It's all on the "Become a registrar" site, and yes, it is only an advance on the actual registrations. I am not sure if they get the money back when they close a registrar, though.
The list of registrars is actually available only, and it is pretty obvious that the system is being played by some companies - you can usually tell from the address who they are...
United Domains of Starnberg, Germany, e.g. is using plant names ( peach-europe Ltd ).
Since this is a pretty obvious process, I guess it amounts to every registrar choosing how many chances in the landrush it wants to pay for... So what? Vetting individual registrars anyway would have been an messy procedure, the EU registry makes some money from the bogus registrations, and nobody knows if anyone will ever pay any sizable amount for a.eu domain.
Ah, journalists... So let's do some homework for them.
So for all of us who are busy googling for this person,
the name is not Valerie McNiven, but Valerie McNevin. She is a lawyer, worked for the state of Colorado in about 2002 and then for the World Bank and is now with a private company, Cybrinth, LLC which does consulting on cyber crime. The Reuters correspondent did not bother to reveal this.
The article itself is rather confusing - he is actually claiming that cybercrime is perpetrated by "idle youths looking for quick gain"? In the Third World??
And just for fun, once the Reuters dispatch gets rewritten, she turns into a cybercrime guru...
Now, how she gets the number of more that $100 bn being made by cybercrime, I have no idea. I guess it includes the $40 bn revenue Microsoft makes each year...
As long as integrated circuits can be purchased and people can build circuits
No real need for this either - think of software radios. Today's computers should be fast enough to just read the TV signal through a simple A/D converter and do everything else in software. Another reason for making software illegal, though...
No it's not. It's not designed to protect products, but inventions. The "nonobviousness" is central to it. It is not a "I called it first". Ask yourself the question: Could I have come up with the design of an iPod bay with an FM transmitter attached?
If you (or, in fact, any specialist in the field) could have come up with this design, it cannot be patented. It doesn't matter whether somebody actually thought of it (this is prior art and another matter). Non-obviousness means that a specialist in the field would have to invest serious effort in the invention. And in most inventions these are the little details, not the general idea (think of computer tomographs - the idea is simple, but the actual implementation, that is protected by patents, depends on many specifics that are non-obvious).
Reading the independent claims in the patent, they are not only blatantly obvious, but only refer to MP3 players. DVForge should simply get a patent covering application of this method to other audio players, then they can prevent DLO from making such a device...
Or they can simply split the FM receiver from the docking unit.
This is ridiculous. To me it looks more and more that these patents are only filed by people completely ignorant. If this had been intentional, they would not have used the word "MP3 player" - they probably did not know what MP3 was. So the nice thing about the patent system now is that it encourages ignorance.
Actually, today's supercomputing centers still operate in exactly that way - they buy a big computer, people apply for time on it, you submit your jobs, and the time gets charged against your account.
The only difference is that, I think, all supercomputing centers at this time are government/university-funded, so there is no transfer of actual money in most cases.
The really new idea in grid computing is not that many users share one machine, but many users many machines.
Nope. We are just buying a large visualization facility - and the graphics cards are either ATI or NVidia. SGI (yes, they are still there) puts ATI chips in its Prism, and the top end systems at Sun
and HP
come with off-the-shelf NVidia cards. Granted, they are a bit more expensive than "consumer" cards, but the technology is the same. And these systems are the absolute top when you buy as a workstation.
We do 3D image reconstruction - the biggest techbological advantage for us is 64-bit, but the extra memory might come in handy for volume visualization - basically when you try to create a translucent image of the voxels in a cube and be able to rotate it in real time. That can be done with textures.
I am surprised that nobody pointed this out but the dictionary attack this guy keeps touting only works if you have access to the authentication hashes. Which you usually don't have unless you have managed to break into the machine before. And then it doesn't matter much.
UNIX used to keep the hashes publicly readable so non-privileged programs could check passwords (xlock), but this was abandoned years ago. On Kerberos, the password hashes are even stored on a separate authentication server.
Technically, the hashing is still done so that a privileged user would not be able to extract another user's password, but as in most machines the privileged user also has full access to everything else (in particular he could intercept the password in transmission) it does not matter much. In practice, when you can get at the authentication hashes you already have full access to the machine.
Also, dictionary attacks can be easily thwarted using the "salt", two bytes of random data that is added to the password before it is encrypted.
So each password corresponds to thousands of hashes that you all have to store.
If you do not have the password hashes, the only way to break a password is trial-and-error, and most systems limit password entries to one every few seconds.
