The right place to put a search engine hook for non-existent domains is in the browser. But by lying about the existence of domains that are looked up, Verisign's sitefinder makes it so nobody can write their own host lookup service for a browser. So they are in fact removing the ability of people to write their own handlers for this conditions, aside from how they break all the other non-HTTP protocols.
Verisign should have their contract yanked, as soon as possible. No ifs and or buts.
The LISP machines built at the MIT AI Lab had hardware which worked in parallel with the main CPU that checked things like array bounds and also did other types of tag checking, such as automatic runtime coercion of ints to floats and other things that are helpful to a high level language.
Since every object in LISP machine memory had a type tag, many useful operations could be parallelized, such as garbage collection and type dispatch for object oriented function calls.
The problem with languages like C is that they have no object semantics at all, so runtime bounds checking and other goodies don't work very well. The C weenies have everybody convinced that this is necessary to get the highest performance, but they don't realize that with a small amount of extra hardware, all these safety operations can be done in parallel. And since the C weenies influence the CPU designers, it is a vicious circle of bad machine architecture.
Stratton Sclavos, the CEO of Verisign, must be Darl McBride's secret twin brother, because he is using exactly the same lies, FUD, and ad-hominem attacks against the Internet technical community as SCO is using against the free software community.
There is an interview with Stratton Sclavos,CEO of Verisign, at http://news.com.com/2008-7347-5092590.html
Here are some highlights of the Q&A which particularly make my blood boil. This guy is both doing a smear campaign against the opposition to SiteFinder, and either has such a warped understanding of how Internet protocols are developed and operate that he is incompetent to be in charge of the root DNS for.com , or else he is a cynical liar. I believe the latter is the more likely. His comments about a "cultural divide" are true, but not in the way he intends. The cultural divide is between the fair, decent, ethical, and technically responsible people and the people such as himself.
* *
*After a couple of weeks on the hot seat, VeriSign CEO Stratton
Sclavos is turning up the fire on his company's severest critics.*
*The Site Finder controversy/You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread
criticism. What's the next step?/*
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question of are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
Still, a lot of people in the Internet community were quite
surprised by Site Finder--and then you had complaints surfacing that
it was not complying to approved standards.
Let's break the argument down: The claim that Site Finder was
nonstandard and that we should have informed the community we were
doing something nonstandard--excuse me: Site Finder is completely
standards-compliant to standards that have been out and published by
the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for years. That's just a
misnomer. The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) in its review of
Site Finder said the very same thing--that VeriSign was adhering to
standards.
What we're seeing are predetermined opinions masquerading as
processes where the outcome is predetermined.
The second claim, that we brought it out without testing--Site
Finder had been operational since March or April and we had been
testing it with individual companies and with the DNS traffic at
large. Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP, and so it
handles it the way it should. Just so you know, our customer service
lines went from 800 or 900 calls on the first day to almost zero
right now. Every customer who had a Site Finder issue, the
remediation took less than 12 hours....
*You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread
criticism. What's the next step? *
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question: Are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure, or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
*
You're hinting at a cultural divide? *
I think that there is. I don't think it's an intentional divide, but
it's drifting apart of the day-to-day usage from the folks who did
great steward's work in the early days and were asked to define all
the standards to make it work.
*And those are the people who still dominate the standards bodies? *
They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right now. It's
not OK to say standards are important, un
There is an interview with Stratton Sclavos,CEO of Verisign, at http://news.com.com/2008-7347-5092590.html.
SclavosThe reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question of are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
Q:Still, a lot of people in the Internet community were quite
surprised by Site Finder--and then you had complaints surfacing that
it was not complying to approved standards.
Sclavos:Let's break the argument down: The claim that Site Finder was
nonstandard and that we should have informed the community we were
doing something nonstandard--excuse me: Site Finder is completely
standards-compliant to standards that have been out and published by
the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for years. That's just a
misnomer. The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) in its review of
Site Finder said the very same thing--that VeriSign was adhering to
standards.
His definition of "standards-compliant" is a cynical and deceptive
one. Sure, the SiteFinder is complying with the standard, in that it
is returning well formatted packets. However the content of those
packets are lies. They are lying by saying that domains exist when
they do not, in order to fool web browsers into loading the commercial
content that Verisign wants to get to web surfers.
