But, since these files are key to IOS as well, one could take the view that IOS is now under the GPL.
To prevent scare-mongering: This isn't how GPL viralness (virality?) works. Assuming that they have mixed IOS with GPL code in a way that would "infect" IOS (they'll argue that it doesn't, of course) they can either 1) GPL IOS to bring everything into compliance (fat chance) or they can stop doing that, stop distributing the stuff they have, pay a big fine, and rewrite everything in a hurry and at great expense - exactly what Linksys did before them. IOS being forcibly placed under the GPL is a vanishingly unlikely possibility (not even sure that a ruling that they must do so would be legal).
Replying to parent, not myself - OP (which was modded down below my threshold when I posted) is an old, old troll that gets posted at least once in any thread even remotely relating to OSS and licensing. It's nice that there was some moderately interesting conversation that came out of it, though.
In the past, it wasn't uncommon for EULAs on compilers and other content creation tools to claim that stuff produced with it was derivative. After all, there's a lot of stuff besides what you wrote in a word document, or in a compiled executable. I don't know that there's ever been any sort of legal case that created a boundary here, it's mainly been market pressure that's ensured that tool creators stopped making these claims or have elected not to pursue them.
I don't actually expect anything to come of this, because bogus DMCA complaints are common and as far as I know there's never been any sanctions on anyone, even much more grievous offenders than this.
But the whole purpose of the clauses you quote above is to *prevent* exactly this use of the DMCA. The entire DMCA complaint was bogus - a lie, if you will. They did not download the files mentioned, they did not contained copyrighted material (even if they violated the DMCA in other ways), and they did not have a good-faith reason to believe that they did (because they didn't, and they didn't check it). Whoever sent that clearly just filled out a boilerplate form without really reading it, involving legal counsel (or misinforming them if they did), and it's exactly this sort of boilerplate abuse that makes the DMCA such a terrible law, despite the controls that are supposedly in place to prevent it. Of course, this is one reason why ChillingEffects.org exists, to document these sort of abuses. And it *is* abuse, even if it was unintentional.
The takedown was signed as coming from the CEO of CoreCodec. That certainly takes it beyond the ream of "overzealous employee" and into the range of "we, as a company, fucked up" as far as I'm concerned, and personally I'd expect an apology, if nothing else, for sending a fraudulent DMCA request and for a corporate officer to have exercised such poor judgment.
An overzealous employee? This was sent over the name of the company CEO, claiming to have been sent by him and it was in his name that the "under penalty of perjury" claim was made. Are there really employees there that are empowered to speak with his name, but make these kind of failures of judgment?
Ask you wife to actually count sometime instead of just telling you stories. Recidivism rates for sex offenders are among the lowest of all types of crimes.
First, it has been shown over and over again that if you commit these crimes once, you're very likely to do it again.
For the record, the opposite is actually true. Since pretty much every other comment on the page that makes this claim has a response refuting it, but your doesn't, I'm doing my part here.
Note that that document is for *any* felony, not sexual crimes. Sex offenders have the second lowest recidivism rate on that list (30%, with manslaughter at 28%). All the violent crimes were quite low - to quote from the document:
"Despite generally held views, the more violent crimes including manslaughter, murder, and robbery, accounted for the smallest number of offenses and, along with sex offenses, the lowest recidivism rates."
Note that these numbers are for *any* recurring offense, the same-crime recidivism rates are much lower.
A problem in the city that I current live in (Houston, TX) is that the restrictions on housing for sex offenders are so draconian (it's something ridiculous like within a mile of any facility that caters to children) that they can't find legal housing anywhere, which forces them to drop off the grid.
Since they have no fixed address and nowhere to go it's much harder for the social workers and parole officers who're supposed to keep tabs on them to do so.
I would gladly accept an example where a legal action of one party requires the illegal action of another party.
