It could be argued that those who print what was leaked from someone with a nondisclosure agreement could be considered an accessory to the crime.
In this case the "press" is not simply reporting the crime but is actively involved in it. If they know they are receiving information they know was part of a nondisclosure agreement for their benefit and possible profit, then they could be held liable.
If they have no contacts with people that have signed these agreements and have used other deductive means to garner their information then there is nothing wrong with that. Apple is protecting itself, as do most other software and computer companies by making employees and contractors sign these. If the person is disclosing this information they are violating their agreement and possibly the law. If they are disclosing this to a journalist then that journalist could be considered an accessory.
Freedom of the press does not give the journalist the right to break the law.
Sure, MS is still making a profit but they are slipping on the slope they had no problem climbing before. Microsoft has its grubby little hands in a lot of ventures. Many of those are wildly unsuccessful. MSN and Xbox have been great ways for Microsoft to lose money. Neither of those divisions has shown a profit. The deep pockets of the other divisions can fund them for some time but for how long?
Microsofts search engine in years past would have had the tech journalists creaming in their jeans but most see it for what it actually is, a rip off of Google with more ads. What has really changed over these last few years is that journalists are not giving Microsoft a "pass" on any product they release just because it comes from redmond. They are treating MS as just another software company and this is long overdue.
I do see harder days ahead for MS. They company will never disappear but they do major problems that are not being addressed.
I think this pretty much sums up Microsofts problems. A friend of mine was a die hard PC user. He was always giving me a bad time for using Macs. I use both platforms but because I had a Mac he was always harping on that. He would bring up the tired old facts, no software.....expensive...etc. I always told him that if he ever tried one for more than a week he would never touch a PC again. He would laugh and say "Yeah right". He surprised me two years ago by getting a Mac, for his kids. Problem was his kids never got it. After about a week he stopped using his PC.
He had all the software he used on the PC...better versions in fact and he did not spend time keeping Window running and healthy. Even he started laughing when he heard another Windows virus was tramping around causing damage. He just ordered his second Mac. A brand new 15 inch powerbook and he is a very happy camper. He will never go back.
Since Microsoft has never really developed anything original themselves they were probably feeling left out. If they can copy software the can sure copy everything else.
I am working on my 70-217 for my MCSE and I admit the there is a lot of power in Active Directory. I ripped XP of my PC and installed Win2000. It is has less problems then XP and is much faster. As good as AD is Microsoft could have done better with a lot of it. With OS X playing nice with AD and with the next Mac OS, Tiger, coming out soon which plays even better with AD it will be nice to see how well it ties in.
Still, home users have no need for the power of AD and with any windows OS viri are the main problem. I will not check email with my Window box, I do most of my web surfing and all of my email on my Mac. Why take the chance. Even with a firewall and up to date virus checkers I still managed to get a virus on the PC. I caught it in time before any damage was done.
Microsoft needs to rethink security.....or at least really think about it the first time. As far as why people still use Windows, well some have to. Gamers won't switch till the games are there and the game developers won't write unless they have sales. The Mac makes a fine game machine it just needs the developers to write for it. I have managed to get some Windows users to switch. If they give the Mac a fair shake they almost always switch.
I know an ex-PC user who used to give me a bad time about using Macs. He bought one to try out and now has dumped his PCs and is shopping for a powerbook to go with his desktop mac.
I have been saying for months now that Apple is going to fool everyone and announce that 10.4 tiger will ship at Macworld expo. I think they will announce that Tiger will ship by the end of January and they pre-orders start the day of the expo. If this does happen it will be one secret that Apple has kept under raps and that no one....besides me....expects.
This maybe the reason for the blackout. Although the blackout does not make a whole lot of sense....There will be plenty of Mac news sites that broadcast up to the minute text based websites of the keynote events. So Apple will only be able to keep a lid on the keynote on the visual side of things. Even though I managed to snag some free tickets to the expo this year I don't think I will be able to attend because of my back injury. I have not been able to attend for 5 years now because of it.
They actually gave the processor away to major companies for free in hopes that they would adopt it for major applications like huge database processing.
When it came time to report how the processor did the companies handed it back them say even though it was free it still costs too much.
