Actually you might want to reread the EULAs for things like MSN mail. At one point the EULA basically stated that any and all messages and attachments sent through their email service automatically granted Microsoft the right to use the content. It may have been intended for AV scans and such, but the phrasing effectively meant that if you sent out sensitive information (e.g. business related, code, etc.), Microsoft could use that information in their own business (and presumably software development.)
I didn't like the phrasing; I stopped using MSN for anything. (What else can you do but vote with your electronic feet?)
Posting to a publicly visible forum does not grant general IP rights to the public. Many websites, including Slashdot, very specifically attribute responsibility for content fragments to the posters, that means that there is no particular IP license granted by posting. Putting something in the public domain requires a specific notice like a license.
Think of it this way. You can get a catalog from a retail company, view it, but do not own any rights to it's images or content. Similarly, you can buy a textbook that describes and documents software methodologies or code, but the author still owns the copyright and is not required to grant you the right to use those ideas or code samples without a license. Most textbooks do include such a grant of license, but they don't have to.
I see nothing in the EULAs or policy statements of any websites I visit which grants ownership to anyone except the author. The closest I see to that is a couple of websites that specifically grant the forum owner/sponsor the right to use posted content in their printed journals.
I can't buy in to the easy answer of "laziness." I saw too many of my classmates genuinely struggle with material when I was in school.
The big problem is the liberal attitude that the "self esteem" of a child is more important than their education. It breeds arrogant, self-centered, uncooperative personalities. By allowing kids with failing grades to move ahead, we take away the lesson that failure is embarassing and painful. Worse, those kids are now being exposed to class material they aren't prepared for, creating a downward grade spiral.
Later in life that former kid gets reprimanded at work, maybe even fired. Instead of dealing with it gracefully, they "lose it" because they've never had to deal with failure before.
What ticks me off most about this inane decision to allow text messaging short forms is that simply demonstrating you "know the material" isn't good enough for the real world. You have to be able to use and communicate ideas, and you can't do that when you can't even read and write properly.
I look forward to the lawsuits in 4-5 years from former students claiming their education rights were short-changed, and that it was the school's fault they never learned to read and write. The schools in question will get nuked in court.
Even if what all of the "PHB's are idiots" ranters were 100% correct, that wouldn't help prepare a student to deal with the real world. It might scare them off, which could be a good thing, but it doesn't help.
Pure programming as a job is pretty much dead.
You must have some business analysis skills, sufficient interpersonal skills to discuss hot issues without upsetting everyone, and enough political savvy to get what you need to do your job. When you get tagged with incomplete or inaccurate specs, you have to be able to get clarification early.
That is perhaps the toughest part for a new grad. They're graduates. They know their stuff. Or at least they think so, and make bad assumptions instead of asking.
For those who gripe about it taking "forever" to get answers:
Did you just fire an email to get lost among the hundred or so a manager gets each day? Did you check with senior team members who might have the answers? Co-workers? Users?
Did you call every once in a while to ask how the spec clarifications were coming along? Did you flag the late clarifications as impacting design, development, testing, and deployment? Did you explain how much overtime would be required to compensate for the late specs, and that OT is more expensive, pushing up the project costs?
There are far more constructive ways to deal with stereotype PHBs and technology-illiterate business people than complaining they're not as "smart" as you. Odds are they think you're a complete idiot because you don't understand what is obvious to them.
While there is no denying the average bandwidth of a box of DVDs, there are alternatives to addressing the download speed. The 50Kb/sec download speed from their server is horrible no matter how you slice it -- far too many corporations serve up well over 100Kb/sec per client.
The problem is that high capacity solutions are not cheap, and I get the impression that there must not be the budget for those options, or no one would have deployed a 50Kb/sec server in the first place.
Aside from DVDs, you could look into a download service that can host encrypted file images. Use Serpent or Rjindael/AES256 and you shouldn't have to worry too much about someone pilfering data files from a semi-public server.
Personally I'd encrypt the data even if it was being sent out on DVD. Mail and courier packages do get lost, especially if a poorly paid employee thinks they can sell the contents of a package.
Degrading the requirements to graduate or earn a degree just churns out more illiterate "graduates" who can't communicate with anyone.
But I don't understand why anyone would be upset about this. It's been known for years that a significant percentage of graduates from post-secondary education can't communicate effectively, liberal nannies have pushed for kids to be "promoted" to the next grade when they fail so they don't feel "left behind", and the fact that slang is in dictionaries is used to justify it's presence in formal documents and discussions.
