Are we certain they weren't available in the UK? Check out the map Dan Kaminsky did of the rootkit's detected prescence in Europe. The UK's almost solid red, indicating that the rootkit is most abundant there.
I question the methodology. As far as I can tell, he's reporting which DNS servers have resolved queries for First4Internet. And he's doing it after the scandal has been all over the online news sites, all over the blogosphere and links to First4Internet's sites posted in a couple of dozen +5 comments on/.
I'd be surprised if there was a DNS server left on earth that hadn't recently handled a query for First4Internet by now.
When some cheapskate downloads copyrighted MP3s from a P2P network, it's `copyright infringement', but when Sony uses GPL'd code it's `stealing', right?
Sony, or representatives thereof, have repeatedly gone on record as claiming that copyright infringement is equivalent to stealing.
Therefore, when we catch Sony infringing copyright, is there anything wrong with using their own term for the act? At the very least, the irony is quite delicious.
3.(1) A person is guilty of an offence if
(a) he does any act which causes an unauthorised modification of the contents of any computer; and
(b) at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an intent to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing
(a) to impair the operation of any computer;
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer; or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data.
I think First4Internet's little toy is designed to prevent or hinder access to programs and data held in a computer, don't you? And I really doubt that their click-through EULA constitutes authorisation to do so; it was fraudulently claimed that the Software was necessary to play the music, which was a plain lie as is shown by every Linux and Apple machine that plays it just fine without the rootkit installed.
I might add that even though these discs are not available in the UK, the Computer Misuse Act still holds.
Anyone know if we could possibly get Inspector Knacker to take a look at these felonious fellows?
They've simultaneously violated DVD Jon's copyright on his code, and (in distributing it in the USA) violated the DMCA to boot!
Sony ought to be in some severely deep shit here. Of course they're a corporation, so they're mostly above the law, but we should still be able to get something to stick.
That's not how I read it. Microsoft is going to require 64 bit processors for its new software. That's about equivalent to them requiring a 32-bit processor for Windows 95, and thereby excluding everyone on a 286. No reason why these systems shouldn't run legacy 32-bit apps - and maybe even 16-bit apps - but they're going to need a 64-bit processor.
It's not really either. Technology progresses, new Windows requires latest processors... it's scarcely news at all.
What is interesting, though, is that there are still a lot of 32-bit processors around which are perfectly viable. Microsoft didn't absolutely require a 32-bit CPU until Windows '95; previous releases could always run in Standard or Real mode if you didn't happen to have the hardware to use 386 Enhanced. When that release came out in late 1995, hardly anyone was still running a 286. But when MS goes to pure 64-bit, there may well still be a lot of legacy Pentium IVs around running just fine. Maybe we'll be able to get these guys to consider alternatives at that point?
Im Indian decent from the Caribbean, and a cop saw me asking someone for directions, and then he stalked me to where I was going, then pulled me over, with 6 other cop cars and a K9 unit, and asked me if I was a terrorist, and if I had bombs...
Wow, that's sneaky. If you really were a terrorist with bombs, they'd have been down on you like a ton of bricks the moment you said 'yes'!
You do realize that this "split" would mean a completely separate network? If somewhere decided to just start using IPs, and set up routing for it, it would screw up all the routing.
I do indeed. But sooner or later that will be preferable to having to go cap in hand to a foreign government to keep your own national infrastructure operational, especially in the hypothetical case where the US government has abandoned its current hands-off approach and started, say, charging huge sums for IP space to nations it didn't like...
Or at least, that's how I see it. It's quite possible that when the time comes we'll all just swallow it. After all, the nations of the world already send enormous sums of money to Redmond for the privilege of using their own computers, don't they?
IPv6 would certainly be lovely. 2^128 addresses... mmmmmm.
In short, if the UN or EU provided better DNS while, at the same time, the US was abusive, people would use the UN/EU servers and they'd become the standard.
