Boy oh boy, it really shows that you haven't seen a book in its raw, straight-from-the-author form. Even with digital goods, there's still plenty of requirement for editing and other things that a publisher currently does.
I know Slashdotters like to go on about buggy whip makers trying to force their extinct product on a society that no longer needs it, but this really isn't one of those cases - a publisher does more than take the final product from the author, slap a markup on it, and sell it to you.
On the BBC website (the link posted in the summary), and it was quite a prominent story - however, I went back to find it this morning and it's nowhere to be found, you have to use a direct link to get to it. Interesting...
The story itself is a typical example of UK officialdom vastly over-reacting, and has been picked up by many mainstream newspapers today - I hope this bloke is absolved and compensated by social services for their idiotic behaviour.
No, it's not irrelevant, infact it's as far from irrelevant as it's possible to be.
You can use all the correct methodologies you want, but if you haven't secured the environment then you are trusting everything else to be correctly coded.
Now, with OSes etc that's always going to be a factor to a degree, but the situation here is when you are trusting every other developer hosting their code in a shared platform - in that case you can do everything correctly, you can use PDO, you can turn off Globals, but you can't trust someone else to have done the same.
So its utterly relevant that the issue is not just applicable to "serious developers", it's the 14 year old who has banged something out before bedtime and uploaded it to their host - a compromised account is still a compromised account, whether it's a "serious developers" account or not, and their compromised account can expose your data without you ever doing anything wrong (other than picking a bad shared host).
The problem isn't people creating new languages, its people creating new languages with gaping holes to start off with - register Globals should have been rejected from the outset, instead it became ingrained into the language to the point where it's taken a decade to get rid of it in the latest versions.
The problem isn't "serious developers", it's those that aren't taking it seriously.
You can take all the precautions you like, but short of getting your own dedicated server and running nothing but your own code (or code you have audited), you are always at risk of the issues introduced by someone else. On a shared host, an exploit in someone elses code is only one local exploit away from your data...
We had a 14 year old work experience lad, who was the nephew of one of the owners of the business, and he wanted to become an app developer - when we chatted about this further, it turned out that his claimed "programming experience" amounted to using the drag-and-drop style of online website wizards, and using apps from the iTunes store.
He had a goal in mind, and he was raring to go, so we decided to embrace this enthusiasm and run with it - so we decided that the best thing for him to do during the two weeks with us was to design and build a basic app - he was thrilled by this. We gave him a task for two hours on the first morning, which was to research the apps out there and decide what was best to build (building a copy of something out there is easier for this sort of thing than coming up with the concept itself).
He came back with "I want to build World of Warcraft". Crap.
We eventually scaled him back to building a HTML5 version of tic-tac-toe, as the logic is simple, the graphics are simple, and the HTML experience travels well. He was given a lot of personal tutorials from myself and the other developers for the first two days, basically a beginners guide to HTML, and then told to see if he could come up with a basic page with a table in which would hold the game board - no styling, no JavaScript, just a basic page with a table.
Despite help from us developers being on tap (we encouraged questions, we discouraged "do it for me" - examples are fine so long as work and understanding was needed to translate the code into what he was doing, so a simple copy and paste wouldn't solve the set issue), by the end of the first day he hadn't grasped the concept of nested elements to build the table. What he came up with even IE barfed over.
The poor kid had no grasp for it at all. I hope it was a failure on our part rather than inability, but really it was inability. He never realised software development was so difficult, no realisation as to what was actually involved in the process or the building itself. He saw pretty things and thought they were simple to produce.
So, anyone who gets the chance to introduce a child to software development, please take it nice and slow and be prepared for lots of failures, lots of frustration and lots of patience.
By the end of the two weeks he was proclaiming he wanted to be a farmer. And now, I hear, he wants to hire out construction equipment (after he was given a day of work experience on a farm).
I'm sorry, but that entire argument is just fucking ridiculous, but I expect nothing less of a community such as Slashdot to come up with such rubbish.