There's tons of them, although you can probably nitpick cases just as you can with with upload/download. One of the most obvious is backup rights under the DMCA, which are guaranteed, although it's prohibited to distribute the information or tools that you'd use to do this. Consensual sex with a minor (statutory rape, by definition, is consensual). In many places it's legal for teens to smoke, but it's illegal to distribute them to someone underage. Criminalizing the tools or processes required to do something instead of the action itself is an ancient political trick.
Acknowledging that behavior has consequences isn't the same as saying that America had it coming. I deplore what happened on 9/11, and every terrorist incident before or after. But that doesn't meant that I'm just going to stuff the flag in my ears and ignore the fact that yes, Americas policies have a great deal to do with engendering the kind of hate that leads to terrorism. Nobody suicide bombs Switzerland. I also am not shy of denouncing reprehensible acts that the US has undertaken, both the current administration and past ones. Ignoring it, or, worse, saying it's okay because we're the good guys, isn't doing anyone any favors.
Car accidents kill more people than terrorism ever has. Therefore, making terrorism the top priority is not justifiable *on the grounds of saving lives*. The "war on terror" has in fact killed (many) more innocent people, both directly and indirectly, than 9/11 did. Again, unjustifiable on the grounds of saving lives (at least as planned and executed - I certainly am willing to speculate about possible strategies that wouldn't have killed so many people and created an entire new generation of people who hate the US).
If your priority is terrorism, then saving lives is not your real objective. You have some other goal, whether you're willing to admit it or not.
But you're deluding yourself if you that an actual reduction in worldwide terrorism, or even the capabilities of terrorism, is the actual result (or, I suspect, even the intention) of the war on terror. Certainly the invasion of Iraq, a nation with at best very tenuous ties to terrorism (Saddam was a secular, military dictator and Iraq was one of the least Islamicist nations in the middle east prior to the US invasion - because we'd set up Saddam as a counterpart to the Ayatollah in Iran), has done nothing to help. To the extent that "we fight them over there so we don't fight them here" is true, it's because we're essentially using US troops as human decoys. I bet that hurts morale a lot more than people who don't wear yellow ribbon pins.
All this doesn't mean that terrorism should simply be ignored as a threat - it's real, even if many of the scenarios bandied about are more fantasy than reality. But we're going to spend a trillion and a half dollars - an amount of money so vast I have trouble comprehending it - on just the Iraq invasion, along with a quite large loss of life. That's not about making the world any safer.
Also, the fact that you'd accuse me of thinking 9/11 was justified says far more about you than it does about me. Fuck you, you bigoted mother fucker.
They've had this *capability* for decades. If you want to actually think anything useful about terrorists (as opposed to politically motivated fearmongering) you need to talk about why they've had more *success* lately. This is totally unrelated to any made up geometric progression you may think you see.
Terrorism is not a significant threat to human life right now. It never has been - we've had reasonable safeguards in place for years. They aren't any more of a threat now than they were before 9/11 (although there are more of them, due in no small part to ridiculous and counter-productive foreign policy on the part of the US). If your goal is to actually reduce human deaths worldwide, stopping terrorism should be way, way down on your list of priorities. If it's not, then your goal is something other than preventing deaths.
There was another poster who quite clearly, rationally, and correctly identified why people tend to react (much) more strongly to terrorism (or even the threat of terrorism) than they do to concrete but impersonal threats. Your post, to the extent that it had anything of factual value in it, was that terrorism is an exponentially growing threat. It's obviously *not* an exponentially growing threat - you're just choosing timescales that let you make that claim. For example, deaths due to individual terrorist attacks have been dropping since 9/11. While it's certainly possible that there will be a massive nuclear terrorist strike sometime in the future, it's not some sort of "geometric progression" of threat that will be responsible. The means for such an attack have been around for decades, just as the ability to crash a plane into a building has been around since the first time someone hijacked a plane.
Your argument is useless and trivial. To the extent that it provides any useful information, it does so entirely on accident.
Because SSL has been hardened against it by normalizing response times, so they don't leak information.
Google for "ssl timing attack", the first hit is a paper on the subject.
