Btw. it's really nice to have a discussion about the EU that doesn't devolve into a flamewar in posting #2
Nice indeed, and much appreciated. The fact is that people tend to have a strong opinion about the EU. Some people are religiously pro or against EU based on their attitude towards the State. Strong Statists generally support a larger bureaucracy, Libertarian types are not favoring more government. From that point on, polarized debates turn into a fight.
My observation is that the nation-state is the only historically proven viable way to tackle governments. Every attempt made to create a form of government contrary to the nation-state principle failed. Nation-state have numerous flaws as a system, but the alternatives (empires and clan/tribe feodality) are even messier and less desirable.
Now, you have to innovate sometimes, and sometimes you even succeed. So someone, at some point of history in the future, will probably manage to transcend the 1000-year old nation-state principle and create a stable, prosperous community in the process.
However, such brutal changes are generally the result of strong-willed and lucky individuals taking charge among much trouble, with lots of unpleasantness for us peons while things settle. Committees and anonymous bureaucrats are notoriously bad at managing changes of such amplitude.
So the question is, will this historical trend be defeated by the EU functionnaries? Can they succeed in getting rid of the nation-state where every king, emperor, president or minister in history has ultimately failed?
Can you actually trust shifty, weasely bureaucrats to be these strong-willed and lucky individuals? Or will they revert to responsability-fleeing, committee-loving herd behavior, with the help of the "perfectly legal" lobbyists you mention?
At the end, it boils down to faith. Faith in the EU system and the bureaucrats. It should be obvious that I'm rather skeptical compared to your more trusting attitude, but you might be right and your faith might be well placed. I don't know. Nobody knows yet.
And so that's why I carefully avoided responding directly to your (good) arguments: Because ultimately, your position boils down to that item of faith.
System theory says that the more complex a system is, the higher the probability it will break down. It also says that complex systems behave in unpredictable ways, most of them harmful. The EU is an extremely complex system, and the recent batch of new members will make things even messier. At this point, system theory says "run for your life"...:-) But it offers only probabilities. One can hope for a miracle.
Let me assure you that I hope you are right. I doubt it and I see the future EU quagmired in incompetent, omnipresent, rival bureaucracies. Pessimistic observers say that forcing people to share resources and living together when they are from widely different cultures has always led to civil wars. I fervently hope they are wrong, but I have no cold facts to present as an objection.
So, Sir, I tip my hat off to both your argumentative skills and your faith in certain bureaucracies!
Oh, I see. I understand your viewpoint better, thank you for taking the time to explain.
The main problem of the EU is that it's bureaucratic apparatus is undemocratic, it's democratic institutions powerless and the national governments who would have the power to change that have no incentive to correct the problems because it would reduce their stranglehold on EU policy.
I agree with you here. However, you underline a major contradiction in the system. If you want accountable people, you need direct representation, as you point out. But directly elected people are not going to be loyal to the EU, they are going to be loyal to their voters. That's what accountability demands. I don't think this dilemma can be easily solved. Any idea?
As for the constitution currenly under work, the drafts I have seen are a model of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo as well as a catalog of empty formulas and devout wishes without substance (thanks largely to French former prez Giscard d'Estaing whose style permeates the document).
The drafts that are circulating are no a good omen of the EU to come. I am really afraid that the EU is sinking into a bureaucratic morass and betraying its ideals.
Also, there is a whole debate around the idea of a European constitution. Under the term of several national constitutions, for instance, it's a betrayal to even consider transfering the authority endowed by to voters to another body. Especially a body not elected by your voters. So the first step in the creation of the EU constitution is to betray the voters. That's a slippery slope, now, isn't it? What can be the value of such a fundamental document created in such conditions?
Of course, cynics say that this is working as designed and that democratic noises in Brussels are just window dressing. "The EU was designed as a tyranny of the Enlightened, unfortunately, nincompoops are now in control."
