The real problem here is not the fact that spam filters aren't 100% perfect and will give false positives occasionally. FWIW, the real problem is not that people subscribe to (opt-in) mailing lists and then mark the messages they get as spam, either.
The REAL problem is that ISPs and Webmail providers use non-user specific spam filters that allow malicious users to perform what is essentially a denial of service attack. Of course, the users in this particular example who flagged the emails as spam are probably just stupid, not malicious, but I at least could just as well imagine spammers signing up for webmail services, sending each other spam and flagging it as valid email, for example, in an effort to "teach" the spam filter that it's not really spam after all.
The only real solution would be to move to a per-user filter configuration, but it's not clear to me how practical that would be. You could use a bayesian filter with automatic learning that also gets updated when the user reports false positives/negatives, and initially use another system (like SpamAssassin) until the filter is fully trained; but it's not clear what the computing costs of that really are (not to mention diskspace requirements for the token databases).
Considering the fact that signing up for these web-based services is usually free, I think that we will see more of this in the future.
So we should be happy because even though they got what they wanted, they maybe could've gotten even more? I sure am happy that insane rubbish like the INDUCE act was thrown out, but I don't quite see why I should celebrate a setback just because it could have been an EVEN bigger setback.
"[...] and, by many measures, the most secure, [...] operating system prowling the earth."
Hum. I like OSX just as much as anybody here does, but please, let's stay with verifiable facts instead of hype, OK? Even if you're working for the NY Times.
Do try without extensions, and see if it still crashes. I guess extensions really shouldn't be able to crash Firefox (or Seamonkey), but my own experience has shown that they do, so maybe they're the problem in your case, too.
Just do a binary search until you find the offending extension and then throw it out.:)
Personally, I'd draw the line at the point where "opt-in" becomes "opt-out". If the customer is being asked whether they want to send this information to M$, and told just what is being transmitted, then I don't see that much of a problem.
However, it's important that you actually have to acknowledge this - so, for example, the default button (the one that has the focus) should be "No" rather than "Yes", so users actually have to make a conscious decision instead of just saying hitting return because that's what they always do when an error pops up.
In other words, consent is required, but it also has to be informed consent. Someone who just says "Yes, do this" because they don't understand what's going on and what the implications are does not consent IMO.
Abandoned? Hmm, I always thought that SourceForge was still being developed (as "SourceForge Enterprise Edition") and sold by VA Software; the sourceforge.net site is still running on a pretty old version (2.8, IIRC, whereas the current EE is 4.1 or so), but the product is being developed and sold - only that it's not free software anymore (the version used to run sourceforge.net was the last that was GPL'ed).
I'm not sure anymore about the details, though, so... by all means, correct me if I'm wrong.
If the author incorporates my GPL code into his project, his project is GPL from that point forward as long as my GPL code exists in his project.
That's a misconception - a common one, admittedly, but it still is not true. If the author incorporates your GPL'ed code into his project, then that means that, if he is not releasing his code under the GPL, he's in violation of the GPL. This, in turn, means that he has to either a) comply with the terms of the GPL by making his code available under the GPL, too, or b) stop using your code; however, the choice is his, and his own code does NOT automatically become GPL'ed. End of story.:)
You'd be surprised at the amounts of data captured during experiments in high-energy physics - and keep in mind that this was 500 TB in a *week*, which is longer than you usually want to wait for your data transfer to complete.
Maybe Eric should actually get to work and code instead - if he had done so a year ago, chances are that by now, there would be a good configuration system for CUPS.
After all, it *is* one of the much-touted advantages of FOSS that you actually can scratch your metaphorical itches instead of having to wait for the vendor to do it.
There's two major flaws in the ZDNet article, really - outside of the fact that they unfortunately buy into McVoy's lies and FUD, they get two things outright wrong.
1) BitKeeper's "free" license does not say that you can't use BK to work on a competing product - it says that you cannot work on a competing product AT ALL, no matter whether you use BK for it or not.
