More interesting, however, is why these companies haven't tested their upgrades prior to deployment. Surely a company with 80,000 comptuers has a few system on which to form a small testing environment behind an internal firewall?
Testing, yes -- but few people expect a Y2K bug in software released after the year 2000. Even if it is a Microsoft product, most people wouldn't think to check to see if software wilfully violates the license under which it was sold to you. It might have been a bit easier for people to figure out something like this with access to the source code --- but MS isn't allowing that.
EULAs notwithstanding, this time bomb is essentially an example of malicious code. Expecting sysadmins to find and document all examples of malicious code in binary-only software where the EULA specifically enjoins you from reverse-engineering is rather like asking a gorilla to dance on the head of a pin.
Isn't all this legislation going to start infringing on rights in the future if not now?Isn't all this legislation going to start infringing on rights in the future if not now?
Forgery is not a 'right' it is a crime. When spammers use false information to get past spam filters -- in order to try and convince me to buy their useless crap they are committing forgery.
You can say what you want, but I don't think it's unconstitutional to demand that someone wanting to do business with me:
Identify themselves properly
Only send me emails if I haven't told them to piss off.
You may have the right to say what you want, but you don't have the right to force me to waste my time listening to you. Nor do you have the right to lie to me.
It's really annoying to have to pull emails from my mom's best friend out of the spam box because it's the first time she's sent me an email.
I wouldn't disagree with that.. The premise of the show was that a nuclear waste dump on the other side of the moon went critical and the resulting blast blew the moon out of orbit. Any blast big enough to send the moon out of orbit at high enough speeds to make a trip past mars (much less to any other star in this galaxy) on non-geological time scales would simply turn the moon into a dust ball..
Some sort of 'wake' might result if they were using a star-trek warp drive on the moon, but this is a different universe with different warp physics than the Star Trek world.
Yep. That was along the lines of my first response too.... "China.com.cn???? GAh! the freakin spammers!!! DIE you spam chucking PIGS!"
Now, when I get spam from a china.com.cn netblock I just started denying the whole block. If I had my druthers, they'd be null-routed until they promised to stop spamming the universe.
I don't understand why getting money from DARPA makes them uncomfortable. He mentions it comes with no strings attached.
This might fit in the context of the recent Technological condrums article. A more extreme example of the condrum that Theo faces would be people who were looking at using the results of NAZI concentration camp experiments on identical twins, hypothermia research, etc. Do you take solace in the fact that it was NAZIs like Mengle (i.e. not you) who killed those subjects, or do you let the research languish in archives because of it's source?
Consider a piece of toast with butter on one side and jam on the other. How do you hold it? If you refuse to hold it, how do you drop it?
The laws against spam (the constitutional ones, at least) aren't against the speech. They're to regulate the annoyance. As an example: it's completely legal for you to stand up in a park and speak for or against the war, but it's not legal to go running thru residential streets at 2AM with loudspeakers saying the same things.
The laws against spam are (probably) legal because spam is getting in the way of productive and wanted communications.
The difference between SPAM laws and the much-struck-down anti-pornography laws is that the latter are designed to make it harder for people to recieve communications -- whether they want to or not. Anti-Pornography laws also attempt to regulate a specific kind of content. Preventing people from recieving specific communications content is always going to get a thorough going-over by the courts.
Do you believe that Muslim fanaticists hate the Americans only because of their involvement in the Middle East and not because of the fact that they preach death to all non-believers (American or not)? Do you not believe that more civilians have died since Saddam took power than in both of the gulf wars combined? Do you not believe
The connection between Iraq and terrorism is tenuous. Yes, the man's a brutal asshole who deserves to be kicked out of Iraq. Unfortunately, he (like Bin Laden) is a monster of US making. I was watching a live press conference where someone asked Rumsfeld if he was aware of / involved in the Regan administration selling chemical/biological technology to Saddam.
Rumsfeld: (mumble, mumble) not my direct responsibility (mumble, mumble) go ask someone else (mumble, mumble)
next question?
I should add Panama's Noriega to the list of former US puppets being used as
an excuse for invasion.
If the US go9vernment would stop supporting brutal psychopaths just because they think that they're "on our side", then the world would have a good bit less to worry about, and a lot fewer dead bodies to deal with.
