The article explained that an email is "discoverable" because it fits all the legal definitions of a "document", and documents are discoverable. That much I can follow.
Then it went on to say that encryption won't help, because your key can be subpoenaed; but no legal grounds for this were given. If I've committed my key to memory, it certainly doesn't seem to fit any definition of "document" (unless legal definitions are even crazier than I thought possible). So what are the legal grounds for forcing me to reveal something that exists only in my head?
Could someone with some legal expertise comment on this?
As I remember the Co$-vs-the-Net war, $cientology subpoenaed computer files from Grady Ward (who most certainly was not Scamizdat). So he turned over a bunch of files, including PGP-encrypted files, and that was that. He was never even asked for a key, IIRC. The Co$ went on to hire a Special Master who attempted to decrpyt the files, much to the continuing amusement of all observers.
The Co$ notoriously uses every legal means available to get what it wants. So if they didn't even ask for a key, I'd very surprised if there is any legal grounds for doing so at all.
It looks like hamburg.de is a pre-existing portal (I think run by the city - the translation is really bad) and the city has partnered with a private company to actually run it. As part of the deal, the city is going to be putting a lot of its administative functions on the site. Also, it looks like they're trying to get local businesses to move into e-commerce through this thing.
Right. The provider "S-Online Schleswig-Holstein GmbH", which has apparently been newly founded for this purpose (the portal had been run by the state up until now, I think), will be owned and financed by a group of banks and an insurance company. The city will also be part owner in order to be able to influence its decision-making, but is not involved in the financing, except that the city and the private partners will put up a total of DM 2.5 million to pay for development of software to be used in city administration. City employees will also receive free training from the provider for the use of its authoring system.
In addition to providing government services, the platform will also provide commercial content and services. There's something in there about a search engine for the portal for items like "weddings", "free time", etc.
Some of the other posters are quite right that this is going create a difficult situation for private providers, and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to fight it. The two biggest players for private internet access in Germany are AOL and T-Online, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and there is a host of smaller providers (I think the smaller ones are better, personally). At least AOL has already raised objections to Chancellor Schröder's initiative, raised in his speech opening the CeBit, to have internet access in all of the German schools within the next couple of years. They'll probably like this idea even less.
The hamburg.de service may very well be swamped and hence too slow and unreliable, which would give the private providers an opening for competition on the basis of better quality. After all, since the Deutsche Telekom's monopoly was broken a few years ago, most German customers have not gone to the very cheapest telecom providers -- they've been willing to pay a little more for better service. Nevertheless, it's not easy to get someone to pay for a service that they can get elsewhere for nothing.
Also in the current Washington Post, columnist Robert J. Samuelson argues the case for sales taxes on items sold over the net.
He says that the present tax exemption is like a government subsidy for e-commerce businesses, and tends to promote waste, since inefficient e-businesses may still have a lower end price for the consumer. Hence there is an unfair penalty for brick-and-mortar businesses that may be more efficient but have to pay taxes.
Switzerland once had no less than Albert Einstein working in its patent office. While he was there, he came up with the theory of relativity in his spare time!
From now on in, B&N must prove invalidity to a jury by clear and convincing evidence, which is the civil law equivalent of "beyond a reasonable doubt."
"Clear and convincing evidence" is a weaker standard in the courts than "beyond reasonable doubt".
As for Amazon's chances of winning, I hereby volunteer to take the stand and testify to my uses of cookies in Web programming before 1997. I'll give the jury some clear and convincing evidence, all right. They won't be confused. And just about every other programmer I know who was working before 1997 can do the same thing.
Why doesn't Rob and friends put their money where their mouth is? Literally.
Rob, the poster is right about this. You've assured us that Slashdot would remain true to its principles, despite becoming a business. Here's a good opportunity for you to prove it. Breaking off your relationship with Amazon may cost a few dollars, but if Amazon prevails, it may cost you and Andover.net and all of the rest of us a lot more in the long run.
Tim O'Reilly has risked some trouble for his business by taking up a public fight with one of his biggest customers; but it will be worth it for him to stand on principle. Will Slashdot be willing to do the same thing?
Tim makes a very good point that Amazon has profited tremendously from people who have made their technologies freely available, and yet could seriously harm those same people with its patent. Where would Amazon be without HTTP, Apache, Perl, gcc and all the rest?
How could the open-source community retaliate? They probably can't do this, since it just doesn't fit the philosophy, but it's fun to imagine modifying the open source licenses so that they specifically forbid Amazon from using the software. Take your favorite license and consider adding the following article:
None of the provisions of this License apply to Amazon, Inc., or any of its subsidiaries or employees. Neither Amazon, Inc. nor its subsidiaries or employees are granted any rights to the use of any part of the Software. Any use of the Software by Amazon, Inc., its subsidiaries or employees is an act of Software Piracy and shall be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law.
Oh, all right, we can't do that. But it would serve 'em, right, wouldn't it?
These motives would seem sensible if Microsoft were openly discussing the idea of Office for Linux, but they're not. Instead, we're getting rumors. You don't go out and create vaporware, talk up a competitor, or gauge public reaction by quietly hiring a group of developers to work on a product.
As my conspiracy theory has it (and that's all I think it is), M$ didn't hire any group of developers. They're just spreading a rumor that they did; this has the advantage that it costs nothing.