2) It's not true that Tridge hasn't "kept up their end of the bargain". He never used BK at all, so why would he be bound by BK's license? McVoy may not like what Tridge did, but let's face it, reverse engineering for compatibility is perfectly acceptable - even the much-maligned DMCA explicitely allows it, because lawmakers realized that it's important.
So, McVoy can rant and rave all he wants - the fact remains that HE is the one who did not keep up his end of the "bargain". The bargain was that kernel developers get to use BK for free, and BitMover gets free advertising - now that the company has established itself, it doesn't need that sort of advertising anymore, so they're just looking for a convenient excuse to pull the plug on the "free" BK.
The fact that McVoy doesn't admit that is probably to be expected, but still, it doesn't change the fact that he spreads just as much FUD and lies as Darl McBride, Laura DiDio, Maureen O'Gara, Steve Balmer and so on.
Being in international waters does not actually mean anything. States do not abide by (international) laws because they have to or feel a moral obligation to do so; they do so because they think they'll be better off in the end by doing so.
So it really depends on two things:
1) How much would the USA gain if it ignored the fact that it's international waters and cracked down on this? (Or, phrased differently, how much would they lose if they decided to not do anything?) 2) How much of a fuss/public outcry/diplomatic incident would there be if they did?
Ultimately, if they decide that the benefits outweigh the risks, they WILL crack down on this. And if you think that you can just tell the soldiers entering your ship that you're in international waters and that they have no right to do what they do, then you're naive. (Well, of course, you CAN tell them, but don't expect more than something along the lines of "cry me a river".)
It's generally a good idea to not rely on your ISP's DNS servers too much. Personally, I just use an OpenNIC server, with one of my ISP's servers as a fallback - that way, I don't get any of the occasional timeouts, failures of new records to propagate properly and all that.
Really, ISPs should focus on providing the connection, nothing more. I don't use my ISP's mail servers for email, and I don't use their nntp servers for Usenet; why should I use their name servers for DNS requests?
You cannot be forced to license your works under a certain license against your will, not even if you include (for example) GPL'ed code in your work. The worst that could happen if it was indeed decided that your document is a derived work of the font would be that you'd have to cease distributing your document until you either exchange the GPL'ed font for another one or agree to put your document under the GPL.
However, that "if it was indeed decided that..." is a very big if, IMO. First of all, it could only possibly apply to electronic distribution of your document; if it was distributed in printed form, for example, there could be no issue as only the font (i.e., the actual file) is copyrightable, not the typeface (i.e., the shape of the glyphs used). And furthermore, it would require that you'd actually embed the font (that is, the file or font data derived from the file) into your document - merely telling the document processor to use font XYZ is not enough - IANAL, but I'd argue that this is similar to the distinction between linking to GPL'ed code and calling a GPL'ed program and parsing its output, for example.
And of course, you'd have to convince a court that a document actually can be seen as a work derived from the font, and that may well be pretty hard even if you did embed the font in your document - I personally would say that doing so merely constitutes an aggregation of the font with another work, a situation in which the GPL explicitely states that it does not apply, similar to how $some_linux_distro putting up ISO images for their distro does not mean that the ISO image as such must be GPL'ed just because it contains GPL'ed software.
Even if it was found that your work was indeed a derivative work of a font, and even if it was somehow decided that the font face as such was indeed copyrighted (as opposed to the font file etc.), then that still wouldn't suddenly make your work GPL'ed. The only thing it'd mean would be that as long as you didn't change your work so it wouldn't be a derivative work of the font anymore, you could not legally distribute it without complying to the terms of the GPL. There is *NOTHING* that actually forces you to distribute it, though; you could just as well decide to not distribute it at all.