Network sniffing attacks are not limited by the length of the password, but by the length and complexity of the encryption keys which are randomly generated. Successful attacks on encrypted communications usually happen when these keys are chosen too short and not randon enough (WEP).
The truth is that even a simple password is relatively secure, and people touting complex password rules do so because they read 10 year old books.
Spammers simply aren't diligent when it comes to maintaining their list
They actually make money by not cleaning their lists, since they charge
by the email address - active or not.
In fact, it seems that most spam is sent to old email addresses - I am getting
most of mine on an address that was active last in 1998. Even addresses
that I put on websites recently on purpose to trap spam don't live up
to the old ones. Spam ain't what it used to be.
Wouldn't software distributed only as source code be non-infringing?
That is a famous discussion even beyond patent law, namely whether source code should be protected as free speech. It might well be.
Then open-source code would be legally privileged over binary executables - something Richard Stallman must have been dreaming about for years.
Make it actually illegal to distribute binaries...
For an example of the shallow border between source code and constitutionally protected speech,
have a look at the
Gallery of CSS Descramblers.
If it's patented, you'd need a license to develop the program further. You'd need a license just to run it.
You need a license to make commercial use of the invention. You can still make an improvement on an invention, and patent the improvement - people wanting to use the improved version would have to pay both you and the original patent holder.
At least German copyright law exempts both private and research use of a patent from licensing. The idea is basically, only if you use it commercially, the patent applies. So patents would kill the Open Source business, but not the original hobbyist-based open-source development model. An university research and teaching would almost certainly been exempted, as the whole idea of publishing a patent is that it can be learned from.
Aside from whether software patents are good or bad, wouldn't that totally defeat the purpose of getting a patent in the first place? Why would people pay the patent-holder royalties if they can get the source for free?
No, that's exactly the idea of both patents and copyrights. They would have to pay because it is the law, however difficult that may be to enforce.
A patent is a promise by the state to enforce
your exclusive rights on an invention in exchange for your publishing its details. Similarly, you are granted a copyright by the state on something in exchange for publishing it. In both cases it has to be "useful" to be protected - you cannot patent trivial ideas as you cannot copyright gibberish.
If you could just keep the inner workings of your invention secret, you would not need a patent to make money out of it, but then nobody else could learn from it and improve upon it. In that sense, open source and patenting are indeed the same idea .
I do not understand why nobody is asking
whether the Microsoft patent would hold up in court.
As I see it, it addresses the question of
how to derive the sender from the RFC821 headers.
It says "Look at [Resent-]{From,Sender}".
D'oh!
No wonder nobody thought of patenting that before.. It's TRIVIAL.
Probably, the Microsoft people sat together and tried to figure out what they could quickly patent to get a foot into anti-spam technology. We will see this from now on with every new idea in computing.
We shouldn't that easily accept trivial software patent claims. I think that is what the IETF tries to say politely. Ignore it, let them sue, see how far they get. In the end, it will be a political decision.
Before 1990, the weather maps on German TV would
not show any national boundaries at all (just cities
and rivers for orientation) because they couldn't
figure out Germany's correct borders.
There were still people around claiming the territories lost after WWII should
still be part of the country. Since it was state TV, some of these people had seats on the board...
Now everything is settled, and the only fun in the weather map is to see which places wrestled its way into the map.
Ever heard about Frankfurt, the place with the airport and the stock exchange? Not on the map...
Since the music in dentists' offices ends up to be permanently associated with a root canal, the record companies probably can sue them for commercial damages.
Of course, some music anyway evokes the feeling of a root canal in listeners...
Privacy rights also include the right to control what happens to
pictures of you taken in public. For example, you cannot simply put a
camera team out on the street and randomly film people to make fun of
on the late-night show "Dorks of Baltimore". There is a fine line of
how much privacy you can expect in public that has been drawn by press
law. It's certainly not "If you do not want to be photograped, stay at
home".
And the crucial thing about publication is how many people have access
to the pictures, and how easily.
There are many reasons why you might not want to have a picture of a
public activity published, even if people have seen you. Starting with
hanging out with the wrong girlfriend...
Like in press law, people should be allowed to sue for punitive
damages if they find that a tape has leaked out. That would make
cities and companies operating cameras think twice on how they handle
it. Having a bunch of retired policemen and college students run the
cameras sounds like a really bad idea in this context...
Did the ENIAC have conditional branches? I thought it executed a hardwired program in sequence, a bit like microcode today? It seems they only later added a stored program when von Neumann came in.
