I still have some problems with page numbering: For example: doing a resume which has a header (including page numbers) but only starting at page 2. At the moment, it would appear that the only way I can see to do that is to split into two separate documents (ugh!).
If only people patent examiners would learn the nature of software, computer technology and complex equilivant meanings in English. Maybe then we'd be spared this.
Problem is, that they'd need to know what the complex equivalent is and the significance of the equivalence.
This is not currently the case, and that's near the heart of the problem.
Nearer the heart of the problem is the fact that a bit over a decade ago, the patent office went from being an administrative center to a revenue center. Since the patent office only makes money from successful patent applications, patent clerks are now strongly encouraged to accept applications. It's now changed from the applicant having to prove that an application is worth awarding a patent (award being a very significant word here), to a situation where the patent clerk has to prove (in the 8-24 hours he has to examine the patent) why (s)he shouldn't award the patent.
The end result is that only the most obviously unpatentable applications are rejected, and even many of those are often let thru.
One day, somebody is going to get a patent on breathing... All it'll take is the properly obfuscatory english.
Of course, SCO, with their current state of mind, could simply strip-off all the (improper, from their point of view anyway) copyright attributions and continue distributing.;-)
With, or without copyright attribution, it's still a violation of copyright
to distribute my GPL code in violation of the GPL. Removing copyright
attribution is a violation of the GPL.
Not only do you have cheaper acquisition costs, but things like this don't get in your way. You can patch 'live' and rarely need to reboot.
I've got roommates who've moved to the Linux desktop. I usually do the upgrades from my desktop. The only reason why I tell them that I'm doing upgrades is that it's annoying if they shut down the system in the middle of an RPM Install. (one dual boots to Windows so he's more likely to reboot, the other runs solely on Linux he really only powers off if he's heading out. I think I've installed one or two kernel upgrades in the last year (which require reboots to enable), but since my roommates reboot so often, I can just wait for their next reboot.
There's also much less need to do testing with Linux patches... You generally know EXACTLY what subsystems are being affected by a patch, so if it's not a critical component, you can often install blindly. Even if it is a critical component, the patches are often well defined and if you have any questions you can read the source code.
The problems with Windows is that it's the large-scale version of spaghetti code. The relationship between various pieces are ill-defined and numerous. Patches spider into various areas and it seems like nobody (even at Microsoft) knows precisely what a patch fixes (or what it breaks).
This doesn't just apply to desktops. I'm in the middle of putting together scripts to enable controlled push of patches to a large number of varied servers. In truth, the hardes part is going to be figuring out which patches go to which boxes -- not figuring out if the patch is going to break things.
Yep. I'm spoiled. Linux makes life both easy and cheap.
By cutting the last of the old growth forests, companies profit and loggers will lose their jobs.
If they DONT cut down the trees, the Companies won't profit and the Loggers won't have a job to loose.
A couple of points here: If you stop logging old-growth, there is still second growth available for logging. Unfortunately, second-growth trees are much smaller than first growth and thus much better suited to heavily mechanized harvesting.
Second point is that, in an area where old-growth logging is stopped, there are other jobs available.... Another way to put it is that if you cut the trees, you destroy OTHER jobs that depend on the forest.
As an example, I'll take the Clayoquot Sound area of BC... A highly contentious area in the past.
In that region there are two towns with very different pasts. Tofino and Ulclulet. The two towns are on either end of a ~30 mile stretch of beach, and each has it's own sound in which logging has occured.
Back in the '70s, Both towns were heavily dependant on the logging industry, but they diverged when Tofino and the logging industry butted heads over the logging of Meares Island. Meares island was considered sacred by the local natives and also served as the town's water supply. When they learned that it was going to be logged, there was strong opposition to the plan.
After many attempts a compromise, etc. ((and I don't remember the long story here)) the logging industry decided to pick up their toys and go home. They stoped ALL logging on the tofino end and shut down the sawmmill throwing much of the town out of work. I'm guessing that they actually intended to make an example of the town but, if so, it didn't turn out quite the way it was intended.
