I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox
Simple, a badly maintained car can cause death. A badly maintained Xbox will cost you $99 for a new one.
Anyone else spotting the difference here? They arent helping YOU, they are helping the independant garages to
keep your car in good shape and help prevent a fatality or two.
Congress allowing reverse engineering of repair codes will allow third party diagnostics systems available
at prices the independant can truely afford to pay. This makes them better at maintaining vehicles.
Yes, it is infact illegal to bring a camera into a cinema in the UK, california and many other places. Doesnt matter that you dont use it, mere possesion of it within the cinema is enough to have you arrested. (Cue plea`s of "but officer, I didnt intend to SMOKE that pot, its merely in my possesion"). This is actually fairly standard for UK law, for example you are not allowed to carry bladed items or pointed items above a certain inch length in public, unless you have a good excuse (its my job, im a carpenter. i just bought it, its still in the wrapping. im taking it over to my mates house, he wants to borrow the tool set.), you also arent allowed to "go equipped" with certain items.
You are in a privately owned public place, if you are copulating with your significant other (or anyone else for that matter) in such surroundings, I think you should be told that there is a big risk of you being arrested for indecent exposure, gross indecency, sex in a public place (actual offence in the UK, if the public place is viewable by the general public without effort) and other offences. Just because the lights go down doesnt mean all of a sudden you have more privacy protection.
Maybe they want to take WINE in a direction that the current maintainers/developers of WINE dont agree with? Its all good and well saying "why dont they contribute to..." but it takes both parties for a successful contribution. Their plans may not fit in with WINES over all structure, hence any code they contribute back may be worthless to the WINE developers.
Why should they, the GPL doesnt contain any advertising clause, infact many people moved away from Xfree precisely because they wanted to have people credit them for their work. You cant have it both ways, these guys took screen shots of a pre alpha, a non finished product, a proof of concept, they had no need to credit anyone.
Who said that they wont be keeping track of it, for all we know "determining exactly which OSS code" may involve querying the developers "external code usage" database. After the recent furor over the project, these guys realise that they cant put a foot wrong, so personally Im going to wait until they release code before judging them. Also they may start out with more origional GPL code than they finish with, as a lot of it may be rewritten to fit their own needs.
Im going to stick with "I think these guys deserve a better judgement than they are currently getting from us" and wait for an actual product to emerge.
Well, its not often that you see this kind of comeback, and I take my hat off to SpecOpS for doing it.
We are puzzled over the furor of some people concerning our use of open source code such as WINE in our David software. The success of the open source movement is based upon the ability of the open source code (such as the Linux code) to be used and modified. We have improved and we will continue to improve code from selected open source projects. Once we make David available for commercial release, we will acknowledge the specific work of other individuals, groups or companies referenced in Project David, we will also release the open source code that we improved back to the community.
I must say that this is pretty much the same view I had when I read the story here on slashdot. A lot of people were lamenting the fact that they seemed to be using WINE derived code, which struck me as strange, since wasnt this the whole point of the GPL? In my view, they have embraced OpenSource pretty much fully, tho only time will tell if they succeed.
The quote they have from Trilogy makes for interesting reading, as they also publish within that quote negative aspects of the review (namely the "we have concerns about the business aspects" quote), which is almost unheard of for a company, which makes me think that they are trying to be legit. They state that the screen shots that made the rounds was basically a pre alpha, WINE repackaged with a bit of their own code, so no wonder people could spot various things wrong with it.
Here on slashdot, we seem to have a strange "community thought" on the usage of GPL code in a commercial project, and this came out in full when this story broke. Many comments were along the lines of "Oh My God, they are using WINE code! This is a rip off, they shouldnt be doing that! Someone get the FSF on this right away" (ok, paraphrased a bit). We knew pretty much nothing about the project, except what they had released as "future goals", and therefor I think the reaction was almost fully unwarranted.
They state that they are using OSS code, and they also state that they will be contributing code back to the community, what more do you want? Until this guys actually start distributing stuff, give them a break, they may very well help WINE along nicely.
Now, im going to play devils advocate here. The guy claimed that they should have stopped him sooner, and as, if you say, he can come up with evidence that the administration had knowledge of his actions well before they approached him, then I *might* think that the administration was obtaining money from him under false pretences.
He was paying the University money for a BA qualification, which he was never going to obtain. Now if the administration KNEW early on in the course that he wasnt going to obtain the qualification due to plagarism, then allowing him to pay for further years would, in my book, be fraud.