No wonder the R&D of the western world is falling behind that of nations placing an emphasis on quality education and training.
I said they're part of the ECMA standard. I said absolutely nothing about whether specific patents were relevant or actionable, nor about how many there might be involved.
My understanding is the core libraries/packages/whatever-the-buzzword-of-the-we ek-is and the syntax of C# are specified by the ECMA standard. This is analagous to the ANSI specs that cover C++ syntax as well as core libraries and STL.
But as with ANSI C++, a language and base libraries is a very, very small part of a complete application environment. It's nice that the Mono team is redeveloping compatible APIs, but that won't prevent the same game that eventually killed OS/2: Every time IBM's team got the Win32 changes incorporated, a new update would be released for some critical component to render OS/2's Win32 APIs temporarily incompatible. I have absolutely zero faith that the same won't happen with Mono -- when the time is right for Microsoft.
Even if Microsoft doesn't utilize any legal weapons or "traps", the next service pack that updates.Net could leave Mono in the cold, destroying the credibility of C#.NET as a cross-platform tool. Microsoft can play innocent easily in such a case, because they specifically did not include a lot of useful APIs in the ECMA standard.
Personally I don't understand why anyone would bother with a "cross platform" tool that doesn't seem to be deployed on any non-Intel platforms. How is anyone supposed to deploy a.NET service on some serious hardware? Not to knock x86 servers -- I just don't like being forced to choose one particular CPU just to get Mono.NET, especially if that forces renegotiating existing contracts for RDBMS and other third party products.
For now I'll stick with Java. It's the only truly cross-platform option right now that doesn't require major macro hacking to maintain cross-platform portability without modifying code as part of the build process (a major no-no in many environments. Check out and compile, changes not permitted.)
Personally I don't see Vista as a viable upgrade. It's not buying anything for existing hardware that already performs it's required functions.
But there will be people who insist on installing an upgrade on older hardware, then complain about how slow it is. The same has been true with every release of Windows since WFW.
An existing developer box could be recommissioned as a standard desktop, but doing development under Vista will require substantial upgrades. Some tools already require 2GB or more per workstation to do enterprise development -- those requirements will only increase under Vista.
On a related note, I found that the IE 7 update for Windows XP or one of the.NET updates over the months left the security sandbox rather open. Both signed and unsigned Authenticode was granted execution rights for Internet connections. I see that as comparable to the risk of someone deploying a damaging ActiveX component, and locked it down as best I could.
For now most of the options are set to prompt. If the prompts get annoying, I'll consider changing the configs.
DRM-enabled operating systems can still run malicious code. Signed or unsigned, a Trojan is a Trojan.
The *AA tried to force Canadians to pay a "royalty" for pirated music when buying any media player, on the theory that their primary use is to play pirated media.
It was knocked out as unconstitutional, and justly so. How insane is it to charge the general public with fines and penalties for crimes they haven't even been accused of, much less convicted?
Microsoft is setting a horrible precedence here for the sake of short-term market gain. Typical insane American greed -- to hell with long term stability, as long as I can get my undeserved cut now.:(
I don't understand why people continue to argue about the details of which language or framework they want to use. Procedural-object languages all function largely the same, they use virtually the same syntax in many cases, and they all have minor gotchas and workarounds.
Add in a distribution layer such as J2EE5/EJB3, CORBA, XML/RPC, SOAP/XML, or good old fashioned fixed-format record overlays ala mainframe/AS400, and there isn't even a need to select one language to implement the whole application.
Personally I'm sticking with Java5/J2EE5/EJB3, because I invested a lot of time and effort in learning the "gotchas" and want some revenue payback before I invest more time and effort in learning something else. Coupled with the fact that only two of the dozen recent interviews are for.Net shops, and C#/.Net are way, way, wayyyyy down my list of priorities.
Yet even C#/.Net isn't "elminated" from what I do, because there are several adapter projects that let C#/.Net desktops access a Java/J2EE server cluster, including SOAP/XML automation from Apache.
Guess I'm just not a language bigot. I worked with too many to hold on to such irrelevant "ideals." (Z80/650x machine code, various assemblers, various C dialects (the world's greatest assembler), C++, ANSI C++, Java 0..5, Perl, KSH scripting, and God knows how many proprietary scriptlet languages.) Worse, I took the 400 series compiler courses from J. P. Tremblay at U of S, so I came right out of school with the mindset that one could compile any language or descriptive structure into another, given the right compiler framework and supporting technology.