My math teacher once told us that they turned one of the first HP pocket
calculator into a computer by removing the keys and connecting each
contact then to a sort of punched card reader. Sliding a punched card
then would close the contacts in a certain sequence and so execute a
program.
This is sort of a computer, but it is still lacking conditional
instructions. However, for many numerical programs (e.g. solving a
differential equations) you do not need conditionals.
To understand how computers evolved, one should keep in mind that
calculators (both mechanical and electromechanical) were
available since the early 20th century. Richard Feynman tells in his
books how they would use these calculators to run programs for the
atomic bomb in Los Alamos. The calculators had hardcoded instructions,
and the sequencing was done by carrying the cards from one machine to
the next (it was Single Instruction Multiple Data parallelism).
The flexibility of modern von Neumann machines comes from reading the program from internal read-write memory, which (a) allows for (conditional) branches and (b) most importantly for computers that rewrite their own programs (remember lambda calculus and LISP?).
A Turing machines is not required to be able to modify its program, so it can be stored on a read-only medium. However, as it is a state machine [it does a conditional branch after every instruction], you either need an ingenious tape reader that can fast forward (still feasible), or some sort of random-access storage.
By the way, Zuses solution to the lack of a branch instruction was to glue the tape ends together...
If you pressed it once, something happened. If you pressed it twice in quick succession, something else happened, and if you held it in for 5 seconds, the device would reset.
Digital watches have been controlled in this way for decades...
Slashdot Mirror
Symbionese Liberation Army?
It's all on the "Become a registrar" site, and yes, it is only an advance on the actual registrations. I am not sure if they get the money back when they close a registrar, though.
Since this is a pretty obvious process, I guess it amounts to every registrar choosing how many chances in the landrush it wants to pay for... So what? Vetting individual registrars anyway would have been an messy procedure, the EU registry makes some money from the bogus registrations, and nobody knows if anyone will ever pay any sizable amount for a .eu domain.
So for all of us who are busy googling for this person, the name is not Valerie McNiven, but Valerie McNevin. She is a lawyer, worked for the state of Colorado in about 2002 and then for the World Bank and is now with a private company, Cybrinth, LLC which does consulting on cyber crime. The Reuters correspondent did not bother to reveal this.
The article itself is rather confusing - he is actually claiming that cybercrime is perpetrated by "idle youths looking for quick gain"? In the Third World?? And just for fun, once the Reuters dispatch gets rewritten, she turns into a cybercrime guru...
Now, how she gets the number of more that $100 bn being made by cybercrime, I have no idea. I guess it includes the $40 bn revenue Microsoft makes each year...
If you (or, in fact, any specialist in the field) could have come up with this design, it cannot be patented. It doesn't matter whether somebody actually thought of it (this is prior art and another matter). Non-obviousness means that a specialist in the field would have to invest serious effort in the invention. And in most inventions these are the little details, not the general idea (think of computer tomographs - the idea is simple, but the actual implementation, that is protected by patents, depends on many specifics that are non-obvious).
Or they can simply split the FM receiver from the docking unit.
This is ridiculous. To me it looks more and more that these patents are only filed by people completely ignorant. If this had been intentional, they would not have used the word "MP3 player" - they probably did not know what MP3 was. So the nice thing about the patent system now is that it encourages ignorance.
Sheesh, when I pointed out the 900.000.000 on usenet nobody wanted to hear it.
The only difference is that, I think, all supercomputing centers at this time are government/university-funded, so there is no transfer of actual money in most cases.
The really new idea in grid computing is not that many users share one machine, but many users many machines.
We do 3D image reconstruction - the biggest techbological advantage for us is 64-bit, but the extra memory might come in handy for volume visualization - basically when you try to create a translucent image of the voxels in a cube and be able to rotate it in real time. That can be done with textures.
UNIX used to keep the hashes publicly readable so non-privileged programs could check passwords (xlock), but this was abandoned years ago. On Kerberos, the password hashes are even stored on a separate authentication server.
Technically, the hashing is still done so that a privileged user would not be able to extract another user's password, but as in most machines the privileged user also has full access to everything else (in particular he could intercept the password in transmission) it does not matter much. In practice, when you can get at the authentication hashes you already have full access to the machine.
Also, dictionary attacks can be easily thwarted using the "salt", two bytes of random data that is added to the password before it is encrypted. So each password corresponds to thousands of hashes that you all have to store.
If you do not have the password hashes, the only way to break a password is trial-and-error, and most systems limit password entries to one every few seconds.
