Even if the case came to court and the judge ruled in favour of the media companies, would Sharman Networks have to pay?
There is a
precedent for cases like this. Yahoo! did not have to comply with the French order because Yahoo! has their servers in the US and they are a US company.
How is this any different?
So what if millions of Californians use Kazaa? There are many times that number of Kazaa users who are not Californians.
Millions of French people could access the US yahoo.com site - the ruling says:
Although France has the sovereign right to regulate what speech is permissible in France, this court may not enforce a foreign order that violates the protections of the United States Constitution by chilling protected speech that occurs simultaneously within our borders
What laws are the MPAA and RIAA using to sue Sharman Networks? Are they applicable in Australia or Vanuatu
The problem, as I see it, is what happens when someone in the open source community contributes a significant module of code, rather than a small patch.
They've written a piece of code, probably in a separate source file, put the GPL comment at the top and sent it to you. Surely they, by law, automatically own the copyright for this code, and they've released it under the GPL.
So what right do you have to then go releasing it under your commercial non-GPL license?
actually makes buffer point to a *different* location, plus "wokie" is a nul-terminated string. In short your code doesn't demonstrate the problem.
Try this:
/* * Demonstrate the need for * zero-padding buffers */
Today, some search engines still look at metatags, but increasingly they put much more emphasis on both visible text on the page and "off-page factors" (popularity, linking structure of the Internet, etc.) to measure page relevance.
Ok, so the linking structure can help - if the page is linked to other pages which also feature my search terms then it is probably a collection of relevant, in-depth information.
But popularity?!?
I don't care if I'm the only person in the world who knows that this page exists - if it has the content I'm looking for then I want to see it.
No-one seems to be looking at the broader picture. The Amazon affiliate scheme is a contract between two parties where one basically says...
"if you send some business my way then you'll get a monetary reward"
They're not saying...
"if you can get software installed on a user's machine then you deserve some money from us"
Whether the user agrees to it or not, he/she is receiving a service (for example, reviews or links to books they would not normally find or buy), and the payment for that service is being diverted.
We don't call burglars black hats and alarm system installers white hats.
Your post indicates that you think to earn the title "hacker" you have to break into other people's computer systems. Well, that's one definition I suppose (one I hate, and I'm
not the only one
), but it is by no means
the only definition.
Anyway, in order to answer to the overall theme of this thread - "why the coloured hats" -
it is helpful to understand both the history of
the term "hacker", and appreciate the prevalence
of moral relativism. So, if you're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin...
The origins of the term "hacker" being used
in relation to computers are described in the
very detailed and entertaining book
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
by Stephen Levy. From the Amazon editorial review:
Steven Levy's classic book explains why the misuse of the word "hackers" to describe computer criminals does a terrible disservice to many important shapers of the digital revolution. Levy follows members of an MIT model railroad club--a group of brilliant budding electrical engineers and computer innovators--from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. These eccentric characters used the term "hack" to describe a clever way of improving the electronic system that ran their massive railroad. And as they started designing clever ways to improve computer systems, "hack" moved over with them.
So how did the meaning of the word change?
Well, this is where moral relativism comes in.
It's human nature to justify yourself, and that's
what people did. When mischievous computer users
began entering computer systems without
authorisation they justified (in their own minds) themselves by claiming that they weren't
doing any damage - just satisfying their
curiousity.
"I'm not a criminal, I'm a hacker", they'd say.
Hence you have an entire culture of people
that rate each other according to technical ability
and/or morals, spawning such terminology as "lamer",
"elite", "black hat", "grey hat", "white hat",
and "script kiddie"; but funnily enough, it
all seems to come down
to the fact that people don't want to admit
that they are doing something wrong - there is
always someone worse than them.
During some of the math drills they said the music got a little stale, and they sometimes just turned it down. Some said they'd prefer a little rap or a little jazz to go with their calculations of mean, median, and range.
"And frustrated offices are faced with two less-than-ideal choices: delete the e-mail and ignore a potential constituent or spend valuable staff time and resources corresponding with nonconstituents - a civic-minded approach, perhaps, but not efficacious for Members who are up for re-election every two years."
It always boils down to two things for them, money and re-election. The whole thing makes me sick.
Rubbish
They care about money and it makes you sick? So you'd rather they wasted tax payers money would you? Like everyone else with a budget, it's their duty to spend it wisely.
And remember, we're not just talking about nonconstituents here. We're also talking about potentially non-existent people! In a world where one person can send millions of spam emails automatically, what makes you think they can't set up a script to send the same message to a politician under as many names as they can think of?
