Note that the comment that I originally replied to said nothing of the conversations that occurred. So I listed legal means, which he totally ignored, to determine security flaws without putting any illegal conversations in there.
I wasn't giving my opinion about the article (I figure the feds did the right thing, including get a warrant), just my opinion of the overly general comment that I replied to.
So, if someone breaks into my house and demands money to fix it, should I honour that? No, I'd by perfectly jsutified in holding them at gun point and calling the police to have them punished. Regardless of thier intent, it's MY house and you'd better not enter it without my permission.
So I'm walking down the street, just looking around, and I notice your front door is open. I take a closer look and notice that you don't have a doorknob, either. I ring your doorbell, mention that you have much less security than what people would generally expect, and that I (or someone else who's qualified) can fix your problem. Have I committed any crime? I then look above your door and see that this is a business establishment, and knowing how most businesses operate, that you don't have your client files secured any more than your premises (not a stretch in both the physical or computer world). So I mention that I'll be driving by in a month or so, and if the door is still wide open, and the doorknob is still missing, that I'll go to some place where your clients frequent and put up a notice about your shoddy practices. Is there any crime in that?
There are many things you can do that don't equate to criminal activity that can tell you a lot about someone else's web site. The properties on java includes and images can point you to potential security breaches, which someone would argue is like walking through an open door - doesn't require any effort, but is still tresspassing. Maybe I noticed that user info is passed through URLs (remember the hotmail problem?) - in that case I haven't even tied to do something unusual with the pages presented to me by the site (like using special characters to see if there is a poorly setup SQL connection), I'm doing what they want me to do. I'm not saying that any of this is what he did, but there a great many things you can do that are entirely expected by the web host that will give you an indication of any security breaches.
This puts the licensees in a difficult position: they have absolutely no idea whether or not they are violating the license.
I'd take a different route: "We're quite eager to settle any issues you may have with other operating systems that we may have. Unfortunately, we have no means of comparing your OS with other OSes withour access to a copy of your source code. If you could forward this to us, we would be very happy to take every effort to determine if any OSes we may be using do not infringe upon your copyright." That should make them pause for thought. And if they do send it to you, forward it to some hired consultants, preferably some informed people, like the Linux kernel programmers.
...but if it's terrorists you're worried about, they now have much more to fear from the passengers than from a computer system...
And this is the reason something like 9/11 won't happen again for a long time. People got complacent, figuring that if they just kept their heads down, they would probably walk away from any hijacking. What they didn't take into consideration was that this would make it more desirable for terrorists (it makes their task less risky), and that terrorists might change their success criteria. Now that people are aware once again that there are worse things than being inconvenienced for a few hours (days?) if they let the situation be controlled by the terrorists, the terrorists won't even try it. They will move on to something that is less risky, and likelier to succeed, such as car bombings and other activities. Remember, terror is rarely caused by the expected.
I once (and only once) had an alarm clock where the alarm and snooze button were broken. The only way to stop the damned thing was to unplug it. It was working pretty well until I woke up one morning, and realized that I didn't have to go anywhere. When I tried to unplug it, it wouldn't come out - it was jammed behind the bed. So here I am, laying on my bed, eyes closed, slamming this clock against the basement floor, hearing it make sounds it was never meant to make. It finally died, and when I finally woke up, I was still holding it. Those were the days...
Why is consent the determining factor? Does a child consent to being given injections or going to the dentist? How about eating broccoli? In these situations the issue is not one of consent but "greater good"...
Wow, you're amazing, both placing consent and the greater good on the same level in this, of all topics. For the two things listed above, the parents must give consent, unless they are mandated by the government (which is another topic), or you can sue the practitioner performing the procedure. So consent is being given by those responsible for people who we, as a society, have decided are not yet capable of being responsible for themselves.
Now where is the greater good for anyone engaging in sexual activity, let alone a child? Not saying I have anything against sex, and not saying that it doesn't improves my existence, but how the HELL does my having sex improve yours (assuming that you're not partner to the activity, of course)?
Now, you might be able to argue that the age of consent is too high, and you could probably find a lot of good evidence to support it, but the definition of "children" extends down to, and includes, infancy.