It is analogous to saying that if I put a detour sign in the middle of
the freeway to direct traffic to my shopping mall, that I am obeying
the traffic sign protocols.
The comment about "ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP" is
a shorthand way to sum up why it is not possible to communicate with
Verisign's executives, and why they must be stopped and soon.
Because it wouldn't matter if one hundred percent of the traffic on
the internet were HTTP, it still is not a reason to break DNS in order
to insert advertising. The "service" they claim to be providing should
be provided by the browsers, giving everyone a chance to implement
their own solution to the problem of mistyped domain names. Then many
possible solutions to this issue can be innovated. By breaking DNS to
lie about the existence of domain names, they actually prevent anybody
else from providing any solution. This is the exact opposite of
innovation. And they are smart people at Verisign, they clearly and
obviously know all this, and yet they are lying to every one about
it. And that, in a nutshell is what makes me more furious about this
than any other Internet legal issue has in a long long time, maybe
ever, or at least since Network Solutions took the.com database
offline and made it their own private property.
There was a story I heard once, about a company (Novell ?) which
implemented their own file transfer protocol over the network. They
did not use exponential backoff on retransmit, which made their
protocol look much faster than TCP/IP. It would in fact hog all the
bandwidth, bumping out all the more polite and well behaved
protocols. This was great for them, but in fact as the network
approached saturation, the system would fail catastrophically, for
reasons obvious to Internet protocol designers.
At some meta-level, this is what is happening to the Internet itself
now. Verisign is itself like the bad protocol, which does not play
well with others. It is taking advantage of an opportunity which gives
it a short term advantage, while degrading the entire network protocol
infrastructure.
Verisign's "site finder" effectively forged fraudulent whois data by making all unknown request to.com forward to their site. Congress should put those thieves in jail.
Darl seemed to say a few reasonable things--they claim ownership of a certain body of IP and that IBM distributed that IP illegally. Both of those claims are under contention, but he stated that that's for the courts to decide. This, to me, seems perfectly reasonable--I may not agree that SCO has a case, but they obviously think they do, and the courts are the proper forum to determine this.
No, he is not being reasonable. Whatever claims he is making are in bad faith. Because he won't tell anyone what the alleged infringing code is. The excuse that "that's a trade secret" is horseshit, because the code is already released under GPL, and is freely available to anyone. He flames on at length about how SCO is the abused party here, but he gives no chance for the Linux developers, who are working in good faith, to address the issue. He wants to make his company seem as damaged as possible, even if it means lying. The author of that
writeup was naive and gullible for trying to seem fair and balanced. When you get a little older, you will see that being objective and being unbiased are not the same thing.
SoundBlox is an MP3 audio playing Internet application that can be embedded into a personal blog template or Web page, and displayed in any modern Web browser.
Every time I hear about a "roadside bomb" killing our soliders in Iraq, I think "why don't they have automated vehicles to send ahead as decoys?". They could even be remote controlled, they don't need to be autonomous.
I suppose we will eventually be building Terminators. That is fine, until the enemy gets them as well. By that time, let's home we have disarmed and defeated all the dictators and totalitarian states this kind of thing won't be needed.
He never produced anything himself, and never did any actual R&D. He would read up on what was happening in a field, from trade magazines and the like, and modify some overly general patent application he had to track changes, delaying as long as possible so that when an industry actually was making money, he could add bits and pieces of existing technologies to his patents.
It's not a lot of money, about what you'll pay walking in to Starbucks for a coffee and an overpriced pastry.
The idea of putting high quality detailed information about everything up for free and open to contributions is a wonderful gift to humanity.
My opinion of Slashdot's user community, on the other hand, has gone down considerably after reading the sour bitch-fest that some people have been posting.
The world moves forward when bold and inspired and tenacious people sit down and create something new. We should be applauding and supporting them. If you have nothing useful to contribute to your fellow human beings, you can at least shut up while other people get on with it.
This was a very chilling scenario, thank you for painting it for us. Unless we watch ourselves, it *will* happen. The DMCA and "palladium" are like storm clouds gathering, and with all that technology for supressing the communication of data, it is not a question of 'if' but 'when' malevolent people will try to exert control over the population. They already are.
