It would be quite easy to achieve what you want on linux, thanks to various sound drivers that are designed to allow streaming to another computer. On Windows however, the sound drivers are discouraged from doing things like that. In fact, some applications will refuse to output sound if the driver isn't "approved" by Microsof, pretty much specifically to block this kind of setup. Still, if someone was buy the DDK and write an unsigned virtual sound driver for windows, most applications out there would accept it for now (except for DRM-enabled things.)
I was playing this free korean shooter game named "gunz", when people started giving out their age. Apparently everyone in the map was around 14, except me, clocking at 30. One of the kids then proceeded to tell me "how brave I was to keep gaming at my age, and not care what people think."
The kid diplomatically chose to interpret my obliviousness as bravery. Now I suppose I have to acknowledge the age gap and go hide in some dark place where teenagers can't find me.
Probably because of the current policy of having checked-in luggages inspected at will, and the various reports of objects found missing after said inspections. I'm sure problems that may have happened in the past have been fixed by now, but it still seems often easier to keep your valuables close to you rather than to hope the system is somehow watching the watchers.
There's also the matter of how delicately checked-in luggages get handled, and how some electronic equipment could take offense to it and go on indefinite strike as a result.
In short, checked-in luggages are fine for clothes, shoes and toothbrushes. Electronic equipment is usually much better off in a carry-on.
I'm with grandparent on this one. Do you know why you sit in front of your computer? Because you have to.
If you could take your computer with you, say, to the restroom, wouldn't you? (yes, if you're a laptop user with wifi, chances are you've already been there.)
The trend is toward less wires and more motion. PDAs are an awkward interface for a real need. Given a choice, people will want to check slashdot while they're walking down the street, or talking to that boring co-worker. I agree people will want more real-estate, but which makes more sense: A set of giant displays that can't follow you and offer you no privacy if people are around you, or a couple of miniaturized high res displays only you can see and take wherever you want?
Anyway, this article is about how microsoft is innovating with 3d-based rendering in Vista, not about screen size and portability.
And yet imagine a world where every windows XP user is using their OS straight out of the box, without service pack and security updates.. (I believe the average pwnage time stands at about 10 minutes for that configuration)
Ford cars are not usually found to have a critical remotely exploitable security exploit every other week.
If MS withdraws support for security updates to a particular market, it makes their platform next to unusable for anyone but the most daring (or clueless) windows user.
The playstation 2 already has a flash player in it, used by various games for their menu systems among other things. I guess game companies try not to annoy their customers, so Flash gets used reasonably there.
This whole "adding new 'non-standard' features is bad" meme is annoying me. The same folks urging developers to not put anything non-standard in a browser are often the same folks that rely on JavaScript to get their job done everyday. That's a little bit hypocritical since javascript itself was added to Netscape 2.0 without a hint of a prior standard to validate its existence as something good or useful. Is the rationale that it was okay to do that in 1996, but the internet is such a mature place nowadays that there is no reason to do that anymore? Somehow I don't buy that.
Hopefully, developers will continue to ignore people complaining about new features, and the best features will continue to become widespread enough to be recognized as de facto standards, at which point the usual standard nazis will retroactively accept said features as having always been good and proper, and quickly move on to denounce the next standard-breaking feature.
BTW, The real reason behind web developers having to target different browers is the lack of support for old/standard features. The existence of a new feature doesn't hurt, as it is much easier to ignore than the lack of a needed feature. For example, IE supports some really cool activeX filters such as "blur" and "shadow". Has that made web developement harder for anyone? I don't think so. Quite the opposite, those same activeX filters have provided developers with an easy way to add opacity and PNG support to IE browsers which bring them a little bit closer to standard capabilities, instead of taking them further away.
I guess most people don't know that IE 5+ has a mechanism that allows any web page (even one in the restricted zone) to store at least 64KB of data on your local computer (1MB for most sites, and up to 10MB under the right conditions.) They also probably don't realize the feature keeps working even if you disable cookies, and that clearing your cookies, your history or whatever else you can find in IE's options will NOT clear those chunks of data.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and charge you with four counts of aggravated naivety.