Of course you can't say it - it's wrong. We already have a three-tier system.
First tier: Canadian-run facilities, whether they be public or private.
Second tier: Veterinaries. Yes, veterinaries. Articles have been written (and no, I'm not going to look them up) that a decently qualified MRI tech at a veterinary can do an MRI on a human that can be easily read by the specialist. And it's cheaper than going stateside.
Third tier: The United States. If you have the bucks, and you don't want to wait until you die for your special needs, you can always go south.
Believe it or not, but Linux can not Legally be exported from the US to Iraq.
FreeBSD is compiled in counties without software munitions laws, specifically for reasons like that. Finally, not only is BSD not dead, but may have found an environment to thrive in.
Come on, show your geek heritage. The appropriate finale, especially given the upcoming event, would be, 'and "osascript -e" to rule them all, and in the command-line bind them...'
Looong ago, I started using computers. Apple II, Mac's, Windows, more windows, and more windows, and UNIX. So here I am, armed with knowledge from reading the complete DOS 5.0 command reference (summary, do everything you can to stay away from a serious DOS script), and I look at UNIX. I spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to do anything besides log out before I log out. And off to the store I go to buy UNIX for Dummies. Now I'm sitting at a unix workstation with a Dummies book, thereby being called a loser by both the geeks and the non-geeks, and looking at commands that do exactly what happens in a basic DOS session. And here's what I learned about the commands used in bash (the only shell I bothered to learn at the time)*:
Take an action you wish to perform, say, see everything in a directory. Think of every command you can think of that sounds like it would do this: directory, catalog, list. Now, discard any command that has been used for that purpose in another OS. That takes care of directory (DOS) and catalog (Apple II), leaving list. Now, remove all the vowels - they're useless anyway. This leaves us with 'lst'. Last, use only the first two letters. Ah, there it is: 'ls'. If this conflicts with another possible unix command (or you unwittingly used a command from an interface more obscure than the Apple II command-line), the more common command (surprisingly) gets the abbreviation, and you need to go back to the top with another possible command.
I may have missed a couple rules, and there might be a couple exceptions, but this handy guide will solve half your problems for figuring out unix commands.
*I already said that this was long ago, and when I first learned unix, and that it is a general rule, so don't go talking about things like chmod, etc.
Windows programmers see the actual data processing as a secondary task that the GUI (and only the GUI) makes happen. Unix programmers see the GUI as a seperate app, which monitors and controls the central data processing app.
You're right on the first point, but need to try a little harder on the second one. Even Windows programmers know the difference between single-app (I can't remember the right name, but I don't write those), client/server, 3-tier, and n-tier. Programming. Hell, MS has books that talk about it. Of course, you might argue that VB programmers can't read anyway...
I would guess that it has nothing to do with supercooling. Human blood freezes at -2 or -3 degrees. Slightly different chemistry could make the freezing point lower for the squirrels.
Also, keep in mind that 60 degrees farenheit is pretty far from freezing and that the inside of your house is unlikely to reach the temperatures required to freeze the pipes *inside* your home.
If he lives in northern U.S, in the Rockies, in Alaska, or any number of places outside the U.S., it is very reasonable to assume that your furnace not working for a day or two will cause your pipes to freeze.
I think the more interesting thing that Linus said is that modules that are derived from a non-Linux source may be by definition not derived from Linux. This leads to a conundrum, and a position that may have legal backing. If the only difference between two modules is that one was initially designed for Linux and the other wasn't, how can it be reasonable to assume that the license restrictions are different? What if the source was identical (for, say, the BSD driver), but I compiled for Linux first? Of course, this only applies if the Linux module doesn't use Linux-specific commands, which one would think is a goal of portability. These are the kinds of issues that judges resolve. This also happens to be one of the (maybe the only) elements of the GPL that I find implausible, and may come to a court decision to see if it stands.
You may be familiar with computers, but apparently not history. Pick any (populated) region over any couple centuries, and you will find atrocities of a greater scale than present-day corporate america. Tell me, would you rather be unemployed in Canada, or living in Genghis Khan's path? Too ugly, not germaine enough? How about Europe during the industrial revolution? People were often treated with as much humanity as the machines they worked with. How about Rome, the birthplace of democracy? Not a bad life if you were a citizen, quite a good one if you were a rich one. But take away either one, and it gets bad fast.
