I remember someone saying that a certain stock price (in the $8 range?) would trigger a number of events which could hurt SCO financially (note that the effect I'm thinking of is from more than just a low share price--it triggers some clause in their contract with Baystar or one of those investors).
Does anyone here remember that price, or how badly it would hurt SCO?:]
They're at $8.71, and I want to know what price to root for...
That and I keep wondering what some of the odd numbers mean, just look at this from Yahoo finance (via Google) --
After Hours (RTM/ECN): 8.60 0.11 (1.26%) Last Trade: 8.71 Trade Time: Mar 19 Change: 0.04 (0.46%) Prev Close: 8.75 Open: 8.43 Bid: 0.01 x 100 Ask: 9,000.00 x 100 1y Target Est: 25.00
Do I read that right that someone was asking $9,000 for 100 shares of SCO? Sheesh! Talk about being out to lunch... I have to think that some people are screwing around here or something, though... Does any of this stuff influence the share price?
Ironically, somehow I feel like the $0.01 bid is reasonable, though, even though I have to figure that someone is goofing off...
Oh well, seems like a perfect time to quote this little tidbit that Packet Storm has had on a sidebar for quite a while now:
Call Your Reps For Free
A toll free number has been set up for the US Senate and Congress at +1-800-839-5276. They immediately answer "Capitol" and will happily transfer you to your congressional representatives. Call during business hours and feel free to speak your mind, asking them not to expand the Patriot act, repeal the DMCA, push through donotcall.gov, etc.
I guess none of the virus kiddies know that the bandwitdth consumed by the worms is a large part of the problem they cause--not very many worms have even had destructive payloads* and we've still gotten hammered by them.
Of course, apparently no one else reads all those widely available reports on damage caused by the worms (securityfocus.com, incidents.org, slashdot, etc. etc. etc. have reported on such things).
(*Well, that depends on whether you consider the common payload of trojans 'destructive', they don't destroy any files directly, so I'm not classifying them as such, but they're not exactly benign...)
Actually, if I remember correctly, it was that they charge them for a copy of Windows whether they install it or not (and is thus part of the "Microsoft tax" in that it's hard to get around paying for a copy of Windows even if you do not want one at all). So the agreement, insofar as I've heard about them, is that the OEMs buy a copy of Windows for every PC they sell, period, according to their OEM agreement.
The justification for that deal, if I remember right, was that they would under-report the number of PCs they installed Windows on and cheat Microsoft out of their due.
The idea is to 'pre commit' to an attack, since that keeps them from getting easy money from settlements.
While I was focused on the idea of the 'vammpires' being goons for hire, there are other companies who seem to be just out to make a buck from suing/settling with people thanks to whatever patent they have.
There's more than one game to play, here. Besides, IBM clearly thinks it's on firm legal ground here, they have a chance to set good precidents vs. a weaker adversary, etc.
The thing is, bottom line, IBM is still out money defending themselves from this nonsense, no matter how it turns out, unless they can prevail in the counter-suits (and here we have to be glad that SCO actually once made a product...), not to mention their interest in exposing Microsoft as the ones behind this...
Anyhow, all that said, the sad fact is that whoever has enough cash can simply hire various goons, supply them with IP and enough capital to sue, and send them on their merry way to attack their competetors. The idea, of course, is to distance themselves from any counter-attacks, while disproportionately draining the adversary's cash reserves as much as possible.
But don't get me wrong; I suppose it's all not quite as dire as I made it sound, even if this use of patents is utterly contrary to the original intent of the patent system. To be sure, there are still plenty of ways left to change the game, and thus the rules...
Otherwise, we may well see this sort of uncreative destruction, simply trying to hurt competitors, even at one's own expense (I think that this is illegal for a monopoly to do, similar to predatory pricing, but a properly funded non-monopoly entry might still be able to do unseemly things... of course, IANAL)
Okay, I'm not a lawyer, much less one who specializes in patents. I am, however, a mathematician who has done some game theory.