The Commission is not elected. It's designated. It's a thrice-removed form of indirect representation, if you prefer.
I see you favor less control, hence less accountability of EU commissars and regulatory bodies. Don't you think that even less accountability will produce even more graft, corruption and lobbyism?
If you remember the corruption scandals of the Cresson era, pressure of national governments had nothing to do with the downright thefts and bribery that took place back then. Removing said pressure is not going to change the success rate of voter-hostile lobbyism. But it will remove one of the last incentives for straight behavior.
Moreover, this is not the only example of the EU bureaucrats pushing a decision in spite of the opposition of the Parliament or the will of (ha ha) us poor taxpaying sods.
This story
tells you how, with the help of US airline lobbyists, the EU Commissars trampled the European privacy laws and made a mockery of all these human right principles they are supposed to defend.
Here is the moral: If you pile up another layer of government and transnational bureaucrats on top of already corrupt governments, you'll not get Beauty, Truth and Good. You'll get the best laws money can buy. And they'll be bought indeed.
Eth1, I second that. Want further proof? Look at
this Wired article about spyware. To quote:
"I was annoyed by these pop-ups," [Portal of Evil's webmaster] Faliszek said. He started digging, but ran into a wall of shadows, denials and false trails. He thinks the problem of sneaky programs like VX2 is growing, and something needs to be done. "Self-policing isn't working," he said. "I hate to say we need government intervention, but something needs to be done."
So let me get this straight: This guy is quoted by a sympathetic journalist and clamors for new regulations, laws, an army of civil servants to enforce them, and the matching tax levying, all of that for his God-given right to use IE under Windows instead of, Heaven forbid, using Mozilla or a non-Windows machine.
At this degree of cluelessness, the words "dribbling idiots" are pitifully unadequate. May I suggest "drooling fuzzbrain"?
SCO claimed ownership of the Stonehenge design and announced a lawsuit aganst the Phoenix Astronomical Society for copyright infringement. "Stonehenge was clearly an early computer, and as such, it might be used to run an early version of Unix. Which we own."
It's very interesting to see that the Diebold debacle pinpointed the lack of security and reliability of a machine that is primarily a Windows 2000 embedded system.
The Wired article shows that many of the system's vulnerability were due not to the GEMS software itself, but to the W2k operating system.
So from now on, if anyone insists on choosing MS over other solutions for mission-critical system, and says "nobody ever got fired for choosing MS", we can point them to the Diebold debacle. Not only were they fired, they got it rubbed in and on national headlines!
From Diebold's site:
The Application Software (Global Election Management System or GEMS®): GEMS® is a powerful multi-user Windows® NT/2000-based software that concurrently and automatically generates...
So let me get this straight: A company deploys thousands of machines that run Win2K. These machines are then used intensively in mission-critical operations (elections). A noticeable proportion of said machines either crash or misbehave. And the result is...
Is it thousand of people saying 'Well, duh!' and shaking their head?
Alas, gentle reader, this is the real world. The actual result was SHOCK! HORROR! DISBELIEF!
What's wrong with these people? They deploy thousand of Win2k systems and then they are shocked (shocked!) that 10% of them crash and burn? When will these people get a grip?
In other news, BoldSmell, the perfume division of Diebold based in Paris (Texas, natch), has introduced a new fragrance named Eau de Raw Meat, targetting the burgeonning demographics of lion tamers, zoo keepers and African reserve veterinaries. Some initial reports about early customers being attacked and devored by usually tame carnivorous animals have been dismissed as "overreaction".
The grey beards among us will remember with a chuckle that "experts" and "researchers" and "respected academics" predicted utter and complete failure for all onboard-laser efforts.
Don't you remember all these naysayers about "SDI won't work" and "you can't make mobile high power lasers"?
I wonder, I really wonder why so many very clever people wasted their time "proving" that it couldn't be done while lowly engineers were busy making it work. Think about what a horrendous, freakin's waste of human energy this was: Clever people fighting to prove that something cannot be done while others just do it. A horrible doubt suddenly assails me: Could it be a case of ideological blindness?