There's a similar old school attack that you could use to identify valid accounts, by measuring the response time to a login attempt - an invalid account would fast-path fail, while a valid account with the wrong password would have to validate the password, taking longer.
If what's being sent is a true-blue DMCA takedown notice (and I haven't read TFA, so I don't know if it is), then it has specific legal weight - an ISP who gets such a notice has to take specific actions in response to it. Because of the power of these documents, anyone sending one has to certify, under penalty of perjury, that they are the copyright holder or an agent of the copyright holder. Sending a DMCA takedown notice without the correct legal authority is itself a crime under the DMCA. You can think of a DMCA as a special shortcut version of a court-ordered takedown - the law is granting copyright holders a certain authority normally reserved to the courts, but they have to have the same information and authority that would stand up in an actual court.
If this is what turned you off of WoW, you might want to remember that WoW was revolutionary for how little grinding it required, especially for leveling, compared to previous MMOs.
It's important to note that what he's comparing virtualization to is running each app on a separate physical box, not to running them on the same box without VT.
VT *does* (or at least can) improve security when you take 2 apps running on one box under a single OS and instead run them on one box under 2 guest OSes. It doesn't provide any gain (and Theo argues, rightly, that it's likely to be a loss) compared to running the 2 apps on 2 distinct physical boxes.
One last point is that the malware has to know or be able to detect that it's running under VT. This can be quite hard, for exactly the same reason that Blue Pill is hard to detect. In a sort of irony, it's quite possible that if a (legit) hypervisor used the same masking techniques that Blue Pill does, that Blue Pill would be powerless against it because it wouldn't know to "break out" and attack the host, even if a vector were available.
I can't speak for tomcat, but SVN is hardly uncommon, and is packaged pretty much everywhere and if you have a problem installing it, it's some failing of yours, not the distro.
If you're talking about configuring Apache to use SVN to serve a repo, sure, you need to configure that manually. It's not like Windows does it any better. According to the rumor mill, Tomcat configuration is just a bitch in general no matter where you are.
The last 3 of your examples should have no effect whatsoever on software and someone would rightfully be bitchy if their machine got bricked because of it.
Even if they modify the firmware, the worst that should happen is that update shouldn't apply - there's no reason it should brick the device. Alternately, the update would simply replace the old firmware wholesale (resulting in a locked phone again), but without damage - this is how iPod firmware updates work. There is a vast difference between "you won't get updates" and "your phone will be ruined".
Lastly, the iPhone unlock doesn't alter or replace the firmware.
If you buy a Chevy arnd replace the engine with some aftermarket engine, Chevy isn't going to fix it when you break it.
Utter bullshit, and could only be said by someone without the slightest inkling of what consumer protection laws are for. Why do you think there's an aftermarket for car parts at all? If you replace the engine in a Chevy, Chevy won't fix the *engine*, but if the differential burns out they'll sure as hell fix that. And if you take it to the dealership to get your brake pads changed, they'll do that. And if they ruin your car while doing that service on, they're going to be liable no matter how many aftermarket parts you had in it.
I could see cases where an update might legitimately brick a phone, like if someone installs custom firmware on it. But the SIM unlocking isn't a firmware replacement or even a hack, it's a settings update, and there's no reason whatsoever why a firmware update should damage the phone in any way. At the very worst, it should refuse to install, but there's not really much justification even for that.
Slashdot Mirror
But, since these files are key to IOS as well, one could take the view that IOS is now under the GPL.
To prevent scare-mongering: This isn't how GPL viralness (virality?) works. Assuming that they have mixed IOS with GPL code in a way that would "infect" IOS (they'll argue that it doesn't, of course) they can either 1) GPL IOS to bring everything into compliance (fat chance) or they can stop doing that, stop distributing the stuff they have, pay a big fine, and rewrite everything in a hurry and at great expense - exactly what Linksys did before them. IOS being forcibly placed under the GPL is a vanishingly unlikely possibility (not even sure that a ruling that they must do so would be legal).
