"The leaked code includes 30,915 files and was apparently removed from a Linux computer used by Mainsoft for development purposes.
Clues to the source code's origin lie in a "core dump" file, which is left by the Linux operating system to record the memory a program is using when it crashes. Further investigation by BetaNews revealed the machine was likely used by Mainsoft's Director of Technology, Eyal Alaluf."
Wow, Microsoft's first source code leak in history came from running Linux. And they traced it because Linux's core files make forensics trivial!
I'm betting there's a lot of folks in Redmond right now saying: "who the hell decided to put Windows code on a Linux box?!!!"
We have the Internet now, which is owned by AOL, which exists in Virginia. Which is under the D.C. Circuit Court. Which means that whatever they decide applies to an overwhelming majority of the Internet's core infrastructure.
You must have been thinking of the real world... which is weird, because this is Slashdot.
Interestingly, this is the exact same appeals court that overturned the decision against Microsoft. It's good to know that there are cool, compassionate people in charge of the courts who don't listen to which way the prevailing "geek winds" are blowing on e issue or another but instead disspassionately apply the law. It appears that in their mind, the RIAA is as mistaken as Microsoft was innocent.
Red Hat, Inc. is now Microsoft's #1 competitor in the marketplace. Has Red Hat been studying Microsoft for years? One need only look at kernel support for NTFS or the Samba project to answer that. Now in order to keep up with this arms race, Microsoft must in turn study Linux in order to keep up.
Capitalism demands this fierce escalation: it's called competition.
Remember, foreign intelligence's wish list never changes:
Classified Material
Signal intelligence/Radio
Infiltration Methodology/Insider
And here's Slashdot, linking directly to a glaring example of #3. I don't know why exactly this guy decided to write up an experience and procedures which they tell you at the door are secret, but I know that the government isn't going to take too kindly to this web site giving Al Queda what is nearly a HOWTO document for infiltrating the NSA. I think we all remember the last time the Secret Service had to delete content from Slashdot. I hope the administrators have the good sense to pull this before the men with the folding uzis visit again.
Admittedly, the "glider" was cool. Everybody played life, everyone knew that crosses were stable and gliders would fly till they impacted - it's a universal identifier for a lot of people.
But the BSD logo and the Linux logo are brands, they're symbols for a codebase, not a loosely and contentiously organized group which most people off the street would mistakenly identify as a word for computer criminals. This really doesn't make any sense- what are you branding yourself as? Are you an ESR/hacker? What if by some fluke you just never played life?
Anyway if we are going to give someone the responsiblity of branding an entire MOVEMENT, I'm not sure it should be some gun crazed wack job that would scare most moms out of the day care center.
Interesting quote from ESR
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 0, Troll
"The dashed red arrow from 4.2BSD to System V represents
stolen property. AT&T, SCO/Caldera's predecessor in interest, took code from BSD Unix into System V, removing copyright notices and attributions in violation of the Berkeley license."
Emphasis mine. I'm surprised to learn that Eric Raymond believes that copying code constitutes "theft of property". It means that a) Eric believes in Intellectual Property and b) Eric believes that copying code fragments in violation of a code license constitutes theft. Probably not an mp3 fan...
Maybe after he's done at OSI he could work for the RIAA - his view of intellectual property law is as reactionary as anything Hillary Rosen has ever proposed. I wonder if, like Orin Hatch, he believes we can now rightfully destroy SCO's computers? Sign me up, man.
I know that the best approach is to ignore you trolls, even as your slander becomes more and more outrageous.
Slander? Fyodor, Slander is an untrue statement made to defame. You posted a page to your web site which said "I hacked into this troll's computer" and you posted screenshots to prove it! I witnessed it!
How can a question like this be entered into rational discourse? You people have been playing too many computer role playing games. Here in real life the bar for "evil" lies a little higher: Charlie Manson, Tim McVeigh.
Here's what I don't understand: Why are we even talking about hydrogen powered anything? Has no one been paying attention?
The Bush Administration needs to buy themselves a cluebat and beat themselves silly. Haven't they ever heard of the Hindenburg? In a post 9/11 era, how can we even talk about letting ordinary Americans (which include of course thousands of sleeper cells) drive around huge hydrogen bombs strapped to cars? Because that's exactly what a hydrogen fuel tank is.
All this talk about water-producing Freedom Cars is great, but wait until someone drives one into a skyscraper!
So, if you want to use their code, it's going to be harder than just typing "make install".
