Now the part I don't understand is why do this if it effects them too?
Given that it's just as easy for me to crack my ISPs router as it is to crack a router in (say) Hoboken, I might as well crack the Hoboken one (presuming that I was up to such things).
Some script kiddies might be stupid enough to break the router that gets them onto the internet -- to that I can only say, "karma blowback".
The last point is that people who actually take the time and think about those kinds of issues aren't generally the kind of people who'll do things like this.
appraising the value of (relatively) unique items is difficult at best. A friend of mine has been studying silversmithing for a few years. He was recently comissioned to do a 1/3 scale solid silver broadsword. It was delivered this summer, and the person who comissioned the work sent it off to get appraised. Months later, the appraiser still hasn't figured out a price.
I can think of two obvious issues to take into account when trying to value a unique item: One would be replacement cost --- how much would it cost to have someone replace the appearance and functionality of the pice. The other would be putting some sort of ballpark on the fact that it's an "original", and even a functional equivalent wouldn't be quite the same.
Pieces like the Mona Lisa are called 'priceless' -- I assume because it's believed that nobody could really do a 'good enough' copy of the piece if it were lost -- and they probably make enough off of the piece that any price payable wouldn't really cover the loss in revenues.
The US is workin it's way into an information tyrrany. The reaction to the 'terrorist threat' is being used as an excuse to accelerate that process.
The laws associated with copyright and information are so vague and general that it's not surprising that it could be determined that they prevent people from talking about security problems...
Think about it for a minute. Skylerov is in a US jail for a program that his employer sold -- this despite the fact that he put in safeguards to prevent his program's rampant misuse.
If current 'anti-terrorism' laws get passed, things are simply going to get worse... The government is going to be able to spy on us on spec, and arrest us because they 'suspect that he may do something nasty' -- like (in some cases) simply go on strike.
If our course doesn't change radically and quickly, I think that we are in for an information-age Mcarthy era. Cox was made aware of this specific writing on the wall, and he decided to take it seriously. He is, in his own way, inviting us to do the same.
There are times when it is appropriate to willfully break the law, but it should be done carefully and sparingly. Breaking the law just because it is 'inconvenient' is a bad idea. It opens you up to getting your ass really nailed to the wall later on when you do something to get people pissed off.
Cox is a high-profile person. The fact that he doesn't want to risk going to jail for a Skylerov style test case is not something that we should be denouncing him for -- we should be denouncing a law that is so broad that he has to reasonably worry about making security information available to people who have a reasonable need to know.
The mac was the original Plug and Play box. I started with a PB140 which I later sold and replaced with a 165... The 165 served me well. I carried it almost everywhere and essentially beat it to death in the space of about 3 years. I'm impressed that it survived the beatings that I subjected it to.
Taking about 3 seconds to go from sleep mode to active was one of the best features... That's part of the reason why I carried it everywhere. It was my 6 pound palm pilot. It was my address book my notepad and my communication system.
After the powerbook died, I ended up with windows laptops that I got from work. They were nowhere near as carefree to use as my powerbook Even with a processor 10 times as fast, it still took more than 5 times as long to come out of sleep mode (presuming that it even survived being put to sleep, but that's another story). In the time it took my (1999) thinkpad to wake up, I could wake my (1993) powerbook, take a quick note, and put it back to sleep. It's usability wasn't really replicated for me until I got a Palm Pilot (interestingly enough -- also a 68000 family processor).
My powerbook was also very stable... The only recurring problem I had was putting it to sleep with Microsoft word in the foreground (Microsoft strikes again). I quickly learned to simply not do that.
If you truely hate MIDI music, then you probably hate about 75-95% of popular music produced these days. MIDI is what's used to run drum machines, synths, etc. Even for live music, it may be used to run secondary sound sources from the keyboard. (or other instrument).
Any time you see two instruments talking to each other, chances are it's midi.
MIDI is likely to be with us for a long time. It's kinda like FORTRAN -- old and chunky but sturdy. Everybody uses it and it does almost everything you could want... about the only place where it falls down is where you have large numbers of machines and/or very wide chords with fast fingering.