Regarding the first paragraph:
- Getting the patch from the govt doesn't require you to be some kind of elite spy. Patches would get deployed in a semi-automatic fashion to every win32 computers under govt control (that's the whole point). That means many thousands of computers with at least as many people in front of it in all sort of low-security settings having access to those patches. It will be an interesting challenge to prevent those patches from getting onto the internet on the day they get distributed through govt systems.
- It doesn't need to (and probably wouldn't) be all done by "one busy cracker". You would have Dummy #1 copying the patch from a govt computer, Dummy #2 diffing the patch and figuring out what the vulnerability is, and Dummy #3 using the vulnerability as part of some obligatory self-serving and self-propagating malware.
- For every viruses and worms listed on your favorite database vendor site that resulted in a serious outbreak, how many have resulted in arrests and prosecutions? The odds that "it would most likely be a Federal case" are not good.
Regarding the 2d part:
- Ok, the govt is not likely to start spreading viruses using mad 0-day provided by microsoft. However, by giving the govt a patch to remotely exploitable system compromise vulnerabilities a month in advance of public release, you're giving law enforcement and intelligence folks a very effective mean to break into target computers. There isn't a lot of difference between private exploits as traded in some circles, and private patches as described by the WSJ. The later converts quite well into the former.
This doesn't have much in common with the %00 bug, which was essentially a visual bug, vaguely useful to convince that small percentage of people that verifies the URL of the site they're in instead of going by the look&feel of the page.
This bug however allows to break cross-domain scripting boundaries. A practical example is that an attacker could craft a web page so that when a slashdotter visits it, it automatically submits a silly comment in reply to a particular post (yes, in spite of the hidden formkey field.) Worse things could be done, like automatically grabbing the last 10 emails from your hotmail account if you happened to be logged in, send random replies to them, etc... Use your imagination.
Describing this as a way to "completely spoof the address bar" misses the impact of this bug entirely.
All in all, a pretty cool exploit. I can't help but wonder if the double use of ExecScript and setTimeout is really necessary, but maybe that's an attempt to make it work accross more environments.
"Evidently, our voting system was so poorly designed we didn't bother to prevent people from using it once the system knew it couldn't store any new vote."
The more I read about those voting machines, the more 2 possibilities come into focus: - The field of voting machine design and development attracts the dumbest people in the country, or - The glaring design flaws have been inserted purposefully, to achieve plausible deniability.
To explain the 2d one a bit, if a system appears to have a sound design, yet it is somehow exposed that the votes stored by that system were manipulated, the focus will quickly go toward the people in control of the system. On the other hand, if the current designs happen to miscount votes, it may be a local nerd that happened to carry a few smartcards in his pocket, it may be some foreign hacker that was wardialing random US numbers using carded VoIP accounts and found a voting system that picked up, or it may just be the system crumbling under the weight of its own ineptitude, among 20 other possible reasons. Since each of those scenarios is more likely than a global conspiracy scenario, Occam's razor ends up providing a nice layer of protection.
Of course this is silly. The first explanation is the correct one. Diebold as a collective entity is stupid. Unilect is stupid. W is stupid. Let's all point our fingers and laugh at them.
Out of curiosity, do you think there would be any practical interest for a web-based slide system that would: - scale slides (automatically) to match the current display, - allow obligatory slide transition effects on IE (and still work otherwise on any modern browser,) - offer a wysiwyg editing system to create simple slide shows, for people that don't feel like editing html?
I kinda see how to put all that together, but it's unclear to me if there's a point.
> if you look at sites like Secunia, there have been _MORE_ vulnerabilities in Firefox than IE in the last six months!
Not all vulnerabilities are equal. Not every security hole can result in your computer becoming a zombie.
Yet by merely counting them, you're implying this is somehow comparable to this
A better way to measure the security (or lack of) of a product could be to keep a calendar:
For every day that goes by with at least one publicly known yet unpatched serious vulnerability (and no, I don't think <script>prompt("enter your CC# now","")</script> qualifies), put a mark on the corresponding product for that day.
