I would guess it was upgraded because of the quantity of network traffic and mail it's creating. I know people who have several hundred people in their main address book...
Oh, and it's reality that is more deceptive. Illusions can be broken.
The thing that scares me is that because of Microsoft's ongoing disregard to basic security concepts all of the internet is in danger, to say so. Spam, worms, viruses - all those things take their toll. Resources are wasted: bandwidth, sysadmins time and so on.
Actually, Gartner (love them or hate them) issued a report that companies should switch to anything other than Windows/IIS sometime last year after one of the IIS worms. MS may ignore a lot of things (like common sense), but it doesn't ignore lost revenue.
The thing that scares me is that these could easily be written by MS, for MS, so that when grandma calls them up because her ISP has blocked her machine, they can say, "that's a known (ahem)issue(ahem), you need to upgrade to Windows 2003SP1(Don't forget that EULA!), which is on sale this month for only $xxx. Oh, that means you'll also have to buy a new computer, or you can switch to MSN WebMail (or whatever the thing is called), and the first two months are free.
I mean, why would all virus writers suddenly become so nice?
Because most of the virus writers today don't know the difference between an IBM 3090 and an Atari 2600? If you think I'm kidding, look at some of the stuff from the 80's, which would see if you were infected by virus "x", and DISINFECT YOUR COMPUTER FOR YOU IF YOU WERE, before infecting you with virus "y".
It also provides an interesting "but I didn't do any harm" attemp at defense if they are actually caught and Mommy and Daddy have to cough up money for a lawyer.
Let's see, there's the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (or whatever they're called this week), the NSA, and pretty much every other "agency" under Czar Bush.
Then throw in what's left of the KGB, the Chinese KGB, the Kinesset and the rest of our "allies", who caught Czar Bush spying on them during the vote for the Iraqi War For Oil^H^H^H^H^H^Hn Terrorism, "US Threat O' The Week", and everybody else.
Oh, and let's not forget the writers of spam protection software, who now get to do the "Buy Our Product[tm] And Protect Your System" speil.
Is that enough? If not, consider the insane antics of SCO. I can just imagine them trying to claim they're only protecting their IP or something.
With a system like the internet you can't really "take it over". However, there are times and places where strikes can be very effective in allowing you to take over specific systems. For an interesting (in my opinion) story on this, see the sci-fi story "Marooned in RealTime" by none other than Vernor Vinge. I prefer the duology, "Across RealTime", which has both "The Peace War", and "Marooned in RealTime" in it.
Since you said you were asking a serious question, I won't do the obligitory "beowoulf" joke here, but think about it. If you're trying to keep mail services, network traffic, and all the related things (AUTH? INFO?) up during one of these things, the odds of you detecting a small attack against one or two servers using a new vulnerability in something like FTP (or God[d][ess][ess] forbid, SSH or something) goes way down.
Which leads me to another thing, calling it "Secure Shell". Zimmerman had the right idea in calling it "Pretty Good Privacy", not "Unbroken Privacy" or something similar. The social engineering mechanics between the two products are very interesting.
A legal spammer (according to my definition) would be one that uses a valid return address, has valid IP addresses, and clearly labels their mail as spam (erm, "advertisements"). Getting rid of them would be trivial if you wanted to.
Heck, so long as they can delay the actual court date with IBM, [...]
SCO started this. Trying to delay the court date would give IBM a (very good) chance of getting the whole thing decided in their favor by the Judge who throws the case out.
I went to grade school in the early 70's. We had just gotten down the concept of printing when they decided to force cursive on us. I never recovered, and it shows in my handwriting even today.
As others have pointed out, we no longer teach quill-and-ink skills in grade school, nor do we teach claymaking and stick sharpening, how to cure hide so you can write on it with the juice of the berries you've collected, and a host of other communication skills that are no longer necessary.
I'm fairly confident that parents lamented the fact that their children would no longer need to learn how to use an inkwell when pencils and pens came out.
Is cursive pretty when done correctly? Sure it is. So is Calligraphy, Japenese, Chinese, and a host of other written languages. Does that mean we should be forcing it down children's throats when they have no useful need of it? No.
Note that I still think children should learn at least two languages, beginning in 1st grade, but as long as you have a kanji input device, and you know how to write up the letters with a pencil, there's no need to become a master of the art.
Sigh. There's so much I want to say here, and not enough time to say it.