Basically, ALL companies are vulnerable to something I have dubbed an "IP Vampire." Whereas other businesses have products, which make them vulnerable to counter-suits over patents, an "IP Vampire" has no products. It has nothing but patents, lawyers, and enough capital to sue. It is NOT vulnerable to counter-suits, so they have only to weigh their case: license the patent, or settle. Either of these costs the business they sink their teeth into. Even defending themselves successfully costs them money. It's a no win situation for the business they bite. Enough of them can drain any company. Anyone who sponsors them is short-sighted. As long as it is legal, the competition can do this just as well as they can. For a monopoly to do this, one might think it could raise anti-trust issues, but I suspect a lawyer would have to make that arguement, and I am not one.
Microsoft is every bit as vulnerable to these as the next company. It nearly got hit for 500M thanks to Eolas. They should be glad that that patent did not have so much prior art. They cannot win them all.
If this is legal, everyone who can do this will. At some point, they will have to sponsor such suits just to stay alive (or to try to). If it's not legal, game over. I hope that someone can eventually find a way to straighten much of this out. Personally, I would end software patents for starters... software is just mathematics, and anyone who says otherwise is spouting nonsense. I do not agree that mathematics should ever be patented. We know that it is not necessary to drive mathematical innovation, after all. Ask Euclid and company. I can only wonder how much mathematical progress would have been lost if all the works of antiquity could not have been preserved... we had all too few copies of the great mathematical works to learn from for too long, after all...
But I digress. The principle behind an "IP Vampire" is simple. Defending against them is futile. I suspect that Microsoft is thus banking on the only principle of that game to their advantage--whoever has the most money, especially if they move first, wins.
But that would eliminate all competition. If our anti-trust regulators are that asleep at the switch, well... something will have to be done... I know all to well that if you don't like the rules, you have to change the game. I know a few other games to play. I would rather not play any of them, however. It is like the movie "WarGames" -- the only way to win is not to play.
In the mean time, I think that publicity will probably suffice. The more people who know why they do not want to do business with Microsoft, or anyone else who promulgates these insidious "IP Vampires" the better...
There's an ancient article on that somewhere on Groklaw.
However, when they did, some mysterious signs saying something to the effect of "we support communism" appeared along with the protesters' signs.
The leader of the protest group, who knew everyone there, took pictures of those signs (which were also posted somewhere on Groklaw), and vouched for the fact that NONE of those signs were made by the protesters.
I leave it to you to conclude just how those signs got there, exactly... I think you know who I think did it. And I no longer write off any underhanded tactics as something they wouldn't use...
I slurped up several bloody files because I had to sort them just so.
I did this on a crappy old compaq, with a Pentium 166, non-MMX. I think I had 72 MB of RAM back then and a slow HD (3600 RPM, IIRC *shudder*)
It took a while, but it worked fine.
What the hell are you running that's crashing so badly? Are you sure it's the data overload and not sloppy programming on your part? Do you have enough RAM?
Now, I grant you, 100MB+ isn't exactly the largest of files, especially these days (it seemed more impressive when I did it, though), but it should be a reasonable amount to give Perl a bit of stress, especially on such an old machine...
They sometimes catch ones with broken headers. And spammers aren't that good at writing SMTP engines, either.
That said, yeah, it's not like it's that hard for them to pass the spam filters. Even so, it's just another thing that might help it seem more legitimate to a potential victim.
Then again, I would hope that a reasonable person would know better than to give them every possible password, address, SSN and bit of personal information they could possibly want...:/
I mean, hell, I was waiting for the field that asked for "3rd grade teacher's name" or "pet(s) name(s)"...
Sad thing is, it's getting harder and harder to be able to give them basic advice.
At the rate things are going, you pretty well have to know all the same tricks the spammers/scammers do...
I mean, just the other day, I got a message from PayPal about my account. Oops, I don't have one... Okay, so that would've been my first clue, but it was faked well enough to pass Hotmail's spam filter, and it looked official, like I really had had an account suspended.
So I check the email source, because I know better. Sure enough, it's using the %00 bug to catch IE users. Assuming they would know to look for where the link actually pointed, instead of where it claimed to.
