This is the security through obscurity vs. dull disclosure agument applied to the legal arena. It does not necessarily follow, I'll grant, that what works in software works in law, but in this case I can't see why not.
If SCO had gone to court straight away they might have stolen the prize while the open source community was off-guard. I think our chances get stronger every day.
Firstly this gives us a way around the SCO NDA bullshit. So far the only way to disprove their case has been to look at the code, after which the NDA stops you from telling anyone. This lovely piece of work sidesteps that nicely. Furthermore, it opens a whole load of possibilties.
It gives software houses a way of publishing commercial code for copyright purposes. If you claim copyright on code, you can publish the MD5 shred sigs for the code. No one can rip you off, but you can enforce your rights in a court.
Even better - no one now has an excuse for not publishing. That means that we can make sure the kernel never comes within spitting distance of anyone else's property again. And if it does - well they should have published.
Now if SCO aren't willing to publish their MD5 shreds, then that can only be because they have no case. In which case - game over!
On the other hand, if they do, the world at large can then go through their published shreds and see exactly whose code SCO have been ripping off. Given the likely origins of those samples they exhibited a while back, I'd say that's likely to be quite a bit.
This looks like the best news for the war against everyone's favourite Stupidly Corrupt Organisation since the whole mess kicked off.
What we need is to take this debate to an area where it can be seen by the Money. Anyone out there have any hints?
I don't just mean posting on the business pages (though some of that might help) but more "how do we explain things there without getting instantly dismissed as reality-challenged-propellor-heads>"
How come if you called anyone else and said "I want to purchase a license for this software" They would jump on it and get your CC# when all SCO is doing is going on and on about lawsuits? This has to be a joke.
Well yeah. Look: I hereby declare that I and I alone own the sole and exclusive right to Feet. You better buy a *ahem* run-time licence off me right now or I will personally sue each and every one of you into oblivion.
OK guys - what crime did I just commit? Fraud? Extortion? Attempting to obtain money under false pretenses? I'm damn sure that'd be illegal behaviour. It would if I did it anyway. Maybe if I was publically traded it'd be another matter.
Point is, I rather suspect that it'd be just as illegal for SCO to do it - especially since their claim to Linux is only marginally stronger than my claim to Feet(tm). But as long as they only talk about it there's no evidence for anyone to base a case around. So there'll be no sales.
It's just more FUD. And possibly, as someone else pointed out, a ploy to get future victims to identify themselves. But mainly FUD I think.
On the othger hand, go to any SF section in a bookshop and you'll see about a zillion franchise books: Dr Who, Star Wars, Star Trek...
the problem seems to be that no one is willing to invest in an author that doesn't have a ready-made audience. That means either a well established author, usually doing sequels of ancient but well loved ideas, or else newbies doings hackwork for corporate properties.
It's nto a lack of talent - it's just getting anything remotely original published
You say that as though you approve. No, I'll rephrase that - you way that as though capitalism excuses any sort of immoral behavior. I beg to differ.
The trouble is, to my mind, that capitalism has become so srongly identified with the US that any criticism of it is seen as an attack on Armerica This harks back to the cold war which was portrayed as a war of capitalism vs communism.
Personally, I'd dispute that characterisation. I see the Cold War as being one of Democracy vs Totalitarianims. There seems to be wide spread misconception that Democracy == Capitalism and vice versa.
Again, I beg to differ.
If we define capitalism as the parent post does, then it is intrinsically anti-democratic. The best way to ensure market dominance is to make competition illegal and purchase of your product compulsory. Between DMCA, palladium and annual licence renewal, this is not a million miles from microsoft's current strategy. The best way to ensure these laws get passed is to ensure that you control the legislative process. To this end, "democracy" becomes an impediment to be quiely done away with. Which would sooner have Capitalism or Democracy? Because as things stand you won't be able to have both for much longer.
Still think ubridled capitalism is a good thing? Then here's a businss model for you. Get a low skill factory. Hire some thugs with guns. Have them round up a couple of hundred people and work them till they die. When you run short of workers go round up some more. There's lots of them out there.