Over the next decade, not having many logging jobs available, Tofino residents turned to eco-touristry and associated methods of making a living. Ulclulet, on the other hand stayed the 'tried and true' resource/logging path. By 1993, when I showed up, the two towns had gone firmly down their two different paths. The area around Ulclulet had been pretty thoroughly logged but Tofino's Clayoquot Sound was still relatively pristine. That's where the big fight started... The Ulclulet loggers wanted to log out Tofino's forests, but the tofino residents wanted none of that.
I was in both towns in 1993... You can find a lot of my notes from that time at on my old website. The towns were a study in contrasts.
The hills around Ulclulet were heavily logged.... Bald. Ugly. The town itself consisted of a couple of very utilitarian stores the local school (shared by Tofino and Ulclulet students) and a couple of provincial government offices.
The town itself was minimalistic and bland.
Tofino, on the other hand, was a good bit more vibrant. Tourism had taken hold and was providing quite a bit of employment including whale-watching and eco-tours. The Tofino fishery was also a good bit more vibrant (salmon and other fish depend heavily on healthy forests). Most of the stores in the area were in tofino as were the bars.
Ulclulet had pretty much nothing but logging jobs, and those were dying. Tofino, on the other hand, also depended on the forests -- but in a non-destructive manner. If only by virtue of the fact that they're now so rare, old growth forests can provide some very healthy employment opportunities in the area of tourism.
In 1993, the logging industry tried to paint Tofino residents as greedy -- not wanting to 'share' their forest with the forestry industry. Tofino, having seen what happened to the Ulclulet logging community (decimated and the few loggers left were now hungry for the trees of Clayoquot) were even more firmly against the idea.
The Ulclulet loggers are mostly gone now. Logging still continues in Cla
(Just had this come up in the OpenBSD fortune(6) files:
The first riddle I ever heard, one familiar to almost every Jewish
child, was propounded to me by my father:
"What is it that hangs on the wall, is green, wet -- and
whistles?"
I knit my brow and thought and thought, and in final perplexity
gave up.
"A herring," said my father.
"A herring," I echoed. "A herring doesn't hang on the wall!"
"So hang it there."
"But a herring isn't green!" I protested.
"Paint it."
"But a herring isn't wet."
"If it's just painted it's still wet."
"But -- " I sputtered, summoning all my outrage, "-- a herring
doesn't whistle!!"
"Right, " smiled my father. "I just put that in to make it
hard."
. . -- Leo Rosten, "The Joys of Yiddish"
My believe is Frauenhofer is completely right in wanting license fees. Only: there is no way in getting a reasonable fee from the endusers, because our law system does not support that. So Frauenhofer needs to patent it and to get the fees from industrial users exploiting the patent.
The problem I have iwth the likes of Frauenhofer is the ambush-marketing approach -- Letting the public think that the method is patent-free until it becomes widely used, and then abushing the users and software manufacturers with patent violation lawsuits once there are MILLIONS of them out there.
I would be happier with the patent laws if a company was required (much like Trademark laws) to mention that they had patents (or patents pending) every time they mentioned the product. At least, then, people could make informed choices about using a given piece of technology and/or we could then make a comment to the patent office that the technology that they have a patent application pending for is obvious/old.
My solution would be to answer the door ask for some ID, Thank him, and tell him that you'll be back in a bit. Then close and lock the door in his face. Take his(her) ID to the phone, and call up the nasty 0870 number and ask to verify his ID, name, and appearance. Once that's done, then let him in.
You do have to let him in, but you're allowed to verify that whomever you do let into your house really is working for the government.
Once you let them in, follow right on their heels, and chat about whatever comes to your mind. Do this until they leave. Don't be overtly implolite or nasty. Just be.... annoying. After a few horror stories, hopefully they'll put you on their "do not visit" list.
This one works a bit better on door-to-door insurance/book salespeople.... A friend of mine invited one in, and was very friendly. She offered some coffee -- and chatted it up about how people always said it was the best coffee they'd ever had. She managed to get about 3 heaping tablespoons of instant coffee to disolve in one cup of boiling water and added sugar to his request.
She brought her "prize" coffee out to him, and proceeded to 'proudly' goad him into drinking the entire thing while he promoted his product. When he had managed to engorge the entire cup, she offered him a second one. At this point, he suddenly remembered a previous appointment and made a hasty departure.