MS's abuse this time as akin to Ford saying "if thou wantest to drive our cars, thou shalt only use Goodyear tyres."
The analogy would only hold if Goodyear Tyres only really fit on Ford cars. Yes, you can get a retrofit to make GoodYears fit on GMs, but god only knows how long Ford will keep making those.
I think that it's more akin to them buying up a number of interstate systems and saying: If thoust whishes to use our roads, thoust must be using Ford Transmissions.
Note that they're not forcing you to buy ford cars -- just to use ford tramsmissions (which sometimes fit in non-ford cars).
What? That's what prior art is for! If you don't patent it no one else can, because you have prior art.
Two things are required for a Prior Art defence: The existence of prior art, and the money and determination to see the court case throught to it's completion. Sometimes, even people with a clear prior art will bend to the will of the patent holder simply because it would take less resources than the legal fight.
Many a retired lawyer has observed that " the legal system has nothing to do with justice".
The telephone system is designed so that the larger system is able to survive a disaster of (most) any group of parts. This is like saying (for example) that cutting off your right pinky finger is not going to affect the left pinky... On the other hand (if you'll excuse the pun), your right hand will hurt like hell, and your dexterity will be somewhat impaired (if only by all the bandages necessary to staunch the wound).
Similarly, I would expect to find that the largest national impact of the WTC disaster on the phone system was all of the people calling into and out of New York with (or for) news on survival (or lack thereof) of friends, family and colleagues.
In any case, I'm going to use the word enjoinder here, because I can't come up with the correct word, and the word enjoinder keeps coming into my head... When some legal eagle recognizes what I'm talking about, please supply the correct word for people to substitute.
'enjoinder' is the polite legal way of saying "you lied to me you bastard, but I'm going to hold you to your word". It basically is the principle that if someone got you to do something based on a lie, you can continue to act as if the lie were sincerely meant... depending on the jurisdiction, this may go as far as forcing the liar to live up to the lie. What this boils down to is that, if 'enjoinder' applies here, people should, at the very least, be able to continue to distribute the old binaries based on the public promises that they were, and would continue to be, free to do so.
It may even extend so far as to be able to get a court injunction forcing the company to release their current sources so that people can use it as open source.
Any real lawyers out there that can say what word I'm talking about?
The enforcement of the open source license depends on the users already having source. This was an open (what) source license. Nobody outside of the company has access to the source code, so nobody other than the company can make upgrades, changes, etc.
Given that the company made it very clear that the product was open source, and freely re-distributable, it may be possible to claim... I think that the legal word is 'enjoinder'... and continue to (re)distribute the available binaries. For future binaries, the question of enjoinment becomes much more debatable.
....
While the idea of learning other programming languages is to extend your ability to identify and abstract problems, as well as adding to your 'armory'
of programming tools, there is no substitute for a good grasp of your problem environment,....
The language that you think about somnething in will shape the way that you think about it. This is as true for human languages as it is for computer languages. Ask anybody you know who is fluent in multiple languages (fluent, in this case, meaning able to "think" in that language).
One of the things that Grace Hopper was proud of was her part in the creation of COBOL.
Around 1983 (+-2 years), Hopper visited the University of Alberta which was, at the time, ripe with computer language types. FLACC (Full Level Algol/68 Checkout Compiler) and, (I think) MAPLE were (partly) developed there. C, APL, SNOBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL/W, PASCAL, PL/1, PL/C, PL/360 and LISP were just some of the languages taught in undergraduate classes there.
In any case, A friend of mine was talking to Grace, and she commented that "Some of the people here were instrumental in the development of COBOL. I wonder why they don't mention it more?", to which Dan replied:
"Perhaps they're ashamed of it".
Another friend quickly pulled him aside and explained the history of Grace an COBOL. Apparently, you could see him blush through his (infamous) grizzly-adams style beard.
APL was heavily used at the University of Alberta in the late 70's and the early 80s (when I was there).It's integrated matrix functions made it really useful for many statistical and applied math activities. Many things that occured as loops in other languages were done as an operation on an array.