After a few weeks/months, tally up the number of days you were explicitely put at risk by using a particular product.
I'd be extremely surprised if FireFox didn't come out spectacularly ahead of IE on this kind of test.
For curious folks who have never heard of paracetamol, it's a popular french brand of headache/pain/fever/whatever-reducer, equivalent to Tylenol.
Re:Integrating with instant messenger?
on
Yahoo! Buys Musicmatch
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You should check the latest yahoo messenger client, as it already integrates with launchast radio. It also lets you put what song you're listening to in your online status, so your friends can appreciate how hip you are, or something. As a bonus, if a friend clicks on your status, he gets to hear a bit of the song you're hearing.
In the real world, apparently not. There are a few different opinions on internet jurisdiction: 1. No physical presence = no jurisdiction. That keeps things simple, superficially. By that token, 419 scammers are not breaking any US laws, and there would be no ground to arrest them or ask for their extraditions. 2. No intent to interact with a country = no jurisdiction. Following that logic, Skylarov would be in hot water, while yahoo would not. This seems to me like a reasonable middle ground. (note that I'm not saying the DMCA is a reasonable law.) 3. Accessible by citizens = jurisdiction applies. That's the logic that has been used in the yahoo case so far. This would also allow Saoudi Arabia to sue porn providers, or China to sue dissident information sources.
In practice, countries that anticipate their restrictive content laws will clash with the internet tend to implement country-wide firewall to "protect" their citizens. France seems to be a bit of an exception in that regard.
> That branch means that the company Yahoo! has a responsibility to not offer stuff to the French that is illegal to offer in France.
I can't disagree with the concept. All I can do is nitpick on what "offer stuff to the French" means.
> Just have a server dedicated to Nazi memorabilia, and block all.fr domains
Well, if we want to go into practical actions, yahoo shut down all the nazi stuff a couple years ago, which is really the only way to block 100% of french citizens. Blocking all.fr domains would miss a lot of users.. Having some kind of half-asses IP-based geolocation scheme would give something close to 95% reliability, which would not be sufficient to appease a court, if Napster is any indication. For all practical matters, the only way to guarantee all users of a country cannot access a given content, is to not have that content available at all.
It boils down to deciding what's reasonable. French courts have obviously no problem with having content they consider illegal becoming unavailable to the entire world, but there is a bigger picture to keep in mind here.
Yahoo has an office in China, for example. Following the same logic, would you be okay with the chinese court system deciding what content should not be available for any user on any yahoo site, be it yahoo.cn, yahoo.com or yahoo.fr?
No it is not about yahoo.fr Read older articles about the court case, it's clearly about the yahoo.com auction site having objectionable content.
I agree it would be quite hard to defend a situation where an american company had a French site that didn't respect French laws, but that's simply not what's happening here.
Pretty much, although there are a few differences: - skylarov's company was using prices in dollars - the credit card processing company used was located in the US - the pages to sell those items were available in english, instead of russian only.
Those elements point toward some form of intent to reach a market beyond Russia.
In contrast, the yahoo auction site didn't have prices in francs nor euros, didn't use a french company to process payments and didn't offer a french version of those pages.
> Americans and American companies have to realize that their laws do NOT apply outside of their borders
There's some irony in that since the case is about the French court system pushing their law on a US site on US soil meant for a US audience.
However, the question remains: The internet is making borders seem more artificial than ever, yet behind each border hides a slightly different sets and rules to abide. This is probably not tenable in the long run.
Your prediction is surprisingly accurate. That's exactly what yahoo did. 2 years ago. My understanding is that this lawsuit is not about being able to have auctions of nazi paraphanelia anymore, but about trying to avoid setting an unhealthy precedent as far as local laws forcing content off the global network.
The dispute is caused because the yahoo.com site hosted content that is apparently at odds with French laws. It is not specifically targetted at the French market. However, the judge on the case ruled that since French citizens were able to access it, it must comply with French laws.