But like I said, this is all purely speculative, based on no evidence at all (although I don't see any evidence to refute it, either). Frankly, I myself don't really believe anything about Office for Linux either way, until there is better evidence than rumors.
Lots of interesting theories around here, so I'll just toss another one out: It could be that M$ isn't doing a damn thing about Office for Linux, but they're spreading rumors (allowing "leaks" to reach the press) that they are.
Why do such a thing? Well...
Maybe some people will hesitate to start using a product like StarOffice, because they'll think it might be worth it to wait for Office/Linux. Indeed, this posture might end making them hesitate to use Linux at all. It would hurt Sun, too.
Maybe they're trying to butter up Linux' reputation as a formidable competitor, to influence the courts' decisions in the anti-trust suit.
Maybe they want to gauge public reaction to such a project. If it's positive, then they might really will give it a whirl.
But you know, everything in this whole thread has the whiff of conspiracy theories. Maybe space aliens have disguised themselves as M$ employees leaking bogus rumors, because, well uh, who the hell knows why those space aliens do what they do? Maybe the Microsofties have been the space aliens all along! We need David Duchovney to find out.
I did not renew my newpaper subscription after it became clear that I get the same news every day, and a day earlier, on the online versions of CNN, the Washington Post, and the Spiegel. Frankly, I'd like these businesses to survive, at least online, and I worry about their ability to continue when people like me no longer buy the paper editions. But I just can't get around the fact that the Internet versions are free and are significantly more timely.
I do buy the paper in situations where I can't get to the Internet, like when I ride the train to work in the morning, and I still enjoy it. Longer, more in-depth reports can make a paper more worthwhile than a collection of articles on the Net.
It's sometimes claimed that books will become obsolete, but I'm sure they won't, because paper probably will always be a much better medium for delivering information than a computer screen with its damnable scroll bar. You can't scribble notes in the margin on your screen; you can't jam your thumb and index finger into two places you want to save; you can't fold it up and stick in your pocket and take it with you to the john. But newspapers will always have the great weakness of being a day behind.
Newspapers may have to become more like magazines to survive -- they'll need to publish longer, more researched articles with more depth than the daily news. These pieces will need more time to develop, hence requiring a weekly or monthly publication schedule rather than daily. But then, weekly and monthly magazines are already there, so the daily paper may really be on its way out.
We mustn't forget, however, that very many people still have no Internet access, and it will last a few years before the Internet is as universal as, say, television. That might keep the papers alive for a while.
When the company was out leveraging it's monopoly power in unfair ways, it wasn't the devs, testers, or program managers fiendishly devising ways to force oems to install windows. All that was carried out at the upper levels by the marketing people without the knowledge of the product teams. [...] It didn't really suprise me to realize this. Pardon my prejudice, but I have a jaded view of the moral character of marketting/sales offices. It seems to me to be an almost unnerringly duplicitous facet of modern business.
I'm inclined to believe this, probably because I have a similarly jaded view of sales and marketing, and positive view of developers.
This raises an amazing thought: If the geeks working for M$ could have their way running the company, it wouldn't be the standards-flouting, gratuitously incompatible, anti-competitive behemoth we know and loathe. They'd take the time to release software that's less bloated, less buggy and standards-compatible. Some of it might even have open source code!
Maybe this is why open source programming strikes so many of us as more ethical: The geeks are running the show, free of markedroids preventing the rest of us from doing it The Right Way.
Since the DOJ is still struggling to decide on a remedy in the anti-trust suit that is not too intrusive and regulatory, and yet solves the problems of anti-competitiveness, here's a suggestion: Fully eliminate M$'s sales department and let the geeks take over. The software industry will be back to normal within months.
The only thing that keeps people on Windows are the applications, and Office is by far the biggest reason.
I don't agree that it's Office the program that keeps people on Windows. Rather, it's the file formats that Office uses (Word doc, Excel, etc.).
Very many conversations I've had with business types who want to defend M$ end with this assertion: "People send me Word.docs all the time and assume that I can read them, so I have to have Word, so I have to have Office, so I have to have Windows; and you're naive if you think that's going to change." It's hard to underestimate how strongly this argument influences the business world. My boss here at the ISP I work for is blessedly clueful and fully understands the evils of M$ and the merits of the Open Source way; and yet he fiercely advocates this position (much to our continuing dismay).
One of M$'s many abuses is the way they make the Office file formats a moving target. They used to keep them secret, in fact, but even if they're published, you never know how they're going to be changed in the next release (you do know that they will be changed). This way they guarantee permanent incompatibility with anyone else's products, and that's why everybody thinks they have to pay for Office.
Thus I don't agree that the software product called Office is all that great. It's exceedingly bloated, filled with features that most users never need. But it produces the files they want.
If a remedy in the anti-trust suit is going to be focused on Office, then it should require M$ to adhere to an open standard on file formats. That's the only way there can be real competition in office software.
I rather doubt that the government will ask for that, though, because the suit was more about bundling Explorer, throttling Netscape, and all of the exclusionary agreements. Office was mentioned in the suit, but it was not an important part of it.
... yes, there really is a connection between this topic and the distributed DoS attacks that made the news last week.
As David Dittrich pointed out in his interview answers, attacks such as these are possible primarily because so many machines on the Internet are poorly secured. And that is mainly because there just aren't enough skilled sysadmins out there with the ability to do it right.
