If I remember correctly, their actual case was that the people who ran the indexing servers also shared copyrighted material and thus the RIAA pretty much had them by the balls. The students agreed to shut down the servers in exchange for a several thousand dollar slap on the wrist for the very clear copyright violations they had committed. The RIAA may have publically made claims running the indexing servers was illegal, but I do not think they filed any charges to that affect. If the students running the indexing servers had not shared copyrighted material, it would have been a totally different ballgame.
In many cases, things which Congress cannot do by direct legislation (or it would be unconstitutional), the federal goverment can do by treaty.
Woe! That's crazy. I don't think I would have ever even thought about that. Where'd you find out about that, and what kind of examples are there of Congress doing this?
Mir. You know, that old space station? The one where people lived for over a year at a time, far longer than any ISS mission?
When we started the joint shuttle-mir missions and asked the Russians for their data studing the effects of weightlessness didn't they give us our skylab data because they hadn't ever bothered to study it? Did they have more data that they gave us later? I guess it's possible they could have and I just never heard about it.
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
Did they shoot it down or did it malfunctiion? It wasn't the first one we lost. We've lost I think two others to various malfunctions, one of them at an airshow. Ouch! You can even get footage of it crashing into a forest.
Re:What is the *source* of the "RMS" controversy?
on
Stallman Goes to India
·
· Score: 1
A very old proverb says that "it's hard to be a prophet in one's own land."
"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor."
--Matthew 13:56-58 Which I think is sometimes translated as: "Only amongst his own people is a prophet without honor", which is my favorite version of the proverb.
the cost for each student was something like $50 per semester, or $5 per credit hour or something like that. [snip] And at A&M the students voted it in. [snip]
It wasn't at all anounced that the microsoft fee was going to be on the ballot that election though so no campaign was mounted against it. There were a few articles in the Battalion about CIS considering a license agreement with microsoft and a few mail calls for and against the idea, but there was no mention of it being on the ballot that semester. Most of the people who vote in the student elections are people who live on-campus, ie fish who don't know any better. It was passed by a pretty wide margin though. The price was $1.25 per a credit hour. Works out to be a little bit more than the price of the educational edition of office for the mac over the course of four years. The license specified the OS was an upgrade but the cd wasn't actually an upgrade cd, it was a full install. The license covered the full version of office.
The Architech also told Neo the first (perfect) matrix failed quickly. I am not sure if he said that 99% of people choose to stay in the second matrix or if it was 99.9%, but he did say that "code" was retrieved from Neo's predecessors to improve each subsequent matrix. Also the population of Zion does not consist entirely of the desendents of the around 30 or so people choosen to rebuild Zion but also all those whose minds get freed until the next destruction of Zion. Since each matrix is an improvement over the last one, each should last a successively longer period of the time then the one before it.
The Upgrade-minifaq has a list of steps to go through for upgrading from 3.0 to OpenBSD-Current. According to 3.2's INSTALL.i386 upgrades for that version are only supported from the immediate previous release. I would follow the steps listed in the minifaq for Upgrading from 3.0. Grab etc31.tgz from ftp, untar it in your home directory or where ever and diff -r it and the old/etc and/var's on the machine for obvious things that need changing. Then I would grab the install bootdisk for 3.1 release and use the upgrade choice. Then follow the steps listed in the minifaq for Upgrading from 3.1, grab etc32.tgz, untar it, diff it and the newly changed/etc and/var making the obvious changes, grab the install bootdisk for 3.2 and use the upgrade choice there. At that point you are running 3.2-release and can either follow the directions in the mini-faq for upgrading to 3.2-stable (You won't need to follow Upgrading from 3.2 for stable), -current (You will need to follow Upgrading from 3.2 and Upgrading from 3.3), or just wait for 3.3's emminent release and use the method discussed above to upgrade to that. While the "make world" method does exist it will not easily work on an upgrade from 3.0 due to the numerous changes to the compiler and toolchain.