Please note that I think this guy is an idiot, and should definately not be allowed into another University in the country, but if he can come up with evidence that supports his beleif that the administration could have dealt with this sooner, rather than letting him complete the course and then pulling him up on it, then I might just think he has a case.
After all, if you are paying money into an endowment fund, or savings fund, and the bank knew that, because of some of your actions, all of your money isnt going toward anything, they have a legal obligation to tell you that and stop taking money from you.
Please spare me the enthusiasts for whom no failure is ever the fault of the object of their enthusiasm. For example, Windows advocates who insist that bluescreens don't count because they're caused by "drivers," while ignoring the fact that you needed to install drivers to get your display hardware/Adaptec SCSI card/whatever to work.
Im no MS apologist (but then Im not linux/BSD fanboi either), but the arguements Ive heard along those lines are more of the "Well, most bluescreens are caused by drivers, which need to reside in kernel space. Linux/Unix has the same problem, kernel modules can cause a kernel panic." Yes, you need to install those drivers to have your hardware run, but then Ive never heard anyone say you dont:D Its jsut a case of it can happen to the majority of OSes.
You wont be able to get the origional content. The BBC peers with almost all of the UKs broadband suppliers, thus allowing tight access control to only those who it wants, IE the UK broadband users. For those on ISPs not peered with the BBC, im afraid you will either loose out, or have to sign up specially.
The BBC isnt actually state owned, its owned by a private Trust and given a Government Mandate to allow it to collect a license fee for TVs. The government actaully has minimal say in the running of the BBC, much to the current governments dislike.
Get what for free? The archive will only be available to UK ADSL/Cable subscribers, the BBC can do this because almost all of the ADSL and cable providers do private peering with the BBC (they have one hell of a network). Other than the limited world services, people outside of the UK get little.
However, for the next 50 years, if you don't buy their stuff outright, they'll just get a law passed under which the government collects money from you on their behalf. You will pay the RIAA whether you want to or not.
50 years? thats like 12 and a half presidential terms, say 6 individual presidents if, at the worst, each goes two term. Are you saying that the Great and Free American people can liberate a country halfway around the world, from a tyrant and really bad man, in less than a year, but in 50 years, cannot choose a decent president or group of lawmakers who will actually do what the American People want them to do? Insane. Am I the only one who has lost faith in the government recently?
Did you realize that you don't even need to spend the dough for an Access Point?
Really? Who is giving away mini-itx systems these days then? My $40 Netgear access point is silent and very small and has all the features I want, Id like to see someone put together a linux based wifi router for that sort of money. The whole point of an access point is that its small and discreat enough to be wall mounted, ceiling mounted, crawl space mounted or whatever. Yes this statement may be true if you are looking to reuse old PC hardware, but then you loose much of the point of an AP.
He was actually talking about the European system. There was a slashdot story on it not that long ago which said that the US military had demanded and gotten termination control of the Galileo system via the usage of certain frequencies, so they can turn it off or degrade it without consulting the owners of the system. (story here).
Reading an offline version of this story, it was said that the US threatened to reintroduce Selective Availability over the EU unless the EU allowed them the ability stated above. Great. So where is our control of the NAVSTAR system?
You don't need a full-fledged OS in order to compile one. Any half-baked operating system which is functional enough and has a compiler worth its salt can compile Linux for example.
Actually, its very hard to get Linux to compile on anything but GCC, because it uses a lot of GCC specific constructs and language methods. Which is a pity, because other compilers offer improvements over GCC in various areas.
This is like trying to avoid speeding fines by leaving your car unlocked and the keys in the ignition, and then pleading to the court that anyone could have been using it. Stupid beyond belief.
The ISP says your responsable, and sure enough it cant land you in jail. But it can land you with Law Enforcement officers on your doorstep asking questions. Basically the ISP has said that anything coming out of your lan is your responsability, and thats enough for them to point the police at you when they come knocking. Then you are in an interesting place, trying to explain to these guys exactly what you have done, and why you have done it.
Lets amend your analogy a bit to more fit the scenario shall we:
Put another way, if there is a shooting in my house, leaving a body in the lounge, a blood trail leading out the door, and the gun on the floor but no third party, I am going to have an interesting time explaining that it wasnt me to the law enforcement officers who will turn up.
Telcos can do that because their agreements allow reselling or passing on of services. Chances are this guys terms and conditions of his internet connection specifically disallow selling or making the services available to third parties, thus putting him outside of the "common carrier" safe haven.
Yes it does change the fact, if you did it on purpose then you can be found to have been negligent and dealt with accordingly (in a court of law, discontinuation of services or whatever.)