Part of the problem, to be sure, are the suits who don't put enough attention and resources into hiring and training good sysadmins. But part of the problem is that there just aren't enough qualified people to start with. And there's the connection, because as Dr. Borg (what a name!) pointed out in the article, if women had been getting involved in technology as much as men have over the past decade or so, today's labor shortage certainly wouldn't be so bad (and might not have existed at all).
Frankly, I think that a lot of the guys (I repeat: guys) in the thread so far who have been downplaying this problem are asinine in principle. The present inequality in a branch of the economy that's become so important should concern everyone; and it's easy for you to ignore it if you're in the majority.
But even if you look at it on purely pragmatic grounds, the dearth of women in technology is still a problem crying out for a solution, because the workforce shortage is a problem, and we're leaving about 50% of the population essentially out of the picture. The labor shortage may be getting us a lot of job security and good pay, but we're also getting exceedingly long work weeks, and worst of all, too many critical tasks are being assigned to too few people. The result is that computer security, among other things, falls by the wayside.
We have to have more skilled people in technology, and that won't happen without more gender equality.
Having said in an earlier post that I like the article, here's two things I disagree with.
For one thing, the claim about a "Killer App" is not terribly persuasive. Perl may not be able to point to an application that is as impressive as Zope, but there is a multitude of Perl software components that have proven themselves as killers -- such as the CGI, DBI and LWP modules and Apache's mod_perl, to name just as a few. A great deal of software running on the Internet constitutes Perl's "killer".
More importantly, I don't at all believe in a distinction between Perl and Python, or for that matter any other language, concerning TMTOWTDI -- as if Python's motto is "There's only one way to do it", or TOOWTDI (pronounced "tooty").
People act as if TMTOWTDI is a special feature of Perl, but I don't buy it. TMTOWTDI is an essential truth about the way computers work, regardless of any programming language. Show me any problem, and I'll show you more than one substantially different Way To Do It, using any language.
TMTOWTDI is often misunderstood as a free-for-all, a ticket to do whatever you want. Not so. The motto should always be continued with, "... But Some Ways Are Sometimes Better Than Others". Some solutions to a problem will run very fast. Others won't run as fast, but will use less memory or I/O. Yet other Ways To Do It lend themselves to being written in more easily maintainable code. If you read the Camel and other Perl docs carefully, you'll notice that the authors are always at pains to make these differences clear.
Suppose your program needs the value of a complex function. You could compute the function on the fly, which may take some time but saves space. Or you may pre-compute it for a large number of values, which will take up a lot more space but will run much more quickly. Your choice of a solution will probably not be influenced at all by the programming language you've chosen to use, but rather by the resources you have available.
I don't know Python, but I flat-out disbelieve that it allows only one way to solve any particular problem.
What's going on around here? A Perl vs. Python thread on Slashdot, and instead of a flamewar, there's a reasonable and even pleasant discussion going on? (At least when I browse at +2.) What's the world coming to?
Well, all right then, I'll try to write a level-headed post as well. This article is very well done, a welcome departure from the usual vitriol. I strongly believe that not only this particular religious conflict, but also many of the other ones such as Mac vs. Windows and Linux vs. BSD and vi vs. emacs, are based much more in habit than in reason. We like what we've learned to use well; everything else seems unintuitive and vaguley threatening.
I myself am very much steeped in Perl programming and simply have not yet gotten around to learning Python, just a lot of other people. I've had a few episodes in the past when I've been much more defensive about Perl than was appropriate. If someone else wants to get all bent out of shape about a programming language, then they have a problem I don't need to compound. See how hard I'm working on bettering myself?:-)
I think the anti-trust suit may have finally stripped M$ of its aura of invincibility in the public eye. For a long time, Joe Random Public thought that the world's largest software company must be just the greatest, particulary if J.R.P. never had the opportunity to see software from any other company. This is still true of a lot of people today, but I think that the general public is finally catching on to the astonishing idea that M$ may actually suck.
Many of those in charge of procurement in the military may have known this for a long time. But it may have only recently become possible for someone like this guy to say so in public.
So, what Linux groupware products can we turn the Navy on to?
Ever since I started reading Slashdot, I've been bewildered at these people who freak out about Jon Katz. To be sure, anyone has a right to dislike or disagree with any of his articles. But when this happens to normal people, they post a critical message and get on with their lives. Not so with Katz Kooks, however. It's not enough to just register dissent; they must, in the grand tradition of net.kookery, gush forth a river of hatred with all the of energy in their soul.
Now I think I've got it. Here's my theory: these people are nuts. They are stark raving mad. I don't mean that as a figure of speech; I mean that they are suffering from a mental health disorder and are need of professional help.
Are they going to be offended by my theory? Boy, do I hope so, because I fancy the idea that my mere words have made their blood boil with apoplectic rage. What power I have, over complete strangers! In fact, maybe Jon has had a similar notion and has decided to provoke the Kooks just for the sheer sport of it. It sure seems easy to pull their the string, just type a few lines, hit "Submit" and watch them cavort in madness. It's like shooting at their feet and commanding them to dance. Now DANCE, ye Kooks!
The post was OK, the apology isn't
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 3
Uh, Roblimo, there was nothing wrong with posting this item. Others may have been familiar with these issues, but I wasn't, and now I know a little more having read about it. I can't imagine that I'm the only one.