BTW: Especially if you include the after-effects of the 1991 war, then yes -- we've killed many more Iraqi civilians than Saddamn(sic) did.
Then, of course, there's the fact that the second worst terrorist bombing in the us was the work of a blond-haired blue-eyed former US Marine...
Re:At least they're honest.
on
Fishing for Ideas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
patent your idea, or they'll steal it from you.
Not so sure about that... The assignment in the legal section could be taken to mean that you're also assigning any patent rights to them as well (along with the explicitly mentioned copyright). If I was being truly paranoid (and submitting anyways), I'd be inclined to have one person patent the idea, and another submit it to Microsoft -- that way they couldn't claim that you assigned them something you don't own.
The moderator who marked it 'offtopic' obviously didn't read the RFC. I didn't even make it through the first paragraph before I realized it was an AF-RFC. At that point, I was too tired to continue.
I think this bill is probably not so much directed at us, IP geeks, as much as it is directed at people stealing sattelite TV, and people stealing cell phones
Nuclear weapons aimed at military targets will still take out civilians. Whomever this law is aimed at, it's still wiping our a lot of legitimate uses.
If I do something as simple as using SSH to start up a netscape/mozilla session from home so I can look at my email, and it incidently opens up the web browser, I could end up in jail. That is absolutely assinine and overreaching.
I will quite often do things like ssh to my friend's box and use that to test whether problems with a network connection are local to my box or more generally net wide.
I do remote system administration... Testing the network connection of a remote box (if it's in Michigan) is now illegal.
Checking the email on my home box while on the road may or may not be illegal, but sending a reply definitely is.
Logging into a work computer and doing anything that involves a second box is now a criminal offence.
Surfing the web through a NAT firewall is now a criminal offence.
How about this one?
Owning a cable/DSL router/firewall could land you in jail!
Many people who use those things probably don't know that they're now the equivalent of burglary tools.
In Canada, the government has OKed some people for medical uses of Marijuana. These people have little cards saying that they have the right to buy and use
small volumes of pot.
Problem is, there's nobody legally allowed to supply them.
The impending TEaCH/DMCA clash is looking like a different version of the same problem.
If they were disinterested, the reports wouldn't be reliable (in terms of either timely or well researched).
The best you can ask for is a reasonably eclectic set of news sources, from which you can, hopefully, synthesize a picture with a reasonably low signal-to-noise ratio. -- rather like the work they do with long baseline radio telescope arrays.
(One thing I like about news sources like the "Marxist Workers Journal" is that it's pretty easy to see where their bias lies. Newspapers like The National Post, on the other hand, tend to have reporters and editors who are reasonably good at hiding their bias. This requires a bit more effort on the part of the sceptical reader).
Expiration dates have their own problem -- on the vendor's side:
As a product approaches it's expiration date, a prospective seller can say to the salesman: "So why should I pay full price for this software if it's going to be free in 4 months?"
An income threshold, on the other hand, allows the sales(wo)man a reasonable response: "If you pay full price, it will get it that much closer to Open Source." There would also, of course, be the support factor.
That having been said, I'd add a couple of caveats: Is the vendor promising to release the original code or the current code at the time the threshold is reached? If it's the original code, then -- unless the threshold is reached in a matter of weeks or months -- that code will be all but useless to the outside community. It will likely be missing all sorts of bug fixes and even enhancements. Slimey companies might even lock down a horribly broken version, and then 'update' to a version that actually works properly for real sales..
I guess this leads to a different issue: Will outside programmers be allowed to view the escrowed source code -- to make sure that it's reasonably clean and maintainable. The last thing I'd want is to find that the company has GPLed a compacted version of their code -- with all the comments and extraneous white space removed.
And, yes -- I'd need a promise based on sales, not profits. The entertainment industry has pretty much perfected the process of making even the most wildly successful project look like a money looser. It would be all to easy for a software company to hire an RIAA certified accounting firm. There should also be a condition that, if a company stops selling a program, that the code gets released after N months -- whether the target has been reached or not.
If I remember correctly,
OpenBSD development was based in Canada (in part) because encryption code was considered a munition and thus the US government refused to allow it's export (while it was allowed from Canada).