A valid question if you don't know the answer, you shouldn't have been moderated as a troll I think. These "unsafe string funtions" sprintf(), strcpy(), and strcat(), are only unsafe if they are used incorrectly, which is easy to do. OpenBSD's source has been audited in the past to make sure they are used correctly. Now instead of making sure these calls are used correctly they are ripping them out and replacing them with calls to safer string functions. Interestingly it appears Theo is being successful in getting these changes made upstream in openssl, sendmail, and bind. I believe in the past there were some bind security flaws that didn't affect OpenBSD because they had altered their version of bind. The functions they are using to replace the "unsafe" ones are: snprintf() which first appeared in 4.4BSD (as in the original Berkley bsd), asprintf() which came from the GNU C library and first appeared in OpenBSD in 2.3, strlcpy() and strlcat() which were created by OpenBSD in 2.4. The man page for strlcpy() and strlcat() is one of my favorites for the blurb at the end under EXAMPLES: However, one may question the validity of such optimizations, as they defeat the whole purpose of strlcpy() and strlcat(). As a matter of fact, the first version of this manual page got it wrong.
Also the packet filter thing wasn't a minor squable. It had a licence which sounded like a bsd licence but did not expressly permit distribution of modified source, thus making distribution of modified source illegal. It also was suppose to be installed into / by default, default being the only way you could legally distribute it. The author thought he was gonna go ahead and point that out and be an ass about it. Pretty strange for a licence which said I hate legalese don't you in it.
I have a gut feeling that unless the xwin project really refactors (i hate that word) a LOT of stuff, it's not going to be something that people are dying to install
According to the article, Keith has the debian and red hat X maintainers interested. If he convinces just one of the major distros to put his fork on the default install, then it will end up on a lot of people's machines.
He said non-MMU processor families such as the Coldfire, MIPS, or ARM. If you look at netbsd's ports page you'll note that it says, "NetBSD should be portable to just about any 32bit or larger machine with an MMU. Machines without an MMU would be more work." So while it is possible to port Netbsd to non-mmu machines it is a bit more work. It should be noted there are 7 Netbsd ports to arm, 11 ports to mips, and I think none to Coldfire's. They list further arm ports as being fairly trivial to do. They do not state how difficult ports to other MIPS would be. Coldfire is a subset of the 68k architecture of which there are many NetBSD ports for which could be used as a starting point. There does appear to be commercially available partial Coldfire port of OpenBSD from Stallion Technologies, so it is possible to do. But what he was really asking was is there any bsd set up to be easily ported in general to platforms without mmu's the way uClinux is. The answer is currently no. Although that is one of NetBSD's future goals according to their 2002 USENIX Presentation.
Actually it's harder than this, due to problems in linux with the virtual terminal locking code. You end up having to compile a completely seperate X server with all the virtual terminal code removed. Details here. These guys are working on fixing linux's virtual terminal problems. I think the new virtual terminal code is one of the things not making it into 2.5 which will be put into 2.6 at some later point.
The package of the month award goes to rdesktop (pkgsrc/net/rdesktop), nominated by Andrew Brown and Ross Harvey. Rdesktop is a "dependency-free" utility to manage a session on a Windows box in an X window.
Sweet. I've been using rdesktop on the linux boxes at work to connect to the one Windows machine when I need to do something off of it occasionally for a few months now. For those who don't know what it is it's a remote desktop client for X to connect to Windows machines running Remote Desktop. It's right up there with samba and wine for unix/Windows compatibility in my opinion, but it seems like there aren't many people who know about it.
You laugh. Both states were admitted to the Union at almost the same time under President James Polk. Texas as a slave state and Oregon as a free state maintaining the all to precious balance of power in the Congress. Following Texas's admission into the Union, Mexico went to war with us. The treaty Texas had signed with Mexico ending the Texas War for Independence had specifically stated The Republic of Texas would NOT annex itself into the United States. Also, there was a dispute as to the exact borders of the Republic of Texas. After the Texans had defeated the Mexican Army, they made Santa Anna sign a treaty which made the Rio Grande Texas's Southern and Western border. The border had previously been much further to the North and East. Here is a map which shows the disputed regions.