If capitalism is it's own justification, and if any means are moral in pursuit of profit, then the scenario above is acceptable behavior. And lest I be accused of constructing a straw man here - that's not too far from the tactics some factory owners used in England duing the early years of the industrial revolution. Workers lived in tied cottages, worked 16 hour shifts, and were requiered to eat from the factory canteen at hugely inflated prices. In some cases it litterally wasn't possible to live on the wage provided given that you had to by food and clothing at the factory prices. Eventually people decided that getting ahead at any price was not entirely good.
I'm not arguing against small business here. I'm not arguing about your right to turn a profit on a good idea. I am arguing against a mindset that applauds when Little Willy Microsoft decides he wants all the toys in his playpen and charges you money just for looking at them.
Just imagine the scene, six months hence. In the face of massive apathy from the geek community, SCO have just been awarded full rights to Linux and a patent on Open Source itself. When geekdom rises to protest, Darl McBride says "You had plenty of chance to present your arguments at the proper time..."
No - I'm going to keep talking about, if its all the same to you. If you find the articles tedious, might I direct you to the wide range of none-SCO artlicles carried by slashdot, even in thses troubled times.
[ A patent on the Open Source Development model?
Now that is scary! ]
As I understand it, the contents of the document will be encrypted with the key stored on a server somewhere.
That means they could fully publish the format and still lock out OOo and the rest, because they MS servers would willfully interpret non-MS apps attempting to contact them as hacking attempts and
refuse to supply the decryption key.
And under the wonderful terms of the DMCA, any attempt to make your office app protocol compatible with the keyserver will count as reverse engineering.
Not only does Little Willy get to jail people up for trying to compete with him, but he can also spit in the face of the antitrust settlement without breaking the law.
Which side of "breaking their kneecaps" does it fall on?
Tcha! Typical bloody slashdotter, always depending on somebody else to do the hard work. This is what you do:
Select two groups of six random spammers each.
Subject Group A to a stern lecture on the ethics of email and general nettiquette.
Break Group B's kneecaps.
Report back with your findings.
Defining a group C and shooting them would, while adding valuable data to the experiment, have some unfortuate legal ramifications. Also it makes it harder for the test subjects to fill in the post experiment feedback questionaire (emailed, of course).
Lastly bear in mind that six really isn't a very large sample for serious research, so you might consider upping the size ofthe test groups. Unless you want others to have to repeat the experiment...
Please Note
The Bulk Club does not promote any portion of this site via bulk email period. It is against our hosting providers terms of service to do so and we will not tolerate anyone who abuses these rules on our web site
Does anyone else read this as "do not spam this list or else?"
So you're saying because a handful of companies are doing bad things and snooping secrataries break the rules and could save the day we shouldn't implement this feature? There's tons of perfectly legitimate uses for this technology and anyone who doesn't like it can go use OO or just ignore the feature.
I think the point is more that the rules of evidence seem to be somewhat lacking in the face of such a syatem. Granted, once an investigation is underway a court can order a company to produce all releveant docuemnts. The trouble is that some evidence is gnerally needed before an official investigation may be begun. Generally this means written evidence, which may be hard to come by if all relevant docs are automatically encrypted.
So it's not about whether "we" should or should implement this feature - its about how it will be used and what mechanisms will need to be defined to provide a check for possible corporate malfeasance. Lord knows its hard enough to pin anything on a big corp as it is, even if, like Enron, they've been caught red handed. It's a little scary to think of how much harder it might become under such a scenario, and personally, I'd just as seen someone was thinking about the issue before the first case comes to trial. Someone who isn't a corporate lawyer in charge of cover-ups, that is.
Besides, Kenneth Lay didn't have a clue what was going on in Enron (or so his PR firm says) - what makes you think he'd be smart enough to use this feature?
Because a lot of people don't believe he's being entirely honest when he says that. And we think if he's smart enough to use a shredder, he's probably smart enough to use the encryption feature. I mean if there's one thing MS do well it's idiot-friendly interfaces... It'll probably ship on-by-default. In fact, if the intention is to break backwards compatibilty (again!) and force upgrades then it'll probably be not only on but mandatory.
The article cites a news.com
storycalling for software developers to be liable for damage caused by their products. All very laudable and hight time it happened, but...
One of the ideas behind the SCO suit, as explained on Slashdot (admittedly not always a solid source and IANAL) was that if major damages were awarded against the linux communiy then the rights to the system would be transferred in lieu of dammages, since linux has no financial existence.
