Some of the abuses you mentioned are -already- covered by law:
1) A threat of violence is assault.
2) Repeated nuisance mail is harrassment.
These things -should- be punished, but 10 years in prison is so strikingly moronic in most cases that I can't believe I'm reading about this in a reality from which I can't wake up.
1) A threat of violence should be reported to the police. Regular law should then be used. We don't need yet another stupid law.
2) Nuisance mail should be handled through normal school disciplinary means. Detentions, extra homework, suspensions, etc. Going to prison for ten years for repeatedly calling your teach a dick in email is absurd beyond comprehension.
Every time some lawmaker tries to offer "protection" from computer uses, I get a sense of just how far down the drain those lawmakers have taken us. I fear we shall not recover.
Remember how stable Win95 was supposed to be? Stability didn't materialize with Win95.
Remember how NT was supposed to be MS' rock solid and stable system. If you would just upgrade to NT, then your stability problems would go away. Stability didn't materialize with NT (okay, people say 3.5 [I think] was fairly stable, but MS blew it).
Remember how Win98 was suppose to solve the stability problems of Win95? Didn't happen, did it?
Remember how Win2000 was suppose to solve all the stability problems of Win9x? Win2000 still crashes frequently.
MS -still- hasn't solved the stability problems of the Win* line, and it never will. WinXP is just one more lap on the upgrade treadmill, and there is no end in sight.
I noticed that the dates on one of my favorite BBS's was very inaccurate, having been listed as running for only 2 years when in reality it ran for about ten years.
Nonetheless, it brought back good memories. I wonder how many people reading this list are going to try connecting to some of those old BBS numbers just for kicks and the off-chance that one of them might still be running.. -lol-
An exception is granted to literary works in the form of computer programs that deny access because of damage. This seems to nullify the DMCA in the case that Windows corrupts the DLL or the program itself that is needed to play that DVD containing Mel Gibson's portayal of Hamlet. If Hamlet won't play because Windows hosed your software, here's your license to circumvent the player software's access controls in order to protect your investment.
Judge: "You are charged with violating the DMCA. What say you?"
Defendent: "Windows crashed and..."
Judge (interrupting): "Ah...understood. Case dismissed!"
It may be true that most of the world's (geographically speaking) Internet access is metered, but the vast majority of Internet users are in the United States. The article is saying that this is in no small part do to flat rate Internet access, a position with which I entirely agree. I would never have signed up for Internet access if I had to pay a metered rate. In fact, the flat rate is largely responsible for the decline in large national BBS providers such as Delphi and Compuserve (which got the name Compu$pend for its high cost due to metered service) because the Internet was a flat rate and these services were metered. The vast majority of users of those systems were spending MUCH more per month for access than they would have to spend on the Internet. Plus, the Internet offered much more to users than the other services. A flat rate and better reach was an unbeatable proposition.
Americans would never accept metered Internet after having gotten used to unlimited access for a flat monthly fee anymore than we would accept metered telephone service after having taken flat local service for granted. There would be riots and violent protests. It doesn't surprise me to see Bob Metcalf argue in favor of metered service. He intentionally spouts the most inane and stupid things in order to get hits from his articles. A guy has one good accident (Ethernet), and suddenly people think he knows something about what dribbles out of his mouth (or out of his keyboard).
You don't have to look far. All the one-click functionality does is pull a cookie off your computer, use it as a key to look up your personal information on Amazon's customer database, and insert that information into a computer form.
Web sites have been doing that ever since Netscape invented the cookie. Linux Today and Slashdot have had that functionality for longer than a year prior to Amazon's first public demonstration of its copycat feature. On LT and SD (and countless other dymanically-enabled web sites), that is how your personal information is embedded in the talkback form. It was one of the earliest uses of cookies.
1) KDE, GNOME, and any window manager that makes a windowed shell available can let you do this. Just click on the shell icon to start it up, su to root, type your commands as root, exit root shell.
2) Similar to above. Click on the shell to invoke it, su to root, start your filemanager from root shell. Now you can drag/drop/paste/move/copy/etc (within the contraints of your file manager) as root.
If their device is so industry-common that a competitor merely reading the driver source code is enough to worry about competing implementations being derived, then the originating company has nothing that hasn't already been seen or done and will be challenged by competition in the short run anyway. In this case, releasing the source to the driver would not do the company any harm that wasn't already in the works.