Naaaah. Our academics are very open-minded. They wouldn't oppose a project just because it's pushed by politicians they dislike. That would be so low, so crass, so intellectually corrupt... Whew! The horrible doubt is gone. And now, if you'd excuse me, I have an appointment with Santa Claus.
Thanks for responding. My fear is that the next SMB protocol version (probably called Whatever.NET) will be protected by licenses and available only to whoever pays a fee. Requesting a fee per installation would defeat the "buy back" scheme that would allow OSS enthusiasts to buy an IP license to implement a Samba update (heck, I donated for Blender).
The EU could have made sure that MS protocols would be documented and available. Instead, the wording of the agreement seems to reinforce MS's future IP enforcement by explicitely allowing licenses.
Again, a license fee is of course not exclusive to the EU. However, I find deplorable that Brussels missed such an opportunity to prevent this.
Say MS comes up with Whatever.NET . It asks for an upfront fee and $3 per CPU implementing a non-MS software compatible with Whatever.NET. That's entirely within the wording of the agreement: $3, now that's a reasonable fee, right, so the EU can't object. Well, Samba could not be legally distributed in this hypothetical situation. They'd have to track and bill each downloader. Curtains.
Does that make sense to you? Or do you think MS will never patent a newer SMB? If so, why?
How high is too high? $100? $1000? That's fuzzy. Your outrageous price tag is my regular license price.
Some people pointed out that the potential Samba killer has nothing to do with this EU ruling, that it is actually the patent protection of future implementations of SMB. They say that all the EU obtained is that MS has to license its future patented networking protocols, which is normal patent licensing business. Tens of thousands of dollar per patent is cheap in this field.
I really wish you're right. SMB was undocumented and protected by obscurity.
But consider this situation now. MS has hired the IBM patent guru, the guy who drove IBM's Intellectual Property licensing from zero to $2 billion a year in a short time. Obviously, MS intends to patent everything they can.
Enter Longhorn, which already includes a slew of patented techs. Here comes a new patented version of SMB. The specs are available to competitors, as per the EU mandates, and the IP license is available for the reasonable sum of $3000. A mere tip in the IP business. Only, the Samba developer cannot afford it.
In this situation, I don't see how Samba can be made compatible with Longhorn without infringing IP or patent laws. If you reimplement a patented technology, you are infringing the patent, even if you have never seen it.
Even if Samba has been shut out in the EU, Linux has not.
You're correct, BiggerIsBetter, but keep in mind that most companies have a lot of Windows server. They see the cost going up, as well as security and reliability problems, so they want to deploy Linux without too much trouble. That's where Samba comes in. Samba allows drop-in replacement of Windows servers. It represents one of the main Linux opportunities that open the door to OSS in corporate and small business shops. Remove Samba and all these Windows shops are effectively trapped into MS forever.
Do you see why Samba is so important and why removing its threat is such a victory for MS?
Optimistic people think that Samba will continue reverse engineering new MS protocols. But the conjunction of patented protocols and for-pay-only specs makes this a shaky proposal from a legal perspective. I doubt Samba can afford long, protracted legal fights. So this stupid EU ruling might well be the weapon that will keep future versions of Samba from being compatible with new Windows protocols.
You are very optimistic, garcia. All this shows is that the EU wasted an excellent opportunity. They could have requested that MS open up their interfaces. For free. It's not unprecedented: IBM was required (by the US DoJ) to publish their mainframe interfacing architecture in order to allow competitors to provide storage and comm hardware as well as security services.
Instead of which, the little Commissars of Brussels royally screwed up by allowing MS to levy a fee for their interface specs. Which guarantees that Open Source software won't be able to use them.
Do you realize what it means?
