I wonder if it isn't possible to release an extension to the Kerberos Standard that 'accidentally' works with windows servers/clients.
There is another thing that bothers me here: MS has put his trade secret in the open, so if they want to take someone publicizing part of it to court couldn't it be argued, that since they didn't take any means to protect their 'trade secret' the legalese obviously weren't worth the bits they were encoded with. And since MS is encouraging criminal acts here, can't they be sued for that?
At least the information where to find the MS extended Protocol (i.e. the link) and maybe even the file 'kerbspec.exe' can be distributed freely (hey i just downloaded it, i didn't even execute it so i didn't agree to anything)
And since it's impractical for unix users to extract the file on a dos box maybe someone could come up with an extractor.
But that is the reason why science successful: doubt. Few physicists going to believe in antigravity until the experiments are repeated in other laboratories all over the world and carefully dissected to understand that the effect is not from a different source.
It's easy to make an error if you don't do a carefully controled experiment, maybe the superconducting disc was repelled by the magnetic field of a motor when it was switched on to start the disc spinning, voila the whole phenomenon is traced to a well known effect.
Probably most people still remember 'cold fusion'. Staying sceptical now will probably spare much embarassement later. And most physicists have good reasons for dismissing the idea of antigravity:
- gravity is a very weak force, the only reason its so 'strong' here is that big ball of mud below our feet. Achieving an effect as large as 2% of the weight of that disc is quite a feat if done by 'gravitation effects' it's by far more probable to stem from electromagnetic effects, especially in an experiment with rotating superconductors.
- it seems reasonable that someone could think up some kind of perpetuum mobile using antigravity, this is normaly considered a strong indicator that something is fishy
- gravity is not 'just' a force, it's intimately connected to spacetime, anyone who heard about black holes will know that much. Antigravity would probably upset some well established (by experiments) concepts here, maybe there's a theoretical way to get around the light barrier using it, which would mean time machines.
As much as i like science fiction i think perpetuum mobiles or time machines just won't happen in the real world.
Well, it's obvious that in the presence of players where region encoding can be disabled easily (without even opening the player, thus voiding the guarantee) other players stand no chance. It's what people want. The true problem here is with the MPAA which is thinking they can sell a product to the consumers with inbuilt features working against the consumers interests. It didn't work with copyprotected VHS players and it didn't work with DAT Tapes.
Either the product flops or someone comes up with a product where these features are disabled (Yeah, "developer feature", there is really a need to make it accessible via the remote control. And the message "You shouldn't be here" is a really good joke, since it implies that the enduser can read it (or was it meant for the developers?)). So we can assume that, since DVD players without region encoding sell better there'll always be someone to make em, if not in the US then somewhere else. Probably their marketing department even leaks the information to some magazines to ensure a good rating.
It'll be fun watching the MPAA trying to put this genie back into the bottle, since now it's their claimed megadollars of negative income versus that of the DVD player makers who don't want their players sit on the shelves until DVD is an obsolete format. The MPAA really is in a no win situation here, they can't annoy the player manufacturers too much since they might get the idea to come up with a format of their own (this they should hve done from the start, it would have been far less trouble) and less sold players = less sold DVDs, an equation that even the MPAA should understand. So the only thing they can do is looking foolish, but they've practised that well.
This also sheds new light on the DeCSS debate, since the MPAA can't sue the DeCSS folks but leave others who basically do the same thing (remove the copy protection) alone.
While small Caps/lowercase are still undistinguishable upside down characters are aligned a little lower than 'normal' characters (even small ones) so they can be distinguished with a ruler. I think though that Poe thought about this and used ambigous characters only for one meaning. For example i didn't see an upside down 'x' in the text, but i did find small caps 'T' and 't' (even next to one another). I did some counting and believe (as some others here) that it's a polyalphabetic ciphre, maybe with some added difficulties, since in the letters i counted (only large upside) none stood out being used particular often and most were used about 9 times throughout the text.
Obviously MS has choosen to implement a standard that, while pretty similar to Kerberos, actually isn't Kerberos. The current standard is available from enough sources and Microsofts changes are not part of it. Thus any company using W2K for which Kerberos is a critical application should sue MS on the grounds that their product W2K isn't able to use Kerberos, contrary to advertising.
It's enough that ONE business successfully sues MS even if it's only for some K$ worth of unscheduled downtime and worktime needed to 'fix' this 'feature'.