Replying to parent, not myself - OP (which was modded down below my threshold when I posted) is an old, old troll that gets posted at least once in any thread even remotely relating to OSS and licensing. It's nice that there was some moderately interesting conversation that came out of it, though.
In the past, it wasn't uncommon for EULAs on compilers and other content creation tools to claim that stuff produced with it was derivative. After all, there's a lot of stuff besides what you wrote in a word document, or in a compiled executable. I don't know that there's ever been any sort of legal case that created a boundary here, it's mainly been market pressure that's ensured that tool creators stopped making these claims or have elected not to pursue them.
I don't actually expect anything to come of this, because bogus DMCA complaints are common and as far as I know there's never been any sanctions on anyone, even much more grievous offenders than this. But the whole purpose of the clauses you quote above is to *prevent* exactly this use of the DMCA. The entire DMCA complaint was bogus - a lie, if you will. They did not download the files mentioned, they did not contained copyrighted material (even if they violated the DMCA in other ways), and they did not have a good-faith reason to believe that they did (because they didn't, and they didn't check it). Whoever sent that clearly just filled out a boilerplate form without really reading it, involving legal counsel (or misinforming them if they did), and it's exactly this sort of boilerplate abuse that makes the DMCA such a terrible law, despite the controls that are supposedly in place to prevent it. Of course, this is one reason why ChillingEffects.org exists, to document these sort of abuses. And it *is* abuse, even if it was unintentional. The takedown was signed as coming from the CEO of CoreCodec. That certainly takes it beyond the ream of "overzealous employee" and into the range of "we, as a company, fucked up" as far as I'm concerned, and personally I'd expect an apology, if nothing else, for sending a fraudulent DMCA request and for a corporate officer to have exercised such poor judgment.
An overzealous employee? This was sent over the name of the company CEO, claiming to have been sent by him and it was in his name that the "under penalty of perjury" claim was made. Are there really employees there that are empowered to speak with his name, but make these kind of failures of judgment?
It is, but that doesn't mean that companies don't issue DMCA takedowns when they really are trying to resolve a trademark issue.
Ask you wife to actually count sometime instead of just telling you stories. Recidivism rates for sex offenders are among the lowest of all types of crimes.
Note that these numbers are for *any* recurring offense, the same-crime recidivism rates are much lower.
A problem in the city that I current live in (Houston, TX) is that the restrictions on housing for sex offenders are so draconian (it's something ridiculous like within a mile of any facility that caters to children) that they can't find legal housing anywhere, which forces them to drop off the grid. Since they have no fixed address and nowhere to go it's much harder for the social workers and parole officers who're supposed to keep tabs on them to do so.
My third grader has decided that he wants to eat termites after watching Man vs Wild. I probably should file some sort of lawsuit.
There's tons of them, although you can probably nitpick cases just as you can with with upload/download. One of the most obvious is backup rights under the DMCA, which are guaranteed, although it's prohibited to distribute the information or tools that you'd use to do this. Consensual sex with a minor (statutory rape, by definition, is consensual). In many places it's legal for teens to smoke, but it's illegal to distribute them to someone underage. Criminalizing the tools or processes required to do something instead of the action itself is an ancient political trick.
Car accidents kill more people than terrorism ever has. Therefore, making terrorism the top priority is not justifiable *on the grounds of saving lives*. The "war on terror" has in fact killed (many) more innocent people, both directly and indirectly, than 9/11 did. Again, unjustifiable on the grounds of saving lives (at least as planned and executed - I certainly am willing to speculate about possible strategies that wouldn't have killed so many people and created an entire new generation of people who hate the US).
If your priority is terrorism, then saving lives is not your real objective. You have some other goal, whether you're willing to admit it or not.
But you're deluding yourself if you that an actual reduction in worldwide terrorism, or even the capabilities of terrorism, is the actual result (or, I suspect, even the intention) of the war on terror. Certainly the invasion of Iraq, a nation with at best very tenuous ties to terrorism (Saddam was a secular, military dictator and Iraq was one of the least Islamicist nations in the middle east prior to the US invasion - because we'd set up Saddam as a counterpart to the Ayatollah in Iran), has done nothing to help. To the extent that "we fight them over there so we don't fight them here" is true, it's because we're essentially using US troops as human decoys. I bet that hurts morale a lot more than people who don't wear yellow ribbon pins.