Doing something on purpose is worlds different to stupidity when it comes to recriminations. Look at murder vs manslaughter. Intent vs stupidity.
I'm not deliberately opening my network to hackers and miscreants bent on downloading copyrighted material. I'm simply choosing not to secure it. That's no different from the millions of people who haven't installed anti-virus software and the millions more who don't keep theirs up to date.
But he IS deliberately opening his network to these people:
Last week, I turned off all the security features of my wireless router. I removed WEP encryption, disabled MAC address filtering and made sure the SSID was being broadcast loud and clear.
If he didnt have them enabled in the first place, then I might have agreed with his statement, but this is nothing like the "millions of people who havent installed anti-virus software", or the "millions more who don't keep theirs up to date". Those people dont intentionally install said protection and then disable it.
And more important, my ISP has no way to be certain if it's me.
And how is this going to matter? The ISP is renting YOU the connection, so its arguably your own responsability for the traffic passing through it. Your landlord might have something to say if you left your front door open to all who might be passing, and drug dealers take up residence. Id love to see his line rentals terms and conditions, they will amost certainly forbid what this guy is doing (intentionally sharing his connection with third parties).
If it ever comes down to a lawsuit, who can be certain that I was the offender? And can the victim of hacking be held responsible for the hacker's crimes?
Theres no hacking (cracking) going on here, the networks wide open. And there are such laws as accessory to a crime, which if you are doing this wilfully, then Id almost certainly say you were.
I hope this guy took legal advice about this, and about his stance regarding correspondance with Comcast in the future, because from where I can see, he may be on the shakiest legal ground. This article is pretty lame imho.
From what I can remember from the previous story on this, when it happened, was that the stylesheet broke only certain later versions of opera, but worked perfectly for prior versions. So i guess that there was a bug in previous versions of opera that was fixed, and the stylesheet issue was noticed before the MSN webdeveloper remembered about it and updated the stylesheet selection rules.
The sinking of hte Belgrano brought no shame to the UK whatever, tho certain politicians will try and say otherwise. If such an act brings shame to a country, then how much shame must Argentinia have brought on themselves for invading anotehr nations territory.
Minor nitpick, wasnt Nato, it was the UK standing alone. We turned down all offers of help, including that of the US who offered to back us up if we decided to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Argentinia.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox
Simple, a badly maintained car can cause death. A badly maintained Xbox will cost you $99 for a new one. Anyone else spotting the difference here? They arent helping YOU, they are helping the independant garages to keep your car in good shape and help prevent a fatality or two.
Congress allowing reverse engineering of repair codes will allow third party diagnostics systems available at prices the independant can truely afford to pay. This makes them better at maintaining vehicles.
Yes, it is infact illegal to bring a camera into a cinema in the UK, california and many other places. Doesnt matter that you dont use it, mere possesion of it within the cinema is enough to have you arrested. (Cue plea`s of "but officer, I didnt intend to SMOKE that pot, its merely in my possesion"). This is actually fairly standard for UK law, for example you are not allowed to carry bladed items or pointed items above a certain inch length in public, unless you have a good excuse (its my job, im a carpenter. i just bought it, its still in the wrapping. im taking it over to my mates house, he wants to borrow the tool set.), you also arent allowed to "go equipped" with certain items.
You are in a privately owned public place, if you are copulating with your significant other (or anyone else for that matter) in such surroundings, I think you should be told that there is a big risk of you being arrested for indecent exposure, gross indecency, sex in a public place (actual offence in the UK, if the public place is viewable by the general public without effort) and other offences. Just because the lights go down doesnt mean all of a sudden you have more privacy protection.
Maybe they want to take WINE in a direction that the current maintainers/developers of WINE dont agree with? Its all good and well saying "why dont they contribute to..." but it takes both parties for a successful contribution. Their plans may not fit in with WINES over all structure, hence any code they contribute back may be worthless to the WINE developers.
Why should they, the GPL doesnt contain any advertising clause, infact many people moved away from Xfree precisely because they wanted to have people credit them for their work. You cant have it both ways, these guys took screen shots of a pre alpha, a non finished product, a proof of concept, they had no need to credit anyone.
Who said that they wont be keeping track of it, for all we know "determining exactly which OSS code" may involve querying the developers "external code usage" database. After the recent furor over the project, these guys realise that they cant put a foot wrong, so personally Im going to wait until they release code before judging them. Also they may start out with more origional GPL code than they finish with, as a lot of it may be rewritten to fit their own needs.
Im going to stick with "I think these guys deserve a better judgement than they are currently getting from us" and wait for an actual product to emerge.