The idea that any work of yours (whether it's a program or something else) can be "forced" into a GPL'ed state against your (the copyright holder's) will is FUD that's typically spread by those who're opposed to FOSS and want other companies to believe that they'd be forced to give away their products for free if (for example) GPL'ed code was incorporated by one of the engineers working on it.
If fonts are not intellectual property, though, then how can a font be GPL'ed? Or, for that matter, how can commercial font makers prevent others from distributing their fonts for free (possibly with a new name)?
So... the fact that ten-year olds shouldn't be looking at porn means that Wifi access for truck drivers at highway reststops has to be regulated? How many 10-year old truck drivers do you know?
Porn may be bad for ten-year olds, but I'd think that most of them (if they check out porn at all) look at it from at home, because their parents just let them use the internet without even so much as talking to them about these things.
That'd be very short-sighted at least, though. Imagine a scenario like the following: tomorrow morning, there will be a vote on an important bill in parliament. Now, the evening before, the government (who wants to silence critics and opposition) has every MP save for those of their own party arrested. The MPs don't have immunity, so there is nothing they can do - the police can hold them for up to 24 hours without even giving a reason.
Of course, there are no actual charges, so the MPs *are* released again 24 hours later; however, due to being arrested, they missed the vote, and the bill has now passed.
I'm not sure, but I think it's a scarier scenario than some MPs parking on the sidewalks.
"Pornography (from Greek pornographia -- literally writing about or drawings of harlots) is the representation of the human body or human sexual behaviour with the goal of sexual arousal, similar to, but (according to some) distinct from, erotica." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography).
That being said, I think there is a saying that goes something like this: "erotica is what me and my friends like; porn is what people I don't know/care about like; and smut is what people my enemies like." It's got some truth in it: more often than not, the distinction between what people call "porn" and what they call "erotica" seems to be based more on their own opinion, preferences and agenda than on hard facts pertaining to the actual piece in question.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem here is not the fact that spam filters aren't 100% perfect and will give false positives occasionally. FWIW, the real problem is not that people subscribe to (opt-in) mailing lists and then mark the messages they get as spam, either.
The REAL problem is that ISPs and Webmail providers use non-user specific spam filters that allow malicious users to perform what is essentially a denial of service attack. Of course, the users in this particular example who flagged the emails as spam are probably just stupid, not malicious, but I at least could just as well imagine spammers signing up for webmail services, sending each other spam and flagging it as valid email, for example, in an effort to "teach" the spam filter that it's not really spam after all.
The only real solution would be to move to a per-user filter configuration, but it's not clear to me how practical that would be. You could use a bayesian filter with automatic learning that also gets updated when the user reports false positives/negatives, and initially use another system (like SpamAssassin) until the filter is fully trained; but it's not clear what the computing costs of that really are (not to mention diskspace requirements for the token databases).
Considering the fact that signing up for these web-based services is usually free, I think that we will see more of this in the future.
So we should be happy because even though they got what they wanted, they maybe could've gotten even more? I sure am happy that insane rubbish like the INDUCE act was thrown out, but I don't quite see why I should celebrate a setback just because it could have been an EVEN bigger setback.
From the NYT guy:
"[...] and, by many measures, the most secure, [...] operating system prowling the earth."
Hum. I like OSX just as much as anybody here does, but please, let's stay with verifiable facts instead of hype, OK? Even if you're working for the NY Times.
Remove the slash at the end of the URL, and it'll work.
Do try without extensions, and see if it still crashes. I guess extensions really shouldn't be able to crash Firefox (or Seamonkey), but my own experience has shown that they do, so maybe they're the problem in your case, too.
:)
Just do a binary search until you find the offending extension and then throw it out.
Personally, I'd draw the line at the point where "opt-in" becomes "opt-out". If the customer is being asked whether they want to send this information to M$, and told just what is being transmitted, then I don't see that much of a problem.
However, it's important that you actually have to acknowledge this - so, for example, the default button (the one that has the focus) should be "No" rather than "Yes", so users actually have to make a conscious decision instead of just saying hitting return because that's what they always do when an error pops up.