If so, that makes the hateful "absolutely no warranty" clause one of the things that makes the GPL practical!
Consider: MegaCorp X puts in linux in a major distribution. Something goes wrong. Linux gets blamed. MegaCorp X says "owned!"
For the paranoia minded, a developer could even be suborned to insert the fatal bug - it's not too far from some of the SCO scenarios.
The Free Software movement needs to think about this one carefully.
Umm...? A quick look at banned books reveals their number two item as Children of the Matrix by David Icke.
"The reptilian-Illuminati know that the balanced fusion of male and female energy create a third and immensely powerful force and this is the real foundation of their obsession with the "trinity".
Banned and Controversial books it says... Did the Reptillian Illuminati try to ban this gobbler, or is stupidity suddenly controversial?
Up until the latest release, which I believe uses ssh, the entire protocol uses plain text. How much reverse engineering does that take for heaven's sake?
it's not like it would have been difficult to use a binary format from the start. They made it easy to reverse engineer. They wanted people using the network.
This was no nicer of them than it was nice when they decided to "give away" internet explorer with windows. That move was aimed at killing off Netscape. This particular MS freebie has been intended to freeze out yahoo, aol, icq and the rest.
The make it free and allow 3rd party clients so they can get the user base. Now they have that user base, its time to start freezing out the free clients. When that's done, there'll only be on free messenger program for MSN. How long do yur suppose the pay clients will last after that? Espcially once MS starts messing about with the protocol to bugger them up.
And when the majority of people use MSN running the MS client - that's when they start charging for it.
Hmmm? I assumed the/. readership would eb familiar enough with the background issues.
How about the one that amazon.com took out (no 5,960,411) " Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network"
You can get the details from
gnu.org
Then there's IBM's patent on the ubiquitous progress bar. I found the datails here
You are quite correct. Patent law is designed to protect implementations and not ideas. However, that is not how it is being used, which in turn is one reason why so many people are getting het up over this issue.
The issue here is patents are being applied to abstract _ideas_ with no instantiation whatsoever. I've been trying to think of a good way of illustrating this.
So, here's a game for you: Get some friends together, 6 or 8 iof you perhaps and all start talking. The first one to say a word gets to hold the patent on that word. Anyone else using it in the conversation has to give him a penny.
See how long the conversation lasts. For added realism, allow players to charge for using thing referred to by the word. So saying blue lets you charge a royaly to anyone in a blue sweater.
Bonus marks for the first player to say "oxygen".
Coming Soon: More Of The Same
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yep - and I predict it will continue to do so.
I think SCO have two strategies here. The main payoff is the licence money paid to them by Microsoft. If they want to safeguard they're only reliable source of income, they need to keep the FUD coming. That means slow development, but a constant sense of threat for IT managers thinking of investing in Linux. The second string, of course, is that they manage to distort the facts enough that they get awarded the rights to linux and can start selling it.
Now then, for the first strategy, going to court would be a disaster. They have _no_ case apart from FUD, and as they are rapidly learning, the open-source community are not so naieve or so inept as to let themselves be brushed aside in the legal arena. If it comes to court they'll lose - and that's the end of their income stream.
On the other hand, it it goes to court and they win, and adopt strategy two - then Microsoft crushes them like a bug, takes the rights to linux and embraces and extends it into oblivion. Once again - end of income stream, and end of SCO. Which isn't to say that Darl McBride won't get some sort of reward from Little Willie Microsoft, but it'd be a bad move for SCO, and bad for SCO investors.
Meantime, we have to keep countering the FUD without dropping the ball, image-wise; a tesk that gets harder as time moves on and peoples attention spans start to time out.
Meanwhile, IBM are playing the game cautiously. They may as well - SCO aren't hurting them, but may yet have a trick or two to play. IBM's best strategy is to emulate the mills of the gods and grind "slow, but exceedingly fine".
I take your point, and I know understand that you're not portraying these changes as good things.
All the same, the grandparent post makes an important point. Innocent until proven guilty. Just because the goverment seems to be ignoring that matter doesn't mean we need lose sight of it.
Thre is a principle at stake here. The auithorities may not be honoring it; it may even no longer be enshrined in law. nevertheless the principle remains and remains worth fight for: Innocent until proven guilty!