In the mean time, I went to the page. Sure enough, it wants every bit of information imagineable. All the other links off it link to actual PayPal pages... the status bar at the bottom is left blank via JavaScript. So the inobservant and gullible would be hosed...
Naturally, I feed it totally fake information (might as well give them more false data... shouldn't harm anyone, should only help get them caught, I hope), just to see what it does. Sure enough, redirects you to another actual part of the PayPal site. I sent off a LART to the hosting provider's abuse email. No response. I don't consider that a good sign.
Note that no SSL was required here. Just official-looking pages. Granted, I didn't fall for it, but I know more about these exploits than Joe Average. Joe Average probably wouldn't know what was wrong with %00 in a URL if he saw it.
This is sad, too. I've taught classes on this, and I try to teach the class as much as they are capable of understanding. Even so, it's getting to the point where I feel like they need to know at least as much as I do just to avoid these stupid scams. There's a new one made up every day, it seems, and I spend a lot of time just keeping up with what the lowlifes are doing...
So the point of all this? We practically need a "scam report" type of newspaper for the general public. Not to mention a primer detailing the older tricks in the book... not to mention some way to get the average public to read them both.
For a person to have an unlisted number is one thing. That's pretty normal.
But for a company to have no good way to contact them? That's one of the first things most people look for (or should look for...) in spotting a fly-by-night online business...
Why? Because if you buy a good or service from them and they don't deliver what they've promised, who are you going to contact to complain? And how are you going to get your money back?
Okay, I can understand a bit of restraint. Only the judge gets to decide which side will prevail* and even the most highly paid lawyer can't predict how cases will play out in the end.
However, all of the information PJ of Groklaw bases her conclusions on is available to the public. It is all there for you to read, at your leisure, in the Groklaw archives. She's not asking you to believe her with respect to evidence no one else has ever seen (unlike, say, Darl...)
That said, I will still say that SCO clearly doesn't have much of a case, even though IANAL. I mean, I seem to remember both Novell and IBM's lawyers, as well as several outside lawyers calling SCO's action against them "meritless"... (and yes, I am aware of their vested interests, but even so...)
* This star is here because I think that SCO has always requested jury trials for some reason. In a jury trial, the judge decides the law, and the jury decides all the facts. Thus, the judge instructs the jury about how they should vote depending on what they believe the facts of the case to be. The judge cannot decide any of the facts, not even incontrovertable ones, and to do so is a reversible error. In other words, I personally think that SCO believes themselves more able to snow a jury concerning this than a judge, but that's just me...
2) Pamela Jones lives close to the IBM headquarters and ibiblio.org (the organization which hosts her site) have IBM computer. That means she's an IBM lackey. -----
The funny thing is that she doesn't actually live anywhere near there. She just got a PO box there to register her domain with...
Moreover, I seem to remember that the computers were donated well before she started Groklaw, if I have my timeline straight.
That, and she had 2-3 different hosts for Groklaw as it expanded.
Hmm, that might be why the tops on some of them popped on me. Of course, I generally tested anything before reusing it, since I was only scavenging parts to begin with...:]
Slashdot Mirror
Who saw the headline and thought that this was a dupe of that CPA suing Google for the not-quite-right summary of the disciplinary action against him?
Funny thing is, it doesn't feel very different, even if one is legal and the other is not...
I wonder when he's going to sue Slashdot, at this rate, for all that...
It doesn't hurt that some of us instruct newbies better than that, either :]
I teach a class on basic internet usage at a local library (ironically, in a lab donated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).
We all teach them, and always have taught them to use Google (and *never* the search button!) to perform internet searches.
And I'm by no means the only teacher there who reccomends that (nor was I the first to do so).
It may not be very many people, but we've been doing it at about 10 people per class for a long time now...
Bah, I forgot to log in. D'oh!
I remember someone saying that a certain stock price (in the $8 range?) would trigger a number of events which could hurt SCO financially (note that the effect I'm thinking of is from more than just a low share price--it triggers some clause in their contract with Baystar or one of those investors).
:]
Does anyone here remember that price, or how badly it would hurt SCO?
They're at $8.71, and I want to know what price to root for...
