First, the members of the Hacking Team that knew about the sales to embargoed countries should be prosecuted. Then worry about how to regulate cyber weapons. Otherwise, the most evil of the members (i.e. the ones who knew about the selling to genocidal governments like Sudan) might just go into hiding and offer their services to other evil organizations like the mafia.
Isn't the second bankruptcy of SGI in three years the bigger story?
If it were not for the pending buyout, I would think that a business that files for bankruptcy this often should be forced into Chapter 7 liquidation because this frequency of filing for bankruptcy means that the company is not viable and keeps hurting investors and banks by creating toxic and worthless debts.
EEPROMs and Flash memory have the nasty side effect that each write damages the memory permanently. They are rated for around 500,000 or more writes according to Wikipedia. Also, Flash memory is so slow to write to that mechanical hard drives usually mop the floor with Flash memory in write speed.
There are cases where the use of MD5, which is considered broken quite thoroughly, will get the case thrown out of court. See Bruce Schneier's blog entry about the MD5 defense. Time to upgrade your hash algorithm. Some smart lawyers are able to use the fact that MD5 is broken to make a judge believe that the evidence could have been doctored to produce an MD5 collision with planted evidence.
Any reasonably-sized cable plant that can handle digital signals uses a hybrid fiber coaxial (or HFC) network. Since digital signals will not survive cables that are too long, the cable company replaced many long haul cables with fiber optic lines, which then terminate at local optical to coax nodes. The cable companies could have asked everyone to abandon their coax wiring and replace all that with fiber wiring. However, most people do not like the idea of having to have their houses rewired for fiber after coax was installed, and having their older televisions becoming obsoleted by the cable company's forced replacement. Also, fiber transceivers that can handle wavelength division multiplexing probably will raise the price of cable boxes, modems, and televisions through the roof, while electrical tuners cost much less to manufacture. Therefore, this hybrid technology was created to solve these problems. Here, the benefits of going all-fiber seemed too little for too much cost.
Now, some people might compare the scenario of replacing coax with fiber to what is going on with HDTV and the phasing out of the NTSC standard. The main reason driving this change is much more substantial, though: the radio dispatch band which emergency services used was getting crowded out by Nextel, which originally was a commercial radio dispatch service which had cellular telephony hacked on. It became crowded enough that emergency crews were dealing with dead spots caused by interference from Nextel, which was not good. Some people noticed that there were many empty TV channels. They were empty because neighboring NTSC TV channels crosstalked over each other (e.g. channel 47 would interfere with channels 46 and 48). The new ATSC format was designed to be much more neighbor friendly, so some channels can then be moved next to each other to make room for an emergency-services band and other uses that were determined by frequency auctions. Therefore, there was a valid reason for the government to need to force the market because the current NTSC, which is an imperfect hack that added color to the original black and white NTSC system and therefore causes some noticeable artifacts, has too much market momentum to die its deserved death naturally. Here, the benefits of better emergency communications resulting in saved lives and stopped crimes outweighed the costs of obsoleting NTSC-only equipment in Congress's eyes.
Patents are not a bad idea for all cases. The idea of patents was to provide an incentive to inventors to register their ideas so that their inventions (as in how to build hardware) never get lost. When dealing with pure software, patents are bad because software just boils down to algorithms. Patents are great for hardware. When dealing with software/hardware hybrids (like DVRs), only the hardware should be patentable. For medicine, the drug industry would collapse without patents because researching new drugs and testing them could be prohobitively expensive without the time the patent grants to recoup the costs.
Without patents, inventors would keep the method for producing their works as trade secrets, which would be worse than granting them a government-enforced monopoly if their ideas never get leaked. For example, if the method for making Damascus steel was patented, it probably would not have been lost. Since the idea of patents did not exist during that time, the people who knew how to do the job kept it as a trade secret that they eventually took to their graves without passing their ideas on to their descendants, depriving the world on how to make Damascus steel. Only recently did we learn that Damascus steel required vanadium. I believe the researchers who discovered this were able to patent their reinvention of Damascus steel because all prior art (which are directions on how to implement the process) were considered lost and therefore could not be presented to refute the patent application.