Life in western civilization isn't half as bad as most anything else out there, past or present. People have been exploiting each other throughout recorded history. No epiphanies here...
Welcome to the New Free America, where anonymous financial transactions are illegal (even vaguely). Apparently, you have a different kind of vagrant, who gives out receipts, or only accepts debit/credit/cheques. Thank God the cops where I live don't handcuff you when you decide to give someone you don't know cash for no reason and with no identification.
There is no arctic continent. It is mostly a big sheet of ice on the ocean. This is why it would not affect the worldwide water levels if it melted, as opposed to the glaciers on Antarctica, Greenland, and elsewhere. Of course, it would have other climatic effects.
Look how far Windows has gotten with nothing more than a couple colored squares.
There are four colored squares, (eight if you count the faded ones) surrounded by wavy lines! They've spent billions of dollars designing, modifying, and marketing that logo, and if they have an inkling that there is someone out there that can't draw it from memory, they're liable to do it again! Now apologize - I don't want to see any more of their commercials!
It may not be as simple as recompiling GCC (because the jig creates a dovetail creating jig, not another jig that creates a dovetail creating jig), but if I was annoyed, that's what I'd do.
And there is the rub. With old compilers, you could make...a compiler. This results in recursion, which points out the flaw in the system (how many generations do I have to be removed before I can use the tool wherever I like?). This is totally different here, since recursion is not present - the tool you make doesn't perform the same functions as the tool you licensed.
I'm not commenting on whether I think this is right, and I'm not yet decided, but your analogy is completely flawed, lacking the same basis as the current case.
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Note that the comment that I originally replied to said nothing of the conversations that occurred. So I listed legal means, which he totally ignored, to determine security flaws without putting any illegal conversations in there.
I wasn't giving my opinion about the article (I figure the feds did the right thing, including get a warrant), just my opinion of the overly general comment that I replied to.
So, if someone breaks into my house and demands money to fix it, should I honour that? No, I'd by perfectly jsutified in holding them at gun point and calling the police to have them punished. Regardless of thier intent, it's MY house and you'd better not enter it without my permission.
So I'm walking down the street, just looking around, and I notice your front door is open. I take a closer look and notice that you don't have a doorknob, either. I ring your doorbell, mention that you have much less security than what people would generally expect, and that I (or someone else who's qualified) can fix your problem. Have I committed any crime? I then look above your door and see that this is a business establishment, and knowing how most businesses operate, that you don't have your client files secured any more than your premises (not a stretch in both the physical or computer world). So I mention that I'll be driving by in a month or so, and if the door is still wide open, and the doorknob is still missing, that I'll go to some place where your clients frequent and put up a notice about your shoddy practices. Is there any crime in that?
There are many things you can do that don't equate to criminal activity that can tell you a lot about someone else's web site. The properties on java includes and images can point you to potential security breaches, which someone would argue is like walking through an open door - doesn't require any effort, but is still tresspassing. Maybe I noticed that user info is passed through URLs (remember the hotmail problem?) - in that case I haven't even tied to do something unusual with the pages presented to me by the site (like using special characters to see if there is a poorly setup SQL connection), I'm doing what they want me to do. I'm not saying that any of this is what he did, but there a great many things you can do that are entirely expected by the web host that will give you an indication of any security breaches.
This puts the licensees in a difficult position: they have absolutely no idea whether or not they are violating the license.
I'd take a different route: "We're quite eager to settle any issues you may have with other operating systems that we may have. Unfortunately, we have no means of comparing your OS with other OSes withour access to a copy of your source code. If you could forward this to us, we would be very happy to take every effort to determine if any OSes we may be using do not infringe upon your copyright." That should make them pause for thought. And if they do send it to you, forward it to some hired consultants, preferably some informed people, like the Linux kernel programmers.
...but if it's terrorists you're worried about, they now have much more to fear from the passengers than from a computer system...