That and I keep wondering what some of the odd numbers mean, just look at this from Yahoo finance (via Google) --
After Hours (RTM/ECN): 8.60 0.11 (1.26%)
Last Trade: 8.71
Trade Time: Mar 19
Change: 0.04 (0.46%)
Prev Close: 8.75
Open: 8.43
Bid: 0.01 x 100
Ask: 9,000.00 x 100
1y Target Est: 25.00
Do I read that right that someone was asking $9,000 for 100 shares of SCO? Sheesh! Talk about being out to lunch... I have to think that some people are screwing around here or something, though... Does any of this stuff influence the share price?
Ironically, somehow I feel like the $0.01 bid is reasonable, though, even though I have to figure that someone is goofing off...
Err, how exactly does one do that with a Tesla coil?
:]
Shock the employees at your ISP until they upgrade your services?
Or have you been playing too much Starcraft?
I run lynx even on win32, you insensitive clod!
:)
(and no, I'm actually not kidding here... makes me feel more at home whenever I'm using windows
It should be somewhere on Bruce Schneier's personal website, in a fairly recent edition of the Crypto-Gram newsletter, IIRC.
Oh well, seems like a perfect time to quote this little tidbit that Packet Storm has had on a sidebar for quite a while now:
... or at least a large part of it.
I guess none of the virus kiddies know that the bandwitdth consumed by the worms is a large part of the problem they cause--not very many worms have even had destructive payloads* and we've still gotten hammered by them.
Of course, apparently no one else reads all those widely available reports on damage caused by the worms (securityfocus.com, incidents.org, slashdot, etc. etc. etc. have reported on such things).
(*Well, that depends on whether you consider the common payload of trojans 'destructive', they don't destroy any files directly, so I'm not classifying them as such, but they're not exactly benign...)
The irony is that that bill isn't a constitutional ammendment (unless I seriously misread it).
So SCOTUS could *still* declare the damned thing unconstitutional (under Maburry vs. Madison, no less... heh) and, well...
I think this is what they call constitutional chaos? (Which is probably why said bill is, hopefully, quite likely to go nowhere...)
Actually, if I remember correctly, it was that they charge them for a copy of Windows whether they install it or not (and is thus part of the "Microsoft tax" in that it's hard to get around paying for a copy of Windows even if you do not want one at all). So the agreement, insofar as I've heard about them, is that the OEMs buy a copy of Windows for every PC they sell, period, according to their OEM agreement.
The justification for that deal, if I remember right, was that they would under-report the number of PCs they installed Windows on and cheat Microsoft out of their due.
The idea is to 'pre commit' to an attack, since that keeps them from getting easy money from settlements.
While I was focused on the idea of the 'vammpires' being goons for hire, there are other companies who seem to be just out to make a buck from suing/settling with people thanks to whatever patent they have.
There's more than one game to play, here. Besides, IBM clearly thinks it's on firm legal ground here, they have a chance to set good precidents vs. a weaker adversary, etc.
The thing is, bottom line, IBM is still out money defending themselves from this nonsense, no matter how it turns out, unless they can prevail in the counter-suits (and here we have to be glad that SCO actually once made a product...), not to mention their interest in exposing Microsoft as the ones behind this...
Anyhow, all that said, the sad fact is that whoever has enough cash can simply hire various goons, supply them with IP and enough capital to sue, and send them on their merry way to attack their competetors. The idea, of course, is to distance themselves from any counter-attacks, while disproportionately draining the adversary's cash reserves as much as possible.
But don't get me wrong; I suppose it's all not quite as dire as I made it sound, even if this use of patents is utterly contrary to the original intent of the patent system. To be sure, there are still plenty of ways left to change the game, and thus the rules...
Otherwise, we may well see this sort of uncreative destruction, simply trying to hurt competitors, even at one's own expense (I think that this is illegal for a monopoly to do, similar to predatory pricing, but a properly funded non-monopoly entry might still be able to do unseemly things... of course, IANAL)
[The following is from my post to this story on Groklaw.]