I believe we have miscommunicated, and I apologize. What I meant to point out was that the code was so inacessible that professional Slashdot programmers had to start from scratch rather than use any of the 5 systems developed at CMU. This means that not only was it a little harder than "make install", but it would have taken more time to adapt the CMU code than it did to attack the problem independently from scratch. There really isn't any other answer to the question of why Slashdot spent months developing a home-brewed system that doesn't even come close to measuring up. I think we'd all agree that the Occam's Razor dictates this answer, since the only other possible alternative was that deep-seated hubris or other mental defects prevented them from using off-the-shelf software.
The captcha project is conceptually pretty cool, but so far they have failed to make their code portable and useful to the community at large. Evidence? Look no further than the site you're reading. To stop spammers from creating tons of bogus Slashdot accounts, the folks at Slashdot had to spend months laboriously writing their own captcha-style process to protect the new user form. Unfortunately due to the failure of CMU to make their code accessible, someone at OSDN was forced to create their own system from scratch and (understandably) it isn't anywhere near as tough or well designed as the CMU captcha, lacking such basics as font rotation, color rotation, anti-aliasing, and other anti-OCR measures.
So, while I commend their effort, I wish CMU would work harder to make their tools available not just to commercial sites but to the Open Source community and projects like Slashcode. This would help the captcha project actually accomplish its mission of protecting users from abuse, instead of leaving sites like Slashdot vulnerable to any 13 year old Visual Basic programmer with a grudge and a clue.
I'll tell you what unnecessary government intrusion is. Unnecessary government intrusion is the DMCA legislating away our right to think critically and speak freely. Unnecessary government intrusion is the "War on Terror", a war on a verb, mind you, which can only be won by injecting drugs into every American which prevents fear regardless of stimulus. Unncessary government intrusion is the Office of Total Information Awareness, a Poindexter-led database of our SSN cross indexed to our freaking chest X-rays to our cell phone locations.
No, this is not "unncessary government intrusion". This is just a court trying to restore our basic unalienable right to a software language that isn't owned by a giant corporation like Microsoft.
It was just an example. Maybe you want to host some software which fights for freedom, like DeCSS, or valid criticism of Ford Motor Company - or maybe there's nothing wrong with what you're hosting, but you're scared because America's laws are crazy. Hell, maybe you just want to post some crazy rambling like this:
The head of the Galactic
Confederation (76 planets around
larger stars visible from here)
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
solved overpopulation (250 billion
or so per planet -- 178 billion on
average) by mass implanting.
He caused people to be brought to
Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H Bomb
on the principal volcanoes (Incident 2)
and then the Pacific area ones
were taken in boxes to Hawaii
and the Atlantic Area ones to
Las Palmas and there "packaged."
His name was Xenu. He used
renegades. Various misleading
data by means of circuits etc.
was placed in the implants.
When through with his crime Loyal Officers
(to the people) captured him
after 6 years of battle
and put him in an electronic
mountain trap where he still
is. "They" are gone. The place (Confed.)
has since been a desert.
Yes, they can find you, but proving that the files came from your IP address does not prove posession. I have this on good authority. It may alert them to your presence and cause them to raid your house, but if when they raid the house they find nothing in your posession, you're scott free.
That's why it's so important to look at the legal concept of ownership. For instance, if you get free storage from a free hosting site, and you put, say, child porno on that site, do you own the child porno? No. So you can't get busted for posession. The trick is to keep stuff off of your computer and host it on someone else's computer.
Anyone hosting their own blog in their own name is confining themselves to boring content. What these people need to wise up to is that you should just make yourself a pseudonym, use no personally traceable information, and post your content on a site with an active legal team, like Slashdot's journal system.
Then it's someone else's problem, not yours, and there are no consequences.
But the reason it was undefended was that Sauron was tricked into thinking that the Ring was in Gondor.
Correct. This would continue as planned, only in the middle of the battle, the Eagles would storm Mount Doom, leaving it undefended.
Further, simply because King Eagle could fly to Mount Doom after the power of Sauron was broken, does not mean it was possible for him to do so before. Many dark magics were intimated in the books that were not fully fleshed out.
Sauron had no power to effect change at a distance, even in Mount Doom. Remember that when Gollum put on a the Ring, all the Nazgul wheeled and headed for Mount Doom. That was Sauron's only response. No dark magicks, no powers, nothing. He was powerless to do anything but command Nazgul to get their ass over there.
There is no reason to believe that with his full powers, Sauron could not have slaughtered a winged ringbearer, or used the power of the ring to subvert him.
Yes there is; a ringbearer was sitting above the lava in Mount Doom for some time while Sauron scrambled the Nazgul. Therefore, this was his only available magick or response.