That having been said, the letter indicates that the appropriate thing to do is to write them. This seems both cheaper and faster than sitting on the phone for god-knows-how-long. I'd put the letter and the envelope on a file just waiting for me to update it with the current date. I get their letter, I print my own and send it to them. If they insist on coming to visit you, then I'd be inclined to refuse them entrance and wait for them to get a search warrent. This actually depends on the law. If the law requires you to let them in, then I'd go for plan A (above). On the other hand, if it simply sais that refusal to allow entry can be considered evidence of guilt when requesting a search warrent --- if they're going to be snots about it, you might as well inconvenience them too. It depends on your mood.
In the least you can establish damages in support of a trespass if you inform them that their actions cause damage, in which case their actions are thereafter wilful, which may make for a cleaner case.
From reading the article, I'd say "been there, done that". They informed the company of the damage they were doing, and the company didn't care. At this point, I'd say double-check to make sure you've got a case for willful damage, and then look for a lawyer willing to take this contingency.
That they went to your customers and complained about you protecting your system frm their effective DOS is something that I agree is (or should be) clasifiable as defamation. First they make you lok bad by beating your web servers t a pulp and now they're telling your custmers (by the sounds of things) that you're trying to prevent 'serious monitoring'.
They are, at best incompetent. At worst, they may be working to wilfully destroy your business. I wouldn't pull out the howitzers at this point, but I'd definitely take off the kid gloves (and I'd quietly check the ammo for the howitzers).
Especially after the first Fsck-up, I would have demanded to see what the monitoring company was setting up, including their ruleset. I probably would have asked for that the first time.
As for your 'security expert', I find it strange that your company management is still listening to him/them after the second fiasco. If you don't have the time to take on security yourself, it might be a good time for you to go out and find someone a bit more capable to handle this stuff.
IF you do have the time to handle it, then this might be a good time to ask (again). Even with very little time to work on it, you could probably do a better job than these dofuses.
X10s or other wireless cameras may not use 802.11b, but if you want this thing for security reasons, then the last thing you want is some random schmoe/ voyeur/ burgler watching what's going on in the baby's room. (Your wife may not always remember to turn off the camera).
If your friend is an airline pilot, then he should be able to afford to spend #50 on an old P1/200 that you can use to run the camera. Stick it in a closet somewhere with a small fan to suck the warm air out, then run an ethernet to your primary box (or just use the P1 to feed the net directly). I'm pretty sure there's a reasonable cache of Linux software out there that'll do what you want in terms of hosting a camera on the net.
While you're at it, if your primary home box is running Windows, then you might also want to have the P1 double as a firewall.
I mean jeez that must have been thousands and thousands of hits to use up that much space.
$ units bits/second bits/day
* 86400
So you're looking at (roughly) 100K hits per day per file downloaded per site. If they're downloading 15 files per site, and you've got 100 sites on the box, then you're looking at an increase of about 120 million requests per day.
My acess log has an average of 200bytes/er line, so you're now looking at 120Mrequests*200bytes/request == a sudden jump of 24gigabytes of logging per day.
Then you've got the effective mail-bombing to deal with.
The article author said that these people sounded like they know what they're doing, so that leaves (in my mind), two likely possibilities:
They're really really good snow-job artists. They understand the terminology, but they have no real sense of methodology or purpose.
They really do know what they're doing, and they're trashing your servers with intent.
I mean -- for crying out loud: Multiple files once per second? And just how long did it take them to inform your customers that they'd managed to crash the servers? Monitoring granularity of more than about one quarter the normal notification time is a complete waste of resources -- and that's giving them lots of leeway to waste.
And Tens of thousands of undelivered emails??? If those emails didn't get delivered, then what did the company do when they didn't arrive in short order? Why didn't they stop the transmission and diagnose why the emails weren't coming thru? If the emails really are undeliverable, then how in the world did you manage to conclude that they know what they're doing?
Other notes (mostly mentioned elsewhere)
are you charging your customers based on their net volume? If so, have you informed your customers of what sort of costs these, uhm, people are imposing on them in addition to their monitoring fees?
I'm guessing that your AUP includes a clause on activities that wilfully or negligently cause inappropriate server load, outages, etc. I think that this company's "services" classifies.