I don't understand it, even the article states, that These "affiliate programs" are commonly used by many sites so it's obviously nothing amazon has innovated. I thought that patents can't be granted for things/processes already in wide use or already published. I even wonder if it isn't possible to sue Amazon for hurting (american) economy with such patents. If they get this patent in court, next i'll try and patent bricklaying, baking bread, brewing beer and some more things which come to my mind (i mean as of now nobody has a patent on that) perhaps someone shuold really go and try to push through such a ridicoulous patent just to draw some public attention to the subject.
There is another implication here too: If the information is out how to make a particular brand of DVD player regionfree, sales go to the sky. Now all marketing has to do is leaking the relevant information somehow and get it public ("We are very concerned about site XXX distributing DeZonePhonyPlayer.zip but what can we do about it?"). We can encourage this starategy by circulating that information even further, especially which players are prone to DeZoning.
The implicit punchline here: "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
This argument is rather pointless because unprovable, MS is no european company and won't become one. Had MS been an EU company we would have heard the same argument when the case in America started. As Microsoft and their business tactics are even under investigation in the USA why shouldn't the EU at least have a look into things? I'm living in the EU and am happy someone is looking into dubious corporate behaviour that affects our economy.
This approach will well work with anything that is in daily use by a reasonably large group of people. Also it works best with information already stored in digital form. There is other information worth keeping, historical data, literature, even texts intended only for reading once (adverts, notes, email) may give later generations an insight into present everyday life and hence be worth keeping.
Many of these texts are not yet broadly available in digital form and are not important or interesting enough for enough people to be kept handy. Try looking for some older book by a not so famous author. Even encyclopaedic works are worked over for each new edition and older bits of information have to make place for newer ones.
With historical facts it's even worse, in most cases there's at least two versions of one event and who was in the right is mostly determined by who survived. Just have a look how warfare now concentrates on media control or try to imagine the twisted version of history if the nazis had won WWII, even now there are some denying the existence of the holocaust.
I think all this information is well worth keeping, and since it's difficult to see today what later generations might find worthy the 'evolutionary' approach (if i/we don't want to keep it later generations won't want it either) doesn't work. And it doesn't suffice to just keep this information somewhere, it has to be kept in an accessible form, on media readable with modern equipment (who will go through the trouble reading an old magnet tape) and indexed (if you have 1GB of unsorted texts/textfragments on a harddisk are you ever going to wade throgh that to get that piece of information presently of interest?)
The code of DeCSS is all over the net now and even the MPAA can't hope to put it out of the world again. AFAIK it is planned to implement a new encryption scheme anyway, so the question is what they are trying to achieve by going to court:
Obviously the MPAA wants to intimidate others so there will be no DeCSS for their next encryption. I don't think that they will succeed though, because so many people have to know how to implement decrytion to build a player that the information will leak sooner or later, because of some carelesness. So the question is only via which channels the next DeCSS will be distributed. The decision to sell some Linux player for DVD's would probably help more, since then there is much less motivation to implement and distribute such a program.
The second reason for going to court is probably to test the leagal grounds and set some precedent. In my opinion this makes the current case very important, because many other cases might be influenced by the outcome of this one.
Another news that microsoft might soon learn is, that the loophole wasn't only good for ripping off $400 but also gives customers who participated in the program a cheap way out and thus an opportunity to rethink the deal. If they still think it was a good one they can even cancel the old contract and do it a second time (they even get a 'fairer' contract that way:-) ).
Who said that it's right to take the money? But in recent times i so often see big companies pummeling whoever they can with the law, that it's a nice break to see microsoft on the wrong end for once. When i don't read the fine print i'll have to pay for my error too, theirs is only a little more expensive.
In my opinion MS played enough bad tricks on it's customers and competing companies, so while two wrongs don't make a right, i think Bill Gates isn't in the best position to demand fair play. And it's more like picking up some $100 bills left carelessly lying around by some Billionaire than like taking candy from a baby, especially regarding the fact that MS didn't take immediate action after it was all over the news.
Apparently this is exactly what Trudel is ranting about if you follow the link 'backgrounds' (leading to just more rant):
The worst news is hidden. Embedded in the middle of the official's talk was a phrase, "re-examination rights." Did that mean that any U.S. firm with patents will be subject to endlessly defending them against re-examination by the Japanese keiretsus?