So when it comes down to it, they just want people who write to them to specify their name and address - in the same way that a proper petition does.
I agree with you but I believe the main point ( besides the obvious statement of laziness ) is that one change can affect many places and many things. e.g. A function that handles formatting may work now on one page but break another ( out of perhaps 70 possible pages )
You should code the "core" or "engine" of the code before you add the GUI. Then problems like this wouldn't happen.
OK, so this is not always practical because requirements change. So how do you ensure that problems like this don't crop up?
Simple. Use unit tests. When the "function that handles formatting" is first written and used on web page X the coder writes a unit test for it - this easy, because there is no UI involved, call the function a few times and test the returned results.
That way, when another coder comes along to code web page Y, and decides he needs to change the "function that handles formatting", he knows he's mucked up because the unit tests start failing.
It is directly aimed at replacing Windows and Outlook/Exchange by giving the German government an effective countersource for this software. Standing alone, that is not bad - iff (sic), they kept the software to themselves.
Hold on a minute...
The government is for the people.
The government needs the software.
The people pay for the software (tax).
...so why shouldn't the software be Open Source?
To the person who compared this with making free cars, software is very different! Once software is created you can duplicate it effortlessly, unlike cars!
This is more like science. I don't hear anyone saying that the Human Genome Project is anti-competetive because they aren't going to charge everyone for what they discover.
I know that it appears to work under UML, but when I did the same strace on two debian installs, one running normally and one UML, and piped the result to wc -l the one running under UML had a smaller number of calls reported.
a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes
Well, yes it is, but if you want to take advantage of the security, and debug processes in depth, then you might have some problems.
Many of you will probably remember the
Reverse Challenge. One evening I downloaded the malicious binary, and decided that UML would be ideal to try running it in a tightly controlled enironment - using
fenris to trace its execution and learn
more about it.
Unfortunately, fenris doesn't work under UML (neither does strace if I remember correctly).
With all due respect...I think you missed the point.
No one is talking about a GNU Votes system.
What is meant by an "open source voting system" is one designed by experts, but the source code / schematics / whatever are available for anyone to examine, critique, and audit.
How can voters have faith in a system when how it works is proprietary?
Of course hardly anyone uses pre-4.x versions of IE/Netscape/Opera. But you are ignoring other victims of kludgy web design - like blind people who rely on browsers with built in speech synthesis.
An easy experiment you can do is to try and access a website with lynx, it will simulate what a blind person listening might here. Straight away you notice that in multi-column table based layouts, all those tiny links down the side of the page (next to the article you actually want to read) have to be scrolled through before you get to the article.
I don't understand the mentality of people who fudge around adding hack after hack for compatibility with 4.x browsers.
If you write a page using XHTML, a user with any browser that understands HTML will be able to read it. You can write it in the order "title,article,links/adds" - then the blind browser will get to the content they came for instantly. With the intelligent use of the DIV tag, all this can be positioned using CSS so you can still have the layout you want for people who can see it.
Best of all, unlike a sea of hacks and workarounds, this is built to standards so it won't need tweaking every few months.
It's easy to say to a 4.x user "upgrade" - after all, the system requirements for IE haven't changed that much from 4 to 5 to 6. But a blind person can't "get some eyes that work". So don't discriminate against them.
...The first is the idea that the Internet is somehow outside or above the real world...
The other thing we need to lose is the ridiculous belief that when we are online we are somehow in 'another place' outside the real world.
Err...these two ideas are different how?
Yes, the article reads like a rant - and basically is. Yes, The Register really isn't the place for such drivel. But it's not worth thousands of comments - that just makes it a troll, and a successful one at that.
Julian
Reminds me of those "original and best" adverts...
on
Next Generation Regexp
·
· Score: 1
Regular expressions - making
line noise useful since 1956!
Julian
(btw, it's a "Internet RFC standard compliant email address matcher")
In our area we have the saying "you earn money with depreciated machines" - and to use them, you simple do need an "old" maintained operating system.
This statement seems to be making the assumption that when talking about software, "newer" is synonymous with "bigger/bloated".
It is still more than possible to set up a small install, using a modern distribution, with the minimum number of functions compiled into the kernel for old machines.
A typical use of older machines, as a firewall/router, springs to mind. Here I doubt that the 2.4 firewall code is much more resource hungry than the 2.0 code, but the changes to the kernel make iptables much more flexible than ipfwadm.