In other words, consent is required, but it also has to be informed consent. Someone who just says "Yes, do this" because they don't understand what's going on and what the implications are does not consent IMO.
Abandoned? Hmm, I always thought that SourceForge was still being developed (as "SourceForge Enterprise Edition") and sold by VA Software; the sourceforge.net site is still running on a pretty old version (2.8, IIRC, whereas the current EE is 4.1 or so), but the product is being developed and sold - only that it's not free software anymore (the version used to run sourceforge.net was the last that was GPL'ed).
I'm not sure anymore about the details, though, so... by all means, correct me if I'm wrong.
That's a misconception - a common one, admittedly, but it still is not true. If the author incorporates your GPL'ed code into his project, then that means that, if he is not releasing his code under the GPL, he's in violation of the GPL. This, in turn, means that he has to either a) comply with the terms of the GPL by making his code available under the GPL, too, or b) stop using your code; however, the choice is his, and his own code does NOT automatically become GPL'ed. End of story. :)
You'd be surprised at the amounts of data captured during experiments in high-energy physics - and keep in mind that this was 500 TB in a *week*, which is longer than you usually want to wait for your data transfer to complete.
Haha, that's a good one. :)
One word: lkml.
Sounds fairly comprehensive to me.
Darn, you beat me to saying that. :)
Maybe Eric should actually get to work and code instead - if he had done so a year ago, chances are that by now, there would be a good configuration system for CUPS.
After all, it *is* one of the much-touted advantages of FOSS that you actually can scratch your metaphorical itches instead of having to wait for the vendor to do it.
There's two major flaws in the ZDNet article, really - outside of the fact that they unfortunately buy into McVoy's lies and FUD, they get two things outright wrong.
1) BitKeeper's "free" license does not say that you can't use BK to work on a competing product - it says that you cannot work on a competing product AT ALL, no matter whether you use BK for it or not.
2) It's not true that Tridge hasn't "kept up their end of the bargain". He never used BK at all, so why would he be bound by BK's license? McVoy may not like what Tridge did, but let's face it, reverse engineering for compatibility is perfectly acceptable - even the much-maligned DMCA explicitely allows it, because lawmakers realized that it's important.
So, McVoy can rant and rave all he wants - the fact remains that HE is the one who did not keep up his end of the "bargain". The bargain was that kernel developers get to use BK for free, and BitMover gets free advertising - now that the company has established itself, it doesn't need that sort of advertising anymore, so they're just looking for a convenient excuse to pull the plug on the "free" BK.
The fact that McVoy doesn't admit that is probably to be expected, but still, it doesn't change the fact that he spreads just as much FUD and lies as Darl McBride, Laura DiDio, Maureen O'Gara, Steve Balmer and so on.
I, for one, sure hope he gets what he deserves.
Being in international waters does not actually mean anything. States do not abide by (international) laws because they have to or feel a moral obligation to do so; they do so because they think they'll be better off in the end by doing so.
So it really depends on two things:
1) How much would the USA gain if it ignored the fact that it's international waters and cracked down on this? (Or, phrased differently, how much would they lose if they decided to not do anything?)
2) How much of a fuss/public outcry/diplomatic incident would there be if they did?
Ultimately, if they decide that the benefits outweigh the risks, they WILL crack down on this. And if you think that you can just tell the soldiers entering your ship that you're in international waters and that they have no right to do what they do, then you're naive. (Well, of course, you CAN tell them, but don't expect more than something along the lines of "cry me a river".)
An interesting story for sure. Did they ever find out why the exercise failed for those users?
Do you think? I'm not sure, but I really doubt it... but then, IANAL, and stranger things are possible in the USA.