Re-examination occurs when someone challenges a patent, usually when there is litigation. Today, if one firm infringes on another firm's patent, it is running a high risk, potentially facing triple damages and legal fees if found guilty. And the cost to defend patents is more or less affordable, even for smaller firms. The Japanese have hated this system for years. Their patent system tends more to distribute technology than to restrict its use. The patent official admitted that my worst fears were valid when we spoke privately. Some Japanese officials were calling Tokyo on their cellular phones to report, "The U.S. has given us its patent system." (Emphasis by me)
I find nothing wrong with more bias on distributing than restricting technology, especially when i see the patent system misused as a tool to block useful but common concepts from the competition. And it doesn't look like the whole patent system was overthrown, just it's now a little easier to attack some dumb and wrongly granted patent. But Trudel is making a nice conspiracy theory about this:
The sellout occurred in letters of agreement between Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Japanese Ambassador Takahazu Kuriyama, dated August 16, 1994.
In my opinion (but i'm not a patent attorney) the agreement makes perfect sense and is a step to establish similar procedures for patent law in the USA and Japan. The 'Ron Brown' link is really strange, apparently it tries to explain his death with brownian motion.
I really don't know much about law, so mostly i keep my trap shut about it. My problem with law is, that by building it on real cases, and the necessity for covering each loophole to deny anyone unfair advantages by exploiting them, the whole matter appears 'overcomplicated' to me.
If likened to a piece of source code it would be some gigantic, hard to maintain, monstrous program with mends and kludges all over the place to cover for all kinds of strange situations, and even so (or maybe because it is so) it occasionally fails to do what it is intended to do.
When i program i don't like my code that way, i like clean, elegant code. Thus i dislike law for it's (apparent) lack of elegance, especially in cases where the outcomes are counterintuitive (in my eyes). Obviously my intuitive approach to law ('that would be a fair solution, so it should come out in the end') is wrong.
The resulting discomfort with questions concerning law makes me avoid them and sometimes results in knee-jerk reactions. Knowing this, i consult a lawyer whenever i really need such questions resolved.
OTOH law works, most of the time, and it has to cover a lot of subjects noone even thought of a few years ago (while i still think it could work better, if it where less subject to the influence of lobbyists)! Probably in most cases it's apparent 'complicatedness' just reflects that life isn't always simple.
For me the main point is, that the spammer pays the money! The only reason why there's more spam in my e-mail than in my regular mail is, that spamming on the internet costs next to nothing. The article stated, that Christian Brothers sent more than 20 million messages (and this is probably a very low estimate) which means that after paying $600.000 of fines each mail cost them only $0.03... looking at it like this the spammers still got a much cheaper service than via snail mail! And why shouldn't AOL get the money, at least it's their service that delivered the mail, and if the case serves as a deterrent to other spammers every internetuser gets something out of it. If customers of AOL want to get back the money they paid for downloading the spam they'll have to pay a lawyer themselves and try to organize a joint case via the net.
A component of Windows 2000 comes from a scientology-company. The defragmentation program "Diskeeper" is intended to be marketed as an integral part of the NT-successor. It was developed by Executive Software, a company of the confessing Scientologist Craig Jensen. The connection from the Pseudo-company [Scientology] to Microsoft bothers representatives of the big Churches concerned with sects.
"Apart from the catholic Church also all German states, the office responsible for defending the constitution, and the german industy, will take an interest in this." comments Harald Baer, catholic representative for sects [...]. According to Ursula Caberta, head of the "workgroup scientology" of Hamburgs interior office, Executive Software belongs to the leading businesses of the WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises) Scientology organisation: "WISE is the main branch of Scientology for undermining and spying out the economy." In the german states Bayern and Hamburg resulitions exist, saying that official authorities may not buy services from Scientology-companies, especially in the Information Technology sector.
This is because Scientology is perceived in Germany neither as a church, nor as a sect, but as an organisation threatening the democratic system in germany. They are observed by the german "Verfassungsschutz" and aswered this with a public relations campaign, even drawing parallels to the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich.
About enlightened governments we have enough, this case seems to start with the enlightened government agencies of the US whose agencies apparently worked with intel to get some handle on spying out people on the net.
It is the job of the government to prevent harm to themselves, it's countries citizens, industry. A good case for this is meat from BSE infected cows, here the own citizens and the own industry had to be protected by import restrictions. Here import restrictions where necessary because noone knows where the meat in the local supermarket is from.
As the US actively spy on EU citizens and industry (Echelon) and harm them, import restrictions to prevent these schemes are considered, in this case because customers in the EU cannot estimate the risk. The EU commitee is not the first to act in this case, the chinese government is actually threatening to forbid PIII and Windows98 in china for similar reasons.