If the device is groundbreaking, then simply publishing its interface (which is all a driver does) can do no harm. Describing how to communicate with the chip in no way reveals how the chip works (unless the chip's functionality depends on already well known techniques).
Let's look at 3dfx: Does describing how to invoke the FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) features of the Voodoo chip via driver code give away the inner-processes of how the chip goes about achieving that? No, not in any way, shape, or form. The FSAA is one of 3dfx's main competitive advantages, but is 3dfx worried that other video card manufacturers are going to be able to copy it just because its programmer interface is published? No. Do they think that other companies (NVidia, for example) wouldn't be able to reproduce it anyway if the driver were closed? Hell no. If NVidia thought that FSAA was a make-or-break line item on a video card, the company's chips designers would find a way to reverse-engineer the chip's functions via hardward reverse-engineering, or they would reproduce it from scratch. Is 3dfx now the major video card among Linux users -because- they opened their drivers? You betcha.
1) The United States Congress passes "The Internet Freedom Act". As is the case with all laws containing the words "Freedom" or "Equality" or "Liberation", this law has nothing of the sort. The "Freedom" this law protects is the freedom -from- information. It establishes that the Internet backbones are to be owned by mega corporations which are charged with governing the content allowed to be transmitted across the 'Net. Broadband access is provided to even the smallest households, since all aspects of life are conducted across the wireless ether. Since all household functions (electricity, water, software) are rented from the same mega corporations, this always-on connection is also the on-off switch to all vital household controls. Because it is a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing environment (if you're not pissing of the owners, then the broadband access is great), the Windows users of the world, by benefit of sheer numbers, herd us into this new paradigm because it is easier than having to read and think. Modems are no longer manufactured since the market base has disappeared, so personal modem-to-modem communications all but disappears. Hence the passing of Act 2:
2) The Personal Communications Liberation Act establishes that modem communication, having been the singular cause of all computer cracking successes, are no longer permitted. Since everyone has broadband access, and only a few "rebel elements" refuse to embrace the corporate-owned broadband world, this is passed with minimal resistance. We will have been "liberated" from unmonitored slow computer-to-computer communication since the act pays telephone companies to dismantle the old infrastructure in favor of supporting the broadband pipeline. No only are modems no longer produced, but the underlying technology no longer supports the concept.
3) The Data Accessibility Equality Act states that all information flowing across the net must be freely available to everyone without restrictions. In essence, this means that data encryption has been outlawed since that would restrict access to only those people who have data encryption/decryption software. Since the mega corporations have shut down all the sites that carry such software, the cry that those "nasty eleet hackers" are trying to shut out the rest of the world prevades the data stream.
In short, George Orwell was right; except his crystal ball wasn't Y2K compliant, which is why his predictions landed in the wrong century.
Perhaps it's because this is non-information. A Linux virus is possible if built-in protection mechanisms are ignored. When reading these virus descriptions, you'll find that the method of infection is just like the method of infection for Windows binaries: the executable must be modified. If you set all your executables with read-only attributes and the owner and group to something other than a user account, then the executable cannot be infected by a non-privileged rogue program.
Of course any executable file format can be abused to make viruses possible if you allow unrestrained write access to the executables. On Linux, the likelihood of viruses is a configuration issue. The built-in protection mechanisms are there, but they have to be used.
Wanting to be fair about legitimate criticism, I evaluated this statement with as open a mind as possible. I could see how VA Linux's statements could be interpreted as FUD by a skeptical person. So what's a person to do when a Linux company makes a statement I can't immediately understand? Simple: Email the company and ask for an explanation. I went to their web page, looked at the phrase in question, and sent email to the Contacts link on their site.
I expected to get an answer on Monday at the earliest (I sent the question in early on Sunday), and I expected the answer to be given by tech support personnel. I certainly didn't expect Chris DiBona to answer me personally, on Sunday afternoon no less, but that is precisely what happened. I am just an end-user with no public Linux credentials (my only software contribution to date is a little-known Yahoo chat client), so it is not as if I were pulling strings to get to the boss. Straight from the top, here is the answer I received:
"This means that when we design a machine, we do it from the ground up for linux, then we do things like recompiling the kernel to run better or, cleaner, on the hardware. I don't care if it is fud or not [note: I mentioned to him in the original email that some people would see the "cleaner" claim as blatant FUD if it were a Microsoft site making similar claims about Windows], we make better machines than anyone, and one of the reasons they are better is because they run a much cleaner kernel."
