The CVS commit and OpenBSD development happens in public and discussed in public on mailing lists. It seems reasonable for comments about that code (such as 'hey, you might like to know that there is copyright infringement, and here is the evidence') to be public in the same way.
The Linux developer didn't threaten a lawsuit. He just told the truth.
As the article says, the OCR itself is still done with proprietary software. I wonder if Google is using Tesseract for their digitization efforts. It would be cool if the original raw scanned images could also be archived and available for download - then you could print your own copy of the book, check the OCR for errors, or even do some weird genetic algorithm thing to make a LaTeX style that typesets the text in the same format as the original book.
The article refers to the 'original Moldovan broadcasts' of Star Trek. Surely everyone knows by now that the original Star Trek is Turkish. Why didn't they offer Turkish Trek for download?
The normal rule is that if a computer can do it, it's not AI. AI only covers things thought to require 'intelligence' but which are too difficult to make a computer do. Once a computer is able to do it, it's no longer thought of as AI. Chess playing is the classic example.
You don't have to trust the FSF completely, since even if they release a truly terrible new version of the GPL, the older ones can still be used. About the 'worst' thing the FSF could do would be to say that GPLv4 will be a permissive licence allowing anything.
Unless you have strong feelings that the current version of the GPL is the only right one, it's an easier life for everyone to leave in the 'or any later version' language. I don't agree with everything the FSF does, and in particular I think that trying to retrospectively punish Novell for their patent deal with Microsoft is a bad idea, but in the wider interests of free software we should try to keep in step with the FSF and not have a proliferation of different GPL versions making code sharing awkward.
I think the supposition was that an obviously not 'wrong' thing would land the guy in the slammer because it would be illegal. Defacement of a website, or something like that... this certainly is a crime in some jurisdictions, and the mere point that you defaced the site by uploading an image to your own Myspace area might not be enough. No, I don't think a prosecution is likely in this case. Am I just spreading FUD about the legal system? Perhaps. But we've seen enough high-profile bad cases like Schwartz or Sklyarov to be wary. Yes, even though the legal arguments in those cases are quite different to ones about defacing a website.
You're right - I should have said 'prosecuted' not 'jailed'. I was kind of thinking that contempt of court is illegal, but to say 'it is illegal because you can be jailed for it' is a circular definition that doesn't really help. For future reference what is the definition of 'illegal'? Webster's definition is not that useful.
I didn't say that judges create the law. What I meant to say was: judges and courts can only sentence you for things that are illegal. If an activity is not illegal, you cannot be sentenced or jailed for it. I think we agree on this (with the possible wrinkle of contempt of court).
I was thinking of your request for an example:
You want a judge or the law sending someone to jail for something that isn't illegal,
There is no such example. Judges and the law don't send people to jail for things that aren't illegal. I agree.
Perhaps I am biased by living in Britain with its silly computer laws. Perhaps the two American examples people have given (Randal Schwartz and the teacher prosecuted for porn popups) are just two isolated cases in a long history of sound jurisprudence, and not enough to show that the US legal system is flawed for computer-related cases. Nonetheless, if you should happen to come across a security hole in your online banking site or your employer's computer system, or if you find a way to print out PDF files with the no-print bit set, or you're tempted to poke around in the directory structure of an open FTP site, I would suggest caution before you tell anyone about it. You may feel differently.
the judge publicly expressed that they felt the ruling was unfair and should not have happened, but that their hands were tied due to the nature of the law.
Isn't that exactly the point? When it comes to the law you can't rely on getting a reasonable or common-sense judgement - at least in the field of computers where we have a lot of hastily passed overzealous laws to deal with 'hackers' (I would suggest some parts of the DMCA, or the British CMA as examples here).
Nobody is saying that judges are stupid and cannot apply the law properly. The convictions are sound. The criminals are guilty. The law is the law. But it isn't always reasonable. You shouldn't trust a court of law to give a sensible judgement in a computer-related case.
Is it not possible to make a kind of single-tub washer-drier reactor that starts with uranium, then in turn uses the plutonium produced for a further nuclear fission?
Of course you can't find a case of a judge sending someone to jail for something that isn't illegal. By definition, if you can be convicted and sentenced for doing it, then it's illegal.
I might mention the example of Randal Schwartz, convicted of three felonies for some work he did as a contractor for Intel. He made the mistake of testing password security and, when he found unsafe practices, pointing them out to management. What he did may have been overzealous, but a criminal conviction and the $68k fine with several years' probation is excessive. This is one example of shooting the messenger, which seems pretty common - those who come across security problems (even by accident) and talk about them are liable to prosecution. Not all of those cases will reach the courts, and not all will result in conviction, but if the legal system really were as reasonable as you say then there wouldn't be even the threat of prosecution.
Cuthbert was found guilty under the Computer Misuse Act of gaining unauthorised access to the Tsunami appeal Web site. He claimed in court that he had made a donation and then became concerned that he'd fallen victim to a phishing scam. To check, he added../../../ to the URL in an attempt to access the site's higher directories -- an action that triggered an alarm.