Therefore, Gandalf was either suicidal or an agent of evil.
As for why they didn't use the Eagles earlier -- you saw Gwaihir in the first movie. He was pretty damn conspicuous. And the Fellbeasts aren't the only aerial defense available to Sauron. He also had crows and ballistas and stone-throwing trolls, not to mention his own magic. The Eagles would have been swatted down like flies, so long as they tried to go straight in.
Incorrect. Remember that the Eagles reached Mount Doom from the Black Gate in time to pick up Frodo before the lava crushes him. This means in under five minutes. Now measure how far this is on the map. This means they can cross the entire world in under an hour. Also remember that the Nazgul could fly above the height of all weapons, so the Eagles can do the same. So, the entire Eagle force could have gotten to Mount Doom faster than any ground forces could have been mustered there. They would have been invincible to all weapons based purely on their altitude. Sauron would have had 9 Nazgul.. maybe and some crows to throw up against 10,000 elven archers mounted on Eagles. As far as misdirection goes, misdirection is great. Send 9,000 eagles to attack the Black Fortress, and only send 1,000 to Mount Doom. Since you're getting there in five minutes, it's really all pointless. You win no matter what.
Mount Doom was undefended and could have been reached by air unopposed in less time than it takes to blink. Sauron was powerless.
The only option is that Gandalf was suicidal or an agent of darkness.
Look just because he doesn't expect it doesn't mean it isn't stupid. You could still pull the He-Cant-Imagine-Anyone-Would-Destroy-It gag and use 10,000 eagles to storm Mount Doom instead of sending it with two pathetic weaklings. Remember that the entire force of 10,000 would be able to reach Mount Doom unopposed in five minutes because Sauron had no airborne forces. He would have been completely helpless. Instead, we end up with one hobbit running around with the ring on inside a tower full of orcs. Pathetic. It was a terrible strategy, and I have no idea why it worked.
Well as far as the ringbearer goes, the solution there is just as obvious. Make a rat the ringbearer by gluing the One Ring to the back of a rat. The rat can't reach the ring to fulfill his temptation. Put the rat in a bag and distance it from the eagle by a rope.
Now as far as Sauron detecting the ring, remember he can only find it when someone's wearing it. Now also remember that it takes five minutes to get from the Black Gate to Mount Doom. Barely enough time to react. The Nazgul would have been stuck full of elven arrows, helpless, and Sauron can't fly.
No, it's pretty obvious that Gandalf was suicidal or evil.
Slashdot Mirror
"The leaked code includes 30,915 files and was apparently removed from a Linux computer used by Mainsoft for development purposes.
Clues to the source code's origin lie in a "core dump" file, which is left by the Linux operating system to record the memory a program is using when it crashes. Further investigation by BetaNews revealed the machine was likely used by Mainsoft's Director of Technology, Eyal Alaluf."
Wow, Microsoft's first source code leak in history came from running Linux. And they traced it because Linux's core files make forensics trivial!
I'm betting there's a lot of folks in Redmond right now saying: "who the hell decided to put Windows code on a Linux box?!!!"
P.S. Eyal is screwed, right?
We have the Internet now, which is owned by AOL, which exists in Virginia. Which is under the D.C. Circuit Court. Which means that whatever they decide applies to an overwhelming majority of the Internet's core infrastructure.
You must have been thinking of the real world... which is weird, because this is Slashdot.
Here's the full text of the ruling.
Interestingly, this is the exact same appeals court that overturned the decision against Microsoft. It's good to know that there are cool, compassionate people in charge of the courts who don't listen to which way the prevailing "geek winds" are blowing on e issue or another but instead disspassionately apply the law. It appears that in their mind, the RIAA is as mistaken as Microsoft was innocent.
Red Hat, Inc. is now Microsoft's #1 competitor in the marketplace. Has Red Hat been studying Microsoft for years? One need only look at kernel support for NTFS or the Samba project to answer that. Now in order to keep up with this arms race, Microsoft must in turn study Linux in order to keep up.
Capitalism demands this fierce escalation: it's called competition.
And here's Slashdot, linking directly to a glaring example of #3. I don't know why exactly this guy decided to write up an experience and procedures which they tell you at the door are secret, but I know that the government isn't going to take too kindly to this web site giving Al Queda what is nearly a HOWTO document for infiltrating the NSA. I think we all remember the last time the Secret Service had to delete content from Slashdot. I hope the administrators have the good sense to pull this before the men with the folding uzis visit again.
It was like how they cut Tom Bombadil out of the first one, or the Weirding Modules out of Dune. This is crucial stuff, people!