It's generally a good idea to not rely on your ISP's DNS servers too much. Personally, I just use an OpenNIC server, with one of my ISP's servers as a fallback - that way, I don't get any of the occasional timeouts, failures of new records to propagate properly and all that. Really, ISPs should focus on providing the connection, nothing more. I don't use my ISP's mail servers for email, and I don't use their nntp servers for Usenet; why should I use their name servers for DNS requests?
You cannot be forced to license your works under a certain license against your will, not even if you include (for example) GPL'ed code in your work. The worst that could happen if it was indeed decided that your document is a derived work of the font would be that you'd have to cease distributing your document until you either exchange the GPL'ed font for another one or agree to put your document under the GPL.
.
However, that "if it was indeed decided that..." is a very big if, IMO. First of all, it could only possibly apply to electronic distribution of your document; if it was distributed in printed form, for example, there could be no issue as only the font (i.e., the actual file) is copyrightable, not the typeface (i.e., the shape of the glyphs used). And furthermore, it would require that you'd actually embed the font (that is, the file or font data derived from the file) into your document - merely telling the document processor to use font XYZ is not enough - IANAL, but I'd argue that this is similar to the distinction between linking to GPL'ed code and calling a GPL'ed program and parsing its output, for example.
And of course, you'd have to convince a court that a document actually can be seen as a work derived from the font, and that may well be pretty hard even if you did embed the font in your document - I personally would say that doing so merely constitutes an aggregation of the font with another work, a situation in which the GPL explicitely states that it does not apply, similar to how $some_linux_distro putting up ISO images for their distro does not mean that the ISO image as such must be GPL'ed just because it contains GPL'ed software
Even if it was found that your work was indeed a derivative work of a font, and even if it was somehow decided that the font face as such was indeed copyrighted (as opposed to the font file etc.), then that still wouldn't suddenly make your work GPL'ed. The only thing it'd mean would be that as long as you didn't change your work so it wouldn't be a derivative work of the font anymore, you could not legally distribute it without complying to the terms of the GPL. There is *NOTHING* that actually forces you to distribute it, though; you could just as well decide to not distribute it at all.
The idea that any work of yours (whether it's a program or something else) can be "forced" into a GPL'ed state against your (the copyright holder's) will is FUD that's typically spread by those who're opposed to FOSS and want other companies to believe that they'd be forced to give away their products for free if (for example) GPL'ed code was incorporated by one of the engineers working on it.
If fonts are not intellectual property, though, then how can a font be GPL'ed? Or, for that matter, how can commercial font makers prevent others from distributing their fonts for free (possibly with a new name)?
So... the fact that ten-year olds shouldn't be looking at porn means that Wifi access for truck drivers at highway reststops has to be regulated? How many 10-year old truck drivers do you know?
Porn may be bad for ten-year olds, but I'd think that most of them (if they check out porn at all) look at it from at home, because their parents just let them use the internet without even so much as talking to them about these things.
That'd be very short-sighted at least, though. Imagine a scenario like the following: tomorrow morning, there will be a vote on an important bill in parliament. Now, the evening before, the government (who wants to silence critics and opposition) has every MP save for those of their own party arrested. The MPs don't have immunity, so there is nothing they can do - the police can hold them for up to 24 hours without even giving a reason. Of course, there are no actual charges, so the MPs *are* released again 24 hours later; however, due to being arrested, they missed the vote, and the bill has now passed. I'm not sure, but I think it's a scarier scenario than some MPs parking on the sidewalks.
"Pornography (from Greek pornographia -- literally writing about or drawings of harlots) is the representation of the human body or human sexual behaviour with the goal of sexual arousal, similar to, but (according to some) distinct from, erotica." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography).
That being said, I think there is a saying that goes something like this: "erotica is what me and my friends like; porn is what people I don't know/care about like; and smut is what people my enemies like." It's got some truth in it: more often than not, the distinction between what people call "porn" and what they call "erotica" seems to be based more on their own opinion, preferences and agenda than on hard facts pertaining to the actual piece in question.