ESR is a loose cannon, he cannot avoid putting his foot in his mouth every time he claims to speak for "us". RMS never claims the be the self-appointed leader of anyone, nor does Linus. Just ESR for some reason.
I just posted this in an earlier SCO story, but I thought it was worth posting again -- I sent a letter to our congressman, Barney Frank (D- MASS), about SCO's abusive use of the court system. He sent this reply:
- - - - September 26, 2003
Dear Mr. Minsky,
I share your view that the suits being brought by the SCO Group against the users of the Linux system are an entirely inappropriate use of the legal systems for broader corporate purposes. While I have not been able, obviously, to examine these in detail, the suits do not appear to me, from what I have read, to have any merit, and in fact seem to be motivated, as I said, by an effort simply to prevent the use of Linux for competitive reasons.
There is, unfortunately, a very limited role for Congress here. I agree with those who would like to see us "stop SCO from punishing innocent consumers to inflate its other legal claims." But under our separation of powers doctrine, Congress has no role whatsoever to play in the pursuit of particular cases. We can pass laws which prevent certain types of suits from being brought, but it is very, very difficult to pass those in a way that would be retroactive ? that is, that would apply to existing suits. And the problem with this suit is not that it is of a sort of legal claim that is inappropriate to bring, but that it is totally unjustified on the merits. In other words, the remedy here is for these suits to be dismissed on their merits and Congress has no role, as I have said, in doing that.
I am prepared to join in expressions of extreme disapproval of what SCO is doing, and I will be consulting with my colleagues to see if there is a movement to do that. I hope that will have some impact on them. All of these lawsuits brought against individuals will of course be dismissed but I realize that is of little consolation to people who have had to go through the trouble and expense of defending against them. It may be that at some point a judge will act decisively enough in this regard to prevent this proliferation of suits, and while, as I said, our Congressional role is very limited here, I will be encouraging anything we can do along these lines.
The software was released before it was ready. That's obvious. It seems to me that a closed source shop would be theoretically better positioned to meet an immutable deadline (such as an election date). At least when you own your employees you can mandate overtime and crack the whip harder. When the software is open source you cannot enter "crunch mode" and make the scattered developers put in long hours.
You have a naive view of software development if you think that anyone, open or closed source, can be made to meet an immutable deadline without some kind of tradeoff. Either the code ships when feature and quality goals are met, or one of those things is slipped. In general the process cannot be speeded up if the team is already working at full efficiency.
When SCO was going around threatening end users, I sent a letter to my congressman, Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Here is his response:
====
September 26, 2003
Dear Mr. Minsky,
I share your view that the suits being brought by the SCO Group against the users of the Linux system are an entirely inappropriate use of the legal systems for broader corporate purposes. While I have note been able, obviously, to examine these in detail, the suits do not appear to me, from what I have read, to have any merit, and in fact seem to be motivated, as I said, by an effort simply to prevent the use of Linux for competitive reasons.
There is, unfortunately, a very limited role for Congress here. I agree with those who would like to see us "stop SCO from punishing innocent consumers to inflate its other legal claims." But under our separation of powers doctrine, Congress has no role whatsoever to play in the pursuit of particular cases. We can pass laws which prevent certain types of suits from being brought, but it is very, very difficult to pass those in a way that would be retroactive - that is, that would apply to existing suits. And the problem with this suit is not that it is of a sort of legal claim that is inappropriate to bring, but that it is totally unjustified on the merits. In other words, the remedy here is for these suits to be dismissed on their merits and Congress has no role, as I have said, in doing that.
I am prepared to join in expressions of extreme disapproval of what SCO is doing, and I will be consulting with my colleagues to see if there is a movement to do that. I hope that will have some impact on them. All of these lawsuits brought against individuals will of course be dismissed but I realize that is of little consolation to people who have had to go through the trouble and expense of defending against them. It may be that at some point a judge will act decisively enough in this regard to prevent this proliferation of suits, and while, as I said, our Congressional role is very limited here, I will be encouraging anything we can do along these lines.