As other posts mentioned, try to read the post above, replacing "French" with "Chinese" or "Saoudi", to get a feel for what this implies.
For example, the 6th Ethical Law of Robotic thus states:
(VI) As spiritual disciple, I will perpetuate the ecclesiastical tradition by professing the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity, and decency) while renouncing the corresponding vices (betrayal, despair, avarice, and antagonism).
Now it might be obvious to its author in which way this relates to robotic, but the journalist would probably have had a hard time conveying the concept to his audience.
> So what they're saying is, rather than porting their calculator software to a new platform, they found it easier to write an emulator that pretends to be the old processor? Sounds like a pretty crappy design decision to me.
HP has a bit of an history of using great hardware for their calculators then botching them with inferior software. The HP48g/gx had 512KB of ROM, a good chunk of it was used to store standard applications programmed in "external" (odd name given to a dialect of RPL that used internal entry-points liberally. Those would render as "<external>" when you'd try to see the source within the calculator, hence the name.) Applications written in "external" would commonly be about 15% faster than user-RPL programs. However in both case, you still use the RPL framework, which means your program is essentially interpreted, token after token. That may be acceptable for user-written programs, but it's a bit sloppy for processor intensive applications that are in charge of plotting graphs and resolving symbolic equations.
A group of hackers once rewrote a good chunk of the built-in applications entirely in assembly, with the goal of making it fit on a 128K memory card. Unsurprisingly, the resulting environment was many times faster and more responsive than the original version.
That said, a whole lot of software has been written for the HP48 in many areas (although I seem to only remember seeing great games and textbook browsers for some strange reason..) I can understand the value of an emulator to keep this software library available to the newer models.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be quite easy to achieve what you want on linux, thanks to various sound drivers that are designed to allow streaming to another computer.
On Windows however, the sound drivers are discouraged from doing things like that. In fact, some applications will refuse to output sound if the driver isn't "approved" by Microsof, pretty much specifically to block this kind of setup.
Still, if someone was buy the DDK and write an unsigned virtual sound driver for windows, most applications out there would accept it for now (except for DRM-enabled things.)
I was playing this free korean shooter game named "gunz", when people started giving out their age. Apparently everyone in the map was around 14, except me, clocking at 30.
One of the kids then proceeded to tell me "how brave I was to keep gaming at my age, and not care what people think."
The kid diplomatically chose to interpret my obliviousness as bravery. Now I suppose I have to acknowledge the age gap and go hide in some dark place where teenagers can't find me.
Or not.
Probably because of the current policy of having checked-in luggages inspected at will, and the various reports of objects found missing after said inspections.
I'm sure problems that may have happened in the past have been fixed by now, but it still seems often easier to keep your valuables close to you rather than to hope the system is somehow watching the watchers.
There's also the matter of how delicately checked-in luggages get handled, and how some electronic equipment could take offense to it and go on indefinite strike as a result.
In short, checked-in luggages are fine for clothes, shoes and toothbrushes.
Electronic equipment is usually much better off in a carry-on.
I'm with grandparent on this one.
Do you know why you sit in front of your computer? Because you have to.
If you could take your computer with you, say, to the restroom, wouldn't you? (yes, if you're a laptop user with wifi, chances are you've already been there.)
The trend is toward less wires and more motion. PDAs are an awkward interface for a real need.
Given a choice, people will want to check slashdot while they're walking down the street, or talking to that boring co-worker.
I agree people will want more real-estate, but which makes more sense: A set of giant displays that can't follow you and offer you no privacy if people are around you, or a couple of miniaturized high res displays only you can see and take wherever you want?
Anyway, this article is about how microsoft is innovating with 3d-based rendering in Vista, not about screen size and portability.
And yet imagine a world where every windows XP user is using their OS straight out of the box, without service pack and security updates.. (I believe the average pwnage time stands at about 10 minutes for that configuration)
Ford cars are not usually found to have a critical remotely exploitable security exploit every other week.