Ironically, the software patent process, while horribly broken and should be abolished, might have saved the algorithm of low density parity check (LDPC) codes from obscurity. When it was first published in the 1960s, we did not have enough computing power to implement them, and the algorithm was rejected on those grounds. After France Telecom patented turbo codes which allowed data rates to approach the theoretical Shannon limit (using a hybrid software/hardware or pure hardware approach because this method requires modification to the hardware to even be used), other engineers searched for other methods to approach the Shannon limit as well. One of them found either the expired LDPC code patent in the U.S. patent database or the LDPC research paper in some old IEEE publication, and now LDPC codes are now a serious and public domain competitor to turbo codes. One more advantage to LDPC codes is that they can be retrofitted onto existing hardware with processors with plenty of spare processing power (e.g. modern PCs) because the algorithm could be implemented entirely in software.
Here is what I think should be done to companies that would stop more companies from abusing the patent system. If a company obtains (a) patent(s) fraudulently, tries to enforce the illegal patent, and the defendant(s) in the resulting lawsuit proves that the patent(s) was/were fraudulently obtained, the defendant(s) should be allowed to place in the public domain any one of the plaintiff's other patents per bad patent the plaintiff tried to enfoce in addition to the bad patent(s) as punishment.
Such a law would do wonders for the Rambus case. The technology for the best RAM would be in the public domain, so that people would be able to use the best technology without paying corrupt corporations.
When I first read the title, I thought that we were dealing with another computer virus like Klez. Who wants a computer virus building hostile nanotechnology in their computers that crashes them or spies on them? (I know this is not possible today. This is meant to be a joke.)
The title should have use the word "Biological" in front of "Viruses", considering that this board is Slashdot, a board that mainly deals with computer stuff.
You forgot about the First Amendment. The First amendment prevents the government from banning spam, but it does not affect commercial entities. They can restrict all the speech you can have them facilitate if their contract allows them to do so if the reason is not unconscionable. Preventing spam that can harm an ISP's relationships with other ISPs is a valid reason because spam can ruin their business if the other ISPs decide to sever theri connections with it. Banning product reviews without the distributor's permission serves no good purpose and therefore is unconscionable. (The example I am citing is the McAfee VirusScan EULA case.)
Just because something is American does not mean that it is good. Remember Timothy McVeigh, Aldrich Ames, Eric Rudolph, Robert Philip Hanssen, and John Walker Lindh? These people are American, and these people are evil. (I am not implying that American equals evil. Remember the passengers who started fighting the terrorists on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.)
Technologies like this could one day be used to control humans if they are not stopped. This technology is a dictator's dream because it will allow anyone to enslave anyone by subjecting the victim to the "appropriate" surgery. Most dictators and communists love to micromanage every one of their citizens' lives, and this technology might allow them to do this. If bin Laden or some other terrorist got this technology, we will see many loved ones get kidnapped, operated on, and turned into suicide bobming slaves. Write to your congressman and senators to have this Pandora's box banned.
That article said that Windows might be used in training, but it clearly states on page 3 under the header "Real Time" that Windows is not used in actual battlefield equipment.
Dinkumware, Ltd. was the company that Microsoft contracted with to write the library files for VC++ 4.2, 5, and 6. Due to a lawsuit involving Dinkumware and not Microsoft, the library was not updated beyond the July 1996 draft standard until VC++.NET was released, which was after Dinkumware trounced Plum Hall, Inc. in that lawsuit. By the way, Dinkumware has a page detailing all the known bugs of the July 1996 draft implementation and how to fix them here.
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Mary Ann Davidson's post shows that she does not know about how the computer security world works. She really is a Chief InSecurity Officer.