Even if it turns out that the issues raised by someone somewhere are unfounded, and Slashdot posters are able to explain why, then the post and ensuing discussion have been worthwhile. It certainly isn't obvious to everyone at first blush that some argument or other doesn't hold water, and if nothing else, Slashdot can serve to make that apparent to a broad audience. Certainly, there's nothing obvious about the arcana of software licensing and corporate law. There is a genuine need for a forum like Slashdot to discuss these issues, where people with well-qualified opinions about this kind of subject can inform the rest of us.
Those of you who are flaming Slashdot in general and Roblimo in particular should bear in mind that what's self-evident to you may be completely mysterious to others. It takes a certain kind of humility and patience to understand that, qualities that some of you apparently don't have.
But, Roblimo, this whiny apology just makes the whole thing worse. Maybe you should consider a vacation from Slashdot, you're taking this far too personally.
To support the argument that this is not just a Microsoft problem, let me point out that the security measures built into Oracle databases are ignored at very many sites I have encountered. The problem is that many administrators do nothing -- and I mean nothing whatsoever -- to change the default state of the database installation. Oracle is a popular choice for e-commerce, and I'm sure that someone, someday, will manage to steal data because of this.
Over the past year or so I have done DBA consultancy for some of our customers, going into sites and helping with their database administration. Very often, I find that the default passwords of privileged database users have never been changed. Try it sometime: the user system, who can read and change any data in the database, has the default password manager, and the user sys, who can start up and shut down the database, has the default password change_on_install. (Some people apparently don't notice that the latter password is a hint.)
Oracle installs a default "listener" that is open on port 1521. Many e-commerce sites have their web and DB servers on the same machine, and don't need any external TCP/IP connections to the database. Even those that do can be set up so that connections are only permitted from a limited number of IP addresses. But this, too, is almost never done. So there's your opening: get an Oracle client to connect to port 1521 on your target machine, log in as system/manager, and in many cases you'll own the whole database.
Another thing: many people routinely do their Oracle admin work by logging as the "oracle" user, the owner of the Oracle software. Few seem to understand that this user is like root: you don't log in under that name unless you absolutely have to, because any mistake you make can be disastrous. What you do is make users with DBA responsibilities members of the group "dba", so they can run the admin software but can't delete anything critical. In fact, you need to be "oracle" far less often than you need to be root -- after installation, you should never log in as "oracle" again. And yet there are admins who work as "oracle" all day long. Even worse: it seems that the most common password chosen for the "oracle" user is, you guessed it, "oracle"!
We could accuse the administrators of laziness and cluelessness. But the real blame lies with management, who want to set up a cheap e-commerce site without paying the price for DBA's who know what they're doing, or for the training that their current admins need. Many of the admins I've worked with have told me that the boss stuck the Oracle CD's in their hand one day and told them to go run a database. That's a surefire formula for an insecure site.
I'm not entirely sure why, but Kerberos is dead in Europe. For secure connections at my ISP in Germany, we use SSH exclusively.
I would guess that it has something to do with license and/or export restrictions, although I frankly don't know what the conditions for using Kerberos are. SSH, on the other hand, was developed in Finland, and at least versions 1.x are free (as in both beer and speech).
Just a side note to say that the premise, namely that lawyers and in particular judges understand technology very poorly, is not necessarily true, and Judge Jackson's findings of fact in the Microsoft case have given us a stunning counterexample to prove it. In the weeks before his decision, I dreaded a clue-free ruling that would give Microsoft ample opportunity to counter-attack, even if it was unfavorable to them. As it turned out, his writing shows a deep understanding of software technology and the software industry that I hadn't dreamed possible. I'll never forget the weekend after the findings were handed down -- it was the first time I ever read a 200-page legal document all the way through, and it made me giddy with joy. I still am. (And to come back around to the topic, I learned a lot about anti-trust law from it.)
I'm still trying to explain to myself how he did it. Does a federal judge have a staff of law clerks to help him with the research and the writing, as Supreme Court justices do? Maybe it wasn't really the judge, but was some nameless clerk who nailed it so well. Or is Judge Jackson especially savvy with respect to technological issues? Or can federal judges in general be trusted to understand this stuff better than I in all my cynicism ever expected?
There are still two groups who consistently cannot buy a clue about technology: the media and politicians. Rajiv Chandrasekharan (sp?) of the Washington Post is the only media writer I trust to get it right, and I can't think of a single politician (excluding activists from groups like the EFF) who has impressed me with any understanding of technology. What we have to do to get these people to Get It? Judge Jackson has shown that we don't have to set our standards so low, after all.
Judge Jackson. His ruling(s) will have the most lasting effect.
Me too! It may have passed with little notice so far, but Judge Jackson's decision may have more long-lasting impact on the future of the computer industry and the economy in general than anything else that has happened this year.
And after months of dread that the Judge would be wholly clueless, he showed an understanding of the software business and of Microsoft's shenanigans that stunned me.
To: info@amazon.com, feedback@amazon.com, suggestions@amazon.com,webmaster@amazon.com, webmaster@amazon.de Subject: Joining the boycott against Amazon Cc: amazon@gnu.org
Dear Madam or Sir,
As you probably know, Richard Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation, has called for a boycott against Amazon because of its patent claim on so-called "One-Click" technology and its lawsuits to enforce the claim.