If MS withdraws support for security updates to a particular market, it makes their platform next to unusable for anyone but the most daring (or clueless) windows user.
You're correct.1 /lucasarts.html )
I should have phrased that as "There is a flash player available for the playstation 2", but it isn't built-in.
Apparently, it was used in "Star Wars Starfighter" ( http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/200
> Next stop, annoying Flash intros.
The playstation 2 already has a flash player in it, used by various games for their menu systems among other things.
I guess game companies try not to annoy their customers, so Flash gets used reasonably there.
This whole "adding new 'non-standard' features is bad" meme is annoying me.
The same folks urging developers to not put anything non-standard in a browser are often the same folks that rely on JavaScript to get their job done everyday.
That's a little bit hypocritical since javascript itself was added to Netscape 2.0 without a hint of a prior standard to validate its existence as something good or useful.
Is the rationale that it was okay to do that in 1996, but the internet is such a mature place nowadays that there is no reason to do that anymore? Somehow I don't buy that.
Hopefully, developers will continue to ignore people complaining about new features, and the best features will continue to become widespread enough to be recognized as de facto standards, at which point the usual standard nazis will retroactively accept said features as having always been good and proper, and quickly move on to denounce the next standard-breaking feature.
BTW, The real reason behind web developers having to target different browers is the lack of support for old/standard features. The existence of a new feature doesn't hurt, as it is much easier to ignore than the lack of a needed feature. For example, IE supports some really cool activeX filters such as "blur" and "shadow". Has that made web developement harder for anyone? I don't think so. Quite the opposite, those same activeX filters have provided developers with an easy way to add opacity and PNG support to IE browsers which bring them a little bit closer to standard capabilities, instead of taking them further away.
I guess most people don't know that IE 5+ has a mechanism that allows any web page (even one in the restricted zone) to store at least 64KB of data on your local computer (1MB for most sites, and up to 10MB under the right conditions.)
r s/reference/behaviors/userdata.asp
They also probably don't realize the feature keeps working even if you disable cookies, and that clearing your cookies, your history or whatever else you can find in IE's options will NOT clear those chunks of data.
It's called the "userdata behavior".
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/behavio
Now just to balance things out, Netscape 4 had a feature that allowed any web site to save an unlimited amount of data on your local FS.
Anyway, moral of the story: IE is a bigger privacy concern than Flash, and FireFox is probably your friend.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and charge you with four counts of aggravated naivety.
Regarding the first paragraph:
- Getting the patch from the govt doesn't require you to be some kind of elite spy. Patches would get deployed in a semi-automatic fashion to every win32 computers under govt control (that's the whole point). That means many thousands of computers with at least as many people in front of it in all sort of low-security settings having access to those patches. It will be an interesting challenge to prevent those patches from getting onto the internet on the day they get distributed through govt systems.
- It doesn't need to (and probably wouldn't) be all done by "one busy cracker". You would have Dummy #1 copying the patch from a govt computer, Dummy #2 diffing the patch and figuring out what the vulnerability is, and Dummy #3 using the vulnerability as part of some obligatory self-serving and self-propagating malware.
- For every viruses and worms listed on your favorite database vendor site that resulted in a serious outbreak, how many have resulted in arrests and prosecutions? The odds that "it would most likely be a Federal case" are not good.
Regarding the 2d part:
- Ok, the govt is not likely to start spreading viruses using mad 0-day provided by microsoft. However, by giving the govt a patch to remotely exploitable system compromise vulnerabilities a month in advance of public release, you're giving law enforcement and intelligence folks a very effective mean to break into target computers.
There isn't a lot of difference between private exploits as traded in some circles, and private patches as described by the WSJ. The later converts quite well into the former.
This doesn't have much in common with the %00 bug, which was essentially a visual bug, vaguely useful to convince that small percentage of people that verifies the URL of the site they're in instead of going by the look&feel of the page.
This bug however allows to break cross-domain scripting boundaries.