Cease the FUD. An article in one small newspaper about one individual being charged under a foreign jurisdiction is not "precedence". It's media flame fodder and a couple idiots laying charges without understanding copyright law.
You can copyright lyrics. You can copyright an arrangement. You can copyright a performance.
A pair of people playing a harmonica and piano can only violate a lyric (song) copyright if they sing.
You can only infringe an arrangement if you're using or practised using sheet music that someone published; if you create a play-alike that sounds close enough to be recognizable, it's a new arrangement that doesn't fall under the copyright of the published version. Bar-bands pay copyright royalties because they're performing the lyrics of well known songs, not because they're performing the arrangement (except for tribute bands.)
Clearly the *AA does not own an individual's performance copyright unless they purchase those rights.
So I'm curious -- what copyright is the pair accused of infringing?
Once the copyright jackboots have their asinine warping of copyright law tossed, what damages and expenses are awarded to the couple? That is the problem with the current legal system -- false accusations from corps that can blow budgets on legal expense are not punished, despite the clear damages to the individuals accused.
Worse, some of the repeat offenders who keep falsely accusing people are never charged under any racketeering laws, and they should be. Using an expensive court case to intimidate someone is as brutal as threatening to turn loose Bruno and his baseball bat.
Every tiny distro out there considers it offensive that they're not included in the deals and financing directly, because they contribute in some way to OSS. Somewhere they've gotten the idea that a small contribution implies ownership of the whole.
It's the same crowd that cries about GPL violations when the software under consideration is licensed under Apache, Mozilla, or a host of other licenses.
Even when dealing with GPL software, they forget that even someone like Stallman who contributed huge amounts of time, effort, and code are still only one team member whose total contribution is still an infinitesmal fraction of the total effort.
If you want to control software, don't use OSS licensing. If you want to share it so everyone can benefit, look into an OSS license that agrees with your personal and business philosophies.
Just remember that virtually every single OSS license out there grants people and companies the right to make money by selling an add on service or product. Packaging and support are a service, and apparently one customers will pay for. The fact that your service or product ideas haven't financed a move out of the basement yet are not the fault of Microsoft, Novell, IBM, or any other company or individual with net-positive revenues.
It's yours. The cheeto-eater. The student with the ideas but no business experience, the theoretician who has proven it works but not built anything useful or saleable from the idea, the idealist who created a great package but has neither mind nor market share.
Figure out a way to convince customers you have something worth paying for, or stop whining that others are more skilled at doing so. Preferably both.
I wondered if you'd catch that detail. It gets worse if a node is re-encrypting a proxy stream.
But an awful lot of sites that peoply surf using anonymizers aren't using encrypted streams. I'd expect them to be very traceable by checksum-correlation.
Your explanation of an onion-router is interesting. It sounds like you're talking about a distributed key decryption, where each node on the route does part of the decryption, but only the ends can see the plain text. I'm not sure how that's any more effective at protecting data, only at stopping surveillance from making a connection between the end points.
My concern has always been data security, not connection hiding. Untraceable connections fly in the face of security access audits.
I guess that depends whether you look at what else happens during significant press events.
Politicians and corps tend to make interesting moves while the public is distracted. Outrage over "terrorism", "human rights violations", and "think of the children" issues hold the public attention away from other issues. With the right emphasis and spin, they get used to justify actions that the public would normally object to.
Given the track record on proving WMD, exagerration of China's human rights issues, etc., I tend to consider the various "watch" lists as indicators of who is being pressured next. They're not necessarily honest assessments of risks or evil intent, but they set the stage for further aggrandizement.
US courts still have the jurisdiction to shut down your operations in the US.
Not all business models require a corporate presence in the US, nor services provided by US hardware, nor even travel to the US. While it's a significant market to sacrifice, it may be better to focus on a global customer base rather than risk interference from a division corp's legal hassles.
Yes, indeed. The former USSR realized blowing a cold-war military budget was killing the region's economy, and that there was no way to "win" the cold war. As mentioned in "War Games", the only way to win is not to play.
Hopefully we won't see any further cold-war mentality military action or buildup from the US, as it's a tremendous waste of resources that are desperately needed elsewhere. As it is, the impact on the US economy from the cash burn will be felt both in the US and around the world for far too long.