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/13652.html
Although I have been a customer of Amazon in the past, I am joining the boycott. As a software engineer at an Internet service provider, I am fully aware of the lack of merit in Amazon's patent assertions -- and please don't insult me by claiming otherwise. The US Patent Office has done a dreadful disservice in granting almost every vacuous claim concerning software technology, but that does not excuse Amazon for this blatantly dishonest action.
If you drop the patent claims, I will respond supportively by buying books from Amazon. But until then, I will do no business with you.
The Co$ has a history of attempting to disrupt online discussions about them, if they are likely to be critical of the "Church". The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology is legendary for this.
So I wonder if this loon with the "Natalie Portman" posts has been hatted to disrupt Slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
The article explained that an email is "discoverable" because it fits all the legal definitions of a "document", and documents are discoverable. That much I can follow.
Then it went on to say that encryption won't help, because your key can be subpoenaed; but no legal grounds for this were given. If I've committed my key to memory, it certainly doesn't seem to fit any definition of "document" (unless legal definitions are even crazier than I thought possible). So what are the legal grounds for forcing me to reveal something that exists only in my head?
Could someone with some legal expertise comment on this?
As I remember the Co$-vs-the-Net war, $cientology subpoenaed computer files from Grady Ward (who most certainly was not Scamizdat). So he turned over a bunch of files, including PGP-encrypted files, and that was that. He was never even asked for a key, IIRC. The Co$ went on to hire a Special Master who attempted to decrpyt the files, much to the continuing amusement of all observers.
The Co$ notoriously uses every legal means available to get what it wants. So if they didn't even ask for a key, I'd very surprised if there is any legal grounds for doing so at all.
It looks like hamburg.de is a pre-existing portal (I think run by the city - the translation is really bad) and the city has partnered with a private company to actually run it. As part of the deal, the city is going to be putting a lot of its administative functions on the site. Also, it looks like they're trying to get local businesses to move into e-commerce through this thing.
Right. The provider "S-Online Schleswig-Holstein GmbH", which has apparently been newly founded for this purpose (the portal had been run by the state up until now, I think), will be owned and financed by a group of banks and an insurance company. The city will also be part owner in order to be able to influence its decision-making, but is not involved in the financing, except that the city and the private partners will put up a total of DM 2.5 million to pay for development of software to be used in city administration. City employees will also receive free training from the provider for the use of its authoring system.
In addition to providing government services, the platform will also provide commercial content and services. There's something in there about a search engine for the portal for items like "weddings", "free time", etc.
Some of the other posters are quite right that this is going create a difficult situation for private providers, and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to fight it. The two biggest players for private internet access in Germany are AOL and T-Online, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, and there is a host of smaller providers (I think the smaller ones are better, personally). At least AOL has already raised objections to Chancellor Schröder's initiative, raised in his speech opening the CeBit, to have internet access in all of the German schools within the next couple of years. They'll probably like this idea even less.
The hamburg.de service may very well be swamped and hence too slow and unreliable, which would give the private providers an opening for competition on the basis of better quality. After all, since the Deutsche Telekom's monopoly was broken a few years ago, most German customers have not gone to the very cheapest telecom providers -- they've been willing to pay a little more for better service. Nevertheless, it's not easy to get someone to pay for a service that they can get elsewhere for nothing.
Also in the current Washington Post, columnist Robert J. Samuelson argues the case for sales taxes on items sold over the net.
He says that the present tax exemption is like a government subsidy for e-commerce businesses, and tends to promote waste, since inefficient e-businesses may still have a lower end price for the consumer. Hence there is an unfair penalty for brick-and-mortar businesses that may be more efficient but have to pay taxes.
Switzerland once had no less than Albert Einstein working in its patent office. While he was there, he came up with the theory of relativity in his spare time!
What have we come to?
From now on in, B&N must prove invalidity to a jury by clear and convincing evidence, which is the civil law equivalent of "beyond a reasonable doubt."
"Clear and convincing evidence" is a weaker standard in the courts than "beyond reasonable doubt".
As for Amazon's chances of winning, I hereby volunteer to take the stand and testify to my uses of cookies in Web programming before 1997. I'll give the jury some clear and convincing evidence, all right. They won't be confused. And just about every other programmer I know who was working before 1997 can do the same thing.
Amazon's patent assertions are worthless.
Why doesn't Rob and friends put their money where their mouth is? Literally.
Rob, the poster is right about this. You've assured us that Slashdot would remain true to its principles, despite becoming a business. Here's a good opportunity for you to prove it. Breaking off your relationship with Amazon may cost a few dollars, but if Amazon prevails, it may cost you and Andover.net and all of the rest of us a lot more in the long run.
Tim O'Reilly has risked some trouble for his business by taking up a public fight with one of his biggest customers; but it will be worth it for him to stand on principle. Will Slashdot be willing to do the same thing?
How could the open-source community retaliate? They probably can't do this, since it just doesn't fit the philosophy, but it's fun to imagine modifying the open source licenses so that they specifically forbid Amazon from using the software. Take your favorite license and consider adding the following article:
Oh, all right, we can't do that. But it would serve 'em, right, wouldn't it?
As my conspiracy theory has it (and that's all I think it is), M$ didn't hire any group of developers. They're just spreading a rumor that they did; this has the advantage that it costs nothing.
But like I said, this is all purely speculative, based on no evidence at all (although I don't see any evidence to refute it, either). Frankly, I myself don't really believe anything about Office for Linux either way, until there is better evidence than rumors.