And this is the reason something like 9/11 won't happen again for a long time. People got complacent, figuring that if they just kept their heads down, they would probably walk away from any hijacking. What they didn't take into consideration was that this would make it more desirable for terrorists (it makes their task less risky), and that terrorists might change their success criteria. Now that people are aware once again that there are worse things than being inconvenienced for a few hours (days?) if they let the situation be controlled by the terrorists, the terrorists won't even try it. They will move on to something that is less risky, and likelier to succeed, such as car bombings and other activities. Remember, terror is rarely caused by the expected.
I once (and only once) had an alarm clock where the alarm and snooze button were broken. The only way to stop the damned thing was to unplug it. It was working pretty well until I woke up one morning, and realized that I didn't have to go anywhere. When I tried to unplug it, it wouldn't come out - it was jammed behind the bed. So here I am, laying on my bed, eyes closed, slamming this clock against the basement floor, hearing it make sounds it was never meant to make. It finally died, and when I finally woke up, I was still holding it. Those were the days...
Why is consent the determining factor? Does a child consent to being given injections or going to the dentist? How about eating broccoli? In these situations the issue is not one of consent but "greater good"...
Wow, you're amazing, both placing consent and the greater good on the same level in this, of all topics. For the two things listed above, the parents must give consent, unless they are mandated by the government (which is another topic), or you can sue the practitioner performing the procedure. So consent is being given by those responsible for people who we, as a society, have decided are not yet capable of being responsible for themselves.
Now where is the greater good for anyone engaging in sexual activity, let alone a child? Not saying I have anything against sex, and not saying that it doesn't improves my existence, but how the HELL does my having sex improve yours (assuming that you're not partner to the activity, of course)?
Now, you might be able to argue that the age of consent is too high, and you could probably find a lot of good evidence to support it, but the definition of "children" extends down to, and includes, infancy.
Of course you can't say it - it's wrong. We already have a three-tier system.
First tier: Canadian-run facilities, whether they be public or private.
Second tier: Veterinaries. Yes, veterinaries. Articles have been written (and no, I'm not going to look them up) that a decently qualified MRI tech at a veterinary can do an MRI on a human that can be easily read by the specialist. And it's cheaper than going stateside.
Third tier: The United States. If you have the bucks, and you don't want to wait until you die for your special needs, you can always go south.
Believe it or not, but Linux can not Legally be exported from the US to Iraq.
FreeBSD is compiled in counties without software munitions laws, specifically for reasons like that. Finally, not only is BSD not dead, but may have found an environment to thrive in.
and "osascript -e" to tie it all together...
Come on, show your geek heritage. The appropriate finale, especially given the upcoming event, would be, 'and "osascript -e" to rule them all, and in the command-line bind them...'
Looong ago, I started using computers. Apple II, Mac's, Windows, more windows, and more windows, and UNIX. So here I am, armed with knowledge from reading the complete DOS 5.0 command reference (summary, do everything you can to stay away from a serious DOS script), and I look at UNIX. I spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to do anything besides log out before I log out. And off to the store I go to buy UNIX for Dummies. Now I'm sitting at a unix workstation with a Dummies book, thereby being called a loser by both the geeks and the non-geeks, and looking at commands that do exactly what happens in a basic DOS session. And here's what I learned about the commands used in bash (the only shell I bothered to learn at the time)*:
Take an action you wish to perform, say, see everything in a directory.
Think of every command you can think of that sounds like it would do this: directory, catalog, list.
Now, discard any command that has been used for that purpose in another OS. That takes care of directory (DOS) and catalog (Apple II), leaving list.
Now, remove all the vowels - they're useless anyway. This leaves us with 'lst'.
Last, use only the first two letters. Ah, there it is: 'ls'. If this conflicts with another possible unix command (or you unwittingly used a command from an interface more obscure than the Apple II command-line), the more common command (surprisingly) gets the abbreviation, and you need to go back to the top with another possible command.
I may have missed a couple rules, and there might be a couple exceptions, but this handy guide will solve half your problems for figuring out unix commands.
*I already said that this was long ago, and when I first learned unix, and that it is a general rule, so don't go talking about things like chmod, etc.
