block delimiters.
It seems to me that most general purpose programming languages would do best if they did exactly three things in relation to their standard library:
The art, of course, is in defining the right frameworks for each area. This is not easy. In fact, it's very hard, perhaps the single hardest thing about developing a good new platform for programming. However, as demonstrated by the C and C++ worlds where standard libraries are minimalist but there are several popular cross-platform libraries used in practice, it can usually be done. And if you can do it, and produce good frameworks that are both clean enough to use for most things as they stand and extensible in useful ways where platform-specific features or future developments warrant, then you're backing a winner for sure.
The language itself should then, IMHO, provide solid support for library users and developers in terms of clear interfaces and facilities for whatever version checking, dynamic loading, calling conventions, data marshalling, documentation or other common aspects make sense for that language.
This combination basically keeps the overhead for learning and portability low, which is the major advantage of having a standard library in the first place, but without committing to writing and maintaining a large standard library from day one. The latter, IME, usually means having to live eternally with the mistakes when the implementation that was driving the library turns out not to be flexible enough a few years down the line; this has happened to most monolithic standard libraries in mainstream programming languages so far.
Down the road when you have, say, 200 cores, do you really want to be dealing with sharing data in memory between tens or hundreds of thousands of threads spread out over them?
I don't know, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. Both shared state and non-shared state concurrency have potential given the right language/environment tools to support them. No-one really knows yet whether shared state will ever scale to many interactions rather than the small numbers typically used in today's research on transactions etc. Nor does anyone really know yet whether unshared state models will ever be viable for general high performance applications where the overheads matter. If I were a betting man, I would wager that non-shared state concurrency will come to dominate "high level concurrency" wherever it's viable, but for the nitty gritty stuff that needs to be fast, shared state will be the only credible choice, though based on a more powerful, more compositional and less error-prone formal model than the manual locking and such we often see in industrial languages today. The one thing that seems pretty certain, though, is that handicapping your entire runtime environment in such a way that one major approach to concurrency is effectively impossible isn't a smart move in the long term.
You want to add something to Python, but only wind up with what you had before anyway? :-/
Surely we should first rename what we've already got to ExParrot, implying that has passed on, is no more, has ceased to be, has gone to meet its maker, etc. Then we'll be free to call its replacement whatever we like. :-)
If you weren't following, Nate Clinton is the leader of the Windows Update team. So the guy who is basically responsible for this update just said that, independent of the selected settings WU installs updates for itself.
The thing is, that's not what he said. If you have Automatic Updates turned off, then no silent updates are done, at all, ever.
However, if you have Automatic Updates turned on and told to check but not download, it seems that's a different matter. There is a genuine concern that the update system patches itself quietly in order to perform that check (which is the analogous behaviour to manually visiting the WU site and having the control update itself before looking for "real" updates). I think it would have been better if the update client had simply popped up the usual "updates available" dialog and said that an update to WU itself was available and needed to be installed before other updates could be checked. This is just the simple principle that if your machine is told to check first, it should never actually change anything without explicit user consent, and that's fair enough.
Still, realistically, anyone who bothers running AU at all is always going to say yes to that. So there's a matter of keeping the user informed — which is good form, to be sure — but anyone who uses this service at all is basically trusting Microsoft not to ship changes to other system components without saying so, so the problem here is mostly illusory. If you don't trust them this far, presumably you never want to install any updates, so you just disable to Automatic Updates service completely (at which point, as noted above, nothing whatsoever is done silently).
Of course, for the rest of us, it would be a problem if Microsoft used this feature to stream anything other than a WU update onto machines without consent. Except that so much FUD has been spread around this story now that anyone who would have cared probably now doesn't. There is certainly a silly PR mistake here for Microsoft, but the practical consequences are near zero for almost everyone, and crying wolf and blowing it out of all proportion doesn't help.
I have long suggested that removing anonymity on the Internet might be a step forward. In practical terms, it offers little protection of free speech in the face of an oppressive government anyway, and supporting such speech is the major argument in favour of it. Meanwhile, all laws basically rely on being able to hold people accountable for their actions. If you allow effectively anonymous use of the Internet, then you allow anyone to break the law without responsibility. And thus we have everything from spamming to identity theft via bot-net extortion going on, with organised crime now behind much of it, and all basically above the law.
Of course, in an ideal society, we could allow anonymous free speech where it's useful, safe in the knowledge that people would view it sceptically. In an ideal society, we'd have some way of signing Internet communications to prove our real identity, so people could trust our material knowing that we are prepared to take responsibility for it. Much of the problem today isn't really with the anonymity, it's with the blind faith that so many people put in things that they shouldn't. But I think we're some way from a society mature enough for this sort of openness to work, so in the meantime, we come back to whether the pragmatic step of requiring accountability is justified.
What, follow the union of laws from both countries, which could be self-contradictory and make doing any business at all impossible?