I'm not convinced of that. Most of the US would do nothing, through sheer inertia. They won't change what came preinstalled. These are the Internet Explorer users. These are the people we have to keep telling not to click 'OK' to every damn message box, not to download that attachment... They won't switch. Maybe their ISPs could do it for them, but that would probably degrade their service - I assume Americans mostly visit American websites, after all.
Outside the US, it's quite possible that we'd end up with more than one competing standard. EU, China, India, Japan... will they really collaborate? I'm not sure they will. We'll have each bloc using its own system, and ISPs including handy applets on their install CDs to allow users to access foreign sites, sort of.
We might, at the end of it all, be glad of Microsoft. The standard that emerges will probably be whatever they bundle with Windows 2020:-)
What has to change? Aren't IP addresses assigned on an as-needed basis?
Well, if the US and UK can find uses for such huge amounts of IP space, far more than one per capita, then once India and China start using the network on the same kind of scale, we certainly will have a problem. There won't be enough to go around. IPv4 has a maximum of 4,294,967,296 numbers, assuming that everything from 000.000.000.000 to 255.255.255.255 is allowable, which it isn't.
Once they run out, we've got a seller's market for IP numbers. And, conveniently, the US happens to be in the position of IP number issuer. Do you really think the government of the day won't abuse that position? Hence the desire on the parts of other countries to reform the net. Either dethrone the US, or fragment the net, or go to IPv6. For the time being, we seem to have the US remaining in control, but knowing that it's being watched by this new committee and that if it misbehaves then the net will probably be split. I, for one, am happy enough with that... though I really wish we could get a move on with IPv6 and make all this more or less irrelevant.
With all the power that the next gen systems are reported to have I was expecting to see a glowing corona of pure energy (maybe like some blue and orangey colors) not a aluminum heatsink.
Well, there was that arcade box Namco once built, which ran off fissile decay, needed a fearsome cooling system based on liquid sodium, and lived in a lead-lined cabinet... That, once opened, I'm sure would glow something amazing.
Unfortunately, when the first arcade opened in Japan with one of these things, the sheer power awoke a zilla, and the whole place got stomped flat. Wonderful system, but really wasn't practical in the real world.
Why does any outside party have the right to demand control, when it's within their ability to set up their own?
Because it's better for all parties that there be a single internet, rather than many. We threaten to set up our own, in the hope of thereby extracting concessions on internet governance from the US.
So:
1: ideal case, internationally-run internet.
2: OK case, status quo with USA knowing its handling of the net is under scrutiny. This is what has happened.
3: Bad case, fragmented internet, regional separate DNS and IP space allocations, unreliable hacks to translate across boundaries
4:Worst case, status quo with USA shamelessly abusing power over internet
We fear that (4) may come to pass, once IP space gets scarce, and the Internet is even more crucial to the world economy than it is now. So we threaten to bring about (3), in the hope of achieving (2) and maybe then working towards (1).
As Paul Atreides realised, the ability to destroy a thing gives you power over it. Any one of the major blocs can destroy the internet as a unified system by, as you say, setting up their own. The USA wants to avoid this, I'm sure; then they'd better listen.
... it seems that the accessibility problems are not the fault of the open source programs or the Open Document Format, but the fault of the closed-source, proprietary Braille interpreters and screen readers which are incompatible.
TFA actually has considerable praise for open source's accessibility in itself:
Another important question is the extent to which the Open Document file format itself supports or fails to support accessibility. This comes up for things like storing the alternate text tag for an image, or noting the relationships of labels with the objects they label in on-line forms. While a thorough examination of the file format specifically for these issues still needs to be done, much of ODF is based on standard web technologies like SMIL for audio and multimedia, and SVG for vector graphics, which have and continue to be vetted by the World Wide Web Accessibility Initiative processes. We also know that two of the existing applications that currently read/write ODF can export Tagged PDF files in support of PDF accessibility, and Adobe has already conducted some tests to verify that accessibility across that translation is preserved (and thus must exist in the original ODF file). Finally, at this very moment the OASIS Technical Committee that created ODF is looking into forming a specific subcommittee to examine ODF for just these accessibility issues and address any shortcomings found.