I think that you had better seriously consider possibility #2 above. Meticulously document what they've done to your servers (including somehow scamming your customer list). Have that information ready to present to your customers and/or a judge. If all goes well, you won't need it, but I'm not expecting all to go well, given how they've gone so far.
One last point -- Even though you may be dealing with a company that you think has a (otherwise) good reputation, doesn't mean that you're not dealing with an inept department of an otherwise good company. Sometimes the VP Engineering puts his/her stupid cousin in some group where they're not likely to do much damage, and then finds out that the goofball has managed to get out 'in the wild' with a 'bright' idea.
I think that what he's talking about is that IE seems to always try to guess the
type of a file by it's extension, but it is only allowed to to that if there's no explicit content type. This makes IE broken (shock, shock), but I wouldn't say that makes it into 'not a browser'.
Thus the GPL challenge. If the GPL is declared invalid, *nobody* would have any rights to use Linux except the copyright holders of the original code.
Right. But if their argument stopped here, all of the owners of original Linux code would have the right to sue SCO into the ground for violating their copyright anyways -- except that we'd have the right to sue them starting with their first distribution of Linux code.
The only way around that would be to say that anything put under the GPL was actually put into the public domain. Once it's in the public domain, SCO would be able to do anything that they want with the code -- including asking for further license fees.
On the other hand, this would also mean that -- since their code was distributed by them (with their knowledge) under the GPL license, IT would be public domain as well... and they wouldn't have any legal force behind a request for more money..
In other words, the worst case of this argument would be that all of Linux (including the SCO code) is public domain, and nobody has to pay anybody for any of it. (but SCO would be free to relicense it in the future).
Does anybody have a copy of SCO Linux from after Feb 2003 (that they haven't already burned)? an install ISO would be best. I'd like to have a copy of SCO Linux running on one of my boxes before I call them to talk about their new license scheme.
Sources would be good too (I guess I could always load an update kernel binary and source from their website)
It's not as recent as the 2.4.19 kernel they're distributing, but this one does have source code and GPL license included.
Where is the 2.4.19 kernel that they're distributing, and where is the source code for that kernel? (or are they distributing it without source? <embed src="evil_laugh.ogg">)
Has anyone checked that they are continuing to distribute the entire source tree?
I haven't done a diff, but I did download a copy of their kernel source, unpack it and verify that the NUMA file is still there. The code seems reasonably intact. If someone wanta to do a proper diff, feel free. Unfortunately, given that they're not documenting which specific code is actually theirs, it's pretty hard to say that "their" code is or isn't there.
On the other hand, their willful refusal to let the greater Linux community know which code they're claiming (much less asking us to remove it from current distributions), indicates an implicit acceptance of it's continued distribution.
If I shoot out the window, not realising you were there, and kill you then my ignorance of the fact of your presence provides a defence.
It might provide a defence against a first degree murder charge, but your best hope would be a conviction for Manslaughter. In the law, wilfull recklessness is only one step down from intentional action.
Executive Summary: You can't (seriously) claim ignorance of a fact that you're using as the basis of an extortion attempt
One must presume that SCO has identified the code that they claim is theirs. Having identified it, they are still distributing it as part of a GPL product. The only way they're allowed to do that is to GPL license any code in the product that they have the abiity/right to license.
QED
I think that Controlled expression pretty much says it. Not quite as 'pretty' It pretty much describes what Copyright and patents are intended to do -- control (as in limit) our expression of certain ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Suggested solutions gratefully accepted.
Perfect for any generation that's grown up on Hollywood pablum.
It still gives them a sense that there's something better out there.
They were just calling to make sure that these people really wanted to be on the list.
Honest!
Problem is, that they'd need to know what the complex equivalent is and the significance of the equivalence. This is not currently the case, and that's near the heart of the problem.
Nearer the heart of the problem is the fact that a bit over a decade ago, the patent office went from being an administrative center to a revenue center. Since the patent office only makes money from successful patent applications, patent clerks are now strongly encouraged to accept applications. It's now changed from the applicant having to prove that an application is worth awarding a patent (award being a very significant word here), to a situation where the patent clerk has to prove (in the 8-24 hours he has to examine the patent) why (s)he shouldn't award the patent.
The end result is that only the most obviously unpatentable applications are rejected, and even many of those are often let thru.