Admittedly, the "glider" was cool. Everybody played life, everyone knew that crosses were stable and gliders would fly till they impacted - it's a universal identifier for a lot of people.
But the BSD logo and the Linux logo are brands, they're symbols for a codebase, not a loosely and contentiously organized group which most people off the street would mistakenly identify as a word for computer criminals. This really doesn't make any sense- what are you branding yourself as? Are you an ESR/hacker? What if by some fluke you just never played life?
Anyway if we are going to give someone the responsiblity of branding an entire MOVEMENT, I'm not sure it should be some gun crazed wack job that would scare most moms out of the day care center.
Maybe after he's done at OSI he could work for the RIAA - his view of intellectual property law is as reactionary as anything Hillary Rosen has ever proposed. I wonder if, like Orin Hatch, he believes we can now rightfully destroy SCO's computers? Sign me up, man.
Slander? Fyodor, Slander is an untrue statement made to defame. You posted a page to your web site which said "I hacked into this troll's computer" and you posted screenshots to prove it! I witnessed it!
How could repeating this be slander?
How can a question like this be entered into rational discourse? You people have been playing too many computer role playing games. Here in real life the bar for "evil" lies a little higher: Charlie Manson, Tim McVeigh.
Get a grip.
Here's what I don't understand: Why are we even talking about hydrogen powered anything? Has no one been paying attention?
The Bush Administration needs to buy themselves a cluebat and beat themselves silly. Haven't they ever heard of the Hindenburg? In a post 9/11 era, how can we even talk about letting ordinary Americans (which include of course thousands of sleeper cells) drive around huge hydrogen bombs strapped to cars? Because that's exactly what a hydrogen fuel tank is.
All this talk about water-producing Freedom Cars is great, but wait until someone drives one into a skyscraper!
So, if you want to use their code, it's going to be harder than just typing "make install".
I believe we have miscommunicated, and I apologize. What I meant to point out was that the code was so inacessible that professional Slashdot programmers had to start from scratch rather than use any of the 5 systems developed at CMU. This means that not only was it a little harder than "make install", but it would have taken more time to adapt the CMU code than it did to attack the problem independently from scratch. There really isn't any other answer to the question of why Slashdot spent months developing a home-brewed system that doesn't even come close to measuring up. I think we'd all agree that the Occam's Razor dictates this answer, since the only other possible alternative was that deep-seated hubris or other mental defects prevented them from using off-the-shelf software.
The captcha project is conceptually pretty cool, but so far they have failed to make their code portable and useful to the community at large. Evidence? Look no further than the site you're reading. To stop spammers from creating tons of bogus Slashdot accounts, the folks at Slashdot had to spend months laboriously writing their own captcha-style process to protect the new user form. Unfortunately due to the failure of CMU to make their code accessible, someone at OSDN was forced to create their own system from scratch and (understandably) it isn't anywhere near as tough or well designed as the CMU captcha, lacking such basics as font rotation, color rotation, anti-aliasing, and other anti-OCR measures.
So, while I commend their effort, I wish CMU would work harder to make their tools available not just to commercial sites but to the Open Source community and projects like Slashcode. This would help the captcha project actually accomplish its mission of protecting users from abuse, instead of leaving sites like Slashdot vulnerable to any 13 year old Visual Basic programmer with a grudge and a clue.
That's simple; Java is Free and Open like the GPL!!
I'll tell you what unnecessary government intrusion is. Unnecessary government intrusion is the DMCA legislating away our right to think critically and speak freely. Unnecessary government intrusion is the "War on Terror", a war on a verb, mind you, which can only be won by injecting drugs into every American which prevents fear regardless of stimulus. Unncessary government intrusion is the Office of Total Information Awareness, a Poindexter-led database of our SSN cross indexed to our freaking chest X-rays to our cell phone locations.
No, this is not "unncessary government intrusion". This is just a court trying to restore our basic unalienable right to a software language that isn't owned by a giant corporation like Microsoft.
It was just an example. Maybe you want to host some software which fights for freedom, like DeCSS, or valid criticism of Ford Motor Company - or maybe there's nothing wrong with what you're hosting, but you're scared because America's laws are crazy. Hell, maybe you just want to post some crazy rambling like this:
The head of the Galactic Confederation (76 planets around larger stars visible from here) (founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera) solved overpopulation (250 billion or so per planet -- 178 billion on average) by mass implanting. He caused people to be brought to Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H Bomb on the principal volcanoes (Incident 2) and then the Pacific area ones were taken in boxes to Hawaii and the Atlantic Area ones to Las Palmas and there "packaged." His name was Xenu. He used renegades. Various misleading data by means of circuits etc. was placed in the implants. When through with his crime Loyal Officers (to the people) captured him after 6 years of battle and put him in an electronic mountain trap where he still is. "They" are gone. The place (Confed.) has since been a desert.