They could be contradictory. But realistically, it would be relatively easy to achieve harmony on the basis that the default position was everyone having privacy and no personal data collection being allowed without explicit consent, and then codifying some reasonable exceptions. Much bigger differences have been worked around when building international agreements in the past.
The only realistic down-side to harmonising in this way is that a lot of companies whose business models are based on collecting personal data under ethically questionable conditions would lose out to some degree, possibly even going bust. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I think the individual's quality of life and in practical terms the need to prevent nasty crimes like identity theft far outweigh the need to allow dubious business practices.
They DID NOT manually visit the WU site.
Can you cite a source for that? None of the sources I found that claimed to reproduce this seemed to specify either way, and both articles mentioned before were overflowing with comments from people saying the same thing about what actually happens.
The problem with the update, from what I've read, is that it happened regardless of whether or not you set WU to ask before installing updates. It isn't a question of what they updated, it is a question of how they are able to simply bypass that configuration option.
Visiting the Windows Update site manually and using the corresponding control in a web browser, is nothing to do with the automatic updating system within the last few versions of Windows. There is no bypassing involved: we're talking about two fundamentally separate mechanisms, which happen to have the same end result.
As far as I'm aware, it has always been the case that when you visit the Windows Update site — a conscious, active decision by the user — and load up the corresponding control, the first thing the control does is make sure it is itself up to date in order to use the site. This is not done stealthily. In fact, the last time this happened to me, it told me in big letters what was going on.
There is no story here. If Microsoft were pushing code onto machines quietly, behind the scenes, against the user's explicit preferences, there would be a story. But that simply isn't what's happening here.
This whole discussion, and the one before it, are kinda sad, actually. After years of OSS fans here on Slashdot criticising Microsoft for spreading FUD about Linux, it turns out that dozens, maybe even hundreds by now, of people here are also willing to propagate FUD about Windows. That is no way to win a grown-up debate about the benefits and risks of using different operating systems.
AFIAK, even in Europe you still do not have the rights to demand that a company delete personal data about you or to prevent them from collecting it in the first place. You only have the right to see (for a fee) what they're holding about you, and to require them to correct it if it's wrong. Some countries impose more restrictions than this, but they're not universal. This is a major part of the privacy problem, IMHO.
Then how do you get your self-esteem, if you aren't using social networks?
Personally, I find insulting people's parentage on antisocial networks quite rewarding. Your mileage may vary. :-)
The laws do differ in Europe, but even the least common denominator is considerably stronger than what the US has. (Obligatory Wikipedia citation for background)
The problem with this whole debate is that it is often presupposed that supporting commercial interests is a good enough reason to allow the arbitrary collection of personal data in the first place, and the question asked is only to what extent this should be regulated. I submit that by the time you get that far, you've already made an irrecoverable error: the only long-term safe position is that by default everyone has a basic right to privacy and collection of any personal data is illegal, and then you codify the exceptions to this principle. Unfortunately, even the EC legislation currently makes this mistake — which might explain the numerous unsavoury business practices based on involuntarily collection and profiling of personal data that are fast becoming commonplace here, and the consequent reduction in general quality of life for everyone affected (except those who own the businesses concerned, of course).
Who do you trust more, Google or the government you live under? That is the root question.
My government, without hesitation.
And believe me, that's really saying something.
The problem with international standards for privacy is that some cultures have to give up the privacy rights
Sorry, but I disagree. If you think carefully, I believe you'll realise there is another remarkably simple solution, and one that is almost certainly in the interests of private citizens everywhere at that. It's just not the solution Google wants.
We already did this one just two days ago.
The anti-Microsoft FUD was thoroughly debunked by numerous Slashdot posters. It was also thoroughly debunked by numerous comments in reply to the various external sources cited in the older Slashdot article.
They updated Windows Update, when people explicitly visited the Windows Update site. That is all. They are not pushing out updates to critical system files without any user intervention.
Last time, several posters asked whether Slashdot would at least have the decency to correct the blatantly Microsoft-bashing headline/article. They didn't, they posted it again. <sigh> Go Zonk!
I don't care whether "my" hurt feelings (you assume it was me who was hurt) are acceptable to you. You are irrelevant. What matters is what the law said at the time "I" posted the material on-line, just as that is what matters in the case we are discussing now.
There are many insidious things about modern copyright legislation in various jurisdictions, but I don't think immediate take-down notices are among them. Such notices are a natural consequence of the need to protect copyright in a world of effectively instant, effectively free transmission of copies with widespread abuse. The notices are just a legal tool, and like all tools, the mechanism itself is neutral and it's how it's used that matters.
(Please don't challenge that "need" now: it's how the law works today, and I don't think this is an appropriate article for the wider discussion.)
The artificial restrictions are a definite merit as far as shareholder value and suitability for media from the perspective of the MAFIAA is concerned.
It's ironic that Apple should buy this unsubstantiated ranting by Big Media, though, considering that they are the single most successful example of doing something Big Media basically claimed couldn't be done for years: making a lot of money by selling legal downloads cheaply.