In the end even US customers might even benefit from this, because it might drive Intel to offer PIII's without serial numbers, or not to include serial numbers in their next series of processors. I'm sure, most people presented with the choice of bying a processor with a stamped in serial number or without, would go for the latter, for any benefits to him can be achieved easier by software registration numbers than by hardware ones! So obviously this registration number is less meant to benefit users as to help spying on them.
Another reason why 'letting the market decide' doesn't work here is, that for most PC's there are only two realistic choices for the processor at the moment, so there's not that many alternatives.
One problem here is, that again it's an ISP which, confronted with implicit threats (i consider a letter by a three letter agency as such) went the easy way and complied. This is perfectly understandable, from their point of view, they have nothing to gain from protecting their customer but very much to loose if targeted with a lawsuit.
This means, that any ISP getting a nice letter from something official enough (lawyer/government agency) will prefer to loose a customer to standing up for them. This will only change if the threat of a lawsuit is oubalanced, for example by the threat of loosing more customers than one. This could be achieved by threatening with consumer boycotts. While switching whole websites from one ISP to another might be too costly, switching ISP providers for private netaccess (i.e. predial another number/switch contracts) is a possibility here.
Also an online list where information concerning ISPs is gathered (prices / netaccess / helpdesk), maybe with a list of links to cases how an ISP reacted on behalf of their customers interests, would be a good starting point, but in general an exemplary case (i.e. getting enough public attention to the mending of the right of free speech and getting consumers boycott an ISP) would really make the ISP's more aware, that their customers are more than a bunch of bankaccounts.
That consumer boycotts really work can be seen from the example of brent spar.
Perhaps it is more important to see what is covered by this patent. Everyone dealing with the internet or information in digital form at large will agree, that finding topics and thus being able to deal with an overwhelming amount of information efficiently by categorizing and sorting it is important beyond spying. This arises the question what the NSA intends to do with this patent. Did they patent for protective means when they could have used the technology without anyone knowing, do they want to make money of this by selling the technology in some form, or do they want to hinder others to use this technology by making it commercially unattractive? This latter possibility might even mean that we will soon see export laws for certain knowledge base systems as we have alredy seen for crypto software.
A few more clarifications on the License and it's future would be nice i think, as i understand PGPfone (2.1 too?) is freeware, but the whole thing is still licensed by NAI... and NAI could change their minds about the project when it's suddenly up and running (for whatever reasons).
It'd be nice to see a license attached to the source where contributors to the source could see how their efforts will be credited and need not fear that the whole project will be taken off their hands when someone decides they can make big money from it.
My opinion was, that patent law was for protecting inventors who came up with an original idea, not for people who scanned for original ideas of others or just very basic or obvious ways to do something, long since in use and well working. Isn't there somewhere in patenting a step where you have to show that what you want to patent is something original and has not been done before? That would also make 'preventive patenting' needless, since a publication would suffice. I mean, what will be patented next? Use of the electromagnetic spectrum as carrier of information? ("Hey you, either close your eyes or pay royalties!")
This just shows that security by obscurity does not work. This incident proves some basic things about handling any computer connected to the net: - any OS or application might have security holes, hence security patches have to be installed on a regular basis (this also totally invalidates the hackpcweek security test) - therefore it is obviusly in the interest of the users to find security holes fast - an open source system reviewed by a large userbase for possible exploits, along with the practice of making such exploits and the countermeasures known, thus provides a good instrument to enhance security. - on the contrary obscure applications can result in security holes known to a select few illmeaning individuals (while a patch for this exploit exists i understand that it is not known how exactly this exploit works.) - also obscurity results in users/administrators lacking necessary knowledge about the system, in contrast to a well documented system where security holes can often be patched temporarily by simply turning off the exploited component - furthermore an open source system makes it nearly impossible for illmeaning programmers to install backdoors for later exploits
In short: for well documented open source software you can expect a higher level of security due to better educated users and quick responses to exploits. Thus exploits will have a much smaller time window in which they work.
An other main issue here is the widespread distribution of windows (complete with IE), making it an ideal target for exploits. It is a very old rule, that heterogeneuos environments are generally more robust and thus healthier.
I wonder if people are really not concerned about where their politicians are funded from, meaning that the news of this funding hitting the press bigtime at the right moment could hurt microsofts case more than benefit it. While judges won't openly admit to consider the public opinion, they probably don't ignore it completely, especially if a too generous ruling could make themselves look dubious.
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I wonder if it isn't possible to release an extension to the Kerberos Standard that 'accidentally' works with windows servers/clients.