This is in stark contrast to proprietary file formats like those used by Microsoft Office. Those formats are totally opaque, with no peer review of accessibility issues possible. Thus we cannot objectively tell how well the Microsoft Office file format supports accessibility, or say whether it does a better or worse job than ODF.
Why? What is this patriotism thing? I don't think I've ever heard a phrase so loathsome as 'my country, right or wrong', except perhaps for 'the innocent have nothing to fear'.
As far as I'm concerned, patriotism died at the Somme.
If Germany had control, they'd probably shutdown more Nazi websites.
Maybe Japan, then. The Japanese have no problem at all with people who deny monstrous war crimes. Deny away to your heart's content, preferably in the history textbooks...
However we should start to consider how net governance (whatever form that should take) will develop in the future, before the future arrives. Just as China, India et al are in a hurry to explode economically they will also be in a hurry to move forward technologically too and if the US or others appear to be moving too slowly they may well 'go it alone' and develop competing networks.
I suspect IP space will be the problem.
There are some four billion possible IP numbers. Of these, some 2.4 billion have been allocated. Of those, some 1.3 billion are allocated to organisations in the United States.
The EU has a little less than twice the population of the United States. India and China each have over four times the population of the United States.
Can you see the upcoming problem, people?
Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6. Four billion is not going to be enough once China and India really start getting wired. Once IP space gets scarce it gets valuable, and that's when the US government will think of export tariffs on IP space, and other governments will think about splitting the internet.
This is great and all, but who's to say the argument won't spring up in another 3 to 4 years.
The newly formed oversight committee is to say.
Thus far, the US has had a pretty much hands-off approach to running the internet. That's been great, guys. However, the internet is getting larger and larger and more and more important to the economies and to the security of all nations. The potential power that comes from running the internet is getting greater. The day may come when the US government starts to abuse its position here - for instance, how about imposing export tariffs on domain names, or on IP space?
Hence the oversight committee. If, five years down the line, the US has been naughty, then it's time to seriously think about splitting the internet. But if they've continued to behave as they generally have in the past, then all is well. The committee won't have power as such over the running of the internet, but if it isn't kept happy then the next round of negotiations might not go so smoothly.
Biased? Perhaps, but you might more accurately have described the Register as 'cynical and nasty'.
The Register thinks the worst of just about everyone and everything. Since it's pretty evenhanded in its loathing, 'biased' while technically correct doesn't quite convey the right picture here.
Slashdot Mirror
I question the methodology. As far as I can tell, he's reporting which DNS servers have resolved queries for First4Internet. And he's doing it after the scandal has been all over the online news sites, all over the blogosphere and links to First4Internet's sites posted in a couple of dozen +5 comments on /.
I'd be surprised if there was a DNS server left on earth that hadn't recently handled a query for First4Internet by now.
Sony, or representatives thereof, have repeatedly gone on record as claiming that copyright infringement is equivalent to stealing.
Therefore, when we catch Sony infringing copyright, is there anything wrong with using their own term for the act? At the very least, the irony is quite delicious.
3.(1) A person is guilty of an offence if
(a) he does any act which causes an unauthorised modification of the contents of any computer; and
(b) at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an intent to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing
(a) to impair the operation of any computer;
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer; or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data.
I think First4Internet's little toy is designed to prevent or hinder access to programs and data held in a computer, don't you? And I really doubt that their click-through EULA constitutes authorisation to do so; it was fraudulently claimed that the Software was necessary to play the music, which was a plain lie as is shown by every Linux and Apple machine that plays it just fine without the rootkit installed.
I might add that even though these discs are not available in the UK, the Computer Misuse Act still holds.
Anyone know if we could possibly get Inspector Knacker to take a look at these felonious fellows?
I don't have a copy of the rootkit myself, but... wow. Just wow. First4Internet covered up their naughtiness with rot13?
That's incompetence not seen since the heyday of Wile E. Coyote.
Dumping PS3 in favour of 360 because you think Sony's evil is kind of similar to dumping Saruman in favour of Sauron.
