If the idea of this domain is that parents can whitelist it, then what is achieved by forbidding links to outside the domain? Or do they envision web browsers with no facility to type in URLs? Or are they targetting children too ignorant or stupid to type?
It's alright, I know the answer. They're targetting voters too stupid to spot the inconsistency.
Interestingly, the article is largely about the great deal this legislation gives the company running the domain. It also mentions that ICANN actually criticised the idea.
I don't know what your experience is, but I have never been able to get any version of Word to emit valid HTML for any document, even the empty document. To say that Word supports HTML seems to me to be somewhat of an exaggeration, especially in the context of open standards.
The AOL Time-Warner brief points out that they are the largest copyright producer, and makes the following arguments:
Vested interests - Revoking the CTEA extension of existing copyright would disrupt business models, including various mergers and other transactions that placed value on IP. AOL/TW is, of course, a prime example of such mergers. It is also argued that it would reduce the anticipated export revenue for the US. These arguably suggest that coyright extension is good for the US, but they don't address the constitutionality, and are thus moot for the Supreme Court.
History of Copyright Law -
Every law that established or extended copyright did so retrospectively; revoking the CTEA would cast doubt on other copyright laws. Neither point bears directly on whether such retrospective extension is constitutional. Clearly the plaintiffs are not required to attack all non-constitutional laws in the same action.
Retrospective Extension Stimulates Creation -
In the light of the increasing cost of production and distribution of movies and music, an enduring revenue stream from previous works is required as "seed corn"; hence, retrospective extention of copyright does stimulate the Arts, in as much as the same people and organizations will create repeatedly. This argument has some facial merit, but neglects the bootstrap issue in favour of business interests.
The End Justifies the Means -
The brief says that the specification of an end (promotion of Arts and Sciences) does not restrict the execution of the power to legislate copyright. It compares this to the ends specified for taxation (common defence and general welfare) and military (to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections, and repell invasions) and how much deference is given to Congress with respect to these.
International Law -
The CTEA apparently both harmonizes with and places the US competitively with respect to international law and convention. The brief fails to be specific about how this makes restrospective copyright extension constitutional.
Ease of Copying -
Apparently "economic analysis" implies that as the cost of copying goes down, the length of exclusive exploitation must go up. No justification is provided, and it does not bear on the constitutional issues anyway.
In short, their brief does more to whine about their business interests that it does to address the consitutional issues.
This sort of attack does have one interesting use. A company that wants to transparent-proxy (and hence monitor) all of its employees' web-browsing can now interfere with SSL connections.
According to the Houston Chronicle article, he discovered the security problem "early March", the demonstration was on March 18th, and he is charged with hacking on Match 8th, so he is being charged with the discovery, not the demo.
Also, there may be more going on, as the article also alludes to "a pornographic picture found on the clerk's office server in March." Perhaps they believe that was another "demonstration".
Macfixit are now reporting that the security hole is fixed:
Entering the URL of an e-mail message generated by.Mac's Webmail function on another computer now results in redirection to the.Mac home page; rather than displaying the private message.
Apple is not alone is embedding a session key into the URL. Users should be aware that passing one such a URL will (at least for a short while) enable others to use their login.
I'm not sure why the corporate sponsors feel they need this law in the first place. Supposing they did hack or DoS a P2P site, can you imagine the site owner persuading The Man to prosecute the MPAA/RIAA for it? It would be like the BSA seeking a law that allowed them to perform software licence audits at victims' expense whenever they wanted. Or like Microsoft drafting a law allowing them to crush competitors.
The ACLU has a a long track record of defending spam as somehow Frea Speach that's worthy of First Amendment protection.
Looking at the ACLU's website, the only things I can find about spam are: several suggestions that they are looking closely at the problem and the proposed legislation, which is unarguably sound; and the assertion that the disputed e-mail in the Hamidi/Intel case is not spam, which does not seem to be supportive of spam in itself. Can you provide a current link to ACLU policy on spam?