Now the military (who were probably the source of these rules) are paying for the continued development of a technology that the forced out of the country on security grounds.
---- internet ----| air gap |--- secure network --
Just what the word says.. empirical testing has shown that wood cement and glass are about as effective at preventing unwanted transmissions as air, but the name has still stuck.
for the seriously paranoid, a faraday cage can also be employed to prevent EM transmissions that can sometimes be used to reverse engineer your activities. (do a google search on ' NSA tempest' if you want more data)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should become a CMS
sorryMore interesting, however, is why these companies haven't tested their upgrades prior to deployment. Surely a company with 80,000 comptuers has a few system on which to form a small testing environment behind an internal firewall?
Testing, yes -- but few people expect a Y2K bug in software released after the year 2000. Even if it is a Microsoft product, most people wouldn't think to check to see if software wilfully violates the license under which it was sold to you. It might have been a bit easier for people to figure out something like this with access to the source code --- but MS isn't allowing that.
EULAs notwithstanding, this time bomb is essentially an example of malicious code. Expecting sysadmins to find and document all examples of malicious code in binary-only software where the EULA specifically enjoins you from reverse-engineering is rather like asking a gorilla to dance on the head of a pin.
Forgery is not a 'right' it is a crime. When spammers use false information to get past spam filters -- in order to try and convince me to buy their useless crap they are committing forgery.
You can say what you want, but I don't think it's unconstitutional to demand that someone wanting to do business with me:
- Identify themselves properly
- Only send me emails if I haven't told them to piss off.
You may have the right to say what you want, but you don't have the right to force me to waste my time listening to you. Nor do you have the right to lie to me.It's really annoying to have to pull emails from my mom's best friend out of the spam box because it's the first time she's sent me an email.
If you're big enough to get address space directly from ARIN, chances are that you are an ISP.
Some sort of 'wake' might result if they were using a star-trek warp drive on the moon, but this is a different universe with different warp physics than the Star Trek world.
"China.com.cn???? GAh! the freakin spammers!!! DIE you spam chucking PIGS!"
Now, when I get spam from a china.com.cn netblock I just started denying the whole block. If I had my druthers, they'd be null-routed until they promised to stop spamming the universe.
This might fit in the context of the recent Technological condrums article. A more extreme example of the condrum that Theo faces would be people who were looking at using the results of NAZI concentration camp experiments on identical twins, hypothermia research, etc. Do you take solace in the fact that it was NAZIs like Mengle (i.e. not you) who killed those subjects, or do you let the research languish in archives because of it's source?
Consider a piece of toast with butter on one side and jam on the other. How do you hold it? If you refuse to hold it, how do you drop it?
The laws against spam are (probably) legal because spam is getting in the way of productive and wanted communications.
The difference between SPAM laws and the much-struck-down anti-pornography laws is that the latter are designed to make it harder for people to recieve communications -- whether they want to or not. Anti-Pornography laws also attempt to regulate a specific kind of content. Preventing people from recieving specific communications content is always going to get a thorough going-over by the courts.
The connection between Iraq and terrorism is tenuous. Yes, the man's a brutal asshole who deserves to be kicked out of Iraq. Unfortunately, he (like Bin Laden) is a monster of US making. I was watching a live press conference where someone asked Rumsfeld if he was aware of / involved in the Regan administration selling chemical/biological technology to Saddam.
I should add Panama's Noriega to the list of former US puppets being used as an excuse for invasion. If the US go9vernment would stop supporting brutal psychopaths just because they think that they're "on our side", then the world would have a good bit less to worry about, and a lot fewer dead bodies to deal with.BTW: Especially if you include the after-effects of the 1991 war, then yes -- we've killed many more Iraqi civilians than Saddamn(sic) did.
Then, of course, there's the fact that the second worst terrorist bombing in the us was the work of a blond-haired blue-eyed former US Marine...
Not so sure about that... The assignment in the legal section could be taken to mean that you're also assigning any patent rights to them as well (along with the explicitly mentioned copyright). If I was being truly paranoid (and submitting anyways), I'd be inclined to have one person patent the idea, and another submit it to Microsoft -- that way they couldn't claim that you assigned them something you don't own.