So there you go. Cleaner means that the system is optimized to run the hardware/software combination it was intended to run.
Thank you Chris DiBona for taking the time to answer my question.
This is my biggest concern about the scanners. What kind of radiation do they emit? How harmful is it for frequent travellers? Could we trust the answers given to us by officials? Many of us can recite countless instances of officials (both private and public) outright lying about health concerns. There are just as many instances of the same officials acting out of ignorance; they may seriously believe there is no health risk, but they really just don't know.
Airports are historically very hot sites for bombings, so I don't have any privacy concerns in that regard. My main objection to any privacy invasion is that these very same airports have access points to planes that criminals can use to bypass these scanners. If airports are going to install scanners, then EVERYONE (employees, pilots, flight attendents, etc. included) should be able to access the planes ONLY through the same entry points as everyone else. Having back doors to entry negates the entire benefit of having the scanners to begin with. Only the stupid criminals would get caught by the scanners. If we must be subjected to these things, then we should at least have the right to demand that passing through these scanners is the only way for anyone to gain access to the planes.
By the court's own arguments, they are wrong on one count: Prodigy's editorial policy removes them from comparisons to telephone providers. The phone company does not reserve the right to eavesdrop on my conversations unless they acquire a court order, so they naturally cannot be held liable for the content of my conversations. If Prodigy took a completely hands-off approach to the content they provide, I would agree that they are not liable for content.
However, Prodigy can (at their sole discretion and without due process of law) monitor and remove any message flowing through their system. This puts them into the position of editor just like a newspaper. This gives them oversite regulation, and as such they should be liable for all content.
Other Internet providers who truly act as merely an electronic conduit, and do not edit content, should not be held liable for anything flowing through that conduit, be it email or web page.
With all the focus on these Gigahertz chips, does that mean that those of us with small budgets will finally be able to afford the 600Mhz chips due to drastic price reductions?
This is typical Microsoft double speak. The article flatly states that Microsoft doesn't put any back doors into their software, but then it says that Microsoft has inserted two decryption keys into all versions of Windows that will allow them access to any Windows computer.
Their explanation is laughable: The second key is a backup in case the first one is destroyed through some kind of natural disaster. They give the impression that they keep the single existing copy of the first key locked up in a vault somewhere when we can be reasonably sure the key exists in multiple forms scattered throughout many locations and computers, and on countless backup devices.
Then they claim that the second key is named NSAKey by an unfortunate coincidence, but that it has nothing to do with our beloved "let's suppress the masses" agency. They go even further to say that the NSA does not have a key (suggesting that MS would not give the NSA a key). All it takes is for the NSA to demand it from MS (assuming you believe they don't already have it) and MS will pee its pants from the effort of complying.
And then we finally arrive at the crux of the entire matter. There shouldn't be ANY built in keys for any reason. Not only does every MS document created with MS-Office clearly identify the author, but now MS (and by extension, any government agency) has a built in back door to nullify any type of security dependant on the cryptographic API. Who knows what other security and privacy breaches are built in. There just doesn't seem to be any safe haven from Uncle Borg and co.
I am less than saddened to see this service excised from the world. Although I was never a customer, I have never forgotten their episodes of surreptitiously(sp?) scanning their customers' hard drives for installed software titles and transmitting that information back to their main servers. The only unfortunate circumstance of their demise is that it occurs for technical reasons rather than moral outrage.
On the bright side, Microsoft seems to be slipping down the same icy slope, though helped along by the winds of distrust.
That said, fair use law allows the use of any trademarked name for the purpose of identification (perhaps requiring a notice that the name is indeed trademarked). Anyone and everyone can say they are selling copies of Red Hat CDs. That is why we are allowed to throw around the names of Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Red Hat, etc. with impunity, provided we don't slander or libel them. So the letter was either a hoax, Microsoft FUD, or a knee-jerk reaction to some misinformation. In any event, the issue has been denied by Red Hat and is totally moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the abuses you mentioned are -already- covered by law:
1) A threat of violence is assault.
2) Repeated nuisance mail is harrassment.