The fact that an artist is influenced by those that went before him has absolutely nothing to do with the apparent appropriation of private, unreleased works - you have no right to those, no entitlement to them, and there is no justification you can give to support the forced acquisition of said private works.
I couldn't care less that Disney didn't invent Cinderella, or that Dan Brown didn't invent the Catholic Church - in time, society gets Disney's rendition of Cinderella and Dan Browns tales of mystery, but society does not have an automatic right to Disney's internal pitches, or Dan Browns private diary or abandoned works. Thats just ridiculous and bordering on an society with a problem.
The whole "x didn't invent y, so therefor everything x creates is owed to society at large" is sociopathic in nature - an individual is entitled to a degree of privacy, and if they do not want to release their work to the public then that should be their choice and their choice alone. And that includes privately selling the rights to said works in whatever manner they wish.
Only on Slashdot would such pure infantile bile such as yours actually get modded up.
There is certainly a case to be made that the issuing company should serve a penalty for making a false or mistaken claim, but its hardly their fault that Flickr have a completely brain dead way of reacting to takedown notices, so I doubt that any court would agree that they are responsible for the loss of comments or broken links - Flickr knows that the DMCA exists, they have an established process for dealing with violation notices and they know that there is a grace period during which a counter claim can be made.
The loss of data and links here is entirely Flickr's fault - their DMCA process should never result in the mess that it did, because there are always going to be situations where counter claims are successful.
The police don't summarily execute everyone they arrest when an allegation has been made, and thats basically what Flickr did here.
I'm sorry, is "society" really entitled to everything a person created, ever? Even if they themselves never published it to the world?
My opinion is that, no, society isn't entitled to everything - a person is quite entitled to not release something and its no loss at all to society at large, because it never influenced it in the first place.
Of course that sort of glosses over the assistance the US provided the UK prior to entering the war as well.
It has to be said, assistance that we actually only stopped repaying the US for a couple of years ago - that assistance was most certainly not free, it was infact very costly.
The thing that people have yet to touch on in this thread is that the bandwidth used does not just affect the end consumer that is having their connection increased or hijacked - and I'm not talking about the effect on other users on the network.
Let's talk peering arrangements. No ISP has access to the entire Internet, so they peer with other networks and backbones to increase their reach - and those agreements are routinely based on an amount of data transferred per period. Go over that agreed amount and the ISP has to pay. Routinely go over that agreed amount and they have to renegotiate the agreement. Routinely stay under the amount and the ISP can renegotiate a less costly agreement.
So yes, there is a real effect here, it's just some way downstream from you.
I personally am of the opinion that it doesn't matter whether they were never going to become a customer regardless, they are "enjoying" the product nonetheless.
Why aren't they jailing the CEOs of the cable companies instead for charging >5000 times the amount they pay for bandwidth for the average user?
Because thats neither fraud nor any other crime - its not illegal to not base your prices on your costs. The cable companies can charge what they like for their product.
Why aren't they jailing the AT&T and Verizon execs for bait-and-switch with the 'Unlimited' plans which are actually limited to single-digit bandwidth amounts?
Now that's a better example, and one I can't give an answer to.
It's all ass-backward, and this guy just had the balls to do something about it. Do your time, but do it proudly.
Sorry, but that's just a pathetic excuse for this guys actions, he didn't do anything justifiable or the be proud of.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy oh boy, it really shows that you haven't seen a book in its raw, straight-from-the-author form. Even with digital goods, there's still plenty of requirement for editing and other things that a publisher currently does.
I know Slashdotters like to go on about buggy whip makers trying to force their extinct product on a society that no longer needs it, but this really isn't one of those cases - a publisher does more than take the final product from the author, slap a markup on it, and sell it to you.
People had the same criticism (dirty screens) of the iPad and iPhone - never turned out to be a real issue.
On the BBC website (the link posted in the summary), and it was quite a prominent story - however, I went back to find it this morning and it's nowhere to be found, you have to use a direct link to get to it. Interesting...