There is another thing that bothers me here: MS has put his trade secret in the open, so if they want to take someone publicizing part of it to court couldn't it be argued, that since they didn't take any means to protect their 'trade secret' the legalese obviously weren't worth the bits they were encoded with. And since MS is encouraging criminal acts here, can't they be sued for that?
At least the information where to find the MS extended Protocol (i.e. the link) and maybe even the file 'kerbspec.exe' can be distributed freely (hey i just downloaded it, i didn't even execute it so i didn't agree to anything)
And since it's impractical for unix users to extract the file on a dos box maybe someone could come up with an extractor.
But that is the reason why science successful: doubt. Few physicists going to believe in antigravity until the experiments are repeated in other laboratories all over the world and carefully dissected to understand that the effect is not from a different source.
It's easy to make an error if you don't do a carefully controled experiment, maybe the superconducting disc was repelled by the magnetic field of a motor when it was switched on to start the disc spinning, voila the whole phenomenon is traced to a well known effect.
Probably most people still remember 'cold fusion'. Staying sceptical now will probably spare much embarassement later. And most physicists have good reasons for dismissing the idea of antigravity:
- gravity is a very weak force, the only reason its so 'strong' here is that big ball of mud below our feet. Achieving an effect as large as 2% of the weight of that disc is quite a feat if done by 'gravitation effects' it's by far more probable to stem from electromagnetic effects, especially in an experiment with rotating superconductors.
- it seems reasonable that someone could think up some kind of perpetuum mobile using antigravity, this is normaly considered a strong indicator that something is fishy
- gravity is not 'just' a force, it's intimately connected to spacetime, anyone who heard about black holes will know that much. Antigravity would probably upset some well established (by experiments) concepts here, maybe there's a theoretical way to get around the light barrier using it, which would mean time machines.
As much as i like science fiction i think perpetuum mobiles or time machines just won't happen in the real world.
Well, it's obvious that in the presence of players where region encoding can be disabled easily (without even opening the player, thus voiding the guarantee) other players stand no chance. It's what people want. The true problem here is with the MPAA which is thinking they can sell a product to the consumers with inbuilt features working against the consumers interests. It didn't work with copyprotected VHS players and it didn't work with DAT Tapes.
Either the product flops or someone comes up with a product where these features are disabled (Yeah, "developer feature", there is really a need to make it accessible via the remote control. And the message "You shouldn't be here" is a really good joke, since it implies that the enduser can read it (or was it meant for the developers?)). So we can assume that, since DVD players without region encoding sell better there'll always be someone to make em, if not in the US then somewhere else. Probably their marketing department even leaks the information to some magazines to ensure a good rating.
It'll be fun watching the MPAA trying to put this genie back into the bottle, since now it's their claimed megadollars of negative income versus that of the DVD player makers who don't want their players sit on the shelves until DVD is an obsolete format. The MPAA really is in a no win situation here, they can't annoy the player manufacturers too much since they might get the idea to come up with a format of their own (this they should hve done from the start, it would have been far less trouble) and less sold players = less sold DVDs, an equation that even the MPAA should understand. So the only thing they can do is looking foolish, but they've practised that well.
This also sheds new light on the DeCSS debate, since the MPAA can't sue the DeCSS folks but leave others who basically do the same thing (remove the copy protection) alone.
While small Caps/lowercase are still undistinguishable upside down characters are aligned a little lower than 'normal' characters (even small ones) so they can be distinguished with a ruler. I think though that Poe thought about this and used ambigous characters only for one meaning. For example i didn't see an upside down 'x' in the text, but i did find small caps 'T' and 't' (even next to one another). I did some counting and believe (as some others here) that it's a polyalphabetic ciphre, maybe with some added difficulties, since in the letters i counted (only large upside) none stood out being used particular often and most were used about 9 times throughout the text.
Obviously MS has choosen to implement a standard that, while pretty similar to Kerberos, actually isn't Kerberos. The current standard is available from enough sources and Microsofts changes are not part of it. Thus any company using W2K for which Kerberos is a critical application should sue MS on the grounds that their product W2K isn't able to use Kerberos, contrary to advertising.
It's enough that ONE business successfully sues MS even if it's only for some K$ worth of unscheduled downtime and worktime needed to 'fix' this 'feature'.