I think in the wave after wave of unbelievable crap that SCO has been dishing out, people have overlooked one very scary and terrible thing. SCO is basically funded by Microsoft at this point. Publicly, Microsoft has given SCO a reported "multimillion dollar license". That is a huge amount of money, enough to keep SCO afloat for years if they are careful. And then then after that $50 million more showed up from some "investors", and I would bet following that money trail would lead to Microsoft as well.
Forget all the speculation about what SCO thinks will happen; they have just pocketed millions of dollars in cold hard cash from their "terror masters" (as George Bush would refer to them) at Microsoft.
So it does not matter one bit if SCO has no long term way to profit from the scam they are pulling. They are providing hundreds of millions of dollars in "service" to Microsoft by creating fear and doubt about free software and Linux, and all they have to do is keep it up to ensure a steady supply of "license fees" from Microsoft.
if there was ever a time for the Justice Department to investigate monopoly practices by Microsoft it would be now, but I think they are too big an assortment of chuckleheads to understand what is going on now.
Below are comments I have on an interview with the CEO of Verislime. The greater issue here is that of people poisoning standards for their own short term gain. This guy is either a cynical liar or incompetent to be in charge of the root DNS for.com. I am almost certain that it is the former.
After a couple of weeks on the hot seat, VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos is turning up the fire on his company's severest critics.
The Site Finder controversy
You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread criticism. What's the next step?
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes to the question of are we going to be in a position to do innovation on this infrastructure or are we going to be locked into obsolete thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than what it was originally supposed to do?
Still, a lot of people in the Internet community were quite surprised by Site Finder--and then you had complaints surfacing that it was not complying to approved standards.
Let's break the argument down: The claim that Site Finder was nonstandard and that we should have informed the community we were doing something nonstandard--excuse me: Site Finder is completely standards-compliant to standards that have been out and published by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for years. That's just a misnomer. The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) in its review of Site Finder said the very same thing--that VeriSign was adhering to standards.
What we're seeing are predetermined opinions masquerading as processes where the outcome is predetermined.
The second claim, that we brought it out without testing--Site Finder had been operational since March or April and we had been testing it with individual companies and with the DNS traffic at large. Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP, and so it handles it the way it should. Just so you know, our customer service lines went from 800 or 900 calls on the first day to almost zero right now. Every customer who had a Site Finder issue, the remediation took less than 12 hours.
His definition of "standards-compliant" is a cynical and deceptive one. Sure, the SiteFinder is complying with the standard, in that it is returning well formatted packets. However the content of those packets are lies. They are lying by saying that domains exist when they do not, in order to fool web browsers into loading the commercial content that Verisign wants to get to web surfers.
It is analogous to saying that if I put a detour sign in the middle of the freeway to direct traffic to my shopping mall, that I am obeying the traffic sign protocols.
The comment about "ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP" is a shorthand way to sum up why it is not possible to communicate with Verisign's executives, and why they must be stopped and soon. Within that short phrase there is a huge and perhaps insurmountable issue as to how Verisign thinks the Internet protocols should work.
Because it wouldn't matter if one hundred percent of the traffic on the internet were HTTP, it still is not a reason to break DNS in order to insert advertising. The "service" they claim to be providing should be provided by the browsers, giving everyone a chance to implement their own solution to the problem of mistyped domain names. Then many possible solutions to this issue can be innovated. By breaking DNS to lie about the existence of domain names, they actually prevent anybody else from providing any solution. This is the exact opposite of innovation. And they are smart people at Verisign, they clearly and obviously know all this, and yet they are lying to every one about it. Mr Sclavos is spinning
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/01 09.3/1579.html Look at this thread, there is some miscommunication about what exactly protection is provided by reiserfs in the face of unexpected system shutdown ; note that they seem to have a problem with file content corruption due to lazy writebacks.
NTT DoCoMo iMode shows why WAP is CRAP
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 1
The IMode phones in Japan use a stripped down version of HTML called CHTML (Compact HTML). It turns out it works better than WAP, and is much easier for developers to generate. You don't need all that "card deck" crap that's in WAP; in iMode all the basic HTML forms and other controls work just fine. And they support GIF images and JPG. WAP solved a problem that did not exist, and in practice is implemented so poorly that you have little chance of a WAP phone actually working (i.e.., max packet sizes, compression settings, are never standard enough to guarantee interop).