The story itself is a typical example of UK officialdom vastly over-reacting, and has been picked up by many mainstream newspapers today - I hope this bloke is absolved and compensated by social services for their idiotic behaviour.
Really? Is finding proof of the Higgs Boson really the "most difference" that the Tevatron will have made during its long life?
No, it's not irrelevant, infact it's as far from irrelevant as it's possible to be.
You can use all the correct methodologies you want, but if you haven't secured the environment then you are trusting everything else to be correctly coded.
Now, with OSes etc that's always going to be a factor to a degree, but the situation here is when you are trusting every other developer hosting their code in a shared platform - in that case you can do everything correctly, you can use PDO, you can turn off Globals, but you can't trust someone else to have done the same.
So its utterly relevant that the issue is not just applicable to "serious developers", it's the 14 year old who has banged something out before bedtime and uploaded it to their host - a compromised account is still a compromised account, whether it's a "serious developers" account or not, and their compromised account can expose your data without you ever doing anything wrong (other than picking a bad shared host).
The problem isn't people creating new languages, its people creating new languages with gaping holes to start off with - register Globals should have been rejected from the outset, instead it became ingrained into the language to the point where it's taken a decade to get rid of it in the latest versions.
The problem isn't "serious developers", it's those that aren't taking it seriously.
You can take all the precautions you like, but short of getting your own dedicated server and running nothing but your own code (or code you have audited), you are always at risk of the issues introduced by someone else. On a shared host, an exploit in someone elses code is only one local exploit away from your data...
And if one of those people sleeping starts snoring loudly, do they deserve to get thwacked around the back of the head to make them shut the fuck up?
We had a 14 year old work experience lad, who was the nephew of one of the owners of the business, and he wanted to become an app developer - when we chatted about this further, it turned out that his claimed "programming experience" amounted to using the drag-and-drop style of online website wizards, and using apps from the iTunes store.
He had a goal in mind, and he was raring to go, so we decided to embrace this enthusiasm and run with it - so we decided that the best thing for him to do during the two weeks with us was to design and build a basic app - he was thrilled by this. We gave him a task for two hours on the first morning, which was to research the apps out there and decide what was best to build (building a copy of something out there is easier for this sort of thing than coming up with the concept itself).
He came back with "I want to build World of Warcraft". Crap.
We eventually scaled him back to building a HTML5 version of tic-tac-toe, as the logic is simple, the graphics are simple, and the HTML experience travels well. He was given a lot of personal tutorials from myself and the other developers for the first two days, basically a beginners guide to HTML, and then told to see if he could come up with a basic page with a table in which would hold the game board - no styling, no JavaScript, just a basic page with a table.
Despite help from us developers being on tap (we encouraged questions, we discouraged "do it for me" - examples are fine so long as work and understanding was needed to translate the code into what he was doing, so a simple copy and paste wouldn't solve the set issue), by the end of the first day he hadn't grasped the concept of nested elements to build the table. What he came up with even IE barfed over.
The poor kid had no grasp for it at all. I hope it was a failure on our part rather than inability, but really it was inability. He never realised software development was so difficult, no realisation as to what was actually involved in the process or the building itself. He saw pretty things and thought they were simple to produce.
So, anyone who gets the chance to introduce a child to software development, please take it nice and slow and be prepared for lots of failures, lots of frustration and lots of patience.
By the end of the two weeks he was proclaiming he wanted to be a farmer. And now, I hear, he wants to hire out construction equipment (after he was given a day of work experience on a farm).
I'm sorry, but that entire argument is just fucking ridiculous, but I expect nothing less of a community such as Slashdot to come up with such rubbish.
The fact that an artist is influenced by those that went before him has absolutely nothing to do with the apparent appropriation of private, unreleased works - you have no right to those, no entitlement to them, and there is no justification you can give to support the forced acquisition of said private works.