These things -should- be punished, but 10 years in prison is so strikingly moronic in most cases that I can't believe I'm reading about this in a reality from which I can't wake up.
1) A threat of violence should be reported to the police. Regular law should then be used. We don't need yet another stupid law.
2) Nuisance mail should be handled through normal school disciplinary means. Detentions, extra homework, suspensions, etc. Going to prison for ten years for repeatedly calling your teach a dick in email is absurd beyond comprehension.
Every time some lawmaker tries to offer "protection" from computer uses, I get a sense of just how far down the drain those lawmakers have taken us. I fear we shall not recover.
Remember how stable Win95 was supposed to be? Stability didn't materialize with Win95.
Remember how NT was supposed to be MS' rock solid and stable system. If you would just upgrade to NT, then your stability problems would go away. Stability didn't materialize with NT (okay, people say 3.5 [I think] was fairly stable, but MS blew it).
Remember how Win98 was suppose to solve the stability problems of Win95? Didn't happen, did it?
Remember how Win2000 was suppose to solve all the stability problems of Win9x? Win2000 still crashes frequently.
MS -still- hasn't solved the stability problems of the Win* line, and it never will. WinXP is just one more lap on the upgrade treadmill, and there is no end in sight.
I was thinking something similar. If the issue is simply that of secrecy, tell them, "For quality control purposes, this encounter is being recorded."
I noticed that the dates on one of my favorite BBS's was very inaccurate, having been listed as running for only 2 years when in reality it ran for about ten years.
Nonetheless, it brought back good memories. I wonder how many people reading this list are going to try connecting to some of those old BBS numbers just for kicks and the off-chance that one of them might still be running.. -lol-
I downloaded that commercial, too. I keep wondering why IBM isn't airing it. Any ideas, anyone? Are they saving it for later?
An exception is granted to literary works in the form of computer programs that deny access because of damage. This seems to nullify the DMCA in the case that Windows corrupts the DLL or the program itself that is needed to play that DVD containing Mel Gibson's portayal of Hamlet. If Hamlet won't play because Windows hosed your software, here's your license to circumvent the player software's access controls in order to protect your investment.
Judge: "You are charged with violating the DMCA. What say you?"
Defendent: "Windows crashed and..."
Judge (interrupting): "Ah...understood. Case dismissed!"
It may be true that most of the world's (geographically speaking) Internet access is metered, but the vast majority of Internet users are in the United States. The article is saying that this is in no small part do to flat rate Internet access, a position with which I entirely agree. I would never have signed up for Internet access if I had to pay a metered rate. In fact, the flat rate is largely responsible for the decline in large national BBS providers such as Delphi and Compuserve (which got the name Compu$pend for its high cost due to metered service) because the Internet was a flat rate and these services were metered. The vast majority of users of those systems were spending MUCH more per month for access than they would have to spend on the Internet. Plus, the Internet offered much more to users than the other services. A flat rate and better reach was an unbeatable proposition.
Americans would never accept metered Internet after having gotten used to unlimited access for a flat monthly fee anymore than we would accept metered telephone service after having taken flat local service for granted. There would be riots and violent protests. It doesn't surprise me to see Bob Metcalf argue in favor of metered service. He intentionally spouts the most inane and stupid things in order to get hits from his articles. A guy has one good accident (Ethernet), and suddenly people think he knows something about what dribbles out of his mouth (or out of his keyboard).
You don't have to look far. All the one-click functionality does is pull a cookie off your computer, use it as a key to look up your personal information on Amazon's customer database, and insert that information into a computer form.
Web sites have been doing that ever since Netscape invented the cookie. Linux Today and Slashdot have had that functionality for longer than a year prior to Amazon's first public demonstration of its copycat feature. On LT and SD (and countless other dymanically-enabled web sites), that is how your personal information is embedded in the talkback form. It was one of the earliest uses of cookies.
1) KDE, GNOME, and any window manager that makes a windowed shell available can let you do this. Just click on the shell icon to start it up, su to root, type your commands as root, exit root shell.
2) Similar to above. Click on the shell to invoke it, su to root, start your filemanager from root shell. Now you can drag/drop/paste/move/copy/etc (within the contraints of your file manager) as root.