The Republic of Texas had been independent for about nine years before it managed to convince the United States to let Texas be admitted, and the reason it had taken so long was Texas allowed slavery. It was only when we had enough people in the Oregon territories that it was decided the United States could just let both of them in at the same time. Both the United States and Britian had claims on the Oregon territories at that time and since neither side wanted war, it was agreed to divide the territories along the 49th parallel. At the end of the Mexican-American war, when we had captured Mexico City, we "negotiated" the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in which we took an enormous quantity of land from Mexico. This land would eventually become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There was some debate in the Congress about taking all of Mexico, we had after all conquered them more or less completely at this point, but we so racist, that we decided we did not want that many Mexicans in "our" country. Thus completed America's manifest destiny of growing from sea to shining sea.
DNS is supposed to provide nameIP mappings, in an application-neutral fashion.
Then what are these mx records being used to relay mail. That's not exactly application neutral. You can place any random text you want to in a dns record. If you do a host -a you will occasionally come across people who have thrown completely random shit into their dns record. The A record is what is used to resolve a hostname to an ip address. Here is a list of other record types from nslookup(1): A the host's Internet address. CNAME the canonical name for an alias. HINFO the host CPU and operating system type. MX the mail exchanger. NS the name server for the named zone. SOA the domain's ``start-of-authority'' information. TXT the text information. WKS the supported well-known services.
Other types (ANY, AXFR, MB, MD, MF, NULL) are described in the RFC-1035 document.
I seem to recall something about jabber using a dns record similar to mx. A quick google search comes up with this page that claims both ldap and jabber use srv records and that jabber formerly used the mx record.
So yeah, dns, more than just ip addresses and hostnames.
I totally agree. I often go look at other os's man pages to see if maybe they have an example when the linux one doesn't. Freebsd, Netbsd,Openbsd, and others
On my system (debian unstable) man tar has an examples section. Name, Synopsis, Description, and then Examples. Maybe it's something the debian people changed or something the gnu tar people changed recently. Here's the relavant text: EXAMPLES
tar -xvvf foo.tar
extract foo.tar
tar -xvvzf foo.tar.gz
extract gzipped foo.tar.gz
tar -cvvf foo.tar foo/
tar contents of folder foo in foo.tar
But yeah, you're right almost all man pages should have examples. I can't count the number of times I've ssh'ed to other boxes to see if a different os had better man pages. Course, that works both ways, I've found my self sshing into a linux box for better man pages too.
Lord knows I have. I had a power outage at my house and got an error on boot for my/home partition. When I searched google with the non-unique part of the error message, the first link on google was a message on the xfs mailing list by one of the developers saying he corrected an endian bug that was probably causing people to have recovery failures. Ah, here it is. I couldn't find anything on the web/newsgroups about how to fix it. I think I eventually ended up using xfs_repair. It complained about the filesystem not having been unmounted cleanly and telling me to mount and then unmount the filesystem. Of course I couldn't mount the filesystem anymore. I can't remember what exactly it told me to do in the event that the filesystem could not be mounted, but it involved some scary warning about losing the filesystem. I think it was to use xfs_repair -L (zero out the journal log). I considered creating another partion (I don't need as much space as today's drives ship with so I leave space to create new partitions/grow old ones) and using xfsdump to back up the filesystem at that point, but there was nothing terribly important on there so I just went for it. It repaired the file system just fine. I've had it put stuff in lost+found for some of the other file systems on other power outages (yes, we have lots of power outages and I need to buy a UPS though we don't seem to have had one for 43 days at this point), but that's not really a big deal. It does mostly restore things to how they are suppose to be. The problem with xfs is that they don't release "stable" patches for 2.4 that often. Oh, they release snapshots for every kernel, but those are at the start of the branch to that kernel and not at the end of the branch. Other than that you can pull their linux kernel with xfs out of their cvs, but they do not have any sort of stable branch in their cvs that I can find. There were 9 months between the release of xfs linux release 1.1 and 1.2 during which time many important bug fixes went into cvs. Don't get me wrong. I still use xfs as my filesystem. Mostly because they have actual real acl's. I just wish they would release some sort of "stable", "blessed" version of their patches every now and then. Can't wait for 2.6 when it's just included in the stable kernel.