One day, somebody is going to get a patent on breathing... All it'll take is the properly obfuscatory english.
With, or without copyright attribution, it's still a violation of copyright to distribute my GPL code in violation of the GPL. Removing copyright attribution is a violation of the GPL.
I'll supply the hardware.
(I'm still working on some minor usability issues)
I've got roommates who've moved to the Linux desktop. I usually do the upgrades from my desktop. The only reason why I tell them that I'm doing upgrades is that it's annoying if they shut down the system in the middle of an RPM Install. (one dual boots to Windows so he's more likely to reboot, the other runs solely on Linux he really only powers off if he's heading out. I think I've installed one or two kernel upgrades in the last year (which require reboots to enable), but since my roommates reboot so often, I can just wait for their next reboot.
There's also much less need to do testing with Linux patches... You generally know EXACTLY what subsystems are being affected by a patch, so if it's not a critical component, you can often install blindly. Even if it is a critical component, the patches are often well defined and if you have any questions you can read the source code.
The problems with Windows is that it's the large-scale version of spaghetti code. The relationship between various pieces are ill-defined and numerous. Patches spider into various areas and it seems like nobody (even at Microsoft) knows precisely what a patch fixes (or what it breaks).
This doesn't just apply to desktops. I'm in the middle of putting together scripts to enable controlled push of patches to a large number of varied servers. In truth, the hardes part is going to be figuring out which patches go to which boxes -- not figuring out if the patch is going to break things.
Yep. I'm spoiled. Linux makes life both easy and cheap.
If they DONT cut down the trees, the Companies won't profit and the Loggers won't have a job to loose.
A couple of points here: If you stop logging old-growth, there is still second growth available for logging. Unfortunately, second-growth trees are much smaller than first growth and thus much better suited to heavily mechanized harvesting.
Second point is that, in an area where old-growth logging is stopped, there are other jobs available.... Another way to put it is that if you cut the trees, you destroy OTHER jobs that depend on the forest.
As an example, I'll take the Clayoquot Sound area of BC... A highly contentious area in the past.
In that region there are two towns with very different pasts. Tofino and Ulclulet. The two towns are on either end of a ~30 mile stretch of beach, and each has it's own sound in which logging has occured. Back in the '70s, Both towns were heavily dependant on the logging industry, but they diverged when Tofino and the logging industry butted heads over the logging of Meares Island. Meares island was considered sacred by the local natives and also served as the town's water supply. When they learned that it was going to be logged, there was strong opposition to the plan.
After many attempts a compromise, etc. ((and I don't remember the long story here)) the logging industry decided to pick up their toys and go home. They stoped ALL logging on the tofino end and shut down the sawmmill throwing much of the town out of work. I'm guessing that they actually intended to make an example of the town but, if so, it didn't turn out quite the way it was intended.
Over the next decade, not having many logging jobs available, Tofino residents turned to eco-touristry and associated methods of making a living. Ulclulet, on the other hand stayed the 'tried and true' resource/logging path. By 1993, when I showed up, the two towns had gone firmly down their two different paths. The area around Ulclulet had been pretty thoroughly logged but Tofino's Clayoquot Sound was still relatively pristine. That's where the big fight started... The Ulclulet loggers wanted to log out Tofino's forests, but the tofino residents wanted none of that.
I was in both towns in 1993... You can find a lot of my notes from that time at on my old website. The towns were a study in contrasts.
The hills around Ulclulet were heavily logged.... Bald. Ugly. The town itself consisted of a couple of very utilitarian stores the local school (shared by Tofino and Ulclulet students) and a couple of provincial government offices. The town itself was minimalistic and bland.
Tofino, on the other hand, was a good bit more vibrant. Tourism had taken hold and was providing quite a bit of employment including whale-watching and eco-tours. The Tofino fishery was also a good bit more vibrant (salmon and other fish depend heavily on healthy forests). Most of the stores in the area were in tofino as were the bars.
Ulclulet had pretty much nothing but logging jobs, and those were dying. Tofino, on the other hand, also depended on the forests -- but in a non-destructive manner. If only by virtue of the fact that they're now so rare, old growth forests can provide some very healthy employment opportunities in the area of tourism.