No. Ronald Piquepaille has mended his ways. The story links straight to the relevant article and not to his blog. The last few stories from him have done the same. It's time to declare victory and move on to some other gripe.
At school there was a Windows 3.1 box with Cyber Patrol or some crapware like that, and locked down to disable running fileman.exe, command.com or indeed any program that wasn't in the Program Manager menus. IIRC you could specify in win.ini to forbid File->Run or altering the program groups. In the end I loaded up Winword and loaded in help.exe or some other worthless program as though it were a Word document, then after Word had thoroughly mangled all the bytes in the file I saved it back again and ran it just to see what would happen. As luck would have it, running the new executable crashed all of Windows and dumped you back at a command prompt.
Looking at porn on a 16-colour VGA display in the middle of a dusty computer lab is not my idea of fun, but as with all filtering programs this one had a lot of false positives and tended to block university websites or ports of Minix shell tools to RISC OS or whatever the hell I was trying to download in those days.
Surely this is the old idea of the line printer applied to inkjets. Line printers bashed out a whole line of text at a time, rather than moving a print head from side to side, and are the reason why anything to do with printing in Unix begins 'lp'.
Netscape tried something like this ten years ago. I think it was called Aurora and was to be a desktop environment - I saw some screenshots in Byte magazine of the time. Eventually it shrivelled down to some browser extensions and was included in the original Mozilla Navigator source release in early 1998. You can still see the Aurora Overview on Netscape's 'future products' page - though the screenshots don't have much relevance.
The Byte article also mentioned that one of the head guys at Netscape had instituted a one dollar fine every time an employee called Netscape a web browser. 'It's not a web browser, it's an operating system!'. This was very soon before Netscape's downfall at the hands of Microsoft.
I like Word 6.0, which is essentially the same as Word 95 but with the retro Win3.1 buttons and dialogue boxes. Get the 32-bit version and run it on Windows NT 3.51... mmm, lovely.
I can't believe that any digital projector will give better dynamic range and a wider colour gamut than a cinema projecting colour film. A television set or computer monitor has much lower dynamic range than cinema, and a projector designed for TV or computer use would surely be the same.
Is there a quantifiable measure of dynamic range so we can check this?
You can prove intent, but intent is not enough to get a conviction: you need the act to have been committed or attempted too. There is no crime of having intent to rob, but there is one of robbery (theft) or of entering a house with intent to rob (burglary). If people start being prosecuted for mere intentions, then you need to fix the law, not worry about mind-reading devices (which after all are just the messenger).
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That cannot be the real reason. Why would it be the FAA's job and the airline's job to enforce that? Why would they care?
The CVS commit and OpenBSD development happens in public and discussed in public on mailing lists. It seems reasonable for comments about that code (such as 'hey, you might like to know that there is copyright infringement, and here is the evidence') to be public in the same way.
The Linux developer didn't threaten a lawsuit. He just told the truth.
Yes, I would so much rather have been using MS-DOS and Windows 3.0... ugh no wait that's what we did have to use.
As the article says, the OCR itself is still done with proprietary software. I wonder if Google is using Tesseract for their digitization efforts. It would be cool if the original raw scanned images could also be archived and available for download - then you could print your own copy of the book, check the OCR for errors, or even do some weird genetic algorithm thing to make a LaTeX style that typesets the text in the same format as the original book.
The article refers to the 'original Moldovan broadcasts' of Star Trek. Surely everyone knows by now that the original Star Trek is Turkish. Why didn't they offer Turkish Trek for download?
The normal rule is that if a computer can do it, it's not AI. AI only covers things thought to require 'intelligence' but which are too difficult to make a computer do. Once a computer is able to do it, it's no longer thought of as AI. Chess playing is the classic example.
You don't have to trust the FSF completely, since even if they release a truly terrible new version of the GPL, the older ones can still be used. About the 'worst' thing the FSF could do would be to say that GPLv4 will be a permissive licence allowing anything.
Unless you have strong feelings that the current version of the GPL is the only right one, it's an easier life for everyone to leave in the 'or any later version' language. I don't agree with everything the FSF does, and in particular I think that trying to retrospectively punish Novell for their patent deal with Microsoft is a bad idea, but in the wider interests of free software we should try to keep in step with the FSF and not have a proliferation of different GPL versions making code sharing awkward.
I think the supposition was that an obviously not 'wrong' thing would land the guy in the slammer because it would be illegal. Defacement of a website, or something like that... this certainly is a crime in some jurisdictions, and the mere point that you defaced the site by uploading an image to your own Myspace area might not be enough. No, I don't think a prosecution is likely in this case. Am I just spreading FUD about the legal system? Perhaps. But we've seen enough high-profile bad cases like Schwartz or Sklyarov to be wary. Yes, even though the legal arguments in those cases are quite different to ones about defacing a website.
You're right - I should have said 'prosecuted' not 'jailed'. I was kind of thinking that contempt of court is illegal, but to say 'it is illegal because you can be jailed for it' is a circular definition that doesn't really help. For future reference what is the definition of 'illegal'? Webster's definition is not that useful.