Just be sure to use the correct survey group, with the necessary statistical manipulation to "smooth out the bumps", and yes, you can make whatever claims you want.
You (and the others that have brought this up) have a very valid point, though. There are certain to be several header files (um, stdlib.h, stdio.h, math.h, time.h) which have, over time, become identical.
There's probably structures and other data-related items that have also through the years converged, thanks to BSD and other things.
Which is probably another reason why SCO is trying to spread so much FUD about this whole situation, and won't let anybody competent see the "offending code".
A comment on the NDA: I've seen some nasty NDA's over the years, but this one wins the "only a complete fool would sign this" award hands down.
I see you have an extranous "practically" in your response.
Seriously, a friend of mine was driving from Denver to Kansas City at the start of the year, and a cop pulled him over for "crowding the center line". Now, I realize that some Kansas cops are just incredibly bored, but get real.
Oh, and of course the cop asked if he could look in the trunk. If Keviee had said "not without a warrent", I'm sure he would have been taken in for acting "like he was hiding something".
Face it, everything that has been done in the name of "the war on terror" has been nothing but a power grab to remove the rights of US citizens.
Not at all. IBM, unlike SCO, is involved in this case to win, not to inflate their stock price, or get bought out, or whatever it is that SCO is doing.
Assuming SCO's right, they could tell IBM and the community exactly what lines of code are identical, [...]
They don't even need to tell the community. They could tell IBM, IBM could re-write the portions, submit it to Linus (he'd probably have to know also), and give it a changelog entry of something like "re-write portions to improve compiler optimizations under gcc 3.0.1 patchlevel 4" or something.
SCO would only need to do the "having worked with IBM to remove the offending sections" routine, and they could still sue for trade-secret infringement and contract violations.
There is a thing known as "independent invention" that says that if you create something, patent it, and I create it on my own (not being aware of your device, patent, etc), then I am *NOT* violating your patent.
You could probably sue me to stop me from continuing to use the item or something, but you can't sue me for patent infringement if I developed it on my own.
In regards to the comments being the same, good coding practices say that your comments should tell what something is doing, not how. This means that for any given function foo() that exists in both kernels, there is a fairly decent chance that the header comments ("This function accepts an IP address and performs a reverse DNS lookup to find the fully-qualified server name.") will be very similar, if not identical.
If somebody has seen the function someplace else (textbook, BSD, HURD, BeOS, you name it), the odds of them using the same comment increases just from the way memory works.
In any event, until SCO actually decides to identify the code (either by showing the code, or saying "kernel version 2.foo.bar, file xyzzyc, lines 18 to 300" or something nobody will be able to say for sure, and any comments made until then are just smoke and mirrors to keep the case in the press.
OBSCO: Trade secret law requires you to take reasonable steps to protect your secret. One of these reasonable steps is requiring you to take immediate action if you find your trade secret has been violated. Given that SCO kept their Linux distribution on their FTP server for weeks (and weeks) after they started this fiasco, I (personally) would think they have given up trade secret protections for those parts of the code.
Re:What else is in the filing cabinet.
on
Latest SCO News
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· Score: 1
The missing whitewater papers? The missing 18 minutes of tape from watergate? Only the shadow knows...
Seriously, I have to wonder if this wasn't something they just cribbed together. Consider the following:
SCO claims to have found an amendment transferring copyright.
Novell can't find it (which leads me to believe that SCO forged this document).
The copyright office was apparantly never notified about this "transfer".
Conclusion: As Eric Cartman of "South Park" would say: "Dude, this is pretty f***ing weak".
Wait until the ST:TNG fans hear about this.
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Chicken Run
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Picard is nothing if he isn't bald!
Re:what if tolkien...
on
Chicken Run
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ok, this is just a wee-bit off-topic, but...
It's already been done. Check out "Watership Down".
The Morningstar Growth Stock Grade has changed from A to A+.
Growth stocks are speculative. If SCO does manage to win this, what do you think will happen to their stock? I suspect that as more things come out (e.g. commentary on the NDA), this will change.
For those who never studied history, Rosa Parks was not the first black person to be arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus.
The public was most sympathetic to her, though.
The public isn't going to be too worried if AOL/Time-Warner/NBC/Coca-Pepsi-Cola sues a bunch of 20+ year old computer geeks for "illegal file trading".