Personally, I'm rather taken with that nifty new controller they're putting on the Revolution...
Sony ought to be in some severely deep shit here. Of course they're a corporation, so they're mostly above the law, but we should still be able to get something to stick.
That's not how I read it. Microsoft is going to require 64 bit processors for its new software. That's about equivalent to them requiring a 32-bit processor for Windows 95, and thereby excluding everyone on a 286. No reason why these systems shouldn't run legacy 32-bit apps - and maybe even 16-bit apps - but they're going to need a 64-bit processor.
It's not really either. Technology progresses, new Windows requires latest processors... it's scarcely news at all.
What is interesting, though, is that there are still a lot of 32-bit processors around which are perfectly viable. Microsoft didn't absolutely require a 32-bit CPU until Windows '95; previous releases could always run in Standard or Real mode if you didn't happen to have the hardware to use 386 Enhanced. When that release came out in late 1995, hardly anyone was still running a 286. But when MS goes to pure 64-bit, there may well still be a lot of legacy Pentium IVs around running just fine. Maybe we'll be able to get these guys to consider alternatives at that point?
-- Bernard Bernoulli, on attempting to revive Dr. Fred Edison after rescuing him from the IRS.
Wow, that's sneaky. If you really were a terrorist with bombs, they'd have been down on you like a ton of bricks the moment you said 'yes'!
Shakespeare didn't write in Old English. For Old English, try reading Beowulf some time.
"Wherefore art thou," may have been the contemporary way of saying "Where are you?"
Or it may even have been the contemporary way of saying "Why are you?"
I do indeed. But sooner or later that will be preferable to having to go cap in hand to a foreign government to keep your own national infrastructure operational, especially in the hypothetical case where the US government has abandoned its current hands-off approach and started, say, charging huge sums for IP space to nations it didn't like...
Or at least, that's how I see it. It's quite possible that when the time comes we'll all just swallow it. After all, the nations of the world already send enormous sums of money to Redmond for the privilege of using their own computers, don't they?
IPv6 would certainly be lovely. 2^128 addresses... mmmmmm.
I'm not convinced of that. Most of the US would do nothing, through sheer inertia. They won't change what came preinstalled. These are the Internet Explorer users. These are the people we have to keep telling not to click 'OK' to every damn message box, not to download that attachment... They won't switch. Maybe their ISPs could do it for them, but that would probably degrade their service - I assume Americans mostly visit American websites, after all.
Outside the US, it's quite possible that we'd end up with more than one competing standard. EU, China, India, Japan... will they really collaborate? I'm not sure they will. We'll have each bloc using its own system, and ISPs including handy applets on their install CDs to allow users to access foreign sites, sort of.
We might, at the end of it all, be glad of Microsoft. The standard that emerges will probably be whatever they bundle with Windows 2020 :-)
Well, if the US and UK can find uses for such huge amounts of IP space, far more than one per capita, then once India and China start using the network on the same kind of scale, we certainly will have a problem. There won't be enough to go around. IPv4 has a maximum of 4,294,967,296 numbers, assuming that everything from 000.000.000.000 to 255.255.255.255 is allowable, which it isn't.
Once they run out, we've got a seller's market for IP numbers. And, conveniently, the US happens to be in the position of IP number issuer. Do you really think the government of the day won't abuse that position? Hence the desire on the parts of other countries to reform the net. Either dethrone the US, or fragment the net, or go to IPv6. For the time being, we seem to have the US remaining in control, but knowing that it's being watched by this new committee and that if it misbehaves then the net will probably be split. I, for one, am happy enough with that... though I really wish we could get a move on with IPv6 and make all this more or less irrelevant.
Well, there was that arcade box Namco once built, which ran off fissile decay, needed a fearsome cooling system based on liquid sodium, and lived in a lead-lined cabinet... That, once opened, I'm sure would glow something amazing.
Unfortunately, when the first arcade opened in Japan with one of these things, the sheer power awoke a zilla, and the whole place got stomped flat. Wonderful system, but really wasn't practical in the real world.