I don't understand it, even the article states, that These "affiliate programs" are commonly used by many sites so it's obviously nothing amazon has innovated. I thought that patents can't be granted for things/processes already in wide use or already published. I even wonder if it isn't possible to sue Amazon for hurting (american) economy with such patents. If they get this patent in court, next i'll try and patent bricklaying, baking bread, brewing beer and some more things which come to my mind (i mean as of now nobody has a patent on that) perhaps someone shuold really go and try to push through such a ridicoulous patent just to draw some public attention to the subject.
There is another implication here too:
If the information is out how to make a particular brand of DVD player regionfree, sales go to the sky. Now all marketing has to do is leaking the relevant information somehow and get it public ("We are very concerned about site XXX distributing DeZonePhonyPlayer.zip but what can we do about it?"). We can encourage this starategy by circulating that information even further, especially which players are prone to DeZoning.
The implicit punchline here: "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
This argument is rather pointless because unprovable, MS is no european company and won't become one. Had MS been an EU company we would have heard the same argument when the case in America started. As Microsoft and their business tactics are even under investigation in the USA why shouldn't the EU at least have a look into things? I'm living in the EU and am happy someone is looking into dubious corporate behaviour that affects our economy.
This approach will well work with anything that is in daily use by a reasonably large group of people. Also it works best with information already stored in digital form. There is other information worth keeping, historical data, literature, even texts intended only for reading once (adverts, notes, email) may give later generations an insight into present everyday life and hence be worth keeping.
Many of these texts are not yet broadly available in digital form and are not important or interesting enough for enough people to be kept handy. Try looking for some older book by a not so famous author. Even encyclopaedic works are worked over for each new edition and older bits of information have to make place for newer ones.
With historical facts it's even worse, in most cases there's at least two versions of one event and who was in the right is mostly determined by who survived. Just have a look how warfare now concentrates on media control or try to imagine the twisted version of history if the nazis had won WWII, even now there are some denying the existence of the holocaust.
I think all this information is well worth keeping, and since it's difficult to see today what later generations might find worthy the 'evolutionary' approach (if i/we don't want to keep it later generations won't want it either) doesn't work. And it doesn't suffice to just keep this information somewhere, it has to be kept in an accessible form, on media readable with modern equipment (who will go through the trouble reading an old magnet tape) and indexed (if you have 1GB of unsorted texts/textfragments on a harddisk are you ever going to wade throgh that to get that piece of information presently of interest?)
The code of DeCSS is all over the net now and even the MPAA can't hope to put it out of the world again. AFAIK it is planned to implement a new encryption scheme anyway, so the question is what they are trying to achieve by going to court:
Obviously the MPAA wants to intimidate others so there will be no DeCSS for their next encryption. I don't think that they will succeed though, because so many people have to know how to implement decrytion to build a player that the information will leak sooner or later, because of some carelesness. So the question is only via which channels the next DeCSS will be distributed. The decision to sell some Linux player for DVD's would probably help more, since then there is much less motivation to implement and distribute such a program.
The second reason for going to court is probably to test the leagal grounds and set some precedent. In my opinion this makes the current case very important, because many other cases might be influenced by the outcome of this one.
Another news that microsoft might soon learn is, that the loophole wasn't only good for ripping off $400 but also gives customers who participated in the program a cheap way out and thus an opportunity to rethink the deal. If they still think it was a good one they can even cancel the old contract and do it a second time (they even get a 'fairer' contract that way :-) ).
Who said that it's right to take the money? But in recent times i so often see big companies pummeling whoever they can with the law, that it's a nice break to see microsoft on the wrong end for once. When i don't read the fine print i'll have to pay for my error too, theirs is only a little more expensive.
In my opinion MS played enough bad tricks on it's customers and competing companies, so while two wrongs don't make a right, i think Bill Gates isn't in the best position to demand fair play. And it's more like picking up some $100 bills left carelessly lying around by some Billionaire than like taking candy from a baby, especially regarding the fact that MS didn't take immediate action after it was all over the news.
Apparently this is exactly what Trudel is ranting about if you follow the link 'backgrounds' (leading to just more rant):
The worst news is hidden. Embedded in the middle of the official's talk was a phrase, "re-examination rights." Did that mean that any U.S. firm with patents will be subject to endlessly defending them against re-examination by the Japanese keiretsus?
Re-examination occurs when someone challenges a patent, usually when there is litigation.
Today, if one firm infringes on another firm's patent, it is running a high risk, potentially facing triple damages and legal fees if found guilty. And the cost to defend patents is more or less affordable, even for smaller firms. The Japanese have hated this system for years. Their patent system tends more to distribute technology than to restrict its use. The patent official admitted that my worst fears were valid when we spoke privately. Some Japanese officials were calling Tokyo on their cellular phones to report, "The U.S. has given us its patent system."