If their device is so industry-common that a competitor merely reading the driver source code is enough to worry about competing implementations being derived, then the originating company has nothing that hasn't already been seen or done and will be challenged by competition in the short run anyway. In this case, releasing the source to the driver would not do the company any harm that wasn't already in the works.
If the device is groundbreaking, then simply publishing its interface (which is all a driver does) can do no harm. Describing how to communicate with the chip in no way reveals how the chip works (unless the chip's functionality depends on already well known techniques).
Let's look at 3dfx: Does describing how to invoke the FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) features of the Voodoo chip via driver code give away the inner-processes of how the chip goes about achieving that? No, not in any way, shape, or form. The FSAA is one of 3dfx's main competitive advantages, but is 3dfx worried that other video card manufacturers are going to be able to copy it just because its programmer interface is published? No. Do they think that other companies (NVidia, for example) wouldn't be able to reproduce it anyway if the driver were closed? Hell no. If NVidia thought that FSAA was a make-or-break line item on a video card, the company's chips designers would find a way to reverse-engineer the chip's functions via hardward reverse-engineering, or they would reproduce it from scratch. Is 3dfx now the major video card among Linux users -because- they opened their drivers? You betcha.
1) The United States Congress passes "The Internet Freedom Act". As is the case with all laws containing the words "Freedom" or "Equality" or "Liberation", this law has nothing of the sort. The "Freedom" this law protects is the freedom -from- information. It establishes that the Internet backbones are to be owned by mega corporations which are charged with governing the content allowed to be transmitted across the 'Net. Broadband access is provided to even the smallest households, since all aspects of life are conducted across the wireless ether. Since all household functions (electricity, water, software) are rented from the same mega corporations, this always-on connection is also the on-off switch to all vital household controls. Because it is a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing environment (if you're not pissing of the owners, then the broadband access is great), the Windows users of the world, by benefit of sheer numbers, herd us into this new paradigm because it is easier than having to read and think. Modems are no longer manufactured since the market base has disappeared, so personal modem-to-modem communications all but disappears. Hence the passing of Act 2:
2) The Personal Communications Liberation Act establishes that modem communication, having been the singular cause of all computer cracking successes, are no longer permitted. Since everyone has broadband access, and only a few "rebel elements" refuse to embrace the corporate-owned broadband world, this is passed with minimal resistance. We will have been "liberated" from unmonitored slow computer-to-computer communication since the act pays telephone companies to dismantle the old infrastructure in favor of supporting the broadband pipeline. No only are modems no longer produced, but the underlying technology no longer supports the concept.
3) The Data Accessibility Equality Act states that all information flowing across the net must be freely available to everyone without restrictions. In essence, this means that data encryption has been outlawed since that would restrict access to only those people who have data encryption/decryption software. Since the mega corporations have shut down all the sites that carry such software, the cry that those "nasty eleet hackers" are trying to shut out the rest of the world prevades the data stream.
In short, George Orwell was right; except his crystal ball wasn't Y2K compliant, which is why his predictions landed in the wrong century.
Perhaps it's because this is non-information. A Linux virus is possible if built-in protection mechanisms are ignored. When reading these virus descriptions, you'll find that the method of infection is just like the method of infection for Windows binaries: the executable must be modified. If you set all your executables with read-only attributes and the owner and group to something other than a user account, then the executable cannot be infected by a non-privileged rogue program.
Of course any executable file format can be abused to make viruses possible if you allow unrestrained write access to the executables. On Linux, the likelihood of viruses is a configuration issue. The built-in protection mechanisms are there, but they have to be used.
Wanting to be fair about legitimate criticism, I evaluated this statement with as open a mind as possible. I could see how VA Linux's statements could be interpreted as FUD by a skeptical person. So what's a person to do when a Linux company makes a statement I can't immediately understand? Simple: Email the company and ask for an explanation. I went to their web page, looked at the phrase in question, and sent email to the Contacts link on their site.
I expected to get an answer on Monday at the earliest (I sent the question in early on Sunday), and I expected the answer to be given by tech support personnel. I certainly didn't expect Chris DiBona to answer me personally, on Sunday afternoon no less, but that is precisely what happened. I am just an end-user with no public Linux credentials (my only software contribution to date is a little-known Yahoo chat client), so it is not as if I were pulling strings to get to the boss. Straight from the top, here is the answer I received:
"This means that when we design a machine, we do it from the ground up for linux, then we do things like recompiling the kernel to run better or, cleaner, on the hardware. I don't care if it is fud or not [note: I mentioned to him in the original email that some people would see the "cleaner" claim as blatant FUD if it were a Microsoft site making similar claims about Windows], we make better machines than anyone, and one of the reasons they are better is because
they run a much cleaner kernel."