If the hacker is smart enough to find out with a simple 'ps ax' that the processes you're running aren't the same as the processes he or she may have seen when they port scanned you (if they take the time to do that), they may realize port forwarding is going on which may raise suspicion
Firstly, assuming they used a tool like "nmap" to do the portscan they would already know that some of the ports are forwarded - nmap states which ones are in the results of the scan (I believe it can tell by the differences in TCP sequence numbers.)
Secondly, why would this detract from the realism of the situation? Not everyone who wants to provide limited services on the internet buys additional IPs. I know I don't have the money to!
My story is similar, except it was at the time when none of the free partition resizers did fat32, and I couldn't afford partition magic.
Having no spare disk drive but an internal zip drive, I download ZipSlack (the filesystem partition is on a zip disk, but you boot from a floppy)
I can agree with the "get all the docs" idea from your post - it took me two evenings reading after I'd downloaded ZipSlack to realise that "root=/dev/sdd4" was for SCSI, I wanted "root=/dev/hdd4"
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the case came to court and the judge ruled in favour of the media companies, would Sharman Networks have to pay?
There is a precedent for cases like this. Yahoo! did not have to comply with the French order because Yahoo! has their servers in the US and they are a US company.
How is this any different?
So what if millions of Californians use Kazaa? There are many times that number of Kazaa users who are not Californians. Millions of French people could access the US yahoo.com site - the ruling says:
What laws are the MPAA and RIAA using to sue Sharman Networks? Are they applicable in Australia or Vanuatu
The problem, as I see it, is what happens when someone in the open source community contributes a significant module of code, rather than a small patch.
They've written a piece of code, probably in a separate source file, put the GPL comment at the top and sent it to you. Surely they, by law, automatically own the copyright for this code, and they've released it under the GPL.
So what right do you have to then go releasing it under your commercial non-GPL license?
In previous post,
should read(and in the original post I presume)Nice try, but you're C is a bit confused.
actually makes buffer point to a *different* location, plus "wokie" is a nul-terminated string. In short your code doesn't demonstrate the problem. Try this:How long have computers existed? 40-odd years?
I wonder how many of them had a finite amount of memory? Wait a second... all of them!
You'd think that people could write an application that says "not enough memory" instead of crashing.
Novel concept eh?
Ok, so the linking structure can help - if the page is linked to other pages which also feature my search terms then it is probably a collection of relevant, in-depth information.
But popularity?!?
I don't care if I'm the only person in the world who knows that this page exists - if it has the content I'm looking for then I want to see it.
No-one seems to be looking at the broader picture. The Amazon affiliate scheme is a contract between two parties where one basically says...
They're not saying...Whether the user agrees to it or not, he/she is receiving a service (for example, reviews or links to books they would not normally find or buy), and the payment for that service is being diverted.
As far as I'm concerned that's fraud.
Your post indicates that you think to earn the title "hacker" you have to break into other people's computer systems. Well, that's one definition I suppose (one I hate, and I'm not the only one ), but it is by no means the only definition.
Anyway, in order to answer to the overall theme of this thread - "why the coloured hats" - it is helpful to understand both the history of the term "hacker", and appreciate the prevalence of moral relativism. So, if you're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin...
The origins of the term "hacker" being used in relation to computers are described in the very detailed and entertaining book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Stephen Levy. From the Amazon editorial review:
So how did the meaning of the word change?
Well, this is where moral relativism comes in. It's human nature to justify yourself, and that's what people did. When mischievous computer users began entering computer systems without authorisation they justified (in their own minds) themselves by claiming that they weren't doing any damage - just satisfying their curiousity.
"I'm not a criminal, I'm a hacker", they'd say.
Hence you have an entire culture of people that rate each other according to technical ability and/or morals, spawning such terminology as "lamer", "elite", "black hat", "grey hat", "white hat", and "script kiddie"; but funnily enough, it all seems to come down to the fact that people don't want to admit that they are doing something wrong - there is always someone worse than them.
Queue RIAA...
Sacrilege! You'd sell your soul for a measly spaceship ride?
:)
Rubbish
They care about money and it makes you sick? So you'd rather they wasted tax payers money would you? Like everyone else with a budget, it's their duty to spend it wisely.
And remember, we're not just talking about nonconstituents here. We're also talking about potentially non-existent people! In a world where one person can send millions of spam emails automatically, what makes you think they can't set up a script to send the same message to a politician under as many names as they can think of?
So when it comes down to it, they just want people who write to them to specify their name and address - in the same way that a proper petition does.
You should code the "core" or "engine" of the code before you add the GUI. Then problems like this wouldn't happen.