(Emphasis by me)
I find nothing wrong with more bias on distributing than restricting technology, especially when i see the patent system misused as a tool to block useful but common concepts from the competition. And it doesn't look like the whole patent system was overthrown, just it's now a little easier to attack some dumb and wrongly granted patent. But Trudel is making a nice conspiracy theory about this:
The sellout occurred in letters of agreement between Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Japanese Ambassador Takahazu Kuriyama, dated August 16, 1994.
In my opinion (but i'm not a patent attorney) the agreement makes perfect sense and is a step to establish similar procedures for patent law in the USA and Japan. The 'Ron Brown' link is really strange, apparently it tries to explain his death with brownian motion.
I really don't know much about law, so mostly i keep my trap shut about it. My problem with law is, that by building it on real cases, and the necessity for covering each loophole to deny anyone unfair advantages by exploiting them, the whole matter appears 'overcomplicated' to me.
If likened to a piece of source code it would be some gigantic, hard to maintain, monstrous program with mends and kludges all over the place to cover for all kinds of strange situations, and even so (or maybe because it is so) it occasionally fails to do what it is intended to do.
When i program i don't like my code that way, i like clean, elegant code. Thus i dislike law for it's (apparent) lack of elegance, especially in cases where the outcomes are counterintuitive (in my eyes). Obviously my intuitive approach to law ('that would be a fair solution, so it should come out in the end') is wrong.
The resulting discomfort with questions concerning law makes me avoid them and sometimes results in knee-jerk reactions. Knowing this, i consult a lawyer whenever i really need such questions resolved.
OTOH law works, most of the time, and it has to cover a lot of subjects noone even thought of a few years ago (while i still think it could work better, if it where less subject to the influence of lobbyists)! Probably in most cases it's apparent 'complicatedness' just reflects that life isn't always simple.
For me the main point is, that the spammer pays the money! The only reason why there's more spam in my e-mail than in my regular mail is, that spamming on the internet costs next to nothing. The article stated, that Christian Brothers sent more than 20 million messages (and this is probably a very low estimate) which means that after paying $600.000 of fines each mail cost them only $0.03 ... looking at it like this the spammers still got a much cheaper service than via snail mail!
And why shouldn't AOL get the money, at least it's their service that delivered the mail, and if the case serves as a deterrent to other spammers every internetuser gets something out of it. If customers of AOL want to get back the money they paid for downloading the spam they'll have to pay a lawyer themselves and try to organize a joint case via the net.
Windows 2000 threatened to be banned
A component of Windows 2000 comes from a scientology-company. The defragmentation program "Diskeeper" is intended to be marketed as an integral part of the NT-successor. It was developed by Executive Software, a company of the confessing Scientologist Craig Jensen. The connection from the Pseudo-company [Scientology] to Microsoft bothers representatives of the big Churches concerned with sects.
"Apart from the catholic Church also all German states, the office responsible for defending the constitution, and the german industy, will take an interest in this." comments Harald Baer, catholic representative for sects [...]. According to Ursula Caberta, head of the "workgroup scientology" of Hamburgs interior office, Executive Software belongs to the leading businesses of the WISE (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises) Scientology organisation: "WISE is the main branch of Scientology for undermining and spying out the economy." In the german states Bayern and Hamburg resulitions exist, saying that official authorities may not buy services from Scientology-companies, especially in the Information Technology sector.
This is because Scientology is perceived in Germany neither as a church, nor as a sect, but as an organisation threatening the democratic system in germany. They are observed
by the german "Verfassungsschutz" and aswered this with a public relations campaign, even drawing parallels to the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich.
About enlightened governments we have enough, this case seems to start with the enlightened government agencies of the US whose agencies apparently worked with intel to get some handle on spying out people on the net.
It is the job of the government to prevent harm to themselves, it's countries citizens, industry. A good case for this is meat from BSE infected cows, here the own citizens and the own industry had to be protected by import restrictions. Here import restrictions where necessary because noone knows where the meat in the local supermarket is from.
As the US actively spy on EU citizens and industry (Echelon) and harm them, import restrictions to prevent these schemes are considered, in this case because customers in the EU cannot estimate the risk. The EU commitee is not the first to act in this case, the chinese government is actually threatening to forbid PIII and Windows98 in china for similar reasons.