Because it's better for all parties that there be a single internet, rather than many. We threaten to set up our own, in the hope of thereby extracting concessions on internet governance from the US.
So:
1: ideal case, internationally-run internet.
2: OK case, status quo with USA knowing its handling of the net is under scrutiny. This is what has happened.
3: Bad case, fragmented internet, regional separate DNS and IP space allocations, unreliable hacks to translate across boundaries
4:Worst case, status quo with USA shamelessly abusing power over internet
We fear that (4) may come to pass, once IP space gets scarce, and the Internet is even more crucial to the world economy than it is now. So we threaten to bring about (3), in the hope of achieving (2) and maybe then working towards (1).
As Paul Atreides realised, the ability to destroy a thing gives you power over it. Any one of the major blocs can destroy the internet as a unified system by, as you say, setting up their own. The USA wants to avoid this, I'm sure; then they'd better listen.
How about lynx? I'm pretty sure that works with speech synthesisers. Obviously you wouldn't get the pictures or animations, but... er...
TFA actually has considerable praise for open source's accessibility in itself:
Another important question is the extent to which the Open Document file format itself supports or fails to support accessibility. This comes up for things like storing the alternate text tag for an image, or noting the relationships of labels with the objects they label in on-line forms. While a thorough examination of the file format specifically for these issues still needs to be done, much of ODF is based on standard web technologies like SMIL for audio and multimedia, and SVG for vector graphics, which have and continue to be vetted by the World Wide Web Accessibility Initiative processes. We also know that two of the existing applications that currently read/write ODF can export Tagged PDF files in support of PDF accessibility, and Adobe has already conducted some tests to verify that accessibility across that translation is preserved (and thus must exist in the original ODF file). Finally, at this very moment the OASIS Technical Committee that created ODF is looking into forming a specific subcommittee to examine ODF for just these accessibility issues and address any shortcomings found.
This is in stark contrast to proprietary file formats like those used by Microsoft Office. Those formats are totally opaque, with no peer review of accessibility issues possible. Thus we cannot objectively tell how well the Microsoft Office file format supports accessibility, or say whether it does a better or worse job than ODF.
Why? What is this patriotism thing? I don't think I've ever heard a phrase so loathsome as 'my country, right or wrong', except perhaps for 'the innocent have nothing to fear'.
As far as I'm concerned, patriotism died at the Somme.
Maybe Japan, then. The Japanese have no problem at all with people who deny monstrous war crimes. Deny away to your heart's content, preferably in the history textbooks...
IP allocation by country.
USA: 1.3 billion. UK: 254 million. Japan: 141 million. China: 72 million.
Something is going to have to change here.
I suspect IP space will be the problem.
There are some four billion possible IP numbers. Of these, some 2.4 billion have been allocated. Of those, some 1.3 billion are allocated to organisations in the United States.
The EU has a little less than twice the population of the United States. India and China each have over four times the population of the United States.
Can you see the upcoming problem, people?
Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6. Four billion is not going to be enough once China and India really start getting wired. Once IP space gets scarce it gets valuable, and that's when the US government will think of export tariffs on IP space, and other governments will think about splitting the internet.
The newly formed oversight committee is to say.
Thus far, the US has had a pretty much hands-off approach to running the internet. That's been great, guys. However, the internet is getting larger and larger and more and more important to the economies and to the security of all nations. The potential power that comes from running the internet is getting greater. The day may come when the US government starts to abuse its position here - for instance, how about imposing export tariffs on domain names, or on IP space?
Hence the oversight committee. If, five years down the line, the US has been naughty, then it's time to seriously think about splitting the internet. But if they've continued to behave as they generally have in the past, then all is well. The committee won't have power as such over the running of the internet, but if it isn't kept happy then the next round of negotiations might not go so smoothly.
No need to go so far west to flee Blair's police state. Myself, I'm starting to seriously think about Dublin...
The Register thinks the worst of just about everyone and everything. Since it's pretty evenhanded in its loathing, 'biased' while technically correct doesn't quite convey the right picture here.