Infrastructure is what makes a nation go. Taxing infrastructures discourages people from extending them, and encourages asset stripping raids that dismantle said them and leave nothing usable in their wake. (Except for "enhanced shareholder value". Allegedly).
Tax, by all means, the company that supplies the infrastructure but tax it on the profits that is makes. And yes, corporate tax laws are a joke, but the solution to this is to fix the laws so the corps pay tax on their income, not to tax them based on how useful they are being. There are already too many companies that see providing custormer servives as an expensive liability.
Look at some of the stately homes in England. You an see ones with chimneys pulled down, because someone decided to tax chimneys, and then there are the ones with the bricked up windows, because someone decided to tax Windows.
Did Ford send the signal out? No, so they are not directly liable. Did they attempt to correct this problem before it was taken advantage of? Yes.
Is this the eighth model in a row they've released with explosive radios? Yes. Were the replacement cars issued as part of the recall process ecutally non-explosive? errm... not always.
His final statement-- that Red Hat's "decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux--" is chilling in light of the business strategy that SCO has adopted
Chilling my arse!
SCO had no intention of letting linux survive in the first place (and if they did, their masters in Redmond certainly did not). So I hardly see why this latest sample of McBride bombast should furnish any additional cause for concern.
SCO are spreading FUD people - lets not do their work for them!
The new Security Engineering Strategy team will look at security across all Microsoft product lines, with the ultimate goal being that customers will take security for granted in Microsoft products
Not "to sell secure software" you'll notice, but to make customers "take security for granted".
So presumably if the security stinks but everyone assumes the system is secure, they will be satisfied.
Everything I dislike about the company in a nutshell
Slashdot Mirror
If SCO had gone to court straight away they might have stolen the prize while the open source community was off-guard. I think our chances get stronger every day.
It gives software houses a way of publishing commercial code for copyright purposes. If you claim copyright on code, you can publish the MD5 shred sigs for the code. No one can rip you off, but you can enforce your rights in a court.
Even better - no one now has an excuse for not publishing. That means that we can make sure the kernel never comes within spitting distance of anyone else's property again. And if it does - well they should have published.
Now if SCO aren't willing to publish their MD5 shreds, then that can only be because they have no case. In which case - game over!
On the other hand, if they do, the world at large can then go through their published shreds and see exactly whose code SCO have been ripping off. Given the likely origins of those samples they exhibited a while back, I'd say that's likely to be quite a bit.
This looks like the best news for the war against everyone's favourite Stupidly Corrupt Organisation since the whole mess kicked off.
What we need is to take this debate to an area where it can be seen by the Money. Anyone out there have any hints?
I don't just mean posting on the business pages (though some of that might help) but more "how do we explain things there without getting instantly dismissed as reality-challenged-propellor-heads>"
OK guys - what crime did I just commit? Fraud? Extortion? Attempting to obtain money under false pretenses? I'm damn sure that'd be illegal behaviour. It would if I did it anyway. Maybe if I was publically traded it'd be another matter.
Point is, I rather suspect that it'd be just as illegal for SCO to do it - especially since their claim to Linux is only marginally stronger than my claim to Feet(tm). But as long as they only talk about it there's no evidence for anyone to base a case around. So there'll be no sales.
It's just more FUD. And possibly, as someone else pointed out, a ploy to get future victims to identify themselves. But mainly FUD I think.
Neal Stephenson
Peter F Hamilton
There are good SF authors out there,
On the othger hand, go to any SF section in a bookshop and you'll see about a zillion franchise books: Dr Who, Star Wars, Star Trek...
the problem seems to be that no one is willing to invest in an author that doesn't have a ready-made audience. That means either a well established author, usually doing sequels of ancient but well loved ideas, or else newbies doings hackwork for corporate properties.
It's nto a lack of talent - it's just getting anything remotely original published
The trouble is, to my mind, that capitalism has become so srongly identified with the US that any criticism of it is seen as an attack on Armerica This harks back to the cold war which was portrayed as a war of capitalism vs communism.
Personally, I'd dispute that characterisation. I see the Cold War as being one of Democracy vs Totalitarianims. There seems to be wide spread misconception that Democracy == Capitalism and vice versa.
Again, I beg to differ.