Ii means that in one fell swoop, the Commissars kicked OSS competitiors out of MS pathway in the file and print server business. If it has been the result of bribery, I'd say "kudos to the bastards". But here, the incompetent Brussels morons apparently wanted to promote competition in this field. Unfortunately, as good carreer bureaucrats, they completely ignored the technical and market environment and used ideologically tainted views instead of reality as a decision basis. Whatever the intent, here is the result: Samba will be unable to develop new versions to follow MS changes without paying. Which they can't. So Samba will become incompatible and irrelevant. Linux will not be able to interface with future Windows 200x servers. The lock-out will be complete.
To paraphrase Linus, the destruction of Samba will be "a completely unintentional side effect".
Nevertheless, that's what the Brussels Buffoons achieved. Which was to be expected, since after all, they are bureaucrats, not techies.
Heck, paying $600M for this result is a piffle. MS would gladly have payed ten times that to kill Samba, only people would have cried foul. But I'm sure Balmer is giggling right now: "Hey Bill, look at that, the Linux crowd is cheering 'cuz we have to pay the equivalent of 3 weeks of revenue!" - "Yes, Steve, little do the fools realize that we just completely won."
Once again, EU snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. And there was much rejoicing (in megacorp orations' board rooms).
Riclewis,
I don't know if this fits your definition, but
here is a piece of C code that crashes a Windows server by exploiting the ASN.1 vuln. Similar pieces of code have been floating for quite a while since at least October 2003. Some of them are rumored to give you a remote shell, which is not unbelievable.
This is marketing BS in the purest form. Here is a nice juicy MS vulnerabilitythat wasn't found by reverse engineering a patch.
As for real security experts, they routinely
find vulnerabilities in Windowsbeforesending a description to MS which would then, a few months later, issue a patch. Maybe.
There is a fine line between marketing and outrageous lying. I'm glad to see that MS gleefully steps over it every single time. Any other conduct would actually be unsettling. You see, we geeks revel in a binary vision of the world, and we cannot thank MS enough for consistently being a caricature of evil villain. It makes working against them so much more rewarding.
Looking up "security" and "stolen passport" in Google leads to interesting stories. Looks like some EU countries have "misplaced" tens of thousands of blank passports, which got stolen right from the storage rooms of passport offices. What good is it to have holographic imprints in the paper if you put the blanks it in a badly protected drawer? And remember, boys and girls, such a passport gives you access to all the EU, 'cuz Europeans don't need no big bad borders no more. You cannot more clearly proclaim "Scum of all Earth, come deal and traffic in our countries!"
In
this story, British journalists demonstrated how easy it is to claim your passport has been stolen and to get a new one issued to a fake identity. And still in sunny UK, another story shows that about 3000 passports a year, sent through 1st class mail,
get lost or stolen in the mail. And there are tons more.
So before they start retina-scanning people in public places, maybe the EU gummints could tighten their abysmally unsecure procedures just a tad?
Did the EU countries tighten their passport renewal procedures? Because right now, anyone can obtain a renewal for a lost passport by providing extremely low-tech documents that are a breeze to forge.
In France and Belgium, for example, you can walk into a police station and declare you have lost your passports (the prevalence of muggers and pickpockets makes it an easily believable story). You have to provide a birth certificate. What is it? An ordinary piece of paper, incredibly easy to counterfeit.
Once your ID has been "established" by this "proof", the authorities will issue a new set of ID documents: forgery-proof ID and biometric passport. With your supplied name and photo on it.
If at least, they keep a database of iris scans, forgers would be able to do it only once. The article doesn't say anything about such a database.
So this is a nice strong link in the othewise very weak security chain in Europe.
I suggest booting your laptop from a Knoppix Linux CD (won't install anything on the HD). Then you'll have a list of what's been detected by Knoppix. Any dead hardware would be missing. Some Windows-only hardware might not show, though.
That would be my first attempt at determining your problem.
From the article: You get what you pay for... Linux is free, hence it is crap...