All this doesn't mean that terrorism should simply be ignored as a threat - it's real, even if many of the scenarios bandied about are more fantasy than reality. But we're going to spend a trillion and a half dollars - an amount of money so vast I have trouble comprehending it - on just the Iraq invasion, along with a quite large loss of life. That's not about making the world any safer.
Also, the fact that you'd accuse me of thinking 9/11 was justified says far more about you than it does about me. Fuck you, you bigoted mother fucker.
Terrorism is not a significant threat to human life right now. It never has been - we've had reasonable safeguards in place for years. They aren't any more of a threat now than they were before 9/11 (although there are more of them, due in no small part to ridiculous and counter-productive foreign policy on the part of the US). If your goal is to actually reduce human deaths worldwide, stopping terrorism should be way, way down on your list of priorities. If it's not, then your goal is something other than preventing deaths.
Your argument is useless and trivial. To the extent that it provides any useful information, it does so entirely on accident.
Google for "ssl timing attack", the first hit is a paper on the subject.
There's a similar old school attack that you could use to identify valid accounts, by measuring the response time to a login attempt - an invalid account would fast-path fail, while a valid account with the wrong password would have to validate the password, taking longer.
You imply that within the next 30 years (my lifetime, and probably yours), terrorists will extinguish human life on earth. HOLY SHIT EVERYBODY PANIC.
Murder is illegal even if the person being murdered consents. The logic is fine.
If what's being sent is a true-blue DMCA takedown notice (and I haven't read TFA, so I don't know if it is), then it has specific legal weight - an ISP who gets such a notice has to take specific actions in response to it. Because of the power of these documents, anyone sending one has to certify, under penalty of perjury, that they are the copyright holder or an agent of the copyright holder. Sending a DMCA takedown notice without the correct legal authority is itself a crime under the DMCA. You can think of a DMCA as a special shortcut version of a court-ordered takedown - the law is granting copyright holders a certain authority normally reserved to the courts, but they have to have the same information and authority that would stand up in an actual court.
If this is what turned you off of WoW, you might want to remember that WoW was revolutionary for how little grinding it required, especially for leveling, compared to previous MMOs.
VT *does* (or at least can) improve security when you take 2 apps running on one box under a single OS and instead run them on one box under 2 guest OSes. It doesn't provide any gain (and Theo argues, rightly, that it's likely to be a loss) compared to running the 2 apps on 2 distinct physical boxes.
One last point is that the malware has to know or be able to detect that it's running under VT. This can be quite hard, for exactly the same reason that Blue Pill is hard to detect. In a sort of irony, it's quite possible that if a (legit) hypervisor used the same masking techniques that Blue Pill does, that Blue Pill would be powerless against it because it wouldn't know to "break out" and attack the host, even if a vector were available.
If you're talking about configuring Apache to use SVN to serve a repo, sure, you need to configure that manually. It's not like Windows does it any better. According to the rumor mill, Tomcat configuration is just a bitch in general no matter where you are.
What bullshit world do you live in that "and the rest of your post is wrong too" constitutes proof of any kind?
Even if they modify the firmware, the worst that should happen is that update shouldn't apply - there's no reason it should brick the device. Alternately, the update would simply replace the old firmware wholesale (resulting in a locked phone again), but without damage - this is how iPod firmware updates work. There is a vast difference between "you won't get updates" and "your phone will be ruined".
Lastly, the iPhone unlock doesn't alter or replace the firmware.
I could see cases where an update might legitimately brick a phone, like if someone installs custom firmware on it. But the SIM unlocking isn't a firmware replacement or even a hack, it's a settings update, and there's no reason whatsoever why a firmware update should damage the phone in any way. At the very worst, it should refuse to install, but there's not really much justification even for that.