First, the members of the Hacking Team that knew about the sales to embargoed countries should be prosecuted. Then worry about how to regulate cyber weapons. Otherwise, the most evil of the members (i.e. the ones who knew about the selling to genocidal governments like Sudan) might just go into hiding and offer their services to other evil organizations like the mafia.
Isn't the second bankruptcy of SGI in three years the bigger story?
If it were not for the pending buyout, I would think that a business that files for bankruptcy this often should be forced into Chapter 7 liquidation because this frequency of filing for bankruptcy means that the company is not viable and keeps hurting investors and banks by creating toxic and worthless debts.
EEPROMs and Flash memory have the nasty side effect that each write damages the memory permanently. They are rated for around 500,000 or more writes according to Wikipedia. Also, Flash memory is so slow to write to that mechanical hard drives usually mop the floor with Flash memory in write speed.
There are cases where the use of MD5, which is considered broken quite thoroughly, will get the case thrown out of court. See Bruce Schneier's blog entry about the MD5 defense. Time to upgrade your hash algorithm. Some smart lawyers are able to use the fact that MD5 is broken to make a judge believe that the evidence could have been doctored to produce an MD5 collision with planted evidence.
Any reasonably-sized cable plant that can handle digital signals uses a hybrid fiber coaxial (or HFC) network. Since digital signals will not survive cables that are too long, the cable company replaced many long haul cables with fiber optic lines, which then terminate at local optical to coax nodes. The cable companies could have asked everyone to abandon their coax wiring and replace all that with fiber wiring. However, most people do not like the idea of having to have their houses rewired for fiber after coax was installed, and having their older televisions becoming obsoleted by the cable company's forced replacement. Also, fiber transceivers that can handle wavelength division multiplexing probably will raise the price of cable boxes, modems, and televisions through the roof, while electrical tuners cost much less to manufacture. Therefore, this hybrid technology was created to solve these problems. Here, the benefits of going all-fiber seemed too little for too much cost.
Now, some people might compare the scenario of replacing coax with fiber to what is going on with HDTV and the phasing out of the NTSC standard. The main reason driving this change is much more substantial, though: the radio dispatch band which emergency services used was getting crowded out by Nextel, which originally was a commercial radio dispatch service which had cellular telephony hacked on. It became crowded enough that emergency crews were dealing with dead spots caused by interference from Nextel, which was not good. Some people noticed that there were many empty TV channels. They were empty because neighboring NTSC TV channels crosstalked over each other (e.g. channel 47 would interfere with channels 46 and 48). The new ATSC format was designed to be much more neighbor friendly, so some channels can then be moved next to each other to make room for an emergency-services band and other uses that were determined by frequency auctions. Therefore, there was a valid reason for the government to need to force the market because the current NTSC, which is an imperfect hack that added color to the original black and white NTSC system and therefore causes some noticeable artifacts, has too much market momentum to die its deserved death naturally. Here, the benefits of better emergency communications resulting in saved lives and stopped crimes outweighed the costs of obsoleting NTSC-only equipment in Congress's eyes.
Patents are not a bad idea for all cases. The idea of patents was to provide an incentive to inventors to register their ideas so that their inventions (as in how to build hardware) never get lost. When dealing with pure software, patents are bad because software just boils down to algorithms. Patents are great for hardware. When dealing with software/hardware hybrids (like DVRs), only the hardware should be patentable. For medicine, the drug industry would collapse without patents because researching new drugs and testing them could be prohobitively expensive without the time the patent grants to recoup the costs.
Without patents, inventors would keep the method for producing their works as trade secrets, which would be worse than granting them a government-enforced monopoly if their ideas never get leaked. For example, if the method for making Damascus steel was patented, it probably would not have been lost. Since the idea of patents did not exist during that time, the people who knew how to do the job kept it as a trade secret that they eventually took to their graves without passing their ideas on to their descendants, depriving the world on how to make Damascus steel. Only recently did we learn that Damascus steel required vanadium. I believe the researchers who discovered this were able to patent their reinvention of Damascus steel because all prior art (which are directions on how to implement the process) were considered lost and therefore could not be presented to refute the patent application.