The public would probably have a different opinion if it got out into the press that they were sueing an 80-year old grandmother of six who bakes apple pies on the weekends after getting home from church for sharing needlepoint patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think MS bought a license to use SCO "intellectual property"?
I would guess it was upgraded because of the quantity of network traffic and mail it's creating. I know people who have several hundred people in their main address book...
Oh, and it's reality that is more deceptive. Illusions can be broken.
To quote the parent:
Actually, Gartner (love them or hate them) issued a report that companies should switch to anything other than Windows/IIS sometime last year after one of the IIS worms. MS may ignore a lot of things (like common sense), but it doesn't ignore lost revenue.
The thing that scares me is that these could easily be written by MS, for MS, so that when grandma calls them up because her ISP has blocked her machine, they can say, "that's a known (ahem)issue(ahem), you need to upgrade to Windows 2003SP1(Don't forget that EULA!), which is on sale this month for only $xxx. Oh, that means you'll also have to buy a new computer, or you can switch to MSN WebMail (or whatever the thing is called), and the first two months are free.
To quote the parent:
Because most of the virus writers today don't know the difference between an IBM 3090 and an Atari 2600? If you think I'm kidding, look at some of the stuff from the 80's, which would see if you were infected by virus "x", and DISINFECT YOUR COMPUTER FOR YOU IF YOU WERE, before infecting you with virus "y".
It also provides an interesting "but I didn't do any harm" attemp at defense if they are actually caught and Mommy and Daddy have to cough up money for a lawyer.
Let's see, there's the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (or whatever they're called this week), the NSA, and pretty much every other "agency" under Czar Bush.
Then throw in what's left of the KGB, the Chinese KGB, the Kinesset and the rest of our "allies", who caught Czar Bush spying on them during the vote for the Iraqi War For Oil^H^H^H^H^H^Hn Terrorism, "US Threat O' The Week", and everybody else.
Oh, and let's not forget the writers of spam protection software, who now get to do the "Buy Our Product[tm] And Protect Your System" speil.
Is that enough? If not, consider the insane antics of SCO. I can just imagine them trying to claim they're only protecting their IP or something.
With a system like the internet you can't really "take it over". However, there are times and places where strikes can be very effective in allowing you to take over specific systems. For an interesting (in my opinion) story on this, see the sci-fi story "Marooned in RealTime" by none other than Vernor Vinge. I prefer the duology, "Across RealTime", which has both "The Peace War", and "Marooned in RealTime" in it.
Since you said you were asking a serious question, I won't do the obligitory "beowoulf" joke here, but think about it. If you're trying to keep mail services, network traffic, and all the related things (AUTH? INFO?) up during one of these things, the odds of you detecting a small attack against one or two servers using a new vulnerability in something like FTP (or God[d][ess][ess] forbid, SSH or something) goes way down.
Which leads me to another thing, calling it "Secure Shell". Zimmerman had the right idea in calling it "Pretty Good Privacy", not "Unbroken Privacy" or something similar. The social engineering mechanics between the two products are very interesting.
have been known to engage in this "anti-picket" stuff before.
A legal spammer (according to my definition) would be one that uses a valid return address, has valid IP addresses, and clearly labels their mail as spam (erm, "advertisements"). Getting rid of them would be trivial if you wanted to.
To quote the original poster:
SCO started this. Trying to delay the court date would give IBM a (very good) chance of getting the whole thing decided in their favor by the Judge who throws the case out.
Speaking of which, when is the first court date?
The first post to the Linux Kernel mailing list saying that SMP was working was from Alan; he had used hardware donated by Caldera.
Export compliance is controlled by the US government. I don't see them filing charges against IBM.
How just just making a .forward file to /dev/null?
I went to grade school in the early 70's. We had just gotten down the concept of printing when they decided to force cursive on us. I never recovered, and it shows in my handwriting even today.
As others have pointed out, we no longer teach quill-and-ink skills in grade school, nor do we teach claymaking and stick sharpening, how to cure hide so you can write on it with the juice of the berries you've collected, and a host of other communication skills that are no longer necessary.
I'm fairly confident that parents lamented the fact that their children would no longer need to learn how to use an inkwell when pencils and pens came out.
Is cursive pretty when done correctly? Sure it is. So is Calligraphy, Japenese, Chinese, and a host of other written languages. Does that mean we should be forcing it down children's throats when they have no useful need of it? No.