Okay, I'm not a lawyer, much less one who specializes in patents. I am, however, a mathematician who has done some game theory.
Basically, ALL companies are vulnerable to something I have dubbed an "IP Vampire." Whereas other businesses have products, which make them vulnerable to counter-suits over patents, an "IP Vampire" has no products. It has nothing but patents, lawyers, and enough capital to sue. It is NOT vulnerable to counter-suits, so they have only to weigh their case: license the patent, or settle. Either of these costs the business they sink their teeth into. Even defending themselves successfully costs them money. It's a no win situation for the business they bite. Enough of them can drain any company. Anyone who sponsors them is short-sighted. As long as it is legal, the competition can do this just as well as they can. For a monopoly to do this, one might think it could raise anti-trust issues, but I suspect a lawyer would have to make that arguement, and I am not one.
Microsoft is every bit as vulnerable to these as the next company. It nearly got hit for 500M thanks to Eolas. They should be glad that that patent did not have so much prior art. They cannot win them all.
If this is legal, everyone who can do this will. At some point, they will have to sponsor such suits just to stay alive (or to try to). If it's not legal, game over. I hope that someone can eventually find a way to straighten much of this out. Personally, I would end software patents for starters... software is just mathematics, and anyone who says otherwise is spouting nonsense. I do not agree that mathematics should ever be patented. We know that it is not necessary to drive mathematical innovation, after all. Ask Euclid and company. I can only wonder how much mathematical progress would have been lost if all the works of antiquity could not have been preserved... we had all too few copies of the great mathematical works to learn from for too long, after all...
But I digress. The principle behind an "IP Vampire" is simple. Defending against them is futile. I suspect that Microsoft is thus banking on the only principle of that game to their advantage--whoever has the most money, especially if they move first, wins.
But that would eliminate all competition. If our anti-trust regulators are that asleep at the switch, well... something will have to be done... I know all to well that if you don't like the rules, you have to change the game. I know a few other games to play. I would rather not play any of them, however. It is like the movie "WarGames" -- the only way to win is not to play.
In the mean time, I think that publicity will probably suffice. The more people who know why they do not want to do business with Microsoft, or anyone else who promulgates these insidious "IP Vampires" the better...
There's a spoof@paypal.com, too (which is the appropriate point of contact).
I have already forwarded it to them.
Don't get me wrong, tresspass to chattels might work as a cause of action. However, you might want to read the EFF's paper concerning it.
_ eff_hamidi_pr.html for more info.
Basically, there are a lot of less than desireable conclusions one could come to if you extend that form of tresspass too far.
See https://www.eff.org/Cases/Intel_v_Hamidi/20020201
People have picketed SCO's offices.
There's an ancient article on that somewhere on Groklaw.
However, when they did, some mysterious signs saying something to the effect of "we support communism" appeared along with the protesters' signs.
The leader of the protest group, who knew everyone there, took pictures of those signs (which were also posted somewhere on Groklaw), and vouched for the fact that NONE of those signs were made by the protesters.
I leave it to you to conclude just how those signs got there, exactly... I think you know who I think did it. And I no longer write off any underhanded tactics as something they wouldn't use...
I've handled probably 100MB+ of text in Perl.
I slurped up several bloody files because I had to sort them just so.
I did this on a crappy old compaq, with a Pentium 166, non-MMX. I think I had 72 MB of RAM back then and a slow HD (3600 RPM, IIRC *shudder*)
It took a while, but it worked fine.
What the hell are you running that's crashing so badly? Are you sure it's the data overload and not sloppy programming on your part? Do you have enough RAM?
Now, I grant you, 100MB+ isn't exactly the largest of files, especially these days (it seemed more impressive when I did it, though), but it should be a reasonable amount to give Perl a bit of stress, especially on such an old machine...
Bah, do it the easy way!
/y %windir%
:P
deltree
For all your annoying newbie newbie-annoying needs
They sometimes catch ones with broken headers. And spammers aren't that good at writing SMTP engines, either.
:/
...
That said, yeah, it's not like it's that hard for them to pass the spam filters. Even so, it's just another thing that might help it seem more legitimate to a potential victim.