WAP is CRAP. HTML is quite sufficient for mobile device use. End of story.
Microsoft wanted Eolas to win. It means they have to close their browser down to third party plugins. It was probably worth $5 billion to them to lose that case. It means they *own* the desktop, and no one can accuse them of monopolistic practices if they close their browser up to any third party extensions.
I would like everyone to take every opportunity to refer to Microsoft's 'trusted' computing as "restricted computing" instead. We need to get this meme going in the mass-market consumer mind. Every place you would ever refer to "trusted" computing, use the phrase "restricted computing" instead. DRM is "restriction management". There are no "rights" here, just restrictions. "RM" should be called "restriction management". If we can get enough steam behind this now, we can turn the debate around to let people really understand what they are dealing with. "Trusted" my ass!
Slashdot Mirror
The right place to put a search engine hook for non-existent domains is in the browser. But by lying about the existence of domains that are looked up, Verisign's sitefinder makes it so nobody can write their own host lookup service for a browser. So they are in fact removing the ability of people to write their own handlers for this conditions, aside from how they break all the other non-HTTP protocols.
Verisign should have their contract yanked, as soon as possible. No ifs and or buts.
The LISP machines built at the MIT AI Lab had hardware which worked in parallel with the main CPU that checked things like array bounds and also did other types of tag checking, such as automatic runtime coercion of ints to floats and other things that are helpful to a high level language.
Since every object in LISP machine memory had a type tag, many useful operations could be parallelized, such as garbage collection and type dispatch for object oriented function calls.
The problem with languages like C is that they have no object semantics at all, so runtime bounds checking and other goodies don't work very well. The C weenies have everybody convinced that this is necessary to get the highest performance, but they don't realize that with a small amount of extra hardware, all these safety operations can be done in parallel. And since the C weenies influence the CPU designers, it is a vicious circle of bad machine architecture.
Stratton Sclavos, the CEO of Verisign, must be Darl McBride's secret twin brother, because he is using exactly the same lies, FUD, and ad-hominem attacks against the Internet technical community as SCO is using against the free software community.
.com
/You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread /*
...
There is an interview with Stratton Sclavos,CEO of Verisign, at http://news.com.com/2008-7347-5092590.html
Here are some highlights of the Q&A which particularly make my blood boil. This guy is both doing a smear campaign against the opposition to SiteFinder, and either has such a warped understanding
of how Internet protocols are developed and operate that he is incompetent to be in charge of the root DNS for
, or else he is a cynical liar. I believe the latter is the more likely. His comments about a "cultural divide" are true, but not
in the way he intends. The cultural divide is between the fair, decent, ethical, and technically responsible people and
the people such as himself.
*
*
*After a couple of weeks on the hot seat, VeriSign CEO Stratton
Sclavos is turning up the fire on his company's severest critics.*
*The Site Finder controversy
criticism. What's the next step?
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question of are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
Still, a lot of people in the Internet community were quite
surprised by Site Finder--and then you had complaints surfacing that
it was not complying to approved standards.
Let's break the argument down: The claim that Site Finder was
nonstandard and that we should have informed the community we were
doing something nonstandard--excuse me: Site Finder is completely
standards-compliant to standards that have been out and published by
the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for years. That's just a
misnomer. The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) in its review of
Site Finder said the very same thing--that VeriSign was adhering to
standards.
What we're seeing are predetermined opinions masquerading as
processes where the outcome is predetermined.
The second claim, that we brought it out without testing--Site
Finder had been operational since March or April and we had been
testing it with individual companies and with the DNS traffic at
large. Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP, and so it
handles it the way it should. Just so you know, our customer service
lines went from 800 or 900 calls on the first day to almost zero
right now. Every customer who had a Site Finder issue, the
remediation took less than 12 hours.
*You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread
criticism. What's the next step? *
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes
to the question: Are we going to be in a position to do innovation
on this infrastructure, or are we going to be locked into obsolete
thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than
what it was originally supposed to do?
*
You're hinting at a cultural divide? *
I think that there is. I don't think it's an intentional divide, but
it's drifting apart of the day-to-day usage from the folks who did
great steward's work in the early days and were asked to define all
the standards to make it work.