It hasn't always been there. I think universities use to not be able to sell patents the way they can today. Congress passed a law during I think the Reagan administration that allowed universities to financially exploit their research more. I think it was being able to sell patents to companies, but it might have been something else. Anyway that is when this started.
Why is it legal for me to have a cable tv descrambler and watch a cable off of a wire (which the cable company can claim ownership of) but not for me to decrypt a satalite signal from the airwaves which the statalite company cannot legimately claim ownership of?
It's not really, but the law is slightly vague, a violation of civil instead of criminal law, and it's never been tested in court. Cable companies long ago feared setting a precedent the "wrong" way because if the courts said you could use cable descramblers, then everyone probably would so they've never prosecuted anyone for it. This was pre-DMCA. I don't know why they don't go after people now. In contrast satellite companies long ago had the law written that decrypting satellite signals is punishable by a fine and/or some jail time. They did this ?at/during/slightly after? the time that they first began licsensing the frequencies from the fcc. Because the law is so clear on the matter, they do not hesitate to prosecute people for violating it. Also, the satellite companies can claim legitimate "ownership" of the airwaves they use. They pay our goverment for them and not in campaign contributions either, but in real actual liscense fees that go into the goverments budget. (Although you could argue they don't pay enough. I'm not sure what current liscensing rates are.) That's why they can ask the goverment to prosecute people for "stealing" "their" signal. They pay a fee to the goverment and get something in return (and the citizens also get something out of it because they can then purchase cable/satellite tv signals, mutually advantages situation blah blah blah...). Cable companies do not pay the goverment a fee and thus haven't gotten the goverment to criminalize "stealing" cable tv. It is however still a violation of your contract with the cable company and thus a violation of civil law. Hypothetically, they could drag you into court for it and collect some stiff penalties, but they never do for fear of setting a precedent that the only thing they can do is disconnect you. My uncle explained this all to me a long time ago when he was descrambling (stealing) cable tv. It struct me as rather screwed up at the time that it was grey area illegal with light penalties if you ever got caught stealing a signal out of a network a company owns that had been built all the way to your house through a labor intensive process and black area illegal with heavy penalties to take a signal being beamed into your house, recieve it, and perform mathematical operations on it. But when you think of it as just a strange artifact of the way law on cable and satellite signals was made, then I guess it makes sense sort of.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, their actual case was that the people who ran the indexing servers also shared copyrighted material and thus the RIAA pretty much had them by the balls. The students agreed to shut down the servers in exchange for a several thousand dollar slap on the wrist for the very clear copyright violations they had committed. The RIAA may have publically made claims running the indexing servers was illegal, but I do not think they filed any charges to that affect. If the students running the indexing servers had not shared copyrighted material, it would have been a totally different ballgame.
Woe! That's crazy. I don't think I would have ever even thought about that. Where'd you find out about that, and what kind of examples are there of Congress doing this?
When we started the joint shuttle-mir missions and asked the Russians for their data studing the effects of weightlessness didn't they give us our skylab data because they hadn't ever bothered to study it? Did they have more data that they gave us later? I guess it's possible they could have and I just never heard about it.
Did they shoot it down or did it malfunctiion?
It wasn't the first one we lost. We've lost I think two others to various malfunctions, one of them at an airshow. Ouch! You can even get footage of it crashing into a forest.
"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor."