Sir, you have no proof whatsoever that the people who control our media are Jewish. Please refrain from posting such offensive garbage.
Yes, they can find you, but proving that the files came from your IP address does not prove posession. I have this on good authority. It may alert them to your presence and cause them to raid your house, but if when they raid the house they find nothing in your posession, you're scott free.
That's why it's so important to look at the legal concept of ownership. For instance, if you get free storage from a free hosting site, and you put, say, child porno on that site, do you own the child porno? No. So you can't get busted for posession. The trick is to keep stuff off of your computer and host it on someone else's computer.
Anyone hosting their own blog in their own name is confining themselves to boring content. What these people need to wise up to is that you should just make yourself a pseudonym, use no personally traceable information, and post your content on a site with an active legal team, like Slashdot's journal system.
Then it's someone else's problem, not yours, and there are no consequences.
That's not true, girls love sexy geeks with money. They also love the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
But the reason it was undefended was that Sauron was tricked into thinking that the Ring was in Gondor.
Correct. This would continue as planned, only in the middle of the battle, the Eagles would storm Mount Doom, leaving it undefended.
Further, simply because King Eagle could fly to Mount Doom after the power of Sauron was broken, does not mean it was possible for him to do so before. Many dark magics were intimated in the books that were not fully fleshed out.
Sauron had no power to effect change at a distance, even in Mount Doom. Remember that when Gollum put on a the Ring, all the Nazgul wheeled and headed for Mount Doom. That was Sauron's only response. No dark magicks, no powers, nothing. He was powerless to do anything but command Nazgul to get their ass over there.
There is no reason to believe that with his full powers, Sauron could not have slaughtered a winged ringbearer, or used the power of the ring to subvert him.
Yes there is; a ringbearer was sitting above the lava in Mount Doom for some time while Sauron scrambled the Nazgul. Therefore, this was his only available magick or response.
Therefore, Gandalf was either suicidal or an agent of evil.
As for why they didn't use the Eagles earlier -- you saw Gwaihir in the first movie. He was pretty damn conspicuous. And the Fellbeasts aren't the only aerial defense available to Sauron. He also had crows and ballistas and stone-throwing trolls, not to mention his own magic. The Eagles would have been swatted down like flies, so long as they tried to go straight in.
Incorrect. Remember that the Eagles reached Mount Doom from the Black Gate in time to pick up Frodo before the lava crushes him. This means in under five minutes. Now measure how far this is on the map. This means they can cross the entire world in under an hour. Also remember that the Nazgul could fly above the height of all weapons, so the Eagles can do the same. So, the entire Eagle force could have gotten to Mount Doom faster than any ground forces could have been mustered there. They would have been invincible to all weapons based purely on their altitude. Sauron would have had 9 Nazgul.. maybe and some crows to throw up against 10,000 elven archers mounted on Eagles. As far as misdirection goes, misdirection is great. Send 9,000 eagles to attack the Black Fortress, and only send 1,000 to Mount Doom. Since you're getting there in five minutes, it's really all pointless. You win no matter what.
Mount Doom was undefended and could have been reached by air unopposed in less time than it takes to blink. Sauron was powerless.
The only option is that Gandalf was suicidal or an agent of darkness.
Look just because he doesn't expect it doesn't mean it isn't stupid. You could still pull the He-Cant-Imagine-Anyone-Would-Destroy-It gag and use 10,000 eagles to storm Mount Doom instead of sending it with two pathetic weaklings. Remember that the entire force of 10,000 would be able to reach Mount Doom unopposed in five minutes because Sauron had no airborne forces. He would have been completely helpless. Instead, we end up with one hobbit running around with the ring on inside a tower full of orcs. Pathetic. It was a terrible strategy, and I have no idea why it worked.
Well as far as the ringbearer goes, the solution there is just as obvious. Make a rat the ringbearer by gluing the One Ring to the back of a rat. The rat can't reach the ring to fulfill his temptation. Put the rat in a bag and distance it from the eagle by a rope.
Now as far as Sauron detecting the ring, remember he can only find it when someone's wearing it. Now also remember that it takes five minutes to get from the Black Gate to Mount Doom. Barely enough time to react. The Nazgul would have been stuck full of elven arrows, helpless, and Sauron can't fly.
No, it's pretty obvious that Gandalf was suicidal or evil.