*And those are the people who still dominate the standards bodies? *
They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right now. It's
not OK to say standards are important, un
to figure out how to rape the Internet and steal more stuff from the naive geeks who built it in good faith and for all humanity.
It is analogous to saying that if I put a detour sign in the middle of the freeway to direct traffic to my shopping mall, that I am obeying the traffic sign protocols.
The comment about "ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP" is a shorthand way to sum up why it is not possible to communicate with Verisign's executives, and why they must be stopped and soon.
Because it wouldn't matter if one hundred percent of the traffic on the internet were HTTP, it still is not a reason to break DNS in order to insert advertising. The "service" they claim to be providing should be provided by the browsers, giving everyone a chance to implement their own solution to the problem of mistyped domain names. Then many possible solutions to this issue can be innovated. By breaking DNS to lie about the existence of domain names, they actually prevent anybody else from providing any solution. This is the exact opposite of innovation. And they are smart people at Verisign, they clearly and obviously know all this, and yet they are lying to every one about it. And that, in a nutshell is what makes me more furious about this than any other Internet legal issue has in a long long time, maybe ever, or at least since Network Solutions took the .com database
offline and made it their own private property.
There was a story I heard once, about a company (Novell ?) which implemented their own file transfer protocol over the network. They did not use exponential backoff on retransmit, which made their protocol look much faster than TCP/IP. It would in fact hog all the bandwidth, bumping out all the more polite and well behaved protocols. This was great for them, but in fact as the network approached saturation, the system would fail catastrophically, for reasons obvious to Internet protocol designers.
At some meta-level, this is what is happening to the Internet itself now. Verisign is itself like the bad protocol, which does not play well with others. It is taking advantage of an opportunity which gives it a short term advantage, while degrading the entire network protocol infrastructure.
Verisign's "site finder" effectively forged fraudulent whois data by making all unknown request to .com forward to their site. Congress should put those thieves in jail.
No, he is not being reasonable. Whatever claims he is making are in bad faith. Because he won't tell anyone what the alleged infringing code is. The excuse that "that's a trade secret" is horseshit, because the code is already released under GPL, and is freely available to anyone. He flames on at length about how SCO is the abused party here, but he gives no chance for the Linux developers, who are working in good faith, to address the issue. He wants to make his company seem as damaged as possible, even if it means lying. The author of that writeup was naive and gullible for trying to seem fair and balanced. When you get a little older, you will see that being objective and being unbiased are not the same thing.
http://soundblox.blogspot.com/
SoundBlox is an MP3 audio playing Internet application that can be embedded into a personal blog template or Web page, and displayed in any modern Web browser.
John Perry Barlow has it on his blog page.
Every time I hear about a "roadside bomb" killing our soliders in Iraq, I think "why don't they have automated vehicles to send ahead as decoys?". They could even be remote controlled, they don't need to be autonomous.
I suppose we will eventually be building Terminators. That is fine, until the enemy gets them as well. By that time, let's home we have
disarmed and defeated all the dictators and totalitarian states this kind of thing won't be needed.
He never produced anything himself, and never did any actual R&D. He would read up on what was happening in a field, from trade magazines and the like, and modify some overly general patent application he had to track changes, delaying as long as possible so that when an industry actually was making money, he could add bits and pieces of existing technologies to his patents.
He was basically a parasite.
and apply auto level and color correction. It looks just like Arizona. Hey! It's a conspiracy!
It's not a lot of money, about what you'll pay walking in to Starbucks for a coffee and an overpriced pastry.
The idea of putting high quality detailed information about everything up for free and open to contributions is a wonderful gift to humanity.
My opinion of Slashdot's user community, on the other hand, has gone down considerably after reading the sour bitch-fest that some people have been posting.
The world moves forward when bold and inspired and tenacious people sit down and create something new. We should be applauding and supporting them. If you have nothing useful to contribute to your fellow human beings, you can at least shut up while other people get on with it.
This was a very chilling scenario, thank you for painting it for us. Unless we watch ourselves, it *will* happen. The DMCA and "palladium" are
like storm clouds gathering, and with all that technology for supressing the communication of data, it is not a question of 'if' but 'when' malevolent people will try to exert control over the population. They already are.