I figured out how to do APL one-liners from the command line for MTS (Michigan Terminal System -- a now defunct OS for IBM/370 type processors) and would often use it as a quick calculator (think bc(1) with matrix functions)
The use of greek letters for all builtin functions meant that the phrase "it's all greek to me", took on a special meaning for second year computer science and statistics students.
One year, we got in a new chinese professor who's mastery of English was only slightly better than my understanding of Chinese (nil). I suggested to one of his frustrated students that she should try asking him questions in APL. At least then, they'd be on even ground.
I know of similar. Back in the early 80's when Myrias was starting up, Dan Wilson --
one of the founders of Myrias -- is said to have written an implementation of SNOBOL for the
68000 in one weekend (the original MYRIAS machines were multi-CPU 68000 boxes).
Dan was one of the computing gods at the University of Alberta. He did a good deal of work
with SNOBOL/SPITBOL (SPeedy ImplemenTation of snoBOL). People who knew the
group were impressed, but nobody was really surprised .
I have to say that spitbol was was an incredible language if you were doing string and
list manipulation. Imagine, if you will, PERL on a combination of crack and LSD...
It supposedly influenced the regex code in UNIX, but was (In my mind) far superior if you were doing interesting stuff.
YOu could do stuff like:
whitechar=any(" \t\n")
sp = whitechar arbno(whitechar)
# equivalent to perl regex whitechar+
salut="hello" | "hi" | "greetings"
friend="mike"|"john"|"sarah"
enemy="louis"|"ian"|"jim"
message salut sp (friend="my friend"|enemy="you slimy creep")
Even better yet, you could say
message salut sp ((friend|enemy)$name = f(name))
In this case f is a user defined function that takes the variable name (which contains
whatever matched 'friend|enemy') and returns a string that replaces it. Rather than
have f() return a string, it could also return a pattern that continued the match....
shadows of this ability are existant in the $1 and \1 constructs of perl, but snobol is far more
capable than that, because you can match on (and replace with) the return value of functions
called with intermediate match results.
(in all of these cases, we're matching the string in message)
One weakness of SNOBOL is that it was almost entirely unstructured. The if/then/else structure was
implemented as tags on the end of a pattern (like above) that implicitly did a GOTO depending
on the success or failure of the match. (does anybody remember the calculated GOTOs of fortran
IV?). Pretty much everything was global, and you could (if I remember corectly) jump into
(and out of) the middle of what would otherwise be considered a function definition.
There attempts to do a structured front end to SPITBOL (I think that it was called RATBOL
(RATional spitBOL). Although it worked fine, it seemed to, somehow, lose some of it's
magic. (perhaps it was just the hacker's yearnin for the obsefecuted(sp)).
Many years ago, the SGI workstation we had had an analog clock program (complete with shadows, and everything). We used to joke that this was a $60,000 analog clock. This unit is one of those... It has 450 features, including a (default?) clock display.
It's really just a PDA with a really small screen. I guess that I could run it with one of my external battery packs.... A 2 pound hip unit with the wire running up my sleeve, I should be able to get all-day power for the unit. Maybe I could even put together a waist level inductive charger and remove the need for a wire.
ASCII/EBCDIC conversions are probably not as bad as EBCDIC/EBCDIC conversions... It took me a long time to realize that IBM has a number of EBCDIC encodings -- and you often don't know which one you're getting unless you know what kind of device you got it from.
For old clints that dont' return a capablility level, find a backwards compatible way for them to indicate a capability level (it may simply be in the form of them doing a query in a specific form-- those that don't do it are considered to be 'ancient'.
Anything that is published through the University would probably belong to the university if you signed something to that effect. On the other hand, if you do not publish it, it may not belong to the university. You should check the contract that you signed with the university.
Technically Copyright only belongs to a work that is published. Using someone else's work -- even if it's not published -- is still plagiarism. It just may not be a copright violation until you publish the work (publishing the plagiarism might, however,engage copyright for the original and thus make your plagiarism illegal -- IANAL).