In 1993, the logging industry tried to paint Tofino residents as greedy -- not wanting to 'share' their forest with the forestry industry. Tofino, having seen what happened to the Ulclulet logging community (decimated and the few loggers left were now hungry for the trees of Clayoquot) were even more firmly against the idea.
The Ulclulet loggers are mostly gone now. Logging still continues in Cla
The first riddle I ever heard, one familiar to almost every Jewish child, was propounded to me by my father:
Sound like anybody we know?The problem I have iwth the likes of Frauenhofer is the ambush-marketing approach -- Letting the public think that the method is patent-free until it becomes widely used, and then abushing the users and software manufacturers with patent violation lawsuits once there are MILLIONS of them out there.
I would be happier with the patent laws if a company was required (much like Trademark laws) to mention that they had patents (or patents pending) every time they mentioned the product. At least, then, people could make informed choices about using a given piece of technology and/or we could then make a comment to the patent office that the technology that they have a patent application pending for is obvious/old.
You do have to let him in, but you're allowed to verify that whomever you do let into your house really is working for the government.
Once you let them in, follow right on their heels, and chat about whatever comes to your mind. Do this until they leave. Don't be overtly implolite or nasty. Just be .... annoying. After a few horror stories, hopefully they'll put you on their "do not visit" list.
This one works a bit better on door-to-door insurance/book salespeople.... A friend of mine invited one in, and was very friendly. She offered some coffee -- and chatted it up about how people always said it was the best coffee they'd ever had. She managed to get about 3 heaping tablespoons of instant coffee to disolve in one cup of boiling water and added sugar to his request.
She brought her "prize" coffee out to him, and proceeded to 'proudly' goad him into drinking the entire thing while he promoted his product. When he had managed to engorge the entire cup, she offered him a second one. At this point, he suddenly remembered a previous appointment and made a hasty departure.
That having been said, the letter indicates that the appropriate thing to do is to write them. This seems both cheaper and faster than sitting on the phone for god-knows-how-long. I'd put the letter and the envelope on a file just waiting for me to update it with the current date. I get their letter, I print my own and send it to them. If they insist on coming to visit you, then I'd be inclined to refuse them entrance and wait for them to get a search warrent. This actually depends on the law. If the law requires you to let them in, then I'd go for plan A (above). On the other hand, if it simply sais that refusal to allow entry can be considered evidence of guilt when requesting a search warrent --- if they're going to be snots about it, you might as well inconvenience them too. It depends on your mood.
From reading the article, I'd say "been there, done that". They informed the company of the damage they were doing, and the company didn't care. At this point, I'd say double-check to make sure you've got a case for willful damage, and then look for a lawyer willing to take this contingency.
That they went to your customers and complained about you protecting your system frm their effective DOS is something that I agree is (or should be) clasifiable as defamation. First they make you lok bad by beating your web servers t a pulp and now they're telling your custmers (by the sounds of things) that you're trying to prevent 'serious monitoring'.
They are, at best incompetent. At worst, they may be working to wilfully destroy your business. I wouldn't pull out the howitzers at this point, but I'd definitely take off the kid gloves (and I'd quietly check the ammo for the howitzers).
As for your 'security expert', I find it strange that your company management is still listening to him/them after the second fiasco. If you don't have the time to take on security yourself, it might be a good time for you to go out and find someone a bit more capable to handle this stuff.
IF you do have the time to handle it, then this might be a good time to ask (again). Even with very little time to work on it, you could probably do a better job than these dofuses.
If your friend is an airline pilot, then he should be able to afford to spend #50 on an old P1/200 that you can use to run the camera. Stick it in a closet somewhere with a small fan to suck the warm air out, then run an ethernet to your primary box (or just use the P1 to feed the net directly). I'm pretty sure there's a reasonable cache of Linux software out there that'll do what you want in terms of hosting a camera on the net.
While you're at it, if your primary home box is running Windows, then you might also want to have the P1 double as a firewall.
$ units bits/second bits/day
* 86400
So you're looking at (roughly) 100K hits per day per file downloaded per site. If they're downloading 15 files per site, and you've got 100 sites on the box, then you're looking at an increase of about 120 million requests per day. My acess log has an average of 200bytes/er line, so you're now looking at 120Mrequests*200bytes/request == a sudden jump of 24gigabytes of logging per day.