Yup, that's true. Hey, Russel, how much did you pay for your wife?
Uh huh.
Well, it shows.
Whenever I hear that stupid argument, I am reminded of that scene in Blues Brothers, in the restaurant:
Jake: How much for the little girl? How much for the women?
Man: What?
Jake: Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters... sell them to me. Sell me your children
As examplified in
this story, we have already seen attempts at inserting backdoors in the Linux kernel.
The attempts failed because of the meticulous grooming given by the "many eyes" watching each open source release.
Any one can write a new kernel patch. But getting these patches accepted is a whole different story.
Conversely, years after the commercial, closed-source program Borland Interbase was released and used worldwide, it was found that it
contained a back-door.
So recent history proves the article is wrong. Facts demonstrate exactly the opposite of what the article rants about.
Conclusion: the article is an unsubstantiated troll written by a Microsoftie eager to fart FUD at the Penguin. Ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice indeed, and much appreciated. The fact is that people tend to have a strong opinion about the EU. Some people are religiously pro or against EU based on their attitude towards the State. Strong Statists generally support a larger bureaucracy, Libertarian types are not favoring more government. From that point on, polarized debates turn into a fight.
My observation is that the nation-state is the only historically proven viable way to tackle governments. Every attempt made to create a form of government contrary to the nation-state principle failed. Nation-state have numerous flaws as a system, but the alternatives (empires and clan/tribe feodality) are even messier and less desirable.
Now, you have to innovate sometimes, and sometimes you even succeed. So someone, at some point of history in the future, will probably manage to transcend the 1000-year old nation-state principle and create a stable, prosperous community in the process.
However, such brutal changes are generally the result of strong-willed and lucky individuals taking charge among much trouble, with lots of unpleasantness for us peons while things settle. Committees and anonymous bureaucrats are notoriously bad at managing changes of such amplitude.
So the question is, will this historical trend be defeated by the EU functionnaries? Can they succeed in getting rid of the nation-state where every king, emperor, president or minister in history has ultimately failed? Can you actually trust shifty, weasely bureaucrats to be these strong-willed and lucky individuals? Or will they revert to responsability-fleeing, committee-loving herd behavior, with the help of the "perfectly legal" lobbyists you mention?
At the end, it boils down to faith. Faith in the EU system and the bureaucrats. It should be obvious that I'm rather skeptical compared to your more trusting attitude, but you might be right and your faith might be well placed. I don't know. Nobody knows yet.
And so that's why I carefully avoided responding directly to your (good) arguments: Because ultimately, your position boils down to that item of faith.
System theory says that the more complex a system is, the higher the probability it will break down. It also says that complex systems behave in unpredictable ways, most of them harmful. The EU is an extremely complex system, and the recent batch of new members will make things even messier. At this point, system theory says "run for your life"... :-) But it offers only probabilities. One can hope for a miracle.
Let me assure you that I hope you are right. I doubt it and I see the future EU quagmired in incompetent, omnipresent, rival bureaucracies. Pessimistic observers say that forcing people to share resources and living together when they are from widely different cultures has always led to civil wars. I fervently hope they are wrong, but I have no cold facts to present as an objection.
So, Sir, I tip my hat off to both your argumentative skills and your faith in certain bureaucracies!
The main problem of the EU is that it's bureaucratic apparatus is undemocratic, it's democratic institutions powerless and the national governments who would have the power to change that have no incentive to correct the problems because it would reduce their stranglehold on EU policy.
I agree with you here. However, you underline a major contradiction in the system. If you want accountable people, you need direct representation, as you point out. But directly elected people are not going to be loyal to the EU, they are going to be loyal to their voters. That's what accountability demands. I don't think this dilemma can be easily solved. Any idea?
As for the constitution currenly under work, the drafts I have seen are a model of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo as well as a catalog of empty formulas and devout wishes without substance (thanks largely to French former prez Giscard d'Estaing whose style permeates the document).