One thing is that, in many cases, the copyright 'rule' is a university policy, but if you don't sign something that explicitly gives away your copyright, you may still legally have copyright on things that you submit... On the other side of that, testing the issue might raise the ire of your university.... step with care -- mines be there.
If you did sign a paper giving away your rights, then find your copy and read it carefully. It will tell you what you can and can't do with your paper. It should also tell you which papers are encumbered. When in doubt, I'm sure that if your university has a law faculty that they would be happy to explain things to you (since it affects them). If it hasn't been a class exercise to examine that piece of contract, by now, it should be.
Re:My favorite part...
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 2
There are rumors running around certain circles that the two were pulled from Sesame Street after someone publicly surmised that they represented a pair of 'in the closet' gays.
A more reasonable interpretation is that the other lab(s) totaled 50 or more. 50 publications split between a lab of 10 or so students would give 3-6 publications for the average PhD student. -- not an unreasonable output for a good lab.
At the very least, the department should allow the, otherwise unpublished, reports to be released as department Technical Reports. This would, at least, give the students some release. It would also prevent the patenting of the students' research by a leech company.
One note here: copyright doesn't exist until a paper is published. Also: the student should have at least some copyright rights to a paper that they write themselves. The university should, at worst, have non-exclusive rights to the paper.
I'll be visiting a lab, today, where I used to work. I'll see if I can get them to look at this article..
Slashdot Mirror
I figufe it should have the options:
The intent was to get an independant appraisal. The problem is, apparently, finding someone else who could/would do something similar.
Given that it's just as easy for me to crack my ISPs router as it is to crack a router in (say) Hoboken, I might as well crack the Hoboken one (presuming that I was up to such things).
Some script kiddies might be stupid enough to break the router that gets them onto the internet -- to that I can only say, "karma blowback".
The last point is that people who actually take the time and think about those kinds of issues aren't generally the kind of people who'll do things like this.
The boot time password could be put on a sticker and pasted to the machine -- it could even go next to the serial number.
Multiple random passwords would also serve as an incentive for admins to set the passwords to something more to their liking (but hopefully not weak).
I can think of two obvious issues to take into account when trying to value a unique item: One would be replacement cost --- how much would it cost to have someone replace the appearance and functionality of the pice. The other would be putting some sort of ballpark on the fact that it's an "original", and even a functional equivalent wouldn't be quite the same.
Pieces like the Mona Lisa are called 'priceless' -- I assume because it's believed that nobody could really do a 'good enough' copy of the piece if it were lost -- and they probably make enough off of the piece that any price payable wouldn't really cover the loss in revenues.
The laws associated with copyright and information are so vague and general that it's not surprising that it could be determined that they prevent people from talking about security problems...
Think about it for a minute. Skylerov is in a US jail for a program that his employer sold -- this despite the fact that he put in safeguards to prevent his program's rampant misuse.
If current 'anti-terrorism' laws get passed, things are simply going to get worse... The government is going to be able to spy on us on spec, and arrest us because they 'suspect that he may do something nasty' -- like (in some cases) simply go on strike.
If our course doesn't change radically and quickly, I think that we are in for an information-age Mcarthy era. Cox was made aware of this specific writing on the wall, and he decided to take it seriously. He is, in his own way, inviting us to do the same.
There are times when it is appropriate to willfully break the law, but it should be done carefully and sparingly. Breaking the law just because it is 'inconvenient' is a bad idea. It opens you up to getting your ass really nailed to the wall later on when you do something to get people pissed off.
Cox is a high-profile person. The fact that he doesn't want to risk going to jail for a Skylerov style test case is not something that we should be denouncing him for -- we should be denouncing a law that is so broad that he has to reasonably worry about making security information available to people who have a reasonable need to know.
Taking about 3 seconds to go from sleep mode to active was one of the best features... That's part of the reason why I carried it everywhere. It was my 6 pound palm pilot. It was my address book my notepad and my communication system.