Note that I still think children should learn at least two languages, beginning in 1st grade, but as long as you have a kanji input device, and you know how to write up the letters with a pencil, there's no need to become a master of the art.
Sigh. There's so much I want to say here, and not enough time to say it.
Just be sure to use the correct survey group, with the necessary statistical manipulation to "smooth out the bumps", and yes, you can make whatever claims you want.
Headers are code just as much as anything else.
You (and the others that have brought this up) have a very valid point, though. There are certain to be several header files (um, stdlib.h, stdio.h, math.h, time.h) which have, over time, become identical.
There's probably structures and other data-related items that have also through the years converged, thanks to BSD and other things.
Which is probably another reason why SCO is trying to spread so much FUD about this whole situation, and won't let anybody competent see the "offending code".
A comment on the NDA: I've seen some nasty NDA's over the years, but this one wins the "only a complete fool would sign this" award hands down.
I see you have an extranous "practically" in your response.
Seriously, a friend of mine was driving from Denver to Kansas City at the start of the year, and a cop pulled him over for "crowding the center line". Now, I realize that some Kansas cops are just incredibly bored, but get real.
Oh, and of course the cop asked if he could look in the trunk. If Keviee had said "not without a warrent", I'm sure he would have been taken in for acting "like he was hiding something".
Face it, everything that has been done in the name of "the war on terror" has been nothing but a power grab to remove the rights of US citizens.
Not at all. IBM, unlike SCO, is involved in this case to win, not to inflate their stock price, or get bought out, or whatever it is that SCO is doing.
To quote:
They don't even need to tell the community. They could tell IBM, IBM could re-write the portions, submit it to Linus (he'd probably have to know also), and give it a changelog entry of something like "re-write portions to improve compiler optimizations under gcc 3.0.1 patchlevel 4" or something.
SCO would only need to do the "having worked with IBM to remove the offending sections" routine, and they could still sue for trade-secret infringement and contract violations.
To quote...
If those 80 lines of code allow you to sort information faster then your competetors, immediately.
IANAL, of course.
There is a thing known as "independent invention" that says that if you create something, patent it, and I create it on my own (not being aware of your device, patent, etc), then I am *NOT* violating your patent.
You could probably sue me to stop me from continuing to use the item or something, but you can't sue me for patent infringement if I developed it on my own.
In regards to the comments being the same, good coding practices say that your comments should tell what something is doing, not how. This means that for any given function foo() that exists in both kernels, there is a fairly decent chance that the header comments ("This function accepts an IP address and performs a reverse DNS lookup to find the fully-qualified server name.") will be very similar, if not identical.
If somebody has seen the function someplace else (textbook, BSD, HURD, BeOS, you name it), the odds of them using the same comment increases just from the way memory works.
In any event, until SCO actually decides to identify the code (either by showing the code, or saying "kernel version 2.foo.bar, file xyzzyc, lines 18 to 300" or something nobody will be able to say for sure, and any comments made until then are just smoke and mirrors to keep the case in the press.
OBSCO: Trade secret law requires you to take reasonable steps to protect your secret. One of these reasonable steps is requiring you to take immediate action if you find your trade secret has been violated. Given that SCO kept their Linux distribution on their FTP server for weeks (and weeks) after they started this fiasco, I (personally) would think they have given up trade secret protections for those parts of the code.
The missing whitewater papers? The missing 18 minutes of tape from watergate? Only the shadow knows...
Seriously, I have to wonder if this wasn't something they just cribbed together. Consider the following:
Conclusion: As Eric Cartman of "South Park" would say: "Dude, this is pretty f***ing weak".
Picard is nothing if he isn't bald!
Ok, this is just a wee-bit off-topic, but...
It's already been done. Check out "Watership Down".
Growth stocks are speculative. If SCO does manage to win this, what do you think will happen to their stock? I suspect that as more things come out (e.g. commentary on the NDA), this will change.
"tripod", also known as "wheelie", also known as "that thing with the little wheels you strap you luggage to".
For those who never studied history, Rosa Parks was not the first black person to be arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus.
The public was most sympathetic to her, though.
The public isn't going to be too worried if AOL/Time-Warner/NBC/Coca-Pepsi-Cola sues a bunch of 20+ year old computer geeks for "illegal file trading".
The public would probably have a different opinion if it got out into the press that they were sueing an 80-year old grandmother of six who bakes apple pies on the weekends after getting home from church for sharing needlepoint patterns.