ESR is a loose cannon, he cannot avoid putting his foot in his mouth every time he claims to speak for "us". RMS never claims the be the self-appointed leader of anyone, nor does Linus. Just ESR for some reason.
I just posted this in an earlier SCO story, but I thought it was worth posting again -- I sent a letter to our congressman, Barney Frank (D- MASS), about SCO's abusive use of the court system. He sent this reply:
- - - -
September 26, 2003
Dear Mr. Minsky,
I share your view that the suits being brought by the SCO Group
against the users of the Linux system are an entirely inappropriate
use of the legal systems for broader corporate purposes. While I have
not been able, obviously, to examine these in detail, the suits do
not appear to me, from what I have read, to have any merit, and in
fact seem to be motivated, as I said, by an effort simply to prevent
the use of Linux for competitive reasons.
There is, unfortunately, a very limited role for Congress here. I
agree with those who would like to see us "stop SCO from punishing
innocent consumers to inflate its other legal claims." But under our
separation of powers doctrine, Congress has no role whatsoever to play
in the pursuit of particular cases. We can pass laws which prevent
certain types of suits from being brought, but it is very, very
difficult to pass those in a way that would be retroactive ? that is,
that would apply to existing suits. And the problem with this suit is
not that it is of a sort of legal claim that is inappropriate to
bring, but that it is totally unjustified on the merits. In other
words, the remedy here is for these suits to be dismissed on their
merits and Congress has no role, as I have said, in doing that.
I am prepared to join in expressions of extreme disapproval of what
SCO is doing, and I will be consulting with my colleagues to see if
there is a movement to do that. I hope that will have some impact on
them. All of these lawsuits brought against individuals will of course
be dismissed but I realize that is of little consolation to people
who have had to go through the trouble and expense of defending against
them. It may be that at some point a judge will act decisively enough
in this regard to prevent this proliferation of suits, and while, as I
said, our Congressional role is very limited here, I will be
encouraging anything we can do along these lines.
Barney Frank
The software was released before it was ready. That's obvious. It seems to me that a closed source shop would be theoretically better positioned to meet an immutable deadline (such as an election date). At least when you own your employees you can mandate overtime and crack the whip harder. When the software is open source you cannot enter "crunch mode" and make the scattered developers put in long hours.
You have a naive view of software development if you think that anyone, open or closed source, can be made to meet an immutable deadline without some kind of tradeoff. Either the code ships when feature and quality goals are met, or one of those things is slipped. In general the process cannot be speeded up if the team is already working at full efficiency.
When SCO was going around threatening end users, I sent a letter to my congressman, Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Here is his response:
====
September 26, 2003
Dear Mr. Minsky,
I share your view that the suits being brought by the SCO Group
against the users of the Linux system are an entirely inappropriate
use of the legal systems for broader corporate purposes. While I have
note been able, obviously, to examine these in detail, the suits do
not appear to me, from what I have read, to have any merit, and in
fact seem to be motivated, as I said, by an effort simply to prevent
the use of Linux for competitive reasons.
There is, unfortunately, a very limited role for Congress here. I
agree with those who would like to see us "stop SCO from punishing
innocent consumers to inflate its other legal claims." But under our
separation of powers doctrine, Congress has no role whatsoever to play
in the pursuit of particular cases. We can pass laws which prevent
certain types of suits from being brought, but it is very, very
difficult to pass those in a way that would be retroactive - that is,
that would apply to existing suits. And the problem with this suit is
not that it is of a sort of legal claim that is inappropriate to
bring, but that it is totally unjustified on the merits. In other
words, the remedy here is for these suits to be dismissed on their
merits and Congress has no role, as I have said, in doing that.
I am prepared to join in expressions of extreme disapproval of what
SCO is doing, and I will be consulting with my colleagues to see if
there is a movement to do that. I hope that will have some impact on
them. All of these lawsuits brought against individuals will of course
be dismissed but I realize that is of little consolation to people
who have had to go through the trouble and expense of defending against
them. It may be that at some point a judge will act decisively enough
in this regard to prevent this proliferation of suits, and while, as I
said, our Congressional role is very limited here, I will be
encouraging anything we can do along these lines.
