"You want access to the US's markets? Well, how much is that worth to you? What are you willing to give up for that access?"
At this point, someone could ask the more fundamental question of whether or not the government should be involved in controlling access to markets in the first place.
Of course, each country must decide on its own how much control to give their government in regulating the markets, but many examples (such as pre-Chinese Hong Kong) seem to suggest that countries are more likely to prosper when governments keep out of market access decisions.
* Users never have to manually configure hardware - the kernel detects the hardware and compiles and loads the requisite modules automatically
In my personal experience, Linux already does this better than Windows. Heck, my Linux system actually can tell I have an HP Laserjet 6L just by looking at the parallel port. In Windows 98 I had to go to the Add Printer icon and select it from a menu!
I also detects my Ethernet card correctly, as well as my SCSI controller and other hardware. The only thing it doesn't recognize is my sound card which unfortunately isn't supported. And that is one of the biggest drawbacks of Linux, less universal hardware support.
They always mention things that I have no idea how to do. I barely know DOS so I don't know many commands for the shell. LINUX is difficult.
This is precisely why the Linux courses that were criticized so much should begin with shell basics and simple Unix commands, as well as the general layout of the filesystem. If you instead just make a friendly course which teaches how to point and click your way around KDE then students will not really be well-equiped to read HOWTOs when they want to do something more sophisticated than making power-point type presentations.
Linux fundamentals (actually Unix fundamentals which are basically the same) are not difficult if time and care are taken in teaching and learning them. And the rewards are worth the effort when you need to do practically anything beyond simply running applications.
The problem with many discussions about the DMCA (and the original post dealt primarily with the DMCA-like aspects of the WIPO treaty) is they degenerate into a discussion on whether or not copyrights are a good thing or not.
Yes, the DMCA does help some IP owners to protect their works, and yes it is under Title 17 of the United States Code, but that doesn't make it a copyright law. It is a law which restricts the creation, use, and communication of certain technologies. The DeCSS program was never copyrighted, but the DMCA has been used to limit its distribution.
If I sit down to create a new tool to allow someone to use their computer in a useful way (a device driver for instance) then the DMCA might be used to prevent me from doing so, if said driver might as a side effect allow someone to copy or access a copyrighted work. Such a law stifles creativity, it doesn't encourage it. Just because the "artists" in this case are computer programmers, it doesn't make their work any less valid.
I, like many others, think the concept of copyright is a useful one. But I don't think the DMCA or the WIPO treaty are merely copyright laws.
People used to say there would always be banking havens, too. That was before 9/11.
Just wait till some terrorists use a pirated copy of Windows to keep their accounts. Then you'll see the "data havens" either changing their ways or being bombed out of existence.
The law says that teachers cannot strike, and this has surely been upheld by the courts since lots of states have that law.
Fine. But is the correct response to illegal striking to fire the workers or put them in jail? I always thought it was the former. That's what Ronald Reagan did to the illegally striking air traffic controllers, for instance. The right thing in my opinion.
Teaching, unlike military service, is a job you are legally allowed to resign from at any time, especially if you aren't under contract. Failure to show up for work when ordered to seems to me an indication that you wish to resign. Why should they be sent to jail?
Right. A good number of physicists never expected to see the Higgs until the LHC comes online. In fact, it is the prime motivation for such an expensive project.
There's still a good chance that the Higgs will be found, and if it isn't, even at LHC energies, that in itself will be an interesting result.
How about holding various companies whose products are exploited the most (re: MS) liable for their lack of security?
Yes. And it is the consumers who should hold them liable by voting with their dollars.
I must say at this point I have very little sympathy for the victims of the Goner virus. Outlook Express has been exploited many times in the past. The attitude is always along the lines of "we have to catch the dirty little hacker to wrote this virus and string him up by his toenails, cover him with honey and release a million army ants into the room." instead of "hmm, Outlook Express has some serious vulnerabilities, and therefore we should consider switching to another e-mail application which treats attachments with more care...".
In order for Windows to consider a sound card when an application opens a Secure Audio Path,
So this decision is made in software? If so, can't one reverse engineer the part of Windows that checks for this signature and create a patch that bypasses it? (I admit, this wouldn't be easy as Windows is closed source, but I'm surprised none of the reverse engineering groups have done this.)
Or am I missing something?
Re:How is this better than rollerblades?
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People fall when learning to walk. People fall when learning to ride a bike. People fall when learning to rollerblade. So wear kneepads, elbow pads and a helmet when learning. Once you get the hang of it, it's as simple and natural as walking. And even if you combine all the protective gear, and the rollerblades themselves, it all weighs a lot less than one of these 60 pound scooters!
What happens when your non-altered-dna child can't get a job because everyone else has had their IQ bumped 50 points?