Ironically, the software patent process, while horribly broken and should be abolished, might have saved the algorithm of low density parity check (LDPC) codes from obscurity. When it was first published in the 1960s, we did not have enough computing power to implement them, and the algorithm was rejected on those grounds. After France Telecom patented turbo codes which allowed data rates to approach the theoretical Shannon limit (using a hybrid software/hardware or pure hardware approach because this method requires modification to the hardware to even be used), other engineers searched for other methods to approach the Shannon limit as well. One of them found either the expired LDPC code patent in the U.S. patent database or the LDPC research paper in some old IEEE publication, and now LDPC codes are now a serious and public domain competitor to turbo codes. One more advantage to LDPC codes is that they can be retrofitted onto existing hardware with processors with plenty of spare processing power (e.g. modern PCs) because the algorithm could be implemented entirely in software.
Here is what I think should be done to companies that would stop more companies from abusing the patent system. If a company obtains (a) patent(s) fraudulently, tries to enforce the illegal patent, and the defendant(s) in the resulting lawsuit proves that the patent(s) was/were fraudulently obtained, the defendant(s) should be allowed to place in the public domain any one of the plaintiff's other patents per bad patent the plaintiff tried to enfoce in addition to the bad patent(s) as punishment.
Such a law would do wonders for the Rambus case. The technology for the best RAM would be in the public domain, so that people would be able to use the best technology without paying corrupt corporations.
Last time I checked, Warner Brothers is part of the MPAA. Source: MPAA's About MPA, MPAA web page
When I first read the title, I thought that we were dealing with another computer virus like Klez. Who wants a computer virus building hostile nanotechnology in their computers that crashes them or spies on them? (I know this is not possible today. This is meant to be a joke.)
The title should have use the word "Biological" in front of "Viruses", considering that this board is Slashdot, a board that mainly deals with computer stuff.
You forgot about the First Amendment. The First amendment prevents the government from banning spam, but it does not affect commercial entities. They can restrict all the speech you can have them facilitate if their contract allows them to do so if the reason is not unconscionable. Preventing spam that can harm an ISP's relationships with other ISPs is a valid reason because spam can ruin their business if the other ISPs decide to sever theri connections with it. Banning product reviews without the distributor's permission serves no good purpose and therefore is unconscionable. (The example I am citing is the McAfee VirusScan EULA case.)
Just because something is American does not mean that it is good. Remember Timothy McVeigh, Aldrich Ames, Eric Rudolph, Robert Philip Hanssen, and John Walker Lindh? These people are American, and these people are evil. (I am not implying that American equals evil. Remember the passengers who started fighting the terrorists on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.)
Technologies like this could one day be used to control humans if they are not stopped. This technology is a dictator's dream because it will allow anyone to enslave anyone by subjecting the victim to the "appropriate" surgery. Most dictators and communists love to micromanage every one of their citizens' lives, and this technology might allow them to do this. If bin Laden or some other terrorist got this technology, we will see many loved ones get kidnapped, operated on, and turned into suicide bobming slaves. Write to your congressman and senators to have this Pandora's box banned.
That article said that Windows might be used in training, but it clearly states on page 3 under the header "Real Time" that Windows is not used in actual battlefield equipment.
Robert Philip Hanssen in the FBI.
Aldrich Ames in the CIA.
Enough said.
Dinkumware, Ltd. was the company that Microsoft contracted with to write the library files for VC++ 4.2, 5, and 6. Due to a lawsuit involving Dinkumware and not Microsoft, the library was not updated beyond the July 1996 draft standard until VC++.NET was released, which was after Dinkumware trounced Plum Hall, Inc. in that lawsuit. By the way, Dinkumware has a page detailing all the known bugs of the July 1996 draft implementation and how to fix them here.