The article linked to (from 1997) says that the many bills that seek to control commercial e-mail on the basis of content face First Amendment issues, and that state-specific legislation also has jurisdictional problems. Personally, I'd rather see spam fail for social and technical reasons, rather than legislative. Certainly if I had to choose between Free Speech and eliminating spam, I know what my choice would be.
That's an idea. Supposing we painted DeCSS (or some other DMCA violation) onto the side of a building (with the owner's permission, of course) together with an explanation of why the wall is now illegal. It would be sure to garner some media attention.
paste the GPL (or any alternative licence/contract) into the testarea and submit
Unfortunately this is a service agreement; I'm not aware of an FSF licence for that. Even if it were software, I couldn't meaningfully agree to distribute the binary only with source code if I don't have the source code.
I have to sign up for a Verisign test server certificate every two weeks. As part of this, I have to agree to a lengthy service agreement displayed in an editable TEXTAREA. Of course, I always delete the contract text before agreeing to it.
I would like to [know] how MONO and DOT-GNU differ
A good question. I seem to recall reading a comment in the DotGNU FAQ that Mono wasn't as "clean-room" and might therefore be more easily killed by Microsoft under some legal theory of intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, that was several weeks ago, and I can no longer find any such reference.
You can still find and play the old adventure games; there even seem to be ports to the Palm. By the same token, you can still write your own versions. See Inform.
That reminds me about a story I heard about the Mail Transport Agent for an obsolete mainframe operating system that couldn't cope with mail messages containing a certain word followed by a space at the start of the line. Fortunately that sort of thing would never happen nowadays.
"Medireview" has even made it into someone's resume (PDF); that must seriously reduce his chances of getting hired. Other references seem to have gotten into scholarly works. This is just the latest in a long string of stories about automatic (or semi-automatic) computer correction having serious consequences.
When I was at college, one student ran his doctoral thesis through the spellchecker one last time before submitting it to the binders, and thence to the Board of Graduate Studies. Unfortunately, he inadvertantly selected the "silently accept all suggestions" option, and failed to check the results. The manuscript he submitted was almost incomprehensible. After that, the University added a one-page warning to the spellchecker output (yes, it was in the days of mainframes).
Unfortunately, it appears that the well-known story about "in the black" becoming "in the African American" is only partly true; it was a deliberate practical joke in the newsroom.
Of course, the next hack will be to produce e-mail that becomes a cross-site scripting attack (or criminal/tortious in some other way) after passing through Yahoo's filter. Who's going to bear the liability for that?
My brother used to work at a naval shipyard. The fire alarm for one part of the site also rang at the central telephone switchboard, where the operator had to call the fire brigade manually. One day, the alarm sounded, she called the fire brigade, they responded, and it turned out to be a false alarm. Later, it sounded again, again she called it it, and again it was a false alarm. The third time it sounded in a matter of hours, she decided it must be another false alarm, and made the decision not to call the emergency services. It turned out that she was correct and it was another false alarm. That telephonist was fired the same day, and an automatic system was subsequently installed.
If it took a few seconds to run the untrusted code, and if it required going to a special mode or whatnot I think that'd prevent most of the blatant "clickisms" that we have today.
And this requires hardware because...?
Microsoft could provide that sort of protection in Outlook, but they don't. Why? Because they don't care about security? Because they're incompetent programmers? Or because their software features are driven by marketing concerns and because users like to be able to open the singing Christmas tree their friend sent them?
I heartily approve of this ruling. The court has managed to make a sensible decision about an online legal issue by extrapolating existing laws. No need to treat web pages as something magically different, or worthy of less protection.
Fourth of July. The day when America celebrates traditional values like conformity, unquestioning obedience to authority, and the triumph of unaccountable centralized government over basic human rights.
As soon as some Slashdotter points it out to them they'll have no choice but to spend next weekend upgrading to Linux!