--Matthew 13:56-58
Which I think is sometimes translated as:
"Only amongst his own people is a prophet without honor", which is my favorite version of the proverb.
It can also be found in Mark 6:4.
I see stow has already been mentioned. You might also want to check out the various Encap variants and also gobolinux
Good luck in all your future endeavers. I hope things work out better for you in the future.
It wasn't at all anounced that the microsoft fee was going to be on the ballot that election though so no campaign was mounted against it. There were a few articles in the Battalion about CIS considering a license agreement with microsoft and a few mail calls for and against the idea, but there was no mention of it being on the ballot that semester. Most of the people who vote in the student elections are people who live on-campus, ie fish who don't know any better. It was passed by a pretty wide margin though. The price was $1.25 per a credit hour. Works out to be a little bit more than the price of the educational edition of office for the mac over the course of four years. The license specified the OS was an upgrade but the cd wasn't actually an upgrade cd, it was a full install. The license covered the full version of office.
The Architech also told Neo the first (perfect) matrix failed quickly. I am not sure if he said that 99% of people choose to stay in the second matrix or if it was 99.9%, but he did say that "code" was retrieved from Neo's predecessors to improve each subsequent matrix. Also the population of Zion does not consist entirely of the desendents of the around 30 or so people choosen to rebuild Zion but also all those whose minds get freed until the next destruction of Zion. Since each matrix is an improvement over the last one, each should last a successively longer period of the time then the one before it.
Very insightful posts, what do you think is going to happen?
The Upgrade-minifaq has a list of steps to go through for upgrading from 3.0 to OpenBSD-Current. According to 3.2's INSTALL.i386 upgrades for that version are only supported from the immediate previous release. I would follow the steps listed in the minifaq for Upgrading from 3.0. Grab etc31.tgz from ftp, untar it in your home directory or where ever and diff -r it and the old /etc and /var's on the machine for obvious things that need changing. Then I would grab the install bootdisk for 3.1 release and use the upgrade choice. Then follow the steps listed in the minifaq for Upgrading from 3.1, grab etc32.tgz, untar it, diff it and the newly changed /etc and /var making the obvious changes, grab the install bootdisk for 3.2 and use the upgrade choice there. At that point you are running 3.2-release and can either follow the directions in the mini-faq for upgrading to 3.2-stable (You won't need to follow Upgrading from 3.2 for stable), -current (You will need to follow Upgrading from 3.2 and Upgrading from 3.3), or just wait for 3.3's emminent release and use the method discussed above to upgrade to that. While the "make world" method does exist it will not easily work on an upgrade from 3.0 due to the numerous changes to the compiler and toolchain.
A valid question if you don't know the answer, you shouldn't have been moderated as a troll I think. These "unsafe string funtions" sprintf(), strcpy(), and strcat(), are only unsafe if they are used incorrectly, which is easy to do. OpenBSD's source has been audited in the past to make sure they are used correctly. Now instead of making sure these calls are used correctly they are ripping them out and replacing them with calls to safer string functions. Interestingly it appears Theo is being successful in getting these changes made upstream in openssl, sendmail, and bind. I believe in the past there were some bind security flaws that didn't affect OpenBSD because they had altered their version of bind. The functions they are using to replace the "unsafe" ones are: snprintf() which first appeared in 4.4BSD (as in the original Berkley bsd), asprintf() which came from the GNU C library and first appeared in OpenBSD in 2.3, strlcpy() and strlcat() which were created by OpenBSD in 2.4. The man page for strlcpy() and strlcat() is one of my favorites for the blurb at the end under EXAMPLES:
However, one may question the validity of such optimizations, as they defeat the whole purpose of strlcpy() and strlcat(). As a matter of fact, the first version of this manual page got it wrong.
Also the packet filter thing wasn't a minor squable. It had a licence which sounded like a bsd licence but did not expressly permit distribution of modified source, thus making distribution of modified source illegal. It also was suppose to be installed into / by default, default being the only way you could legally distribute it. The author thought he was gonna go ahead and point that out and be an ass about it. Pretty strange for a licence which said I hate legalese don't you in it.