So there you go. Cleaner means that the system is optimized to run the hardware/software combination it was intended to run.
Thank you Chris DiBona for taking the time to answer my question.
This is my biggest concern about the scanners. What kind of radiation do they emit? How harmful is it for frequent travellers? Could we trust the answers given to us by officials? Many of us can recite countless instances of officials (both private and public) outright lying about health concerns. There are just as many instances of the same officials acting out of ignorance; they may seriously believe there is no health risk, but they really just don't know.
Airports are historically very hot sites for bombings, so I don't have any privacy concerns in that regard. My main objection to any privacy invasion is that these very same airports have access points to planes that criminals can use to bypass these scanners. If airports are going to install scanners, then EVERYONE (employees, pilots, flight attendents, etc. included) should be able to access the planes ONLY through the same entry points as everyone else. Having back doors to entry negates the entire benefit of having the scanners to begin with. Only the stupid criminals would get caught by the scanners. If we must be subjected to these things, then we should at least have the right to demand that passing through these scanners is the only way for anyone to gain access to the planes.
By the court's own arguments, they are wrong on one count: Prodigy's editorial policy removes them from comparisons to telephone providers. The phone company does not reserve the right to eavesdrop on my conversations unless they acquire a court order, so they naturally cannot be held liable for the content of my conversations. If Prodigy took a completely hands-off approach to the content they provide, I would agree that they are not liable for content.
However, Prodigy can (at their sole discretion and without due process of law) monitor and remove any message flowing through their system. This puts them into the position of editor just like a newspaper. This gives them oversite regulation, and as such they should be liable for all content.
Other Internet providers who truly act as merely an electronic conduit, and do not edit content, should not be held liable for anything flowing through that conduit, be it email or web page.
With all the focus on these Gigahertz chips, does that mean that those of us with small budgets will finally be able to afford the 600Mhz chips due to drastic price reductions?
This is typical Microsoft double speak. The article flatly states that Microsoft doesn't put any back doors into their software, but then it says that Microsoft has inserted two decryption keys into all versions of Windows that will allow them access to any Windows computer.
Their explanation is laughable: The second key is a backup in case the first one is destroyed through some kind of natural disaster. They give the impression that they keep the single existing copy of the first key locked up in a vault somewhere when we can be reasonably sure the key exists in multiple forms scattered throughout many locations and computers, and on countless backup devices.
Then they claim that the second key is named NSAKey by an unfortunate coincidence, but that it has nothing to do with our beloved "let's suppress the masses" agency. They go even further to say that the NSA does not have a key (suggesting that MS would not give the NSA a key). All it takes is for the NSA to demand it from MS (assuming you believe they don't already have it) and MS will pee its pants from the effort of complying.
And then we finally arrive at the crux of the entire matter. There shouldn't be ANY built in keys for any reason. Not only does every MS document created with MS-Office clearly identify the author, but now MS (and by extension, any government agency) has a built in back door to nullify any type of security dependant on the cryptographic API. Who knows what other security and privacy breaches are built in. There just doesn't seem to be any safe haven from Uncle Borg and co.
I am less than saddened to see this service excised from the world. Although I was never a customer, I have never forgotten their episodes of surreptitiously(sp?) scanning their customers' hard drives for installed software titles and transmitting that information back to their main servers. The only unfortunate circumstance of their demise is that it occurs for technical reasons rather than moral outrage.
On the bright side, Microsoft seems to be slipping down the same icy slope, though helped along by the winds of distrust.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
That said, fair use law allows the use of any trademarked name for the purpose of identification (perhaps requiring a notice that the name is indeed trademarked). Anyone and everyone can say they are selling copies of Red Hat CDs. That is why we are allowed to throw around the names of Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Red Hat, etc. with impunity, provided we don't slander or libel them. So the letter was either a hoax, Microsoft FUD, or a knee-jerk reaction to some misinformation. In any event, the issue has been denied by Red Hat and is totally moot.