And maybe if I work hard and become wealthy I shouldn't send my kids to Harvard because they might make it difficult for kids who went to a state University to compete.
How is this better than rollerblades?
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Ok. The advantage of this scooter over walking is the speed. It will go a whopping 12mph. And it can go 15 miles between recharges. And it is much more energy efficient than a car.
Consider rollerblades. They can certainly do 12mph, and probably more. And a healthy person in reasonable shape can go 15 miles on rollerblades without too much trouble. (Although who can afford to spend more than an hour travelling 15 miles to work?)
Rollerblades are much lighter, cheaper, and they are legal on most city sidewalks which usually ban motorized devices.
So, unless you're really, really lazy, can you name one advantage of this scooter over rollerblades?
I agree the Felton case never had legs, but I don't see what you have against Corley. He was the one guy who didn't back down. He had nothing to gain financially by posting DeCSS, he was just fighting for our freedoms.
What specifically makes him unsympathetic? Unlike many of the DeCSS posters he didn't engage in profanity while describing the MPAA, and never encouraged illegal copying. If you've heard him on the radio you've probably heard he is an articulate and level-headed guy even though his politics are a little to the left of center.
Has it gotten to the point where no one with long hair should expect a fair trial?
But this case was never really about DeCSS. The MPAA knows they can't put DeCSS back in the bottle. What it is about is open DVD players that contain CSS decoding circuitry without region coding, Macrovision, and licensing from DVDCCA. If DeCSS were declared legal, what would stop a hardware manufacturer from selling DVD players with no licensing from DVDCCA.
Ditto for open source Linux DVD players. They'll be just like encryption software used to be. You'll have to download them from some European country since they'll never be part of Red Hat or Mandrake. This is a big win for the MPAA.
And that's just the tip of the iceburg. The next generation of DVDs which will have high definition video will have a new encryption system, and the MPAA wants to make sure a crack for that is never released.
By the way, this decision doesn't bode well for Sklyarov.
item: there was supposed to be a coordinated advisory put out on dec. 3rd. rh preempted that, causing this nasty confusion.
Co-ordinated by whom? That's the scary part. Is there a secret society of bug-finders that schedule release dates for disclosures just like movie studios have release dates for films? I found it rather disturbing when I found this quote from the SecurityFocus page:
Solutions:
Vendor notified on Nov 14, 2001.
Fixes will be available from the author as well as from vendors who
ship products that include Wu-Ftpd as core or optional components.
This vulnerability was initially scheduled for public release on
December 3, 2001. Red Hat pre-emptively released an advisory on
November 27, 2001. As a result, other vendors may not yet have fixes
available.
The implication here is that any time a bug is fixed in a popular open source product, we don't tell the public until each and every distro vendor has time to provide convenient patches in their own proprietary format.
Doesn't this go against the whole philosophy of open-source software? Are there so few people left who can use patch, configure, make, make install, that we must keep sysadmins in the dark until they can type rpm -Fvh? Perhaps it's time for an CERT replacement that is open to the public.
Ok. First of all, Red Hat's first loyalty must be to its customers some of whom are paying customers. Every minute they delayed releasing a patch is one more minute that its customer's servers are vulnerable.
Secondly, Red Hat released a patch, not an exploit script, so how exactly are they hurting anyone?
Thirdly, Red Hat releases patched sources, as well as binaries, so presumably people with other distros can compare the patched sources to theirs to discover the patch on their own. It does require the rpm program, but I understand it can be made to run in a limited sense on other distros.
Um, how could they get your private key from intercepting an e-mail on the receiving end?
They don't need your private key. Only the private key of the recipient. That's my point! And if people sending mail to you also encrypt with their own public key (which is commonly done to make it easier for people to archive sent mail) they can read both your inbound and outbound mail.
all a company has to do is to bring the person to a federal court and the defence sites what ever ruling is highest up at the time,
Well, the ruling has to be in regard to whichever law is being decided at the time. A precedent under trademark law may have no bearing on a case brought under UCITA laws. UCITA is a state law, the relevent part of which expands the definition of contract to include click-wrap or shrink-wrap EULAs. This doesn't necessarily come into conflict with this ruling on trademark law. A Federal Court would basically have to find UCITA unconstitutional to strike it down, and the present case makes no such finding.
specifically federal copyright law, which recognizes the right of the owner of a copy of a copyrighted work to dispose of it by resale.
Ok. First of all, there is no federal law which so states, rather it is a doctrine, which is a court interpretation which sets a precedent. The doctrine in this case is the first sale doctrine established by a Supreme Court case in 1905. The doctrine basically stated that under existing copyright law, copyright holders can't create arbitrary new rights for themselves by simply stating so on a book jacket.
UCITA however deals with contract law, not copyright law, and it expands the scope of what is considered a contract. It is not in conflict with federal law, as contracts can be written under both federal and state law. Many rights granted under the U.S. Constitution, including First Amendment rights, can be signed away in a contract, even one governed by state law.