If we define capitalism as the parent post does, then it is intrinsically anti-democratic. The best way to ensure market dominance is to make competition illegal and purchase of your product compulsory. Between DMCA, palladium and annual licence renewal, this is not a million miles from microsoft's current strategy. The best way to ensure these laws get passed is to ensure that you control the legislative process. To this end, "democracy" becomes an impediment to be quiely done away with. Which would sooner have Capitalism or Democracy? Because as things stand you won't be able to have both for much longer.
Still think ubridled capitalism is a good thing? Then here's a businss model for you. Get a low skill factory. Hire some thugs with guns. Have them round up a couple of hundred people and work them till they die. When you run short of workers go round up some more. There's lots of them out there.
If capitalism is it's own justification, and if any means are moral in pursuit of profit, then the scenario above is acceptable behavior. And lest I be accused of constructing a straw man here - that's not too far from the tactics some factory owners used in England duing the early years of the industrial revolution. Workers lived in tied cottages, worked 16 hour shifts, and were requiered to eat from the factory canteen at hugely inflated prices. In some cases it litterally wasn't possible to live on the wage provided given that you had to by food and clothing at the factory prices. Eventually people decided that getting ahead at any price was not entirely good.
I'm not arguing against small business here. I'm not arguing about your right to turn a profit on a good idea. I am arguing against a mindset that applauds when Little Willy Microsoft decides he wants all the toys in his playpen and charges you money just for looking at them.
Just imagine the scene, six months hence. In the face of massive apathy from the geek community, SCO have just been awarded full rights to Linux and a patent on Open Source itself. When geekdom rises to protest, Darl McBride says "You had plenty of chance to present your arguments at the proper time..."
No - I'm going to keep talking about, if its all the same to you. If you find the articles tedious, might I direct you to the wide range of none-SCO artlicles carried by slashdot, even in thses troubled times.
[ A patent on the Open Source Development model? Now that is scary! ]
That means they could fully publish the format and still lock out OOo and the rest, because they MS servers would willfully interpret non-MS apps attempting to contact them as hacking attempts and refuse to supply the decryption key.
And under the wonderful terms of the DMCA, any attempt to make your office app protocol compatible with the keyserver will count as reverse engineering.
Not only does Little Willy get to jail people up for trying to compete with him, but he can also spit in the face of the antitrust settlement without breaking the law.
- Select two groups of six random spammers each.
- Subject Group A to a stern lecture on the ethics of email and general nettiquette.
- Break Group B's kneecaps.
- Report back with your findings.
Defining a group C and shooting them would, while adding valuable data to the experiment, have some unfortuate legal ramifications. Also it makes it harder for the test subjects to fill in the post experiment feedback questionaire (emailed, of course).Lastly bear in mind that six really isn't a very large sample for serious research, so you might consider upping the size ofthe test groups. Unless you want others to have to repeat the experiment...
So it's not about whether "we" should or should implement this feature - its about how it will be used and what mechanisms will need to be defined to provide a check for possible corporate malfeasance. Lord knows its hard enough to pin anything on a big corp as it is, even if, like Enron, they've been caught red handed. It's a little scary to think of how much harder it might become under such a scenario, and personally, I'd just as seen someone was thinking about the issue before the first case comes to trial. Someone who isn't a corporate lawyer in charge of cover-ups, that is.
Because a lot of people don't believe he's being entirely honest when he says that. And we think if he's smart enough to use a shredder, he's probably smart enough to use the encryption feature. I mean if there's one thing MS do well it's idiot-friendly interfaces... It'll probably ship on-by-default. In fact, if the intention is to break backwards compatibilty (again!) and force upgrades then it'll probably be not only on but mandatory.One of the ideas behind the SCO suit, as explained on Slashdot (admittedly not always a solid source and IANAL) was that if major damages were awarded against the linux communiy then the rights to the system would be transferred in lieu of dammages, since linux has no financial existence.
If so, that makes the hateful "absolutely no warranty" clause one of the things that makes the GPL practical!
Consider: MegaCorp X puts in linux in a major distribution. Something goes wrong. Linux gets blamed. MegaCorp X says "owned!"
For the paranoia minded, a developer could even be suborned to insert the fatal bug - it's not too far from some of the SCO scenarios.