- They give you the disk, and notify you that it's illegal to use without a license.
-
They wait for you to use the 'key' on the back of the disk.
-
They send the BSA in with SWAT backup to audit you
-
They threaten to fine you waaaayyy more than the cost of the software
-
You buy a proper license or two.
< EMBED SRC="Evil_Laugh.ogg" >?????
With "Microsoft" and "Security" in the same sentence, It's got to be an April Fool's posting....
Time to go to bed.
Nuclear weapons aimed at military targets will still take out civilians. Whomever this law is aimed at, it's still wiping our a lot of legitimate uses.
If I do something as simple as using SSH to start up a netscape/mozilla session from home so I can look at my email, and it incidently opens up the web browser, I could end up in jail. That is absolutely assinine and overreaching.
I will quite often do things like ssh to my friend's box and use that to test whether problems with a network connection are local to my box or more generally net wide.
I do remote system administration... Testing the network connection of a remote box (if it's in Michigan) is now illegal.
Checking the email on my home box while on the road may or may not be illegal, but sending a reply definitely is.
Logging into a work computer and doing anything that involves a second box is now a criminal offence.
Surfing the web through a NAT firewall is now a criminal offence.
How about this one?
Owning a cable/DSL router/firewall could land you in jail!
Many people who use those things probably don't know that they're now the equivalent of burglary tools.
Because describing it as 1/100 the diameter of a doomsday metor might just upset people?
Once Microsoft finishes off their 'secure OS' design, they're going to declare Linux an 'circumventing technology' and get it declared illegal.
Problem is, there's nobody legally allowed to supply them.
The impending TEaCH/DMCA clash is looking like a different version of the same problem.
Funny, actually.
Need .... modertion ... points .... (wheeze, gasp!).
They never said anything about locking the safe.
Always read the fine print... even if it isn't there.
The best you can ask for is a reasonably eclectic set of news sources, from which you can, hopefully, synthesize a picture with a reasonably low signal-to-noise ratio. -- rather like the work they do with long baseline radio telescope arrays.
(One thing I like about news sources like the "Marxist Workers Journal" is that it's pretty easy to see where their bias lies. Newspapers like The National Post, on the other hand, tend to have reporters and editors who are reasonably good at hiding their bias. This requires a bit more effort on the part of the sceptical reader).
As a product approaches it's expiration date, a prospective seller can say to the salesman: "So why should I pay full price for this software if it's going to be free in 4 months?"
An income threshold, on the other hand, allows the sales(wo)man a reasonable response: "If you pay full price, it will get it that much closer to Open Source." There would also, of course, be the support factor.
That having been said, I'd add a couple of caveats: Is the vendor promising to release the original code or the current code at the time the threshold is reached? If it's the original code, then -- unless the threshold is reached in a matter of weeks or months -- that code will be all but useless to the outside community. It will likely be missing all sorts of bug fixes and even enhancements. Slimey companies might even lock down a horribly broken version, and then 'update' to a version that actually works properly for real sales..
I guess this leads to a different issue: Will outside programmers be allowed to view the escrowed source code -- to make sure that it's reasonably clean and maintainable. The last thing I'd want is to find that the company has GPLed a compacted version of their code -- with all the comments and extraneous white space removed.
And, yes -- I'd need a promise based on sales, not profits. The entertainment industry has pretty much perfected the process of making even the most wildly successful project look like a money looser. It would be all to easy for a software company to hire an RIAA certified accounting firm. There should also be a condition that, if a company stops selling a program, that the code gets released after N months -- whether the target has been reached or not.
Nuff said?
If I remember correctly, OpenBSD development was based in Canada (in part) because encryption code was considered a munition and thus the US government refused to allow it's export (while it was allowed from Canada).
Now the military (who were probably the source of these rules) are paying for the continued development of a technology that the forced out of the country on security grounds.
Convoluted enough for you???
a little bit more secure than a firewall
Just what the word says.. empirical testing has shown that wood cement and glass are about as effective at preventing unwanted transmissions as air, but the name has still stuck.for the seriously paranoid, a faraday cage can also be employed to prevent EM transmissions that can sometimes be used to reverse engineer your activities. (do a google search on ' NSA tempest' if you want more data)