I was thinking of your request for an example:There is no such example. Judges and the law don't send people to jail for things that aren't illegal. I agree.
Perhaps I am biased by living in Britain with its silly computer laws. Perhaps the two American examples people have given (Randal Schwartz and the teacher prosecuted for porn popups) are just two isolated cases in a long history of sound jurisprudence, and not enough to show that the US legal system is flawed for computer-related cases. Nonetheless, if you should happen to come across a security hole in your online banking site or your employer's computer system, or if you find a way to print out PDF files with the no-print bit set, or you're tempted to poke around in the directory structure of an open FTP site, I would suggest caution before you tell anyone about it. You may feel differently.
Isn't that exactly the point? When it comes to the law you can't rely on getting a reasonable or common-sense judgement - at least in the field of computers where we have a lot of hastily passed overzealous laws to deal with 'hackers' (I would suggest some parts of the DMCA, or the British CMA as examples here).
Nobody is saying that judges are stupid and cannot apply the law properly. The convictions are sound. The criminals are guilty. The law is the law. But it isn't always reasonable. You shouldn't trust a court of law to give a sensible judgement in a computer-related case.
Is it not possible to make a kind of single-tub washer-drier reactor that starts with uranium, then in turn uses the plutonium produced for a further nuclear fission?
I might mention the example of Randal Schwartz, convicted of three felonies for some work he did as a contractor for Intel. He made the mistake of testing password security and, when he found unsafe practices, pointing them out to management. What he did may have been overzealous, but a criminal conviction and the $68k fine with several years' probation is excessive. This is one example of shooting the messenger, which seems pretty common - those who come across security problems (even by accident) and talk about them are liable to prosecution. Not all of those cases will reach the courts, and not all will result in conviction, but if the legal system really were as reasonable as you say then there wouldn't be even the threat of prosecution.
Another example is the case of Daniel Cuthbert:
Yes - but don't expect any common sense from the legal system in anything related to computers or (shiver) 'hacking'.
No. Ronald Piquepaille has mended his ways. The story links straight to the relevant article and not to his blog. The last few stories from him have done the same. It's time to declare victory and move on to some other gripe.
At school there was a Windows 3.1 box with Cyber Patrol or some crapware like that, and locked down to disable running fileman.exe, command.com or indeed any program that wasn't in the Program Manager menus. IIRC you could specify in win.ini to forbid File->Run or altering the program groups. In the end I loaded up Winword and loaded in help.exe or some other worthless program as though it were a Word document, then after Word had thoroughly mangled all the bytes in the file I saved it back again and ran it just to see what would happen. As luck would have it, running the new executable crashed all of Windows and dumped you back at a command prompt.
Looking at porn on a 16-colour VGA display in the middle of a dusty computer lab is not my idea of fun, but as with all filtering programs this one had a lot of false positives and tended to block university websites or ports of Minix shell tools to RISC OS or whatever the hell I was trying to download in those days.
Surely this is the old idea of the line printer applied to inkjets. Line printers bashed out a whole line of text at a time, rather than moving a print head from side to side, and are the reason why anything to do with printing in Unix begins 'lp'.
When you escape with the Destinator, put Triax in an infinite loop between caves 27 and 187. It will keep him busy for a while.
Netscape tried something like this ten years ago. I think it was called Aurora and was to be a desktop environment - I saw some screenshots in Byte magazine of the time. Eventually it shrivelled down to some browser extensions and was included in the original Mozilla Navigator source release in early 1998. You can still see the Aurora Overview on Netscape's 'future products' page - though the screenshots don't have much relevance.
The Byte article also mentioned that one of the head guys at Netscape had instituted a one dollar fine every time an employee called Netscape a web browser. 'It's not a web browser, it's an operating system!'. This was very soon before Netscape's downfall at the hands of Microsoft.
As well as Commodore the 'Acorn' brand name has also been sold to PC clonebuilders.
Unfortunately due to trademark issues with the Starfleet Foundation they had to change the name and logo to 'Barflotilla'.
I like Word 6.0, which is essentially the same as Word 95 but with the retro Win3.1 buttons and dialogue boxes. Get the 32-bit version and run it on Windows NT 3.51... mmm, lovely.
I can't believe that any digital projector will give better dynamic range and a wider colour gamut than a cinema projecting colour film. A television set or computer monitor has much lower dynamic range than cinema, and a projector designed for TV or computer use would surely be the same.
Is there a quantifiable measure of dynamic range so we can check this?
You can prove intent, but intent is not enough to get a conviction: you need the act to have been committed or attempted too. There is no crime of having intent to rob, but there is one of robbery (theft) or of entering a house with intent to rob (burglary). If people start being prosecuted for mere intentions, then you need to fix the law, not worry about mind-reading devices (which after all are just the messenger).
Are network card makers also evil because '100 megabits per second' really does mean 100 million bits and not 1.048576 million?