According to the article, Keith has the debian and red hat X maintainers interested. If he convinces just one of the major distros to put his fork on the default install, then it will end up on a lot of people's machines.
You're suppose to email the editor who posted it. In this case malda@slashdot.org.
He said non-MMU processor families such as the Coldfire, MIPS, or ARM.
If you look at netbsd's ports page you'll note that it says, "NetBSD should be portable to just about any 32bit or larger machine with an MMU. Machines without an MMU would be more work."
So while it is possible to port Netbsd to non-mmu machines it is a bit more work. It should be noted there are 7 Netbsd ports to arm, 11 ports to mips, and I think none to Coldfire's. They list further arm ports as being fairly trivial to do. They do not state how difficult ports to other MIPS would be. Coldfire is a subset of the 68k architecture of which there are many NetBSD ports for which could be used as a starting point. There does appear to be commercially available partial Coldfire port of OpenBSD from Stallion Technologies, so it is possible to do.
But what he was really asking was is there any bsd set up to be easily ported in general to platforms without mmu's the way uClinux is. The answer is currently no. Although that is one of NetBSD's future goals according to their 2002 USENIX Presentation.
Actually it's harder than this, due to problems in linux with the virtual terminal locking code. You end up having to compile a completely seperate X server with all the virtual terminal code removed. Details here. These guys are working on fixing linux's virtual terminal problems. I think the new virtual terminal code is one of the things not making it into 2.5 which will be put into 2.6 at some later point.
Sweet. I've been using rdesktop on the linux boxes at work to connect to the one Windows machine when I need to do something off of it occasionally for a few months now. For those who don't know what it is it's a remote desktop client for X to connect to Windows machines running Remote Desktop. It's right up there with samba and wine for unix/Windows compatibility in my opinion, but it seems like there aren't many people who know about it.
You laugh. Both states were admitted to the Union at almost the same time under President James Polk. Texas as a slave state and Oregon as a free state maintaining the all to precious balance of power in the Congress. Following Texas's admission into the Union, Mexico went to war with us. The treaty Texas had signed with Mexico ending the Texas War for Independence had specifically stated The Republic of Texas would NOT annex itself into the United States. Also, there was a dispute as to the exact borders of the Republic of Texas. After the Texans had defeated the Mexican Army, they made Santa Anna sign a treaty which made the Rio Grande Texas's Southern and Western border. The border had previously been much further to the North and East. Here is a map which shows the disputed regions.
The Republic of Texas had been independent for about nine years before it managed to convince the United States to let Texas be admitted, and the reason it had taken so long was Texas allowed slavery. It was only when we had enough people in the Oregon territories that it was decided the United States could just let both of them in at the same time. Both the United States and Britian had claims on the Oregon territories at that time and since neither side wanted war, it was agreed to divide the territories along the 49th parallel. At the end of the Mexican-American war, when we had captured Mexico City, we "negotiated" the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in which we took an enormous quantity of land from Mexico. This land would eventually become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There was some debate in the Congress about taking all of Mexico, we had after all conquered them more or less completely at this point, but we so racist, that we decided we did not want that many Mexicans in "our" country. Thus completed America's manifest destiny of growing from sea to shining sea.
Then what are these mx records being used to relay mail. That's not exactly application neutral. You can place any random text you want to in a dns record. If you do a host -a you will occasionally come across people who have thrown completely random shit into their dns record. The A record is what is used to resolve a hostname to an ip address. Here is a list of other record types from nslookup(1):
A the host's Internet address.
CNAME the canonical name for an alias.
HINFO the host CPU and operating system type.
MX the mail exchanger.
NS the name server for the named zone.
SOA the domain's ``start-of-authority'' information.
TXT the text information.
WKS the supported well-known services.