Well, its not often that you see this kind of comeback, and I take my hat off to SpecOpS for doing it.
We are puzzled over the furor of some people concerning our use of open source code such as WINE in our David software. The success of the open source movement is based upon the ability of the open source code (such as the Linux code) to be used and modified. We have improved and we will continue to improve code from selected open source projects. Once we make David available for commercial release, we will acknowledge the specific work of other individuals, groups or companies referenced in Project David, we will also release the open source code that we improved back to the community.
I must say that this is pretty much the same view I had when I read the story here on slashdot. A lot of people were lamenting the fact that they seemed to be using WINE derived code, which struck me as strange, since wasnt this the whole point of the GPL? In my view, they have embraced OpenSource pretty much fully, tho only time will tell if they succeed.
The quote they have from Trilogy makes for interesting reading, as they also publish within that quote negative aspects of the review (namely the "we have concerns about the business aspects" quote), which is almost unheard of for a company, which makes me think that they are trying to be legit. They state that the screen shots that made the rounds was basically a pre alpha, WINE repackaged with a bit of their own code, so no wonder people could spot various things wrong with it.
Here on slashdot, we seem to have a strange "community thought" on the usage of GPL code in a commercial project, and this came out in full when this story broke. Many comments were along the lines of "Oh My God, they are using WINE code! This is a rip off, they shouldnt be doing that! Someone get the FSF on this right away" (ok, paraphrased a bit). We knew pretty much nothing about the project, except what they had released as "future goals", and therefor I think the reaction was almost fully unwarranted.
They state that they are using OSS code, and they also state that they will be contributing code back to the community, what more do you want? Until this guys actually start distributing stuff, give them a break, they may very well help WINE along nicely.
Now, im going to play devils advocate here. The guy claimed that they should have stopped him sooner, and as, if you say, he can come up with evidence that the administration had knowledge of his actions well before they approached him, then I *might* think that the administration was obtaining money from him under false pretences.
He was paying the University money for a BA qualification, which he was never going to obtain. Now if the administration KNEW early on in the course that he wasnt going to obtain the qualification due to plagarism, then allowing him to pay for further years would, in my book, be fraud.
Please note that I think this guy is an idiot, and should definately not be allowed into another University in the country, but if he can come up with evidence that supports his beleif that the administration could have dealt with this sooner, rather than letting him complete the course and then pulling him up on it, then I might just think he has a case.
After all, if you are paying money into an endowment fund, or savings fund, and the bank knew that, because of some of your actions, all of your money isnt going toward anything, they have a legal obligation to tell you that and stop taking money from you.
This guy is an idiot, in any case.
Please spare me the enthusiasts for whom no failure is ever the fault of the object of their enthusiasm. For example, Windows advocates who insist that bluescreens don't count because they're caused by "drivers," while ignoring the fact that you needed to install drivers to get your display hardware/Adaptec SCSI card/whatever to work.
Im no MS apologist (but then Im not linux/BSD fanboi either), but the arguements Ive heard along those lines are more of the "Well, most bluescreens are caused by drivers, which need to reside in kernel space. Linux/Unix has the same problem, kernel modules can cause a kernel panic." Yes, you need to install those drivers to have your hardware run, but then Ive never heard anyone say you dont :D Its jsut a case of it can happen to the majority of OSes.
SWF is an open standard. How do you think ming SWF for php etc came about?
You wont be able to get the origional content. The BBC peers with almost all of the UKs broadband suppliers, thus allowing tight access control to only those who it wants, IE the UK broadband users. For those on ISPs not peered with the BBC, im afraid you will either loose out, or have to sign up specially.
The BBC isnt actually state owned, its owned by a private Trust and given a Government Mandate to allow it to collect a license fee for TVs. The government actaully has minimal say in the running of the BBC, much to the current governments dislike.
Get what for free? The archive will only be available to UK ADSL/Cable subscribers, the BBC can do this because almost all of the ADSL and cable providers do private peering with the BBC (they have one hell of a network). Other than the limited world services, people outside of the UK get little.
However, for the next 50 years, if you don't buy their stuff outright, they'll just get a law passed under which the government collects money from you on their behalf. You will pay the RIAA whether you want to or not.
50 years? thats like 12 and a half presidential terms, say 6 individual presidents if, at the worst, each goes two term. Are you saying that the Great and Free American people can liberate a country halfway around the world, from a tyrant and really bad man, in less than a year, but in 50 years, cannot choose a decent president or group of lawmakers who will actually do what the American People want them to do? Insane. Am I the only one who has lost faith in the government recently?