Network sniffing attacks are not limited by the length of the password, but by the length and complexity of the encryption keys which are randomly generated. Successful attacks on encrypted communications usually happen when these keys are chosen too short and not randon enough (WEP).
The truth is that even a simple password is relatively secure, and people touting complex password rules do so because they read 10 year old books.
Well, except if you use 20 year old software...
In fact, it seems that most spam is sent to old email addresses - I am getting most of mine on an address that was active last in 1998. Even addresses that I put on websites recently on purpose to trap spam don't live up to the old ones. Spam ain't what it used to be.
That's so weird - they are using the Duke 2000 campaign slogan. When's the "Compassionate Fascism" ad coming???
That is a famous discussion even beyond patent law, namely whether source code should be protected as free speech. It might well be.
Then open-source code would be legally privileged over binary executables - something Richard Stallman must have been dreaming about for years. Make it actually illegal to distribute binaries...
For an example of the shallow border between source code and constitutionally protected speech, have a look at the Gallery of CSS Descramblers.
You need a license to make commercial use of the invention. You can still make an improvement on an invention, and patent the improvement - people wanting to use the improved version would have to pay both you and the original patent holder.
At least German copyright law exempts both private and research use of a patent from licensing. The idea is basically, only if you use it commercially, the patent applies. So patents would kill the Open Source business, but not the original hobbyist-based open-source development model. An university research and teaching would almost certainly been exempted, as the whole idea of publishing a patent is that it can be learned from.
A patent is a promise by the state to enforce your exclusive rights on an invention in exchange for your publishing its details. Similarly, you are granted a copyright by the state on something in exchange for publishing it. In both cases it has to be "useful" to be protected - you cannot patent trivial ideas as you cannot copyright gibberish.
If you could just keep the inner workings of your invention secret, you would not need a patent to make money out of it, but then nobody else could learn from it and improve upon it. In that sense, open source and patenting are indeed the same idea .
No wonder nobody thought of patenting that before.. It's TRIVIAL. Probably, the Microsoft people sat together and tried to figure out what they could quickly patent to get a foot into anti-spam technology. We will see this from now on with every new idea in computing.
We shouldn't that easily accept trivial software patent claims. I think that is what the IETF tries to say politely. Ignore it, let them sue, see how far they get. In the end, it will be a political decision.
Confusingly enough, "Dutch" is actually derived from the word "Deutsch" that Germans use to refer to their language.
For your entertainment: In German this could be
(trying to keep as close to the original as possible)
Before 1990, the weather maps on German TV would not show any national boundaries at all (just cities and rivers for orientation) because they couldn't figure out Germany's correct borders.
There were still people around claiming the territories lost after WWII should still be part of the country. Since it was state TV, some of these people had seats on the board...
Now everything is settled, and the only fun in the weather map is to see which places wrestled its way into the map. Ever heard about Frankfurt, the place with the airport and the stock exchange? Not on the map...
Of course, some music anyway evokes the feeling of a root canal in listeners...
There are many reasons why you might not want to have a picture of a public activity published, even if people have seen you. Starting with hanging out with the wrong girlfriend...
Like in press law, people should be allowed to sue for punitive damages if they find that a tape has leaked out. That would make cities and companies operating cameras think twice on how they handle it. Having a bunch of retired policemen and college students run the cameras sounds like a really bad idea in this context...
Did the ENIAC have conditional branches? I thought it executed a hardwired program in sequence, a bit like microcode today? It seems they only later added a stored program when von Neumann came in.
This is sort of a computer, but it is still lacking conditional instructions. However, for many numerical programs (e.g. solving a differential equations) you do not need conditionals.
To understand how computers evolved, one should keep in mind that calculators (both mechanical and electromechanical) were available since the early 20th century. Richard Feynman tells in his books how they would use these calculators to run programs for the atomic bomb in Los Alamos. The calculators had hardcoded instructions, and the sequencing was done by carrying the cards from one machine to the next (it was Single Instruction Multiple Data parallelism).
The flexibility of modern von Neumann machines comes from reading the program from internal read-write memory, which (a) allows for (conditional) branches and (b) most importantly for computers that rewrite their own programs (remember lambda calculus and LISP?).
A Turing machines is not required to be able to modify its program, so it can be stored on a read-only medium. However, as it is a state machine [it does a conditional branch after every instruction], you either need an ingenious tape reader that can fast forward (still feasible), or some sort of random-access storage.
By the way, Zuses solution to the lack of a branch instruction was to glue the tape ends together...