Other types (ANY, AXFR, MB, MD, MF, NULL) are described in the RFC-1035 document.
I seem to recall something about jabber using a dns record similar to mx. A quick google search comes up with this page that claims both ldap and jabber use srv records and that jabber formerly used the mx record.
So yeah, dns, more than just ip addresses and hostnames.
I totally agree. I often go look at other os's man pages to see if maybe they have an example when the linux one doesn't. Freebsd, Netbsd ,Openbsd, and others
On my system (debian unstable) man tar has an examples section. Name, Synopsis, Description, and then Examples. Maybe it's something the debian people changed or something the gnu tar people changed recently. Here's the relavant text:
EXAMPLES
tar -xvvf foo.tar
extract foo.tar
tar -xvvzf foo.tar.gz
extract gzipped foo.tar.gz
tar -cvvf foo.tar foo/
tar contents of folder foo in foo.tar
But yeah, you're right almost all man pages should have examples. I can't count the number of times I've ssh'ed to other boxes to see if a different os had better man pages. Course, that works both ways, I've found my self sshing into a linux box for better man pages too.
Lord knows I have. I had a power outage at my house and got an error on boot for my
The problem with xfs is that they don't release "stable" patches for 2.4 that often. Oh, they release snapshots for every kernel, but those are at the start of the branch to that kernel and not at the end of the branch. Other than that you can pull their linux kernel with xfs out of their cvs, but they do not have any sort of stable branch in their cvs that I can find. There were 9 months between the release of xfs linux release 1.1 and 1.2 during which time many important bug fixes went into cvs.
Don't get me wrong. I still use xfs as my filesystem. Mostly because they have actual real acl's. I just wish they would release some sort of "stable", "blessed" version of their patches every now and then. Can't wait for 2.6 when it's just included in the stable kernel.
It hasn't always been there. I think universities use to not be able to sell patents the way they can today. Congress passed a law during I think the Reagan administration that allowed universities to financially exploit their research more. I think it was being able to sell patents to companies, but it might have been something else. Anyway that is when this started.
It's not really, but the law is slightly vague, a violation of civil instead of criminal law, and it's never been tested in court. Cable companies long ago feared setting a precedent the "wrong" way because if the courts said you could use cable descramblers, then everyone probably would so they've never prosecuted anyone for it. This was pre-DMCA. I don't know why they don't go after people now.
In contrast satellite companies long ago had the law written that decrypting satellite signals is punishable by a fine and/or some jail time. They did this ?at/during/slightly after? the time that they first began licsensing the frequencies from the fcc. Because the law is so clear on the matter, they do not hesitate to prosecute people for violating it. Also, the satellite companies can claim legitimate "ownership" of the airwaves they use. They pay our goverment for them and not in campaign contributions either, but in real actual liscense fees that go into the goverments budget. (Although you could argue they don't pay enough. I'm not sure what current liscensing rates are.) That's why they can ask the goverment to prosecute people for "stealing" "their" signal. They pay a fee to the goverment and get something in return (and the citizens also get something out of it because they can then purchase cable/satellite tv signals, mutually advantages situation blah blah blah...). Cable companies do not pay the goverment a fee and thus haven't gotten the goverment to criminalize "stealing" cable tv. It is however still a violation of your contract with the cable company and thus a violation of civil law. Hypothetically, they could drag you into court for it and collect some stiff penalties, but they never do for fear of setting a precedent that the only thing they can do is disconnect you.
My uncle explained this all to me a long time ago when he was descrambling (stealing) cable tv. It struct me as rather screwed up at the time that it was grey area illegal with light penalties if you ever got caught stealing a signal out of a network a company owns that had been built all the way to your house through a labor intensive process and black area illegal with heavy penalties to take a signal being beamed into your house, recieve it, and perform mathematical operations on it. But when you think of it as just a strange artifact of the way law on cable and satellite signals was made, then I guess it makes sense sort of.
You can try. Give cvoicecontrol a shot.