I couldn't care less that Disney didn't invent Cinderella, or that Dan Brown didn't invent the Catholic Church - in time, society gets Disney's rendition of Cinderella and Dan Browns tales of mystery, but society does not have an automatic right to Disney's internal pitches, or Dan Browns private diary or abandoned works. Thats just ridiculous and bordering on an society with a problem.
The whole "x didn't invent y, so therefor everything x creates is owed to society at large" is sociopathic in nature - an individual is entitled to a degree of privacy, and if they do not want to release their work to the public then that should be their choice and their choice alone. And that includes privately selling the rights to said works in whatever manner they wish.
Only on Slashdot would such pure infantile bile such as yours actually get modded up.
Or in other words, the normal Slashdot mantra...
There is certainly a case to be made that the issuing company should serve a penalty for making a false or mistaken claim, but its hardly their fault that Flickr have a completely brain dead way of reacting to takedown notices, so I doubt that any court would agree that they are responsible for the loss of comments or broken links - Flickr knows that the DMCA exists, they have an established process for dealing with violation notices and they know that there is a grace period during which a counter claim can be made.
The loss of data and links here is entirely Flickr's fault - their DMCA process should never result in the mess that it did, because there are always going to be situations where counter claims are successful.
The police don't summarily execute everyone they arrest when an allegation has been made, and thats basically what Flickr did here.
Still got more mod points I see?
Looks like the same person still doesn't have the balls...
I'd love to see how you came to that conclusion.
Evidently someone disagrees with me but doesn't have the balls to actually enter into discussion about it.
No, you do not have an entitlement to something just because it exists. There, I said it again.
I'm sorry, is "society" really entitled to everything a person created, ever? Even if they themselves never published it to the world?
My opinion is that, no, society isn't entitled to everything - a person is quite entitled to not release something and its no loss at all to society at large, because it never influenced it in the first place.
"Being in existence somewhere" never reasonably equates to "Should be available to me, just because I say so".
I'd actually answer all your points, but I rarely feel any benefit is gained from engaging an Anonymous Coward in actual discussion.
Especially one that just insults me at the end of their post.
I'd like to add that Israel contains the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, two very sacred Islamic sites.
It's worth pointing out that Israel doesn't contain either of those things, illegally occupied land contains both of those things.
Of course that sort of glosses over the assistance the US provided the UK prior to entering the war as well.
It has to be said, assistance that we actually only stopped repaying the US for a couple of years ago - that assistance was most certainly not free, it was infact very costly.
The thing that people have yet to touch on in this thread is that the bandwidth used does not just affect the end consumer that is having their connection increased or hijacked - and I'm not talking about the effect on other users on the network.
Let's talk peering arrangements. No ISP has access to the entire Internet, so they peer with other networks and backbones to increase their reach - and those agreements are routinely based on an amount of data transferred per period. Go over that agreed amount and the ISP has to pay. Routinely go over that agreed amount and they have to renegotiate the agreement. Routinely stay under the amount and the ISP can renegotiate a less costly agreement.
So yes, there is a real effect here, it's just some way downstream from you.
I personally am of the opinion that it doesn't matter whether they were never going to become a customer regardless, they are "enjoying" the product nonetheless.
Why aren't they jailing the CEOs of the cable companies instead for charging >5000 times the amount they pay for bandwidth for the average user?
Because thats neither fraud nor any other crime - its not illegal to not base your prices on your costs. The cable companies can charge what they like for their product.
Why aren't they jailing the AT&T and Verizon execs for bait-and-switch with the 'Unlimited' plans which are actually limited to single-digit bandwidth amounts?
Now that's a better example, and one I can't give an answer to.
It's all ass-backward, and this guy just had the balls to do something about it. Do your time, but do it proudly.
Sorry, but that's just a pathetic excuse for this guys actions, he didn't do anything justifiable or the be proud of.
They certainly do get enforced - http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280094253/Google-breached-UK-data-protection-laws-says-ICO
Google also respond to Data Requests under the DPA.
Not entirely sure about the reference to the UK, as we have some of the best data protection laws there are.