Except that, as was covered before, Microsoft is probably not a direct contractor to the county, and this change would affect future procurement anyway.
The article presents a false dichotomy. On the one hand, it talks about the "technology-friendly" who adhere to the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" (sic), and claim that "the Internet is a new, unique thing that requires its own special laws". On the other hand, it has "cyberskeptics" who believe "something happening online shouldn't be treated any differently by the law".
In fact, the "Cyberspace Declaration of Independence" was written in response to the Telecom Reform Act, as a reaction to attempts to burden the online world with extra legislation that enforces distinctions. I believe the declaration's author, along with most readers of Slashdot, would agree with the idea that online activity generally suffers from specific laws.
The "cyber" world, just like the real world, should be governed by fair principles (such as those of the US constitution) justly applied. The point, which is totally missed by the author of this article, is that our legal system is groaning under the weight of regulations pandering to special interests, and that the good of the people comes off second best.
Slashdot Mirror
If the idea of this domain is that parents can whitelist it, then what is achieved by forbidding links to outside the domain? Or do they envision web browsers with no facility to type in URLs? Or are they targetting children too ignorant or stupid to type?
It's alright, I know the answer. They're targetting voters too stupid to spot the inconsistency.
Interestingly, the article is largely about the great deal this legislation gives the company running the domain. It also mentions that ICANN actually criticised the idea.
I don't know what your experience is, but I have never been able to get any version of Word to emit valid HTML for any document, even the empty document. To say that Word supports HTML seems to me to be somewhat of an exaggeration, especially in the context of open standards.
Information doesn't want to be free.
People want to be free.
The AOL Time-Warner brief points out that they are the largest copyright producer, and makes the following arguments:
In short, their brief does more to whine about their business interests that it does to address the consitutional issues.
This sort of attack does have one interesting use. A company that wants to transparent-proxy (and hence monitor) all of its employees' web-browsing can now interfere with SSL connections.
According to the Houston Chronicle article, he discovered the security problem "early March", the demonstration was on March 18th, and he is charged with hacking on Match 8th, so he is being charged with the discovery, not the demo.
Also, there may be more going on, as the article also alludes to "a pornographic picture found on the clerk's office server in March." Perhaps they believe that was another "demonstration".
On page 2 he says:
which implies over a hundred per week, but on page 9 he says:
which sounds somewhat lower. Which is it?
Either way, it's a pretty horrific number.
Macfixit are now reporting that the security hole is fixed:
Apple is not alone is embedding a session key into the URL. Users should be aware that passing one such a URL will (at least for a short while) enable others to use their login.
I'm not sure why the corporate sponsors feel they need this law in the first place. Supposing they did hack or DoS a P2P site, can you imagine the site owner persuading The Man to prosecute the MPAA/RIAA for it? It would be like the BSA seeking a law that allowed them to perform software licence audits at victims' expense whenever they wanted. Or like Microsoft drafting a law allowing them to crush competitors.
Looking at the ACLU's website, the only things I can find about spam are: several suggestions that they are looking closely at the problem and the proposed legislation, which is unarguably sound; and the assertion that the disputed e-mail in the Hamidi/Intel case is not spam, which does not seem to be supportive of spam in itself. Can you provide a current link to ACLU policy on spam?
The article linked to (from 1997) says that the many bills that seek to control commercial e-mail on the basis of content face First Amendment issues, and that state-specific legislation also has jurisdictional problems. Personally, I'd rather see spam fail for social and technical reasons, rather than legislative. Certainly if I had to choose between Free Speech and eliminating spam, I know what my choice would be.
The funniest part of the Reuters report is what Bill is caught standing next to in the photograph.
That's an idea. Supposing we painted DeCSS (or some other DMCA violation) onto the side of a building (with the owner's permission, of course) together with an explanation of why the wall is now illegal. It would be sure to garner some media attention.