All the money the leeches suck from the ecosystem will never replace food, air, or water, much less species or genomes.
The one relief is that after the psychopaths running the damaging industries die off, and the majority of humanity is mere memory, the planet itself will eventually recover. It may take centuries or millenia, but we won't kill the planet.
I see the solution to the US patent roulette as simple: Don't establish a US office. Force all customers to contract with a head office in a nation that has SANE laws that aren't sold to the highest bidder. Force them to deal with fair courts, and cut them off if they don't abide by agreements.
If necessary, establish offices in a jurisdiction like Germany where innovation and privacy trump companies that have no products.
ECMAScript with support for VRML and related vector/plane graphics animation technology could compete with something like Flash, but I wouldn't call it a replacement.
I would call it a standards-based answer to Microsoft's clumsy attempt to create a competing "standard" that only runs on WinXX. FUD for FUD, the battle over market share continues to be about media mind share, not quality, performance, scalability, portability, or any other technical "issue". Heck, most of the FUD bombs launched aren't even demos, much less production products.
In case you hadn't noticed, there is a heavy overlap between this list and the infamous US "axis of evil" list.
As I've worked with people from some of the nations on the list, I consider it far more likely to be a fluff piece to get the techies voting for continued US warmongering, given it's fortuitous release on the day of an important US vote.
I speak of doing it while the connection is open and active.
It doesn't take much of a hashing function to boil down a response packet to a 32-64 bit integer. Watch the packets going into the anonymizer, calculating their hash functions on the body (not the IP header.)
Watch for the outcoming packets, and where they're destined. 99% of the time it'll give a point-to-point address map.
In theory you could route through multiple anonymizers working as a peer network, but as long as you can keep an eye on the end points, the "in between" of the anonymizer network is just noise.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you might want to reread the EULAs for things like MSN mail. At one point the EULA basically stated that any and all messages and attachments sent through their email service automatically granted Microsoft the right to use the content. It may have been intended for AV scans and such, but the phrasing effectively meant that if you sent out sensitive information (e.g. business related, code, etc.), Microsoft could use that information in their own business (and presumably software development.)
I didn't like the phrasing; I stopped using MSN for anything. (What else can you do but vote with your electronic feet?)
Posting to a publicly visible forum does not grant general IP rights to the public. Many websites, including Slashdot, very specifically attribute responsibility for content fragments to the posters, that means that there is no particular IP license granted by posting. Putting something in the public domain requires a specific notice like a license.
Think of it this way. You can get a catalog from a retail company, view it, but do not own any rights to it's images or content. Similarly, you can buy a textbook that describes and documents software methodologies or code, but the author still owns the copyright and is not required to grant you the right to use those ideas or code samples without a license. Most textbooks do include such a grant of license, but they don't have to.
I see nothing in the EULAs or policy statements of any websites I visit which grants ownership to anyone except the author. The closest I see to that is a couple of websites that specifically grant the forum owner/sponsor the right to use posted content in their printed journals.
I can't buy in to the easy answer of "laziness." I saw too many of my classmates genuinely struggle with material when I was in school.
The big problem is the liberal attitude that the "self esteem" of a child is more important than their education. It breeds arrogant, self-centered, uncooperative personalities. By allowing kids with failing grades to move ahead, we take away the lesson that failure is embarassing and painful. Worse, those kids are now being exposed to class material they aren't prepared for, creating a downward grade spiral.
Later in life that former kid gets reprimanded at work, maybe even fired. Instead of dealing with it gracefully, they "lose it" because they've never had to deal with failure before.
What ticks me off most about this inane decision to allow text messaging short forms is that simply demonstrating you "know the material" isn't good enough for the real world. You have to be able to use and communicate ideas, and you can't do that when you can't even read and write properly.
I look forward to the lawsuits in 4-5 years from former students claiming their education rights were short-changed, and that it was the school's fault they never learned to read and write. The schools in question will get nuked in court.
Even if what all of the "PHB's are idiots" ranters were 100% correct, that wouldn't help prepare a student to deal with the real world. It might scare them off, which could be a good thing, but it doesn't help.
Pure programming as a job is pretty much dead.
You must have some business analysis skills, sufficient interpersonal skills to discuss hot issues without upsetting everyone, and enough political savvy to get what you need to do your job. When you get tagged with incomplete or inaccurate specs, you have to be able to get clarification early.