Why do such a thing? Well
But you know, everything in this whole thread has the whiff of conspiracy theories. Maybe space aliens have disguised themselves as M$ employees leaking bogus rumors, because, well uh, who the hell knows why those space aliens do what they do? Maybe the Microsofties have been the space aliens all along! We need David Duchovney to find out.
Keep up the good work, you guys.
Looking forward to the cool million.
I did not renew my newpaper subscription after it became clear that I get the same news every day, and a day earlier, on the online versions of CNN, the Washington Post, and the Spiegel. Frankly, I'd like these businesses to survive, at least online, and I worry about their ability to continue when people like me no longer buy the paper editions. But I just can't get around the fact that the Internet versions are free and are significantly more timely.
I do buy the paper in situations where I can't get to the Internet, like when I ride the train to work in the morning, and I still enjoy it. Longer, more in-depth reports can make a paper more worthwhile than a collection of articles on the Net.
It's sometimes claimed that books will become obsolete, but I'm sure they won't, because paper probably will always be a much better medium for delivering information than a computer screen with its damnable scroll bar. You can't scribble notes in the margin on your screen; you can't jam your thumb and index finger into two places you want to save; you can't fold it up and stick in your pocket and take it with you to the john. But newspapers will always have the great weakness of being a day behind.
Newspapers may have to become more like magazines to survive -- they'll need to publish longer, more researched articles with more depth than the daily news. These pieces will need more time to develop, hence requiring a weekly or monthly publication schedule rather than daily. But then, weekly and monthly magazines are already there, so the daily paper may really be on its way out.
We mustn't forget, however, that very many people still have no Internet access, and it will last a few years before the Internet is as universal as, say, television. That might keep the papers alive for a while.
When the company was out leveraging it's monopoly power in unfair ways, it wasn't the devs, testers, or program managers fiendishly devising ways to force oems to install windows. All that was carried out at the upper levels by the marketing people without the knowledge of the product teams. [...] It didn't really suprise me to realize this. Pardon my prejudice, but I have a jaded view of the moral character of marketting/sales offices. It seems to me to be an almost unnerringly duplicitous facet of modern business.
I'm inclined to believe this, probably because I have a similarly jaded view of sales and marketing, and positive view of developers.
This raises an amazing thought: If the geeks working for M$ could have their way running the company, it wouldn't be the standards-flouting, gratuitously incompatible, anti-competitive behemoth we know and loathe. They'd take the time to release software that's less bloated, less buggy and standards-compatible. Some of it might even have open source code!
Maybe this is why open source programming strikes so many of us as more ethical: The geeks are running the show, free of markedroids preventing the rest of us from doing it The Right Way.
Since the DOJ is still struggling to decide on a remedy in the anti-trust suit that is not too intrusive and regulatory, and yet solves the problems of anti-competitiveness, here's a suggestion: Fully eliminate M$'s sales department and let the geeks take over. The software industry will be back to normal within months.
The only thing that keeps people on Windows are the applications, and Office is by far the biggest reason.
.docs all the time and assume that I can read them, so I have to have Word, so I have to have Office, so I have to have Windows; and you're naive if you think that's going to change." It's hard to underestimate how strongly this argument influences the business world. My boss here at the ISP I work for is blessedly clueful and fully understands the evils of M$ and the merits of the Open Source way; and yet he fiercely advocates this position (much to our continuing dismay).
I don't agree that it's Office the program that keeps people on Windows. Rather, it's the file formats that Office uses (Word doc, Excel, etc.).
Very many conversations I've had with business types who want to defend M$ end with this assertion: "People send me Word
One of M$'s many abuses is the way they make the Office file formats a moving target. They used to keep them secret, in fact, but even if they're published, you never know how they're going to be changed in the next release (you do know that they will be changed). This way they guarantee permanent incompatibility with anyone else's products, and that's why everybody thinks they have to pay for Office.
Thus I don't agree that the software product called Office is all that great. It's exceedingly bloated, filled with features that most users never need. But it produces the files they want.
If a remedy in the anti-trust suit is going to be focused on Office, then it should require M$ to adhere to an open standard on file formats. That's the only way there can be real competition in office software.
I rather doubt that the government will ask for that, though, because the suit was more about bundling Explorer, throttling Netscape, and all of the exclusionary agreements. Office was mentioned in the suit, but it was not an important part of it.
... yes, there really is a connection between this topic and the distributed DoS attacks that made the news last week.
As David Dittrich pointed out in his interview answers, attacks such as these are possible primarily because so many machines on the Internet are poorly secured. And that is mainly because there just aren't enough skilled sysadmins out there with the ability to do it right.
Part of the problem, to be sure, are the suits who don't put enough attention and resources into hiring and training good sysadmins. But part of the problem is that there just aren't enough qualified people to start with. And there's the connection, because as Dr. Borg (what a name!) pointed out in the article, if women had been getting involved in technology as much as men have over the past decade or so, today's labor shortage certainly wouldn't be so bad (and might not have existed at all).
Frankly, I think that a lot of the guys (I repeat: guys) in the thread so far who have been downplaying this problem are asinine in principle. The present inequality in a branch of the economy that's become so important should concern everyone; and it's easy for you to ignore it if you're in the majority.