Barney Frank
when someone answers their finger phone and then says "it's for you..."
I think in the wave after wave of unbelievable crap that SCO has been dishing out, people have overlooked one very scary and terrible thing. SCO is basically funded by Microsoft at this point. Publicly, Microsoft has given SCO
a reported "multimillion dollar license". That is a huge amount of money, enough to keep SCO afloat for years if they are careful. And then then after that $50 million more showed up from some "investors", and I would bet following that money trail would lead to Microsoft as well.
Forget all the speculation about what SCO thinks will happen; they have just pocketed millions of dollars in cold hard cash from their "terror masters" (as George Bush would refer to them) at
Microsoft.
So it does not matter one bit if SCO has no long term way to profit from the scam they are pulling. They are providing hundreds of millions of dollars in "service" to Microsoft by creating fear and doubt about free software and Linux, and all they have to do is keep it up to ensure a steady supply of "license fees" from Microsoft.
if there was ever a time for the Justice Department to investigate monopoly practices by Microsoft it would be now, but I think they are too big an assortment of chuckleheads to understand what is going on now.
The cultural divide and the Internet's future |CNET.com
.com. I am almost certain that it is the former.
Below are comments I have on an interview with the CEO of Verislime. The greater issue here is that of people poisoning standards for their own short term gain. This guy is either a cynical liar or incompetent to be in charge of the root DNS for
After a couple of weeks on the hot seat, VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos is turning up the fire on his company's severest critics.
His definition of "standards-compliant" is a cynical and deceptive one. Sure, the SiteFinder is complying with the standard, in that it is returning well formatted packets. However the content of those packets are lies. They are lying by saying that domains exist when they do not, in order to fool web browsers into loading the commercial content that Verisign wants to get to web surfers.
It is analogous to saying that if I put a detour sign in the middle of the freeway to direct traffic to my shopping mall, that I am obeying the traffic sign protocols.
The comment about "ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP" is a shorthand way to sum up why it is not possible to communicate with Verisign's executives, and why they must be stopped and soon. Within that short phrase there is a huge and perhaps insurmountable issue as to how Verisign thinks the Internet protocols should work.
Because it wouldn't matter if one hundred percent of the traffic on the internet were HTTP, it still is not a reason to break DNS in order to insert advertising. The "service" they claim to be providing should be provided by the browsers, giving everyone a chance to implement their own solution to the problem of mistyped domain names. Then many possible solutions to this issue can be innovated. By breaking DNS to lie about the existence of domain names, they actually prevent anybody else from providing any solution. This is the exact opposite of innovation. And they are smart people at Verisign, they clearly and obviously know all this, and yet they are lying to every one about it. Mr Sclavos is spinning
Well said! Saves me the trouble of tearing the guy a new asshoxxxx I mean educating him as to the shortcomings in his article.
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0
Look at this thread, there is some miscommunication about what exactly protection is provided by reiserfs in the face of unexpected system shutdown ; note that they seem to have a problem with file content corruption due to lazy writebacks.
The IMode phones in Japan use a stripped down version of HTML called CHTML (Compact HTML). It turns out it works better than WAP, and is much easier for developers to generate. You don't need all that "card deck" crap that's in WAP; in iMode all the basic HTML forms and other controls work just fine. And they support GIF images and JPG. WAP solved a problem that did not exist, and in practice is implemented so poorly that you have little chance of a WAP phone actually working (i.e.., max packet sizes, compression settings, are never standard enough to guarantee interop).
WAP is CRAP. HTML is quite sufficient for mobile device use. End of story.
Microsoft wanted Eolas to win. It means they have to close their browser down to third party plugins. It was probably worth $5 billion to them
to lose that case. It means they *own* the desktop, and no one can accuse them of monopolistic practices if they close their browser up to any third party extensions.
I would like everyone to take every opportunity to refer to Microsoft's 'trusted' computing as "restricted computing" instead. We need to get this meme going in the mass-market consumer mind. Every place you would ever refer to "trusted" computing, use the phrase "restricted computing" instead. DRM is "restriction management". There are no "rights" here, just restrictions. "RM" should be called "restriction management". If we can get enough steam behind this now, we can turn the debate around to let people really understand what they are dealing with. "Trusted" my ass!