Did you realize that you don't even need to spend the dough for an Access Point?
Really? Who is giving away mini-itx systems these days then? My $40 Netgear access point is silent and very small and has all the features I want, Id like to see someone put together a linux based wifi router for that sort of money. The whole point of an access point is that its small and discreat enough to be wall mounted, ceiling mounted, crawl space mounted or whatever. Yes this statement may be true if you are looking to reuse old PC hardware, but then you loose much of the point of an AP.
He was actually talking about the European system. There was a slashdot story on it not that long ago which said that the US military had demanded and gotten termination control of the Galileo system via the usage of certain frequencies, so they can turn it off or degrade it without consulting the owners of the system. (story here).
Reading an offline version of this story, it was said that the US threatened to reintroduce Selective Availability over the EU unless the EU allowed them the ability stated above. Great. So where is our control of the NAVSTAR system?
You don't need a full-fledged OS in order to compile one. Any half-baked operating system which is functional enough and has a compiler worth its salt can compile Linux for example.
Actually, its very hard to get Linux to compile on anything but GCC, because it uses a lot of GCC specific constructs and language methods. Which is a pity, because other compilers offer improvements over GCC in various areas.
This is like trying to avoid speeding fines by leaving your car unlocked and the keys in the ignition, and then pleading to the court that anyone could have been using it. Stupid beyond belief.
The ISP says your responsable, and sure enough it cant land you in jail. But it can land you with Law Enforcement officers on your doorstep asking questions. Basically the ISP has said that anything coming out of your lan is your responsability, and thats enough for them to point the police at you when they come knocking. Then you are in an interesting place, trying to explain to these guys exactly what you have done, and why you have done it.
Lets amend your analogy a bit to more fit the scenario shall we:
Put another way, if there is a shooting in my house, leaving a body in the lounge, a blood trail leading out the door, and the gun on the floor but no third party, I am going to have an interesting time explaining that it wasnt me to the law enforcement officers who will turn up.
Telcos can do that because their agreements allow reselling or passing on of services. Chances are this guys terms and conditions of his internet connection specifically disallow selling or making the services available to third parties, thus putting him outside of the "common carrier" safe haven.
Yes it does change the fact, if you did it on purpose then you can be found to have been negligent and dealt with accordingly (in a court of law, discontinuation of services or whatever.)
Doing something on purpose is worlds different to stupidity when it comes to recriminations. Look at murder vs manslaughter. Intent vs stupidity.
I'm not deliberately opening my network to hackers and miscreants bent on downloading copyrighted material. I'm simply choosing not to secure it. That's no different from the millions of people who haven't installed anti-virus software and the millions more who don't keep theirs up to date.
But he IS deliberately opening his network to these people:
Last week, I turned off all the security features of my wireless router. I removed WEP encryption, disabled MAC address filtering and made sure the SSID was being broadcast loud and clear.
If he didnt have them enabled in the first place, then I might have agreed with his statement, but this is nothing like the "millions of people who havent installed anti-virus software", or the "millions more who don't keep theirs up to date". Those people dont intentionally install said protection and then disable it.
And more important, my ISP has no way to be certain if it's me.
And how is this going to matter? The ISP is renting YOU the connection, so its arguably your own responsability for the traffic passing through it. Your landlord might have something to say if you left your front door open to all who might be passing, and drug dealers take up residence. Id love to see his line rentals terms and conditions, they will amost certainly forbid what this guy is doing (intentionally sharing his connection with third parties).
If it ever comes down to a lawsuit, who can be certain that I was the offender? And can the victim of hacking be held responsible for the hacker's crimes?
Theres no hacking (cracking) going on here, the networks wide open. And there are such laws as accessory to a crime, which if you are doing this wilfully, then Id almost certainly say you were.
I hope this guy took legal advice about this, and about his stance regarding correspondance with Comcast in the future, because from where I can see, he may be on the shakiest legal ground. This article is pretty lame imho.
From what I can remember from the previous story on this, when it happened, was that the stylesheet broke only certain later versions of opera, but worked perfectly for prior versions. So i guess that there was a bug in previous versions of opera that was fixed, and the stylesheet issue was noticed before the MSN webdeveloper remembered about it and updated the stylesheet selection rules.
The sinking of hte Belgrano brought no shame to the UK whatever, tho certain politicians will try and say otherwise. If such an act brings shame to a country, then how much shame must Argentinia have brought on themselves for invading anotehr nations territory.
Minor nitpick, wasnt Nato, it was the UK standing alone. We turned down all offers of help, including that of the US who offered to back us up if we decided to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Argentinia.