That is perhaps the toughest part for a new grad. They're graduates. They know their stuff. Or at least they think so, and make bad assumptions instead of asking.
For those who gripe about it taking "forever" to get answers:
Did you just fire an email to get lost among the hundred or so a manager gets each day? Did you check with senior team members who might have the answers? Co-workers? Users?
Did you call every once in a while to ask how the spec clarifications were coming along? Did you flag the late clarifications as impacting design, development, testing, and deployment? Did you explain how much overtime would be required to compensate for the late specs, and that OT is more expensive, pushing up the project costs?
There are far more constructive ways to deal with stereotype PHBs and technology-illiterate business people than complaining they're not as "smart" as you. Odds are they think you're a complete idiot because you don't understand what is obvious to them.
While there is no denying the average bandwidth of a box of DVDs, there are alternatives to addressing the download speed. The 50Kb/sec download speed from their server is horrible no matter how you slice it -- far too many corporations serve up well over 100Kb/sec per client.
The problem is that high capacity solutions are not cheap, and I get the impression that there must not be the budget for those options, or no one would have deployed a 50Kb/sec server in the first place.
Aside from DVDs, you could look into a download service that can host encrypted file images. Use Serpent or Rjindael/AES256 and you shouldn't have to worry too much about someone pilfering data files from a semi-public server.
Personally I'd encrypt the data even if it was being sent out on DVD. Mail and courier packages do get lost, especially if a poorly paid employee thinks they can sell the contents of a package.
That's rich -- you complaining that someone didn't "read carefully" after the way you tried to spin my points into an argument about patents.
Degrading the requirements to graduate or earn a degree just churns out more illiterate "graduates" who can't communicate with anyone.
But I don't understand why anyone would be upset about this. It's been known for years that a significant percentage of graduates from post-secondary education can't communicate effectively, liberal nannies have pushed for kids to be "promoted" to the next grade when they fail so they don't feel "left behind", and the fact that slang is in dictionaries is used to justify it's presence in formal documents and discussions.
No wonder the R&D of the western world is falling behind that of nations placing an emphasis on quality education and training.
Please read before ranting.
I said they're part of the ECMA standard. I said absolutely nothing about whether specific patents were relevant or actionable, nor about how many there might be involved.
My understanding is the core libraries/packages/whatever-the-buzzword-of-the-we ek-is and the syntax of C# are specified by the ECMA standard. This is analagous to the ANSI specs that cover C++ syntax as well as core libraries and STL.
But as with ANSI C++, a language and base libraries is a very, very small part of a complete application environment. It's nice that the Mono team is redeveloping compatible APIs, but that won't prevent the same game that eventually killed OS/2: Every time IBM's team got the Win32 changes incorporated, a new update would be released for some critical component to render OS/2's Win32 APIs temporarily incompatible. I have absolutely zero faith that the same won't happen with Mono -- when the time is right for Microsoft.
Even if Microsoft doesn't utilize any legal weapons or "traps", the next service pack that updates .Net could leave Mono in the cold, destroying the credibility of C#.NET as a cross-platform tool. Microsoft can play innocent easily in such a case, because they specifically did not include a lot of useful APIs in the ECMA standard.
Personally I don't understand why anyone would bother with a "cross platform" tool that doesn't seem to be deployed on any non-Intel platforms. How is anyone supposed to deploy a .NET service on some serious hardware? Not to knock x86 servers -- I just don't like being forced to choose one particular CPU just to get Mono.NET, especially if that forces renegotiating existing contracts for RDBMS and other third party products.
For now I'll stick with Java. It's the only truly cross-platform option right now that doesn't require major macro hacking to maintain cross-platform portability without modifying code as part of the build process (a major no-no in many environments. Check out and compile, changes not permitted.)
Personally I don't see Vista as a viable upgrade. It's not buying anything for existing hardware that already performs it's required functions.
But there will be people who insist on installing an upgrade on older hardware, then complain about how slow it is. The same has been true with every release of Windows since WFW.
An existing developer box could be recommissioned as a standard desktop, but doing development under Vista will require substantial upgrades. Some tools already require 2GB or more per workstation to do enterprise development -- those requirements will only increase under Vista.