The drafts that are circulating are no a good omen of the EU to come. I am really afraid that the EU is sinking into a bureaucratic morass and betraying its ideals.
Also, there is a whole debate around the idea of a European constitution. Under the term of several national constitutions, for instance, it's a betrayal to even consider transfering the authority endowed by to voters to another body. Especially a body not elected by your voters. So the first step in the creation of the EU constitution is to betray the voters. That's a slippery slope, now, isn't it? What can be the value of such a fundamental document created in such conditions?
Of course, cynics say that this is working as designed and that democratic noises in Brussels are just window dressing. "The EU was designed as a tyranny of the Enlightened, unfortunately, nincompoops are now in control."
The Commission is not elected. It's designated. It's a thrice-removed form of indirect representation, if you prefer.
I see you favor less control, hence less accountability of EU commissars and regulatory bodies. Don't you think that even less accountability will produce even more graft, corruption and lobbyism?
If you remember the corruption scandals of the Cresson era, pressure of national governments had nothing to do with the downright thefts and bribery that took place back then. Removing said pressure is not going to change the success rate of voter-hostile lobbyism. But it will remove one of the last incentives for straight behavior.
Moreover, this is not the only example of the EU bureaucrats pushing a decision in spite of the opposition of the Parliament or the will of (ha ha) us poor taxpaying sods.
This story tells you how, with the help of US airline lobbyists, the EU Commissars trampled the European privacy laws and made a mockery of all these human right principles they are supposed to defend.
Here is the moral: If you pile up another layer of government and transnational bureaucrats on top of already corrupt governments, you'll not get Beauty, Truth and Good. You'll get the best laws money can buy. And they'll be bought indeed.
"I was annoyed by these pop-ups," [Portal of Evil's webmaster] Faliszek said. He started digging, but ran into a wall of shadows, denials and false trails. He thinks the problem of sneaky programs like VX2 is growing, and something needs to be done. "Self-policing isn't working," he said. "I hate to say we need government intervention, but something needs to be done."
So let me get this straight: This guy is quoted by a sympathetic journalist and clamors for new regulations, laws, an army of civil servants to enforce them, and the matching tax levying, all of that for his God-given right to use IE under Windows instead of, Heaven forbid, using Mozilla or a non-Windows machine.
At this degree of cluelessness, the words "dribbling idiots" are pitifully unadequate. May I suggest "drooling fuzzbrain"?
SCO claimed ownership of the Stonehenge design and announced a lawsuit aganst the Phoenix Astronomical Society for copyright infringement. "Stonehenge was clearly an early computer, and as such, it might be used to run an early version of Unix. Which we own."
The Wired article shows that many of the system's vulnerability were due not to the GEMS software itself, but to the W2k operating system.
So from now on, if anyone insists on choosing MS over other solutions for mission-critical system, and says "nobody ever got fired for choosing MS", we can point them to the Diebold debacle. Not only were they fired, they got it rubbed in and on national headlines!
So let me get this straight: A company deploys thousands of machines that run Win2K. These machines are then used intensively in mission-critical operations (elections). A noticeable proportion of said machines either crash or misbehave. And the result is...
Is it thousand of people saying 'Well, duh!' and shaking their head?
Alas, gentle reader, this is the real world. The actual result was SHOCK! HORROR! DISBELIEF!
What's wrong with these people? They deploy thousand of Win2k systems and then they are shocked (shocked!) that 10% of them crash and burn? When will these people get a grip?
In other news, BoldSmell, the perfume division of Diebold based in Paris (Texas, natch), has introduced a new fragrance named Eau de Raw Meat, targetting the burgeonning demographics of lion tamers, zoo keepers and African reserve veterinaries. Some initial reports about early customers being attacked and devored by usually tame carnivorous animals have been dismissed as "overreaction".
The grey beards among us will remember with a chuckle that "experts" and "researchers" and "respected academics" predicted utter and complete failure for all onboard-laser efforts.