Most MAFIAA members are making funny noises about going elsewhere with their wares.
The MAFIAA have been making funny noises about a lot of things for a long time. But realistically, Apple should be their best friend right now, and they should be aggressively promoting similar services as a new distribution channel. Their luck with the courts is going to run out, sooner rather than later I suspect. Who knows, it could even backfire spectacularly if someone finds a legal hole that allows all the people coerced into unreasonably expensive settlements to sue. Their luck with DRM ran out a long time ago, and they all know it but can't admit it. Before long, possibly as a direct result of concerns with iPods and the like and the negative PR surrounding Vista, hardware and software companies are going to view DRM as the same kind of liability that informed customers already do. And the RIAA and their international counterparts just need to realise that in an age of on-line downloads, the filler-filled album is dead. It might be their favourite cash cow, but it was always screwing the market, and sooner or later, markets who are being screwed find alternatives.
Bottom line: Apple are in at least as powerful a bargaining position as Big Media. If Big Media threaten to pull out en masse then there are clear anti-competitive concerns. If Big Media companies are forced to compete as they should be, then those who continue to do business with Apple and those like them will surely come out on top pretty quickly. Either way, it's in their interests to work with companies like Apple, not against them.
It's funny. A while ago, probably not long after Google bought out Deja News, there was some bad feeling from Usenet contributors who felt that their content had been sold, and others were basically profiteering on the back of their work. A few custom services were also popping up, which reproduced the content on certain Usenet groups but splatted those irritating ad-links all over key words in the content. When I suggested that this was inappropriate in a discussion here, a whole load of people basically told me to STFU because once I'd posted the content on Usenet I should have known that was going to happen.
I pointed out that at the time Deja started keeping its archive, I (and many others) would not necessarily have been aware of it, and might reasonably have expected articles to expire after a few days (as they did at the time on pretty much all ISPs' Usenet servers). I was directed to the relevant RFCs and told that they said content could be kept effectively indefinitely, and that this was more important than the industry standard practice at the time that users would actually have experienced.
I pointed out that the only licence anyone had to copy my and others' copyrighted content from Usenet was the implicit one granted by posting in the first place, and that it was questionable whether this covered commercial use or for that matter the RFC-sanctioned archival if most people using the system didn't know that could happen. This, too was our problem, I was told.
I pointed out that splatting the hyperlink ads all over the content degraded the content and certainly would not be expected on a normal Usenet system. This, apparently, was just fair use, and the fact that US-style fair use doesn't even apply in my country (where some of the material was being posted) didn't matter.
The critics' conclusion: Too bad, get over it, you have no legal rights.
My conclusion #1: Don't ask Slashdot about legal rights, ask a lawyer.
My conclusion #2: Expect to get screwed by unethical/illegal business practices if you put your content on-line anywhere but you don't have big enough legal guns to defend it afterwards. But you should take what steps you can to minimise the effort required to defend your rights: including the non-commercial clause that applies here, for example.
My prediction: In the current, Web 2.0-ish world full of community-made content, there's going to be a lot of bad feeling sooner or later, as the numerous businesses who basically just host discussion facilities but then claim rights over the content start profiteering, potentially at the expense of those who wrote the material in the first place. The so-called "you write all the content, they keep all the money" model is a great deal for businesses but a lousy deal for the contributors, who tend to suffer from some idealistic illusion that their content is safe and the service they are supporting will continue to operate for their benefit even if it's not making enough money. A lot of people's feelings are going to get hurt as this happens more often, and this case is just the start.
My answer: If you want to share content on-line, always host it on your own terms. Don't use a commercial service for your blog, set up your own. It's almost as cheap and easy these days, and then there's no ambiguity about the ongoing hosting, the rights to the material, or the privacy implications of someone else holding potentially substantial amounts of personal data. If you want to set up a community site with friends, get a friendly geek to help you do so with your own web host, for the same reasons.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but further reading suggests this isn't nearly as bad as TFSummary makes out. If you follow the links to the stories on the other sites, and read the comments and links given there, a lot of people are suggesting that this is only updating Windows Update files when you visit the Windows Update site, and not in fact a push of arbitrary changes at all. There's so much hype and FUD flying around this discussion that it's hard to see the wood for the trees.
This is actually pretty disturbing. One of the major reasons I have completely avoided Vista is that I was aware the system was set up so changes could be pushed. But XP wasn't supposed to be that way if you switched off automatic updates. The fact that Microsoft have done this is pretty bad. The fact that it was even technically possible for them to do it after all the assurances is unforgivable. The privacy concerns, security concerns, and even cost and performance concerns (not everyone has broadband and flat-rate Internet access!) are pretty serious.
It's lightweight, it opens word document, and it doesn't have a load of autobullshit.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have a load of basic WP features, either. If you don't need those, then great, but AbiWord isn't competing with OO Writer and MS Word for the same market.