In the end even US customers might even benefit from this, because it might drive Intel to offer PIII's without serial numbers, or not to include serial numbers in their next series of processors. I'm sure, most people presented with the choice of bying a processor with a stamped in serial number or without, would go for the latter, for any benefits to him can be achieved easier by software registration numbers than by hardware ones! So obviously this registration number is less meant to benefit users as to help spying on them.
Another reason why 'letting the market decide' doesn't work here is, that for most PC's there are only two realistic choices for the processor at the moment, so there's not that many alternatives.
One problem here is, that again it's an ISP which, confronted with implicit threats (i consider a letter by a three letter agency as such) went the easy way and complied. This is perfectly understandable, from their point of view, they have nothing to gain from protecting their customer but very much to loose if targeted with a lawsuit.
This means, that any ISP getting a nice letter from something official enough (lawyer/government agency) will prefer to loose a customer to standing up for them. This will only change if the threat of a lawsuit is oubalanced, for example by the threat of loosing more customers than one. This could be achieved by threatening with consumer boycotts. While switching whole websites from one ISP to another might be too costly, switching ISP providers for private netaccess (i.e. predial another number/switch contracts) is a possibility here.
Also an online list where information concerning ISPs is gathered (prices / netaccess / helpdesk), maybe with a list of links to cases how an ISP reacted on behalf of their customers interests, would be a good starting point, but in general an exemplary case (i.e. getting enough public attention to the mending of the right of free speech and getting consumers boycott an ISP) would really make the ISP's more aware, that their customers are more than a bunch of bankaccounts.
That consumer boycotts really work can be seen from the example of brent spar.
A good starting point for this
Hey, they should patent their 6-klick lawsuit! ...
maybe from the royalties they can pay the lawyers they might need
Perhaps it is more important to see what is covered by this patent. Everyone dealing with the internet or information in digital form at large will agree, that finding topics and thus being able to deal with an overwhelming amount of information efficiently by categorizing and sorting it is important beyond spying.
This arises the question what the NSA intends to do with this patent. Did they patent for protective means when they could have used the technology without anyone knowing, do they want to make money of this by selling the technology in some form, or do they want to hinder others to use this technology by making it commercially unattractive?
This latter possibility might even mean that we will soon see export laws for certain knowledge base systems as we have alredy seen for crypto software.
A few more clarifications on the License and it's future would be nice i think, as i understand PGPfone (2.1 too?) is freeware, but the whole thing is still licensed by NAI ... and NAI could change their minds about the project when it's suddenly up and running (for whatever reasons).
It'd be nice to see a license attached to the source where contributors to the source could see how their efforts will be credited and need not fear that the whole project will be taken off their hands when someone decides they can make big money from it.
My opinion was, that patent law was for protecting inventors who came up with an original idea, not for people who scanned for original ideas of others or just very basic or obvious ways to do something, long since in use and well working. Isn't there somewhere in patenting a step where you have to show that what you want to patent is something original and has not been done before?
That would also make 'preventive patenting' needless, since a publication would suffice.
I mean, what will be patented next? Use of the electromagnetic spectrum as carrier of information? ("Hey you, either close your eyes or pay royalties!")
This just shows that security by obscurity does not work. This incident proves some basic things about handling any computer connected to the net:
- any OS or application might have security holes, hence security patches have to be installed on a regular basis (this also totally invalidates the hackpcweek security test)
- therefore it is obviusly in the interest of the users to find security holes fast
- an open source system reviewed by a large userbase for possible exploits, along with the practice of making such exploits and the countermeasures known, thus provides a good instrument to enhance security.
- on the contrary obscure applications can result in security holes known to a select few illmeaning individuals (while a patch for this exploit exists i understand that it is not known how exactly this exploit works.)
- also obscurity results in users/administrators lacking necessary knowledge about the system, in contrast to a well documented system where security holes can often be patched temporarily by simply turning off the exploited component
- furthermore an open source system makes it nearly impossible for illmeaning programmers to install backdoors for later exploits
In short: for well documented open source software you can expect a higher level of security due to better educated users and quick responses to exploits. Thus exploits will have a much smaller time window in which they work.
An other main issue here is the widespread distribution of windows (complete with IE), making it an ideal target for exploits. It is a very old rule, that heterogeneuos environments are generally more robust and thus healthier.
I wonder if people are really not concerned about where their politicians are funded from, meaning that the news of this funding hitting the press bigtime at the right moment could hurt microsofts case more than benefit it. While judges won't openly admit to consider the public opinion, they probably don't ignore it completely, especially if a too generous ruling could make themselves look dubious.