On a related note, I found that the IE 7 update for Windows XP or one of the .NET updates over the months left the security sandbox rather open. Both signed and unsigned Authenticode was granted execution rights for Internet connections. I see that as comparable to the risk of someone deploying a damaging ActiveX component, and locked it down as best I could.
For now most of the options are set to prompt. If the prompts get annoying, I'll consider changing the configs.
DRM-enabled operating systems can still run malicious code. Signed or unsigned, a Trojan is a Trojan.
The *AA tried to force Canadians to pay a "royalty" for pirated music when buying any media player, on the theory that their primary use is to play pirated media.
It was knocked out as unconstitutional, and justly so. How insane is it to charge the general public with fines and penalties for crimes they haven't even been accused of, much less convicted?
Microsoft is setting a horrible precedence here for the sake of short-term market gain. Typical insane American greed -- to hell with long term stability, as long as I can get my undeserved cut now. :(
So I guess if you change the name from "Chicago", the project schedule starts anew, and the previous decade of effort doesn't count. :p :D :p
I don't understand why people continue to argue about the details of which language or framework they want to use. Procedural-object languages all function largely the same, they use virtually the same syntax in many cases, and they all have minor gotchas and workarounds.
Add in a distribution layer such as J2EE5/EJB3, CORBA, XML/RPC, SOAP/XML, or good old fashioned fixed-format record overlays ala mainframe/AS400, and there isn't even a need to select one language to implement the whole application.
Personally I'm sticking with Java5/J2EE5/EJB3, because I invested a lot of time and effort in learning the "gotchas" and want some revenue payback before I invest more time and effort in learning something else. Coupled with the fact that only two of the dozen recent interviews are for .Net shops, and C#/.Net are way, way, wayyyyy down my list of priorities.
Yet even C#/.Net isn't "elminated" from what I do, because there are several adapter projects that let C#/.Net desktops access a Java/J2EE server cluster, including SOAP/XML automation from Apache.
Guess I'm just not a language bigot. I worked with too many to hold on to such irrelevant "ideals." (Z80/650x machine code, various assemblers, various C dialects (the world's greatest assembler), C++, ANSI C++, Java 0..5, Perl, KSH scripting, and God knows how many proprietary scriptlet languages.) Worse, I took the 400 series compiler courses from J. P. Tremblay at U of S, so I came right out of school with the mindset that one could compile any language or descriptive structure into another, given the right compiler framework and supporting technology.
Cease the FUD. An article in one small newspaper about one individual being charged under a foreign jurisdiction is not "precedence". It's media flame fodder and a couple idiots laying charges without understanding copyright law.
You can copyright lyrics. You can copyright an arrangement. You can copyright a performance.
A pair of people playing a harmonica and piano can only violate a lyric (song) copyright if they sing.
You can only infringe an arrangement if you're using or practised using sheet music that someone published; if you create a play-alike that sounds close enough to be recognizable, it's a new arrangement that doesn't fall under the copyright of the published version. Bar-bands pay copyright royalties because they're performing the lyrics of well known songs, not because they're performing the arrangement (except for tribute bands.)
Clearly the *AA does not own an individual's performance copyright unless they purchase those rights.
So I'm curious -- what copyright is the pair accused of infringing?
Once the copyright jackboots have their asinine warping of copyright law tossed, what damages and expenses are awarded to the couple? That is the problem with the current legal system -- false accusations from corps that can blow budgets on legal expense are not punished, despite the clear damages to the individuals accused.
Worse, some of the repeat offenders who keep falsely accusing people are never charged under any racketeering laws, and they should be. Using an expensive court case to intimidate someone is as brutal as threatening to turn loose Bruno and his baseball bat.
Every tiny distro out there considers it offensive that they're not included in the deals and financing directly, because they contribute in some way to OSS. Somewhere they've gotten the idea that a small contribution implies ownership of the whole.
It's the same crowd that cries about GPL violations when the software under consideration is licensed under Apache, Mozilla, or a host of other licenses.
Even when dealing with GPL software, they forget that even someone like Stallman who contributed huge amounts of time, effort, and code are still only one team member whose total contribution is still an infinitesmal fraction of the total effort.
If you want to control software, don't use OSS licensing. If you want to share it so everyone can benefit, look into an OSS license that agrees with your personal and business philosophies.
Just remember that virtually every single OSS license out there grants people and companies the right to make money by selling an add on service or product. Packaging and support are a service, and apparently one customers will pay for. The fact that your service or product ideas haven't financed a move out of the basement yet are not the fault of Microsoft, Novell, IBM, or any other company or individual with net-positive revenues.