Windows programmers see the actual data processing as a secondary task that the GUI (and only the GUI) makes happen. Unix programmers see the GUI as a seperate app, which monitors and controls the central data processing app.
You're right on the first point, but need to try a little harder on the second one. Even Windows programmers know the difference between single-app (I can't remember the right name, but I don't write those), client/server, 3-tier, and n-tier. Programming. Hell, MS has books that talk about it. Of course, you might argue that VB programmers can't read anyway...
I would guess that it has nothing to do with supercooling. Human blood freezes at -2 or -3 degrees. Slightly different chemistry could make the freezing point lower for the squirrels.
Also, keep in mind that 60 degrees farenheit is pretty far from freezing and that the inside of your house is unlikely to reach the temperatures required to freeze the pipes *inside* your home.
If he lives in northern U.S, in the Rockies, in Alaska, or any number of places outside the U.S., it is very reasonable to assume that your furnace not working for a day or two will cause your pipes to freeze.
I think the more interesting thing that Linus said is that modules that are derived from a non-Linux source may be by definition not derived from Linux. This leads to a conundrum, and a position that may have legal backing. If the only difference between two modules is that one was initially designed for Linux and the other wasn't, how can it be reasonable to assume that the license restrictions are different? What if the source was identical (for, say, the BSD driver), but I compiled for Linux first? Of course, this only applies if the Linux module doesn't use Linux-specific commands, which one would think is a goal of portability. These are the kinds of issues that judges resolve. This also happens to be one of the (maybe the only) elements of the GPL that I find implausible, and may come to a court decision to see if it stands.
You may be familiar with computers, but apparently not history. Pick any (populated) region over any couple centuries, and you will find atrocities of a greater scale than present-day corporate america. Tell me, would you rather be unemployed in Canada, or living in Genghis Khan's path? Too ugly, not germaine enough? How about Europe during the industrial revolution? People were often treated with as much humanity as the machines they worked with. How about Rome, the birthplace of democracy? Not a bad life if you were a citizen, quite a good one if you were a rich one. But take away either one, and it gets bad fast.
Life in western civilization isn't half as bad as most anything else out there, past or present. People have been exploiting each other throughout recorded history. No epiphanies here...
Fortunately, even with this greenhorn product, kernel panic is unlikely to cause a stampede...
Welcome to the New Free America, where anonymous financial transactions are illegal (even vaguely). Apparently, you have a different kind of vagrant, who gives out receipts, or only accepts debit/credit/cheques. Thank God the cops where I live don't handcuff you when you decide to give someone you don't know cash for no reason and with no identification.
There is no arctic continent. It is mostly a big sheet of ice on the ocean. This is why it would not affect the worldwide water levels if it melted, as opposed to the glaciers on Antarctica, Greenland, and elsewhere. Of course, it would have other climatic effects.
Look how far Windows has gotten with nothing more than a couple colored squares.
There are four colored squares, (eight if you count the faded ones) surrounded by wavy lines! They've spent billions of dollars designing, modifying, and marketing that logo, and if they have an inkling that there is someone out there that can't draw it from memory, they're liable to do it again! Now apologize - I don't want to see any more of their commercials!
They have neither brain nor backbone.
So they are politicians.
I wonder what a plot of stories/posts over time would look like...
I would guess it would look like a giant hand, with the middle finger raised...
I thought what you were saying was interesting, but you lost me somewhere after the second paragraph...
I never understood that about the Borg. Presumably they would have assimilated *some* marketing staff over the years...
Even the Borg have standards.
My bad, I recall reading that earlier.
It may not be as simple as recompiling GCC (because the jig creates a dovetail creating jig, not another jig that creates a dovetail creating jig), but if I was annoyed, that's what I'd do.
And there is the rub. With old compilers, you could make...a compiler. This results in recursion, which points out the flaw in the system (how many generations do I have to be removed before I can use the tool wherever I like?). This is totally different here, since recursion is not present - the tool you make doesn't perform the same functions as the tool you licensed.
I'm not commenting on whether I think this is right, and I'm not yet decided, but your analogy is completely flawed, lacking the same basis as the current case.