But even if you look at it on purely pragmatic grounds, the dearth of women in technology is still a problem crying out for a solution, because the workforce shortage is a problem, and we're leaving about 50% of the population essentially out of the picture. The labor shortage may be getting us a lot of job security and good pay, but we're also getting exceedingly long work weeks, and worst of all, too many critical tasks are being assigned to too few people. The result is that computer security, among other things, falls by the wayside.
We have to have more skilled people in technology, and that won't happen without more gender equality.
Having said in an earlier post that I like the article, here's two things I disagree with.
For one thing, the claim about a "Killer App" is not terribly persuasive. Perl may not be able to point to an application that is as impressive as Zope, but there is a multitude of Perl software components that have proven themselves as killers -- such as the CGI, DBI and LWP modules and Apache's mod_perl, to name just as a few. A great deal of software running on the Internet constitutes Perl's "killer".
More importantly, I don't at all believe in a distinction between Perl and Python, or for that matter any other language, concerning TMTOWTDI -- as if Python's motto is "There's only one way to do it", or TOOWTDI (pronounced "tooty").
People act as if TMTOWTDI is a special feature of Perl, but I don't buy it. TMTOWTDI is an essential truth about the way computers work, regardless of any programming language. Show me any problem, and I'll show you more than one substantially different Way To Do It, using any language.
TMTOWTDI is often misunderstood as a free-for-all, a ticket to do whatever you want. Not so. The motto should always be continued with, "... But Some Ways Are Sometimes Better Than Others". Some solutions to a problem will run very fast. Others won't run as fast, but will use less memory or I/O. Yet other Ways To Do It lend themselves to being written in more easily maintainable code. If you read the Camel and other Perl docs carefully, you'll notice that the authors are always at pains to make these differences clear.
Suppose your program needs the value of a complex function. You could compute the function on the fly, which may take some time but saves space. Or you may pre-compute it for a large number of values, which will take up a lot more space but will run much more quickly. Your choice of a solution will probably not be influenced at all by the programming language you've chosen to use, but rather by the resources you have available.
I don't know Python, but I flat-out disbelieve that it allows only one way to solve any particular problem.
What's going on around here? A Perl vs. Python thread on Slashdot, and instead of a flamewar, there's a reasonable and even pleasant discussion going on? (At least when I browse at +2.) What's the world coming to?
:-)
Well, all right then, I'll try to write a level-headed post as well. This article is very well done, a welcome departure from the usual vitriol. I strongly believe that not only this particular religious conflict, but also many of the other ones such as Mac vs. Windows and Linux vs. BSD and vi vs. emacs, are based much more in habit than in reason. We like what we've learned to use well; everything else seems unintuitive and vaguley threatening.
I myself am very much steeped in Perl programming and simply have not yet gotten around to learning Python, just a lot of other people. I've had a few episodes in the past when I've been much more defensive about Perl than was appropriate. If someone else wants to get all bent out of shape about a programming language, then they have a problem I don't need to compound. See how hard I'm working on bettering myself?
I think the anti-trust suit may have finally stripped M$ of its aura of invincibility in the public eye. For a long time, Joe Random Public thought that the world's largest software company must be just the greatest, particulary if J.R.P. never had the opportunity to see software from any other company. This is still true of a lot of people today, but I think that the general public is finally catching on to the astonishing idea that M$ may actually suck.
Many of those in charge of procurement in the military may have known this for a long time. But it may have only recently become possible for someone like this guy to say so in public.
So, what Linux groupware products can we turn the Navy on to?
Ever since I started reading Slashdot, I've been bewildered at these people who freak out about Jon Katz. To be sure, anyone has a right to dislike or disagree with any of his articles. But when this happens to normal people, they post a critical message and get on with their lives. Not so with Katz Kooks, however. It's not enough to just register dissent; they must, in the grand tradition of net.kookery, gush forth a river of hatred with all the of energy in their soul.
Now I think I've got it. Here's my theory: these people are nuts. They are stark raving mad. I don't mean that as a figure of speech; I mean that they are suffering from a mental health disorder and are need of professional help.
Are they going to be offended by my theory? Boy, do I hope so, because I fancy the idea that my mere words have made their blood boil with apoplectic rage. What power I have, over complete strangers! In fact, maybe Jon has had a similar notion and has decided to provoke the Kooks just for the sheer sport of it. It sure seems easy to pull their the string, just type a few lines, hit "Submit" and watch them cavort in madness. It's like shooting at their feet and commanding them to dance. Now DANCE, ye Kooks!
Uh, Roblimo, there was nothing wrong with posting this item. Others may have been familiar with these issues, but I wasn't, and now I know a little more having read about it. I can't imagine that I'm the only one.
Even if it turns out that the issues raised by someone somewhere are unfounded, and Slashdot posters are able to explain why, then the post and ensuing discussion have been worthwhile. It certainly isn't obvious to everyone at first blush that some argument or other doesn't hold water, and if nothing else, Slashdot can serve to make that apparent to a broad audience. Certainly, there's nothing obvious about the arcana of software licensing and corporate law. There is a genuine need for a forum like Slashdot to discuss these issues, where people with well-qualified opinions about this kind of subject can inform the rest of us.
Those of you who are flaming Slashdot in general and Roblimo in particular should bear in mind that what's self-evident to you may be completely mysterious to others. It takes a certain kind of humility and patience to understand that, qualities that some of you apparently don't have.