Unfortunately this is a service agreement; I'm not aware of an FSF licence for that. Even if it were software, I couldn't meaningfully agree to distribute the binary only with source code if I don't have the source code.
I have to sign up for a Verisign test server certificate every two weeks. As part of this, I have to agree to a lengthy service agreement displayed in an editable TEXTAREA. Of course, I always delete the contract text before agreeing to it.
A good question. I seem to recall reading a comment in the DotGNU FAQ that Mono wasn't as "clean-room" and might therefore be more easily killed by Microsoft under some legal theory of intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, that was several weeks ago, and I can no longer find any such reference.
You can still find and play the old adventure games; there even seem to be ports to the Palm. By the same token, you can still write your own versions. See Inform.
That reminds me about a story I heard about the Mail Transport Agent for an obsolete mainframe operating system that couldn't cope with mail messages containing a certain word followed by a space at the start of the line. Fortunately that sort of thing would never happen nowadays.
"Medireview" has even made it into someone's resume (PDF); that must seriously reduce his chances of getting hired. Other references seem to have gotten into scholarly works. This is just the latest in a long string of stories about automatic (or semi-automatic) computer correction having serious consequences.
When I was at college, one student ran his doctoral thesis through the spellchecker one last time before submitting it to the binders, and thence to the Board of Graduate Studies. Unfortunately, he inadvertantly selected the "silently accept all suggestions" option, and failed to check the results. The manuscript he submitted was almost incomprehensible. After that, the University added a one-page warning to the spellchecker output (yes, it was in the days of mainframes).
Unfortunately, it appears that the well-known story about "in the black" becoming "in the African American" is only partly true; it was a deliberate practical joke in the newsroom.
Of course, the next hack will be to produce e-mail that becomes a cross-site scripting attack (or criminal/tortious in some other way) after passing through Yahoo's filter. Who's going to bear the liability for that?
My brother used to work at a naval shipyard. The fire alarm for one part of the site also rang at the central telephone switchboard, where the operator had to call the fire brigade manually. One day, the alarm sounded, she called the fire brigade, they responded, and it turned out to be a false alarm. Later, it sounded again, again she called it it, and again it was a false alarm. The third time it sounded in a matter of hours, she decided it must be another false alarm, and made the decision not to call the emergency services. It turned out that she was correct and it was another false alarm. That telephonist was fired the same day, and an automatic system was subsequently installed.
And this requires hardware because ...?
Microsoft could provide that sort of protection in Outlook, but they don't. Why? Because they don't care about security? Because they're incompetent programmers? Or because their software features are driven by marketing concerns and because users like to be able to open the singing Christmas tree their friend sent them?
New York Law Journal
The opinion
I heartily approve of this ruling. The court has managed to make a sensible decision about an online legal issue by extrapolating existing laws. No need to treat web pages as something magically different, or worthy of less protection.
Fourth of July. The day when America celebrates traditional values like conformity, unquestioning obedience to authority, and the triumph of unaccountable centralized government over basic human rights.
Except that, as was covered before, Microsoft is probably not a direct contractor to the county, and this change would affect future procurement anyway.
The article presents a false dichotomy. On the one hand, it talks about the "technology-friendly" who adhere to the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" (sic), and claim that "the Internet is a new, unique thing that requires its own special laws". On the other hand, it has "cyberskeptics" who believe "something happening online shouldn't be treated any differently by the law".
In fact, the "Cyberspace Declaration of Independence" was written in response to the Telecom Reform Act, as a reaction to attempts to burden the online world with extra legislation that enforces distinctions. I believe the declaration's author, along with most readers of Slashdot, would agree with the idea that online activity generally suffers from specific laws.
The "cyber" world, just like the real world, should be governed by fair principles (such as those of the US constitution) justly applied. The point, which is totally missed by the author of this article, is that our legal system is groaning under the weight of regulations pandering to special interests, and that the good of the people comes off second best.