OK, so this is not always practical because requirements change. So how do you ensure that problems like this don't crop up?
Simple. Use unit tests. When the "function that handles formatting" is first written and used on web page X the coder writes a unit test for it - this easy, because there is no UI involved, call the function a few times and test the returned results.
That way, when another coder comes along to code web page Y, and decides he needs to change the "function that handles formatting", he knows he's mucked up because the unit tests start failing.
Hold on a minute...
...so why shouldn't the software be Open Source?
To the person who compared this with making free cars, software is very different! Once software is created you can duplicate it effortlessly, unlike cars!
This is more like science. I don't hear anyone saying that the Human Genome Project is anti-competetive because they aren't going to charge everyone for what they discover.
Are you sure?
I know that it appears to work under UML, but when I did the same strace on two debian installs, one running normally and one UML, and piped the result to wc -l the one running under UML had a smaller number of calls reported.
Well, yes it is, but if you want to take advantage of the security, and debug processes in depth, then you might have some problems.
Many of you will probably remember the Reverse Challenge. One evening I downloaded the malicious binary, and decided that UML would be ideal to try running it in a tightly controlled enironment - using fenris to trace its execution and learn more about it.
Unfortunately, fenris doesn't work under UML (neither does strace if I remember correctly).
Shame. It's a lot cheaper than VMWare!
With all due respect...I think you missed the point. No one is talking about a GNU Votes system. What is meant by an "open source voting system" is one designed by experts, but the source code / schematics / whatever are available for anyone to examine, critique, and audit. How can voters have faith in a system when how it works is proprietary?
Of course hardly anyone uses pre-4.x versions of IE/Netscape/Opera. But you are ignoring other victims of kludgy web design - like blind people who rely on browsers with built in speech synthesis.
An easy experiment you can do is to try and access a website with lynx, it will simulate what a blind person listening might here. Straight away you notice that in multi-column table based layouts, all those tiny links down the side of the page (next to the article you actually want to read) have to be scrolled through before you get to the article.
I don't understand the mentality of people who fudge around adding hack after hack for compatibility with 4.x browsers.
If you write a page using XHTML, a user with any browser that understands HTML will be able to read it. You can write it in the order "title,article,links/adds" - then the blind browser will get to the content they came for instantly. With the intelligent use of the DIV tag, all this can be positioned using CSS so you can still have the layout you want for people who can see it.
Best of all, unlike a sea of hacks and workarounds, this is built to standards so it won't need tweaking every few months.
It's easy to say to a 4.x user "upgrade" - after all, the system requirements for IE haven't changed that much from 4 to 5 to 6. But a blind person can't "get some eyes that work". So don't discriminate against them.
OK, the article is poorly thought out.
Err...these two ideas are different how?
Yes, the article reads like a rant - and basically is.
Yes, The Register really isn't the place for such drivel.
But it's not worth thousands of comments - that just makes it a troll, and a successful one at that.
Julian
Regular expressions - making line noise useful since 1956!
Julian
(btw, it's a "Internet RFC standard compliant email address matcher")
This statement seems to be making the assumption that when talking about software, "newer" is synonymous with "bigger/bloated".
It is still more than possible to set up a small install, using a modern distribution, with the minimum number of functions compiled into the kernel for old machines.
A typical use of older machines, as a firewall/router, springs to mind. Here I doubt that the 2.4 firewall code is much more resource hungry than the 2.0 code, but the changes to the kernel make iptables much more flexible than ipfwadm.
Julian
From the article:
Firstly, assuming they used a tool like "nmap" to do the portscan they would already know that some of the ports are forwarded - nmap states which ones are in the results of the scan (I believe it can tell by the differences in TCP sequence numbers.)
Secondly, why would this detract from the realism of the situation? Not everyone who wants to provide limited services on the internet buys additional IPs. I know I don't have the money to!
Julian
I heard about this fake on the radio. Apparently the giveaway that the book comes from China and not J K Rowling is the "sweet and sour rain".
:)
The mind boggles!
Julian
Their "linking policy" will have absolutely no affect.
My story is similar, except it was at the time when none of the free partition resizers did fat32, and I couldn't afford partition magic.
Having no spare disk drive but an internal zip drive, I download ZipSlack (the filesystem partition is on a zip disk, but you boot from a floppy)
I can agree with the "get all the docs" idea from your post - it took me two evenings reading after I'd downloaded ZipSlack to realise that "root=/dev/sdd4" was for SCSI, I wanted "root=/dev/hdd4"
Then it booted. :)