Then you've got the effective mail-bombing to deal with.
The article author said that these people sounded like they know what they're doing, so that leaves (in my mind), two likely possibilities:
- They're really really good snow-job artists. They understand the terminology, but they have no real sense of methodology or purpose.
- They really do know what they're doing, and they're trashing your servers with intent.
I mean -- for crying out loud: Multiple files once per second? And just how long did it take them to inform your customers that they'd managed to crash the servers? Monitoring granularity of more than about one quarter the normal notification time is a complete waste of resources -- and that's giving them lots of leeway to waste.And Tens of thousands of undelivered emails??? If those emails didn't get delivered, then what did the company do when they didn't arrive in short order? Why didn't they stop the transmission and diagnose why the emails weren't coming thru? If the emails really are undeliverable, then how in the world did you manage to conclude that they know what they're doing?
Other notes (mostly mentioned elsewhere)
-
are you charging your customers based on their net volume? If so, have you informed your customers of what sort of costs these, uhm, people are imposing on them in addition to their monitoring fees?
- I'm guessing that your AUP includes a clause on activities that wilfully or negligently cause inappropriate server load, outages, etc. I think that this company's "services" classifies.
- I think that you had better seriously consider possibility #2 above. Meticulously document what they've done to your servers (including somehow scamming your customer list). Have that information ready to present to your customers and/or a judge. If all goes well, you won't need it, but I'm not expecting all to go well, given how they've gone so far.
One last point -- Even though you may be dealing with a company that you think has a (otherwise) good reputation, doesn't mean that you're not dealing with an inept department of an otherwise good company. Sometimes the VP Engineering puts his/her stupid cousin in some group where they're not likely to do much damage, and then finds out that the goofball has managed to get out 'in the wild' with a 'bright' idea.On second thought, the most appropriate place to respond t his web browser comment would have been on his journal page -- not an unrelated article..
I think that what he's talking about is that IE seems to always try to guess the type of a file by it's extension, but it is only allowed to to that if there's no explicit content type. This makes IE broken (shock, shock), but I wouldn't say that makes it into 'not a browser'.
Right. But if their argument stopped here, all of the owners of original Linux code would have the right to sue SCO into the ground for violating their copyright anyways -- except that we'd have the right to sue them starting with their first distribution of Linux code.
The only way around that would be to say that anything put under the GPL was actually put into the public domain. Once it's in the public domain, SCO would be able to do anything that they want with the code -- including asking for further license fees.
On the other hand, this would also mean that -- since their code was distributed by them (with their knowledge) under the GPL license, IT would be public domain as well... and they wouldn't have any legal force behind a request for more money..
In other words, the worst case of this argument would be that all of Linux (including the SCO code) is public domain, and nobody has to pay anybody for any of it. (but SCO would be free to relicense it in the future).
Sources would be good too (I guess I could always load an update kernel binary and source from their website)
Where is the 2.4.19 kernel that they're distributing, and where is the source code for that kernel? (or are they distributing it without source? <embed src="evil_laugh.ogg">)
I haven't done a diff, but I did download a copy of their kernel source, unpack it and verify that the NUMA file is still there. The code seems reasonably intact. If someone wanta to do a proper diff, feel free. Unfortunately, given that they're not documenting which specific code is actually theirs, it's pretty hard to say that "their" code is or isn't there.
On the other hand, their willful refusal to let the greater Linux community know which code they're claiming (much less asking us to remove it from current distributions), indicates an implicit acceptance of it's continued distribution.
It might provide a defence against a first degree murder charge, but your best hope would be a conviction for Manslaughter. In the law, wilfull recklessness is only one step down from intentional action.
Executive Summary: You can't (seriously) claim ignorance of a fact that you're using as the basis of an extortion attempt
One must presume that SCO has identified the code that they claim is theirs. Having identified it, they are still distributing it as part of a GPL product. The only way they're allowed to do that is to GPL license any code in the product that they have the abiity/right to license.
QED
I think that Controlled expression pretty much says it. Not quite as 'pretty' It pretty much describes what Copyright and patents are intended to do -- control (as in limit) our expression of certain ideas.
Too bad airfare isn't free too..... (Western Canada -> Germany).