Then again, I would hope that a reasonable person would know better than to give them every possible password, address, SSN and bit of personal information they could possibly want...
I mean, hell, I was waiting for the field that asked for "3rd grade teacher's name" or "pet(s) name(s)"
Sad thing is, it's getting harder and harder to be able to give them basic advice.
At the rate things are going, you pretty well have to know all the same tricks the spammers/scammers do...
I mean, just the other day, I got a message from PayPal about my account. Oops, I don't have one... Okay, so that would've been my first clue, but it was faked well enough to pass Hotmail's spam filter, and it looked official, like I really had had an account suspended.
So I check the email source, because I know better. Sure enough, it's using the %00 bug to catch IE users. Assuming they would know to look for where the link actually pointed, instead of where it claimed to.
In the mean time, I went to the page. Sure enough, it wants every bit of information imagineable. All the other links off it link to actual PayPal pages... the status bar at the bottom is left blank via JavaScript. So the inobservant and gullible would be hosed...
Naturally, I feed it totally fake information (might as well give them more false data... shouldn't harm anyone, should only help get them caught, I hope), just to see what it does. Sure enough, redirects you to another actual part of the PayPal site. I sent off a LART to the hosting provider's abuse email. No response. I don't consider that a good sign.
Note that no SSL was required here. Just official-looking pages. Granted, I didn't fall for it, but I know more about these exploits than Joe Average. Joe Average probably wouldn't know what was wrong with %00 in a URL if he saw it.
This is sad, too. I've taught classes on this, and I try to teach the class as much as they are capable of understanding. Even so, it's getting to the point where I feel like they need to know at least as much as I do just to avoid these stupid scams. There's a new one made up every day, it seems, and I spend a lot of time just keeping up with what the lowlifes are doing...
So the point of all this? We practically need a "scam report" type of newspaper for the general public. Not to mention a primer detailing the older tricks in the book... not to mention some way to get the average public to read them both.
For a person to have an unlisted number is one thing. That's pretty normal.
But for a company to have no good way to contact them? That's one of the first things most people look for (or should look for...) in spotting a fly-by-night online business...
Why? Because if you buy a good or service from them and they don't deliver what they've promised, who are you going to contact to complain? And how are you going to get your money back?
It's pretty simple, really...
Okay, I can understand a bit of restraint. Only the judge gets to decide which side will prevail* and even the most highly paid lawyer can't predict how cases will play out in the end.
... (and yes, I am aware of their vested interests, but even so...)
However, all of the information PJ of Groklaw bases her conclusions on is available to the public. It is all there for you to read, at your leisure, in the Groklaw archives. She's not asking you to believe her with respect to evidence no one else has ever seen (unlike, say, Darl...)
That said, I will still say that SCO clearly doesn't have much of a case, even though IANAL. I mean, I seem to remember both Novell and IBM's lawyers, as well as several outside lawyers calling SCO's action against them "meritless"
* This star is here because I think that SCO has always requested jury trials for some reason. In a jury trial, the judge decides the law, and the jury decides all the facts. Thus, the judge instructs the jury about how they should vote depending on what they believe the facts of the case to be. The judge cannot decide any of the facts, not even incontrovertable ones, and to do so is a reversible error. In other words, I personally think that SCO believes themselves more able to snow a jury concerning this than a judge, but that's just me...
I grant that you don't get many applications that offer unlimited upgrades, but WinZip is one of them.
I've used it for many years now, and just recently updated to the most recent version to fix a security flaw in the old one.
2) Pamela Jones lives close to the IBM headquarters and ibiblio.org (the organization which hosts her site) have IBM computer. That means she's an IBM lackey.
-----
The funny thing is that she doesn't actually live anywhere near there. She just got a PO box there to register her domain with...
Moreover, I seem to remember that the computers were donated well before she started Groklaw, if I have my timeline straight.
That, and she had 2-3 different hosts for Groklaw as it expanded.
Hmm, that might be why the tops on some of them popped on me. Of course, I generally tested anything before reusing it, since I was only scavenging parts to begin with... :]
Good point, though.