Don't you remember all these naysayers about "SDI won't work" and "you can't make mobile high power lasers"?
I wonder, I really wonder why so many very clever people wasted their time "proving" that it couldn't be done while lowly engineers were busy making it work. Think about what a horrendous, freakin's waste of human energy this was: Clever people fighting to prove that something cannot be done while others just do it. A horrible doubt suddenly assails me: Could it be a case of ideological blindness?
Naaaah. Our academics are very open-minded. They wouldn't oppose a project just because it's pushed by politicians they dislike. That would be so low, so crass, so intellectually corrupt... Whew! The horrible doubt is gone. And now, if you'd excuse me, I have an appointment with Santa Claus.
The EU could have made sure that MS protocols would be documented and available. Instead, the wording of the agreement seems to reinforce MS's future IP enforcement by explicitely allowing licenses.
Again, a license fee is of course not exclusive to the EU. However, I find deplorable that Brussels missed such an opportunity to prevent this.
Say MS comes up with Whatever .NET . It asks for an upfront fee and $3 per CPU implementing a non-MS software compatible with Whatever .NET. That's entirely within the wording of the agreement: $3, now that's a reasonable fee, right, so the EU can't object. Well, Samba could not be legally distributed in this hypothetical situation. They'd have to track and bill each downloader. Curtains.
Does that make sense to you? Or do you think MS will never patent a newer SMB? If so, why?
Some people pointed out that the potential Samba killer has nothing to do with this EU ruling, that it is actually the patent protection of future implementations of SMB. They say that all the EU obtained is that MS has to license its future patented networking protocols, which is normal patent licensing business. Tens of thousands of dollar per patent is cheap in this field.
But consider this situation now. MS has hired the IBM patent guru, the guy who drove IBM's Intellectual Property licensing from zero to $2 billion a year in a short time. Obviously, MS intends to patent everything they can.
Enter Longhorn, which already includes a slew of patented techs. Here comes a new patented version of SMB. The specs are available to competitors, as per the EU mandates, and the IP license is available for the reasonable sum of $3000. A mere tip in the IP business. Only, the Samba developer cannot afford it.
In this situation, I don't see how Samba can be made compatible with Longhorn without infringing IP or patent laws. If you reimplement a patented technology, you are infringing the patent, even if you have never seen it.
Feel free to reassure me. Please.
You're correct, BiggerIsBetter, but keep in mind that most companies have a lot of Windows server. They see the cost going up, as well as security and reliability problems, so they want to deploy Linux without too much trouble. That's where Samba comes in. Samba allows drop-in replacement of Windows servers. It represents one of the main Linux opportunities that open the door to OSS in corporate and small business shops. Remove Samba and all these Windows shops are effectively trapped into MS forever.
Do you see why Samba is so important and why removing its threat is such a victory for MS?
Optimistic people think that Samba will continue reverse engineering new MS protocols. But the conjunction of patented protocols and for-pay-only specs makes this a shaky proposal from a legal perspective. I doubt Samba can afford long, protracted legal fights. So this stupid EU ruling might well be the weapon that will keep future versions of Samba from being compatible with new Windows protocols.
Instead of which, the little Commissars of Brussels royally screwed up by allowing MS to levy a fee for their interface specs. Which guarantees that Open Source software won't be able to use them.
Do you realize what it means?
Ii means that in one fell swoop, the Commissars kicked OSS competitiors out of MS pathway in the file and print server business. If it has been the result of bribery, I'd say "kudos to the bastards". But here, the incompetent Brussels morons apparently wanted to promote competition in this field. Unfortunately, as good carreer bureaucrats, they completely ignored the technical and market environment and used ideologically tainted views instead of reality as a decision basis. Whatever the intent, here is the result: Samba will be unable to develop new versions to follow MS changes without paying. Which they can't. So Samba will become incompatible and irrelevant. Linux will not be able to interface with future Windows 200x servers. The lock-out will be complete.