A practical example is that an attacker could craft a web page so that when a slashdotter visits it, it automatically submits a silly comment in reply to a particular post (yes, in spite of the hidden formkey field.)
Worse things could be done, like automatically grabbing the last 10 emails from your hotmail account if you happened to be logged in, send random replies to them, etc...
Use your imagination.
Describing this as a way to "completely spoof the address bar" misses the impact of this bug entirely.
All in all, a pretty cool exploit. I can't help but wonder if the double use of ExecScript and setTimeout is really necessary, but maybe that's an attempt to make it work accross more environments.
How about:
"Evidently, our voting system was so poorly designed we didn't bother to prevent people from using it once the system knew it couldn't store any new vote."
The more I read about those voting machines, the more 2 possibilities come into focus:
- The field of voting machine design and development attracts the dumbest people in the country, or
- The glaring design flaws have been inserted purposefully, to achieve plausible deniability.
To explain the 2d one a bit, if a system appears to have a sound design, yet it is somehow exposed that the votes stored by that system were manipulated, the focus will quickly go toward the people in control of the system.
On the other hand, if the current designs happen to miscount votes, it may be a local nerd that happened to carry a few smartcards in his pocket, it may be some foreign hacker that was wardialing random US numbers using carded VoIP accounts and found a voting system that picked up, or it may just be the system crumbling under the weight of its own ineptitude, among 20 other possible reasons.
Since each of those scenarios is more likely than a global conspiracy scenario, Occam's razor ends up providing a nice layer of protection.
Of course this is silly. The first explanation is the correct one.
Diebold as a collective entity is stupid. Unilect is stupid. W is stupid.
Let's all point our fingers and laugh at them.
Out of curiosity, do you think there would be any practical interest for a web-based slide system that would:
- scale slides (automatically) to match the current display,
- allow obligatory slide transition effects on IE (and still work otherwise on any modern browser,)
- offer a wysiwyg editing system to create simple slide shows, for people that don't feel like editing html?
I kinda see how to put all that together, but it's unclear to me if there's a point.
Not all vulnerabilities are equal. Not every security hole can result in your computer becoming a zombie.
Yet by merely counting them, you're implying this is somehow comparable to this
A better way to measure the security (or lack of) of a product could be to keep a calendar:
For every day that goes by with at least one publicly known yet unpatched serious vulnerability (and no, I don't think <script>prompt("enter your CC# now","")</script> qualifies), put a mark on the corresponding product for that day.
After a few weeks/months, tally up the number of days you were explicitely put at risk by using a particular product.
I'd be extremely surprised if FireFox didn't come out spectacularly ahead of IE on this kind of test.
For curious folks who have never heard of paracetamol, it's a popular french brand of headache/pain/fever/whatever-reducer, equivalent to Tylenol.
You should check the latest yahoo messenger client, as it already integrates with launchast radio.
It also lets you put what song you're listening to in your online status, so your friends can appreciate how hip you are, or something.
As a bonus, if a friend clicks on your status, he gets to hear a bit of the song you're hearing.
> It's an open and shut case.
In the real world, apparently not.
There are a few different opinions on internet jurisdiction:
1. No physical presence = no jurisdiction. That keeps things simple, superficially. By that token, 419 scammers are not breaking any US laws, and there would be no ground to arrest them or ask for their extraditions.
2. No intent to interact with a country = no jurisdiction. Following that logic, Skylarov would be in hot water, while yahoo would not. This seems to me like a reasonable middle ground. (note that I'm not saying the DMCA is a reasonable law.)
3. Accessible by citizens = jurisdiction applies. That's the logic that has been used in the yahoo case so far. This would also allow Saoudi Arabia to sue porn providers, or China to sue dissident information sources.
In practice, countries that anticipate their restrictive content laws will clash with the internet tend to implement country-wide firewall to "protect" their citizens. France seems to be a bit of an exception in that regard.
> That branch means that the company Yahoo! has a responsibility to not offer stuff to the French that is illegal to offer in France.