After the powerbook died, I ended up with windows laptops that I got from work. They were nowhere near as carefree to use as my powerbook Even with a processor 10 times as fast, it still took more than 5 times as long to come out of sleep mode (presuming that it even survived being put to sleep, but that's another story). In the time it took my (1999) thinkpad to wake up, I could wake my (1993) powerbook, take a quick note, and put it back to sleep. It's usability wasn't really replicated for me until I got a Palm Pilot (interestingly enough -- also a 68000 family processor).
My powerbook was also very stable... The only recurring problem I had was putting it to sleep with Microsoft word in the foreground (Microsoft strikes again). I quickly learned to simply not do that.
Any time you see two instruments talking to each other, chances are it's midi.
MIDI is likely to be with us for a long time. It's kinda like FORTRAN -- old and chunky but sturdy. Everybody uses it and it does almost everything you could want... about the only place where it falls down is where you have large numbers of machines and/or very wide chords with fast fingering.
The analogy would only hold if Goodyear Tyres only really fit on Ford cars. Yes, you can get a retrofit to make GoodYears fit on GMs, but god only knows how long Ford will keep making those.
I think that it's more akin to them buying up a number of interstate systems and saying: If thoust whishes to use our roads, thoust must be using Ford Transmissions.
Note that they're not forcing you to buy ford cars -- just to use ford tramsmissions (which sometimes fit in non-ford cars).
Two things are required for a Prior Art defence: The existence of prior art, and the money and determination to see the court case throught to it's completion. Sometimes, even people with a clear prior art will bend to the will of the patent holder simply because it would take less resources than the legal fight.
Many a retired lawyer has observed that " the legal system has nothing to do with justice".
Similarly, I would expect to find that the largest national impact of the WTC disaster on the phone system was all of the people calling into and out of New York with (or for) news on survival (or lack thereof) of friends, family and colleagues.
Ah, so I finally have a practical use for my Klingon costume!
'enjoinder' is the polite legal way of saying "you lied to me you bastard, but I'm going to hold you to your word". It basically is the principle that if someone got you to do something based on a lie, you can continue to act as if the lie were sincerely meant... depending on the jurisdiction, this may go as far as forcing the liar to live up to the lie. What this boils down to is that, if 'enjoinder' applies here, people should, at the very least, be able to continue to distribute the old binaries based on the public promises that they were, and would continue to be, free to do so.
It may even extend so far as to be able to get a court injunction forcing the company to release their current sources so that people can use it as open source.
Any real lawyers out there that can say what word I'm talking about?
Given that the company made it very clear that the product was open source, and freely re-distributable, it may be possible to claim ... I think that the legal word is 'enjoinder' ... and continue to (re)distribute the available binaries. For future binaries, the question of enjoinment becomes much more debatable.
IANAL... I just like thinking in the space.
.... While the idea of learning other programming languages is to extend your ability to identify and abstract problems, as well as adding to your 'armory' of programming tools, there is no substitute for a good grasp of your problem environment, ....
The language that you think about somnething in will shape the way that you think about it. This is as true for human languages as it is for computer languages. Ask anybody you know who is fluent in multiple languages (fluent, in this case, meaning able to "think" in that language).
Oh, great! Now just watch them try to blame it on the "open sores" movement.
Around 1983 (+-2 years), Hopper visited the University of Alberta which was, at the time, ripe with computer language types. FLACC (Full Level Algol/68 Checkout Compiler) and, (I think) MAPLE were (partly) developed there. C, APL, SNOBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL/W, PASCAL, PL/1, PL/C, PL/360 and LISP were just some of the languages taught in undergraduate classes there.
In any case, A friend of mine was talking to Grace, and she commented that "Some of the people here were instrumental in the development of COBOL. I wonder why they don't mention it more?", to which Dan replied:
"Perhaps they're ashamed of it".
Another friend quickly pulled him aside and explained the history of Grace an COBOL. Apparently, you could see him blush through his (infamous) grizzly-adams style beard.
The use of greek letters for all builtin functions meant that the phrase "it's all greek to me", took on a special meaning for second year computer science and statistics students.