To paraphrase Linus, the destruction of Samba will be "a completely unintentional side effect". Nevertheless, that's what the Brussels Buffoons achieved. Which was to be expected, since after all, they are bureaucrats, not techies.
Heck, paying $600M for this result is a piffle. MS would gladly have payed ten times that to kill Samba, only people would have cried foul. But I'm sure Balmer is giggling right now: "Hey Bill, look at that, the Linux crowd is cheering 'cuz we have to pay the equivalent of 3 weeks of revenue!" - "Yes, Steve, little do the fools realize that we just completely won."
Once again, EU snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. And there was much rejoicing (in megacorp orations' board rooms).
Cool trick. Keep testing employees for gullability.
This, I believe, fits your description.
Was this what you wanted?
As for real security experts, they routinely find vulnerabilities in Windows beforesending a description to MS which would then, a few months later, issue a patch. Maybe.
There is a fine line between marketing and outrageous lying. I'm glad to see that MS gleefully steps over it every single time. Any other conduct would actually be unsettling. You see, we geeks revel in a binary vision of the world, and we cannot thank MS enough for consistently being a caricature of evil villain. It makes working against them so much more rewarding.
Looking up "security" and "stolen passport" in Google leads to interesting stories. Looks like some EU countries have "misplaced" tens of thousands of blank passports, which got stolen right from the storage rooms of passport offices. What good is it to have holographic imprints in the paper if you put the blanks it in a badly protected drawer? And remember, boys and girls, such a passport gives you access to all the EU, 'cuz Europeans don't need no big bad borders no more. You cannot more clearly proclaim "Scum of all Earth, come deal and traffic in our countries!"
In this story, British journalists demonstrated how easy it is to claim your passport has been stolen and to get a new one issued to a fake identity. And still in sunny UK, another story shows that about 3000 passports a year, sent through 1st class mail, get lost or stolen in the mail. And there are tons more.
So before they start retina-scanning people in public places, maybe the EU gummints could tighten their abysmally unsecure procedures just a tad?
In France and Belgium, for example, you can walk into a police station and declare you have lost your passports (the prevalence of muggers and pickpockets makes it an easily believable story). You have to provide a birth certificate. What is it? An ordinary piece of paper, incredibly easy to counterfeit. Once your ID has been "established" by this "proof", the authorities will issue a new set of ID documents: forgery-proof ID and biometric passport. With your supplied name and photo on it.
If at least, they keep a database of iris scans, forgers would be able to do it only once. The article doesn't say anything about such a database.
So this is a nice strong link in the othewise very weak security chain in Europe.
Good point. Thanks for supplying this info. Onan, make a note of this.
I suggest booting your laptop from a Knoppix Linux CD (won't install anything on the HD). Then you'll have a list of what's been detected by Knoppix. Any dead hardware would be missing. Some Windows-only hardware might not show, though. That would be my first attempt at determining your problem.
Yes, granted, the author mention that fact and tries to sweep away. But he doesn't say explicitely that such an attempt failed in the past.
Yup, that's true. Hey, Russel, how much did you pay for your wife?
Uh huh.
Well, it shows.
Whenever I hear that stupid argument, I am reminded of that scene in Blues Brothers, in the restaurant:
Jake: How much for the little girl? How much for the women?
Man: What?
Jake: Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters... sell them to me. Sell me your children
The attempts failed because of the meticulous grooming given by the "many eyes" watching each open source release.
Any one can write a new kernel patch. But getting these patches accepted is a whole different story.
Conversely, years after the commercial, closed-source program Borland Interbase was released and used worldwide, it was found that it contained a back-door.
So recent history proves the article is wrong. Facts demonstrate exactly the opposite of what the article rants about.
Conclusion: the article is an unsubstantiated troll written by a Microsoftie eager to fart FUD at the Penguin. Ignore.