But, Roblimo, this whiny apology just makes the whole thing worse. Maybe you should consider a vacation from Slashdot, you're taking this far too personally.
To support the argument that this is not just a Microsoft problem, let me point out that the security measures built into Oracle databases are ignored at very many sites I have encountered. The problem is that many administrators do nothing -- and I mean nothing whatsoever -- to change the default state of the database installation. Oracle is a popular choice for e-commerce, and I'm sure that someone, someday, will manage to steal data because of this.
Over the past year or so I have done DBA consultancy for some of our customers, going into sites and helping with their database administration. Very often, I find that the default passwords of privileged database users have never been changed. Try it sometime: the user system, who can read and change any data in the database, has the default password manager, and the user sys, who can start up and shut down the database, has the default password change_on_install. (Some people apparently don't notice that the latter password is a hint.)
Oracle installs a default "listener" that is open on port 1521. Many e-commerce sites have their web and DB servers on the same machine, and don't need any external TCP/IP connections to the database. Even those that do can be set up so that connections are only permitted from a limited number of IP addresses. But this, too, is almost never done. So there's your opening: get an Oracle client to connect to port 1521 on your target machine, log in as system/manager, and in many cases you'll own the whole database.
Another thing: many people routinely do their Oracle admin work by logging as the "oracle" user, the owner of the Oracle software. Few seem to understand that this user is like root: you don't log in under that name unless you absolutely have to, because any mistake you make can be disastrous. What you do is make users with DBA responsibilities members of the group "dba", so they can run the admin software but can't delete anything critical. In fact, you need to be "oracle" far less often than you need to be root -- after installation, you should never log in as "oracle" again. And yet there are admins who work as "oracle" all day long. Even worse: it seems that the most common password chosen for the "oracle" user is, you guessed it, "oracle"!
We could accuse the administrators of laziness and cluelessness. But the real blame lies with management, who want to set up a cheap e-commerce site without paying the price for DBA's who know what they're doing, or for the training that their current admins need. Many of the admins I've worked with have told me that the boss stuck the Oracle CD's in their hand one day and told them to go run a database. That's a surefire formula for an insecure site.
I'm not entirely sure why, but Kerberos is dead in Europe. For secure connections at my ISP in Germany, we use SSH exclusively.
I would guess that it has something to do with license and/or export restrictions, although I frankly don't know what the conditions for using Kerberos are. SSH, on the other hand, was developed in Finland, and at least versions 1.x are free (as in both beer and speech).
Just a side note to say that the premise, namely that lawyers and in particular judges understand technology very poorly, is not necessarily true, and Judge Jackson's findings of fact in the Microsoft case have given us a stunning counterexample to prove it. In the weeks before his decision, I dreaded a clue-free ruling that would give Microsoft ample opportunity to counter-attack, even if it was unfavorable to them. As it turned out, his writing shows a deep understanding of software technology and the software industry that I hadn't dreamed possible. I'll never forget the weekend after the findings were handed down -- it was the first time I ever read a 200-page legal document all the way through, and it made me giddy with joy. I still am. (And to come back around to the topic, I learned a lot about anti-trust law from it.)
I'm still trying to explain to myself how he did it. Does a federal judge have a staff of law clerks to help him with the research and the writing, as Supreme Court justices do? Maybe it wasn't really the judge, but was some nameless clerk who nailed it so well. Or is Judge Jackson especially savvy with respect to technological issues? Or can federal judges in general be trusted to understand this stuff better than I in all my cynicism ever expected?
There are still two groups who consistently cannot buy a clue about technology: the media and politicians. Rajiv Chandrasekharan (sp?) of the Washington Post is the only media writer I trust to get it right, and I can't think of a single politician (excluding activists from groups like the EFF) who has impressed me with any understanding of technology. What we have to do to get these people to Get It? Judge Jackson has shown that we don't have to set our standards so low, after all.
Judge Jackson. His ruling(s) will have the most lasting effect.
Me too! It may have passed with little notice so far, but Judge Jackson's decision may have more long-lasting impact on the future of the computer industry and the economy in general than anything else that has happened this year.
And after months of dread that the Judge would be wholly clueless, he showed an understanding of the software business and of Microsoft's shenanigans that stunned me.
Thomas Penfield Jackson for President!
To: info@amazon.com, feedback@amazon.com, suggestions@amazon.com,webmaster@amazon.com, webmaster@amazon.de
Subject: Joining the boycott against Amazon
Cc: amazon@gnu.org
Dear Madam or Sir,
As you probably know, Richard Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation, has called for a boycott against Amazon because of its patent claim on so-called "One-Click" technology and its lawsuits to enforce the claim.
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/13652.html
Although I have been a customer of Amazon in the past, I am joining the boycott. As a software engineer at an Internet service provider, I am fully aware of the lack of merit in Amazon's patent assertions -- and please don't insult me by claiming otherwise. The US Patent Office has done a dreadful disservice in granting almost every vacuous claim concerning software technology, but that does not excuse Amazon for this blatantly dishonest action.
If you drop the patent claims, I will respond supportively by buying books from Amazon. But until then, I will do no business with you.
Sincerely,
The Co$ has a history of attempting to disrupt online discussions about them, if they are likely to be critical of the "Church". The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology is legendary for this.
So I wonder if this loon with the "Natalie Portman" posts has been hatted to disrupt Slashdot?