The courts have ruled that the states may not pass laws that usurp or interfere with Federal copyright law.
I don't disagree, but UCITA basically expands the scope of what is considered a contract, and federal copyright law permits the waiving of certain rights, including those granted by copyright law, by entering into a contract. And contracts can be signed under state as well as federal laws as I said.
No. This case was decided in a federal court because the suit involved a federal trademark law. This doesn't nullify UCITA, since the suit was not a UCITA suit. Nothing in the opinion states that UCITA or similar laws are invalid, only that the laws that were implicated in the present suit did not forbid resale of the software. As far as I can tell, nothing in the opinion prevents state legislatures from passing other laws which may forbid such resale.
Well, Cogeco used to hit several (at least half a dozen) @Home routers (in Canada then the U.S., when tracerouting to a U.S. address) and now there's only one, and the next hop after that one is in cgocable.net., so my guess is not really an @Home router, but merely a Cogeco router which hasn't changed its name yet.
Presumably since the recording industry's current attempts at watermarking schemes have been cracked, they will try to implement new systems.
Do you plan to try to find weaknesses in newer schemes, or do the current legal headaches discourage you from doing so?
Was it simply the existence of the contest which prompted you to do the research you did, or would you try to work on cracking future schemes even if there were no such contest?
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At this point, someone could ask the more fundamental question of whether or not the government should be involved in controlling access to markets in the first place.
Of course, each country must decide on its own how much control to give their government in regulating the markets, but many examples (such as pre-Chinese Hong Kong) seem to suggest that countries are more likely to prosper when governments keep out of market access decisions.
In my personal experience, Linux already does this better than Windows. Heck, my Linux system actually can tell I have an HP Laserjet 6L just by looking at the parallel port. In Windows 98 I had to go to the Add Printer icon and select it from a menu!
I also detects my Ethernet card correctly, as well as my SCSI controller and other hardware. The only thing it doesn't recognize is my sound card which unfortunately isn't supported. And that is one of the biggest drawbacks of Linux, less universal hardware support.
This is precisely why the Linux courses that were criticized so much should begin with shell basics and simple Unix commands, as well as the general layout of the filesystem. If you instead just make a friendly course which teaches how to point and click your way around KDE then students will not really be well-equiped to read HOWTOs when they want to do something more sophisticated than making power-point type presentations.
Linux fundamentals (actually Unix fundamentals which are basically the same) are not difficult if time and care are taken in teaching and learning them. And the rewards are worth the effort when you need to do practically anything beyond simply running applications.
Yes, the DMCA does help some IP owners to protect their works, and yes it is under Title 17 of the United States Code, but that doesn't make it a copyright law. It is a law which restricts the creation, use, and communication of certain technologies. The DeCSS program was never copyrighted, but the DMCA has been used to limit its distribution.
If I sit down to create a new tool to allow someone to use their computer in a useful way (a device driver for instance) then the DMCA might be used to prevent me from doing so, if said driver might as a side effect allow someone to copy or access a copyrighted work. Such a law stifles creativity, it doesn't encourage it. Just because the "artists" in this case are computer programmers, it doesn't make their work any less valid.
I, like many others, think the concept of copyright is a useful one. But I don't think the DMCA or the WIPO treaty are merely copyright laws.
People used to say there would always be banking havens, too. That was before 9/11.
Just wait till some terrorists use a pirated copy of Windows to keep their accounts. Then you'll see the "data havens" either changing their ways or being bombed out of existence.
Fine. But is the correct response to illegal striking to fire the workers or put them in jail? I always thought it was the former. That's what Ronald Reagan did to the illegally striking air traffic controllers, for instance. The right thing in my opinion.
Teaching, unlike military service, is a job you are legally allowed to resign from at any time, especially if you aren't under contract. Failure to show up for work when ordered to seems to me an indication that you wish to resign. Why should they be sent to jail?
There's still a good chance that the Higgs will be found, and if it isn't, even at LHC energies, that in itself will be an interesting result.
Yes. And it is the consumers who should hold them liable by voting with their dollars.
I must say at this point I have very little sympathy for the victims of the Goner virus. Outlook Express has been exploited many times in the past. The attitude is always along the lines of "we have to catch the dirty little hacker to wrote this virus and string him up by his toenails, cover him with honey and release a million army ants into the room." instead of "hmm, Outlook Express has some serious vulnerabilities, and therefore we should consider switching to another e-mail application which treats attachments with more care...".
So this decision is made in software? If so, can't one reverse engineer the part of Windows that checks for this signature and create a patch that bypasses it? (I admit, this wouldn't be easy as Windows is closed source, but I'm surprised none of the reverse engineering groups have done this.)
Or am I missing something?