.fr domains
.fr domains would miss a lot of users.. Having some kind of half-asses IP-based geolocation scheme would give something close to 95% reliability, which would not be sufficient to appease a court, if Napster is any indication.
I can't disagree with the concept. All I can do is nitpick on what "offer stuff to the French" means.
> Just have a server dedicated to Nazi memorabilia, and block all
Well, if we want to go into practical actions, yahoo shut down all the nazi stuff a couple years ago, which is really the only way to block 100% of french citizens. Blocking all
For all practical matters, the only way to guarantee all users of a country cannot access a given content, is to not have that content available at all.
It boils down to deciding what's reasonable. French courts have obviously no problem with having content they consider illegal becoming unavailable to the entire world, but there is a bigger picture to keep in mind here.
Yahoo has an office in China, for example. Following the same logic, would you be okay with the chinese court system deciding what content should not be available for any user on any yahoo site, be it yahoo.cn, yahoo.com or yahoo.fr?
No it is not about yahoo.fr
Read older articles about the court case, it's clearly about the yahoo.com auction site having objectionable content.
I agree it would be quite hard to defend a situation where an american company had a French site that didn't respect French laws, but that's simply not what's happening here.
Pretty much, although there are a few differences:
- skylarov's company was using prices in dollars
- the credit card processing company used was located in the US
- the pages to sell those items were available in english, instead of russian only.
Those elements point toward some form of intent to reach a market beyond Russia.
In contrast, the yahoo auction site didn't have prices in francs nor euros, didn't use a french company to process payments and didn't offer a french version of those pages.
> Americans and American companies have to realize that their laws do NOT apply outside of their borders
There's some irony in that since the case is about the French court system pushing their law on a US site on US soil meant for a US audience.
However, the question remains:
The internet is making borders seem more artificial than ever, yet behind each border hides a slightly different sets and rules to abide.
This is probably not tenable in the long run.
Your prediction is surprisingly accurate. That's exactly what yahoo did. 2 years ago.
My understanding is that this lawsuit is not about being able to have auctions of nazi paraphanelia anymore, but about trying to avoid setting an unhealthy precedent as far as local laws forcing content off the global network.
The dispute is caused because the yahoo.com site hosted content that is apparently at odds with French laws.
It is not specifically targetted at the French market. However, the judge on the case ruled that since French citizens were able to access it, it must comply with French laws.
As other posts mentioned, try to read the post above, replacing "French" with "Chinese" or "Saoudi", to get a feel for what this implies.
Problem is, the "laws" are, well, odd.
For example, the 6th Ethical Law of Robotic thus states:
(VI) As spiritual disciple, I will perpetuate the ecclesiastical tradition by professing the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity, and decency) while renouncing the corresponding vices (betrayal, despair, avarice, and antagonism).
Now it might be obvious to its author in which way this relates to robotic, but the journalist would probably have had a hard time conveying the concept to his audience.
> So what they're saying is, rather than porting their calculator software to a new platform, they found it easier to write an emulator that pretends to be the old processor? Sounds like a pretty crappy design decision to me.
HP has a bit of an history of using great hardware for their calculators then botching them with inferior software.
The HP48g/gx had 512KB of ROM, a good chunk of it was used to store standard applications programmed in "external" (odd name given to a dialect of RPL that used internal entry-points liberally. Those would render as "<external>" when you'd try to see the source within the calculator, hence the name.) Applications written in "external" would commonly be about 15% faster than user-RPL programs. However in both case, you still use the RPL framework, which means your program is essentially interpreted, token after token.
That may be acceptable for user-written programs, but it's a bit sloppy for processor intensive applications that are in charge of plotting graphs and resolving symbolic equations.
A group of hackers once rewrote a good chunk of the built-in applications entirely in assembly, with the goal of making it fit on a 128K memory card. Unsurprisingly, the resulting environment was many times faster and more responsive than the original version.
That said, a whole lot of software has been written for the HP48 in many areas (although I seem to only remember seeing great games and textbook browsers for some strange reason..)
I can understand the value of an emulator to keep this software library available to the newer models.