One year, we got in a new chinese professor who's mastery of English was only slightly better than my understanding of Chinese (nil). I suggested to one of his frustrated students that she should try asking him questions in APL. At least then, they'd be on even ground.
Dan was one of the computing gods at the University of Alberta. He did a good deal of work with SNOBOL/SPITBOL (SPeedy ImplemenTation of snoBOL). People who knew the group were impressed, but nobody was really surprised
. I have to say that spitbol was was an incredible language if you were doing string and list manipulation. Imagine, if you will, PERL on a combination of crack and LSD... It supposedly influenced the regex code in UNIX, but was (In my mind) far superior if you were doing interesting stuff.
YOu could do stuff like:
whitechar=any(" \t\n")
sp = whitechar arbno(whitechar)
# equivalent to perl regex whitechar+
salut="hello" | "hi" | "greetings"
friend="mike"|"john"|"sarah"
enemy="louis"|"ian"|"jim"
message salut sp (friend="my friend"|enemy="you slimy creep")
Even better yet, you could say
message salut sp ((friend|enemy)$name = f(name))
In this case f is a user defined function that takes the variable name (which contains whatever matched 'friend|enemy') and returns a string that replaces it. Rather than have f() return a string, it could also return a pattern that continued the match....
message (salut sp (friend|enemy)$name f(name))$sentence = g(sentence)
shadows of this ability are existant in the $1 and \1 constructs of perl, but snobol is far more capable than that, because you can match on (and replace with) the return value of functions called with intermediate match results.
(in all of these cases, we're matching the string in message)
One weakness of SNOBOL is that it was almost entirely unstructured. The if/then/else structure was implemented as tags on the end of a pattern (like above) that implicitly did a GOTO depending on the success or failure of the match. (does anybody remember the calculated GOTOs of fortran IV?). Pretty much everything was global, and you could (if I remember corectly) jump into (and out of) the middle of what would otherwise be considered a function definition.
There attempts to do a structured front end to SPITBOL (I think that it was called RATBOL (RATional spitBOL). Although it worked fine, it seemed to, somehow, lose some of it's magic. (perhaps it was just the hacker's yearnin for the obsefecuted(sp)).
It's really just a PDA with a really small screen. I guess that I could run it with one of my external battery packs.... A 2 pound hip unit with the wire running up my sleeve, I should be able to get all-day power for the unit. Maybe I could even put together a waist level inductive charger and remove the need for a wire.
ASCII/EBCDIC conversions are probably not as bad as EBCDIC/EBCDIC conversions ... It took me a long time to realize that IBM has a number of EBCDIC encodings -- and you often don't know which one you're getting unless you know what kind of device you got it from.
For old clints that dont' return a capablility level, find a backwards compatible way for them to indicate a capability level (it may simply be in the form of them doing a query in a specific form-- those that don't do it are considered to be 'ancient'.
Technically Copyright only belongs to a work that is published. Using someone else's work -- even if it's not published -- is still plagiarism. It just may not be a copright violation until you publish the work (publishing the plagiarism might, however,engage copyright for the original and thus make your plagiarism illegal -- IANAL).
One thing is that, in many cases, the copyright 'rule' is a university policy, but if you don't sign something that explicitly gives away your copyright, you may still legally have copyright on things that you submit... On the other side of that, testing the issue might raise the ire of your university.... step with care -- mines be there.
If you did sign a paper giving away your rights, then find your copy and read it carefully. It will tell you what you can and can't do with your paper. It should also tell you which papers are encumbered. When in doubt, I'm sure that if your university has a law faculty that they would be happy to explain things to you (since it affects them). If it hasn't been a class exercise to examine that piece of contract, by now, it should be.
They just quietly 'disappeared'.
At the very least, the department should allow the, otherwise unpublished, reports to be released as department Technical Reports. This would, at least, give the students some release. It would also prevent the patenting of the students' research by a leech company.
One note here: copyright doesn't exist until a paper is published. Also: the student should have at least some copyright rights to a paper that they write themselves. The university should, at worst, have non-exclusive rights to the paper.
I'll be visiting a lab, today, where I used to work. I'll see if I can get them to look at this article..