The Free Software movement needs to think about this one carefully.
it's not like it would have been difficult to use a binary format from the start. They made it easy to reverse engineer. They wanted people using the network.
This was no nicer of them than it was nice when they decided to "give away" internet explorer with windows. That move was aimed at killing off Netscape. This particular MS freebie has been intended to freeze out yahoo, aol, icq and the rest.
The make it free and allow 3rd party clients so they can get the user base. Now they have that user base, its time to start freezing out the free clients. When that's done, there'll only be on free messenger program for MSN. How long do yur suppose the pay clients will last after that? Espcially once MS starts messing about with the protocol to bugger them up.
And when the majority of people use MSN running the MS client - that's when they start charging for it.
"Nice!"
How about the one that amazon.com took out (no 5,960,411) " Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network" You can get the details from gnu.org
Then there's IBM's patent on the ubiquitous progress bar. I found the datails here
You are quite correct. Patent law is designed to protect implementations and not ideas. However, that is not how it is being used, which in turn is one reason why so many people are getting het up over this issue.
So, here's a game for you: Get some friends together, 6 or 8 iof you perhaps and all start talking. The first one to say a word gets to hold the patent on that word. Anyone else using it in the conversation has to give him a penny.
See how long the conversation lasts. For added realism, allow players to charge for using thing referred to by the word. So saying blue lets you charge a royaly to anyone in a blue sweater.
Bonus marks for the first player to say "oxygen".
I think SCO have two strategies here. The main payoff is the licence money paid to them by Microsoft. If they want to safeguard they're only reliable source of income, they need to keep the FUD coming. That means slow development, but a constant sense of threat for IT managers thinking of investing in Linux. The second string, of course, is that they manage to distort the facts enough that they get awarded the rights to linux and can start selling it.
Now then, for the first strategy, going to court would be a disaster. They have _no_ case apart from FUD, and as they are rapidly learning, the open-source community are not so naieve or so inept as to let themselves be brushed aside in the legal arena. If it comes to court they'll lose - and that's the end of their income stream.
On the other hand, it it goes to court and they win, and adopt strategy two - then Microsoft crushes them like a bug, takes the rights to linux and embraces and extends it into oblivion. Once again - end of income stream, and end of SCO. Which isn't to say that Darl McBride won't get some sort of reward from Little Willie Microsoft, but it'd be a bad move for SCO, and bad for SCO investors.
Meantime, we have to keep countering the FUD without dropping the ball, image-wise; a tesk that gets harder as time moves on and peoples attention spans start to time out.
Meanwhile, IBM are playing the game cautiously. They may as well - SCO aren't hurting them, but may yet have a trick or two to play. IBM's best strategy is to emulate the mills of the gods and grind "slow, but exceedingly fine".
Nope, I can see this one might run and run.
All the same, the grandparent post makes an important point. Innocent until proven guilty. Just because the goverment seems to be ignoring that matter doesn't mean we need lose sight of it.
Thre is a principle at stake here. The auithorities may not be honoring it; it may even no longer be enshrined in law. nevertheless the principle remains and remains worth fight for: Innocent until proven guilty!
Odd, I don't remember getting on that soapbox...
At worst they're guilty of being uninformed. I don't think microsoft can adopt that defence with any degree of credibility
Tax, by all means, the company that supplies the infrastructure but tax it on the profits that is makes. And yes, corporate tax laws are a joke, but the solution to this is to fix the laws so the corps pay tax on their income, not to tax them based on how useful they are being. There are already too many companies that see providing custormer servives as an expensive liability.
Look at some of the stately homes in England. You an see ones with chimneys pulled down, because someone decided to tax chimneys, and then there are the ones with the bricked up windows, because someone decided to tax Windows.
Which now I come to think about it...
The situation is a little deeper than that.
Be thankful for the little you get - rumour has it that IBM's SCO bashing operation is about to be outsourced to India
Chilling my arse!
SCO had no intention of letting linux survive in the first place (and if they did, their masters in Redmond certainly did not). So I hardly see why this latest sample of McBride bombast should furnish any additional cause for concern.
SCO are spreading FUD people - lets not do their work for them!
Not "to sell secure software" you'll notice, but to make customers "take security for granted".
So presumably if the security stinks but everyone assumes the system is secure, they will be satisfied.
Everything I dislike about the company in a nutshell