And maybe if I work hard and become wealthy I shouldn't send my kids to Harvard because they might make it difficult for kids who went to a state University to compete.
Consider rollerblades. They can certainly do 12mph, and probably more. And a healthy person in reasonable shape can go 15 miles on rollerblades without too much trouble. (Although who can afford to spend more than an hour travelling 15 miles to work?)
Rollerblades are much lighter, cheaper, and they are legal on most city sidewalks which usually ban motorized devices.
So, unless you're really, really lazy, can you name one advantage of this scooter over rollerblades?
What specifically makes him unsympathetic? Unlike many of the DeCSS posters he didn't engage in profanity while describing the MPAA, and never encouraged illegal copying. If you've heard him on the radio you've probably heard he is an articulate and level-headed guy even though his politics are a little to the left of center.
Has it gotten to the point where no one with long hair should expect a fair trial?
But this case was never really about DeCSS. The MPAA knows they can't put DeCSS back in the bottle. What it is about is open DVD players that contain CSS decoding circuitry without region coding, Macrovision, and licensing from DVDCCA. If DeCSS were declared legal, what would stop a hardware manufacturer from selling DVD players with no licensing from DVDCCA.
Ditto for open source Linux DVD players. They'll be just like encryption software used to be. You'll have to download them from some European country since they'll never be part of Red Hat or Mandrake. This is a big win for the MPAA.
And that's just the tip of the iceburg. The next generation of DVDs which will have high definition video will have a new encryption system, and the MPAA wants to make sure a crack for that is never released.
By the way, this decision doesn't bode well for Sklyarov.
It was rejected?!?!?
Man, posting updats on the 2600 case used to be a guaranteed way to have articles accepted. Someone's asleep at the switch.
Co-ordinated by whom? That's the scary part. Is there a secret society of bug-finders that schedule release dates for disclosures just like movie studios have release dates for films? I found it rather disturbing when I found this quote from the SecurityFocus page:
Solutions:
Vendor notified on Nov 14, 2001.
Fixes will be available from the author as well as from vendors who ship products that include Wu-Ftpd as core or optional components.
This vulnerability was initially scheduled for public release on December 3, 2001. Red Hat pre-emptively released an advisory on November 27, 2001. As a result, other vendors may not yet have fixes available.
The implication here is that any time a bug is fixed in a popular open source product, we don't tell the public until each and every distro vendor has time to provide convenient patches in their own proprietary format.
Doesn't this go against the whole philosophy of open-source software? Are there so few people left who can use patch, configure, make, make install, that we must keep sysadmins in the dark until they can type rpm -Fvh? Perhaps it's time for an CERT replacement that is open to the public.
Secondly, Red Hat released a patch, not an exploit script, so how exactly are they hurting anyone?
Thirdly, Red Hat releases patched sources, as well as binaries, so presumably people with other distros can compare the patched sources to theirs to discover the patch on their own. It does require the rpm program, but I understand it can be made to run in a limited sense on other distros.
So what exactly are you complaining about?
So you think Red Hat owes more loyalty to its competitors than to its customers?
They don't need your private key. Only the private key of the recipient. That's my point! And if people sending mail to you also encrypt with their own public key (which is commonly done to make it easier for people to archive sent mail) they can read both your inbound and outbound mail.
Well, the ruling has to be in regard to whichever law is being decided at the time. A precedent under trademark law may have no bearing on a case brought under UCITA laws. UCITA is a state law, the relevent part of which expands the definition of contract to include click-wrap or shrink-wrap EULAs. This doesn't necessarily come into conflict with this ruling on trademark law. A Federal Court would basically have to find UCITA unconstitutional to strike it down, and the present case makes no such finding.
Ok. First of all, there is no federal law which so states, rather it is a doctrine, which is a court interpretation which sets a precedent. The doctrine in this case is the first sale doctrine established by a Supreme Court case in 1905. The doctrine basically stated that under existing copyright law, copyright holders can't create arbitrary new rights for themselves by simply stating so on a book jacket.
UCITA however deals with contract law, not copyright law, and it expands the scope of what is considered a contract. It is not in conflict with federal law, as contracts can be written under both federal and state law. Many rights granted under the U.S. Constitution, including First Amendment rights, can be signed away in a contract, even one governed by state law.
The courts have ruled that the states may not pass laws that usurp or interfere with Federal copyright law.
I don't disagree, but UCITA basically expands the scope of what is considered a contract, and federal copyright law permits the waiving of certain rights, including those granted by copyright law, by entering into a contract. And contracts can be signed under state as well as federal laws as I said.
Do you plan to try to find weaknesses in newer schemes, or do the current legal headaches discourage you from doing so?
Was it simply the existence of the contest which prompted you to do the research you did, or would you try to work on cracking future schemes even if there were no such contest?