It's yours. The cheeto-eater. The student with the ideas but no business experience, the theoretician who has proven it works but not built anything useful or saleable from the idea, the idealist who created a great package but has neither mind nor market share.
Figure out a way to convince customers you have something worth paying for, or stop whining that others are more skilled at doing so. Preferably both.
I wondered if you'd catch that detail. It gets worse if a node is re-encrypting a proxy stream.
But an awful lot of sites that peoply surf using anonymizers aren't using encrypted streams. I'd expect them to be very traceable by checksum-correlation.
Your explanation of an onion-router is interesting. It sounds like you're talking about a distributed key decryption, where each node on the route does part of the decryption, but only the ends can see the plain text. I'm not sure how that's any more effective at protecting data, only at stopping surveillance from making a connection between the end points.
My concern has always been data security, not connection hiding. Untraceable connections fly in the face of security access audits.
I guess that depends whether you look at what else happens during significant press events.
Politicians and corps tend to make interesting moves while the public is distracted. Outrage over "terrorism", "human rights violations", and "think of the children" issues hold the public attention away from other issues. With the right emphasis and spin, they get used to justify actions that the public would normally object to.
Given the track record on proving WMD, exagerration of China's human rights issues, etc., I tend to consider the various "watch" lists as indicators of who is being pressured next. They're not necessarily honest assessments of risks or evil intent, but they set the stage for further aggrandizement.
Not all business models require a corporate presence in the US, nor services provided by US hardware, nor even travel to the US. While it's a significant market to sacrifice, it may be better to focus on a global customer base rather than risk interference from a division corp's legal hassles.
Yes, indeed. The former USSR realized blowing a cold-war military budget was killing the region's economy, and that there was no way to "win" the cold war. As mentioned in "War Games", the only way to win is not to play.
Hopefully we won't see any further cold-war mentality military action or buildup from the US, as it's a tremendous waste of resources that are desperately needed elsewhere. As it is, the impact on the US economy from the cash burn will be felt both in the US and around the world for far too long.
As to Rumsfeld: Goodbye and good luck.
It's not melodramatic, it's fact.
All the money the leeches suck from the ecosystem will never replace food, air, or water, much less species or genomes.
The one relief is that after the psychopaths running the damaging industries die off, and the majority of humanity is mere memory, the planet itself will eventually recover. It may take centuries or millenia, but we won't kill the planet.
Just ourselves.
I see the solution to the US patent roulette as simple: Don't establish a US office. Force all customers to contract with a head office in a nation that has SANE laws that aren't sold to the highest bidder. Force them to deal with fair courts, and cut them off if they don't abide by agreements.
If necessary, establish offices in a jurisdiction like Germany where innovation and privacy trump companies that have no products.
As per usual, the US patent system is doing a great job of stifling even the most minor innovation.
Email over a non-copper transport. Wow. What an intelligent patent. Using wireless IP networks as they were designed.
My contempt and disgust for what passes for "justice" south of the border knows no bounds. Justice is dead -- long live the court leeches!
ECMAScript with support for VRML and related vector/plane graphics animation technology could compete with something like Flash, but I wouldn't call it a replacement.
I would call it a standards-based answer to Microsoft's clumsy attempt to create a competing "standard" that only runs on WinXX. FUD for FUD, the battle over market share continues to be about media mind share, not quality, performance, scalability, portability, or any other technical "issue". Heck, most of the FUD bombs launched aren't even demos, much less production products.
In case you hadn't noticed, there is a heavy overlap between this list and the infamous US "axis of evil" list.
As I've worked with people from some of the nations on the list, I consider it far more likely to be a fluff piece to get the techies voting for continued US warmongering, given it's fortuitous release on the day of an important US vote.
Thumbs down on clumsy propaganda.
You speak of doing the trace after the fact.
I speak of doing it while the connection is open and active.
It doesn't take much of a hashing function to boil down a response packet to a 32-64 bit integer. Watch the packets going into the anonymizer, calculating their hash functions on the body (not the IP header.)
Watch for the outcoming packets, and where they're destined. 99% of the time it'll give a point-to-point address map.
In theory you could route through multiple anonymizers working as a peer network, but as long as you can keep an eye on the end points, the "in between" of the anonymizer network is just noise.