Add to the fact that the Register in the UK never had a good thing to say about it and the chip was doomed from the start. Might be good for a collectors item but not for actual use. The only problem....they never sold a whole lot of them.
If it were up to the telcos service would stop at the city limit signs....like many cable companies do. Since nearly all rural telephone lines were subsidized telcos have always taken the cheapest route in giving them service. While I was in high school in the late 70's I went to visit my mother who at the time was living in the Nampa-Boise-Caldwell area of Idaho. The only phone service they could get in their "rural" area was a party line. This was cheapest for the telcos to provide even though they got the same money for laying copper the first foot out of town as they did to run it to their house.
Being a California boy I had never used a party line before....even being every bit as rural than they were. Not far from where I live today is one town that bucked the bell and started their own telephone company. For many years it was behind what Bell offered and before 1996 to call out of the county required that you dialed a lot of extra digits.....PacBells, now SBC, way of saying don't start your own company.
Most of the copper in this country was laid at tax payers expense and thus came out of our pockets. Instead of pissing and moaning and trying to block the competition they should do what other business have to do to stay in business.....offer better services and better bang for your buck.
One of the simplest way to enhance security on the Windows platform is for the OS to require the users password for ALL software installs.
While it would not prevent people from infecting themselves if they OK the installation it would stop programs from installing themselves without the user knowing or by clicking a simple link on a web page or email.
As far as digitally signed drivers go it would be nice if companies actually use them.....most don't. This is one of the funniest parts of my MCSE course...they really harp on driver signing for a stable system....it would work because you would not be able to install 90 percent of the drivers out there!
I think it is some kind of BS since the article did not mention which iPods were affected. My 3G iPod shipped with OS 2.2 and even with all the iPod updates released since I bought it have never updated the OS.
I think Apple should break reals songs for a number of reasons. Chiefly the Real whines about choice but does not offer these songs to Mac owners. Also Apples deals with the record companies depend on the DRM not being broken. Real found a way around this and gets off by not paying Apple fees for the DRM. So if it does wind up being unplayable Real should refund their customers money.
What iPods have been updated not to work with Real Purchased songs? I bought my 3G ipod in May of this year and it is still running the same OS v2.2 that it shipped with....which is also the current version in all iPod updaters released since that time. Any updater I have downloaded did not update my iPod. I assume if Apple were going to make the Real tunes unavailable and I think they should, then how come they did not do it across the board on all models?
Actually you have it right! These people are doing what the have the right to do, complain to the FCC. The fact that they are about the only ones doing it is the problem. You never hear of a deluge of letters supporting the way things are now.
Freedom of speech is what the country is built on....often that means that if PETA can speak out then the nazi party can too. I don't want to curtail anyones right to free speech...I want to encourage it in those who don't use it often enough!
The Mac actually did this to prevent shared disks from being removed from the computer. That way the shared resources would be there for the people that are using them.
Windows of course lets you take any disk out while it is being used or shared and when information is requested from that drive it will fail miserably. Actually the bug, and I call it a bug, is that Windows programs map the drive letter in the program from the drive it was installed on. Say you have CD drives lettered E: and F:, if you installed a program from CD on drive E: it will always expect the CD to be in drive E:, the program will not be able to find it if the CD is in drive F:.
Ballmer wanted to get all lawsuits out of the way. The best way to do that was pay off everyone. Ballmer laid out his top 10 plans in order of importance.
1. Pay off all litigants.
2. Buy a new shirt, all the my others have pit stains.
3. Investigate what antiperspirant is
4. Attend next class of the Howard Dean speech school
5. Hostile take-over of The Hair Club for men for their technology.
6. Steal Apples ideas, rebrand as Microsofts.
7. Portray everyone who uses a non-microsoft MP3 player as thieves. Portray Windows users as honest folk...ignore questions about product activation that contacts our servers.
8. Buy another shirt, this one is pit stained already.
9. Say I saw linux developers dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight.
If Creative wants to get more of the market from the iPod they are going to have to do a few things, some of which they probably won't do, so the are doomed to fail from the start.
1. Quit making cheap, crappy players. Since they don't understand what makes the iPod so popular this one is going to be a big hurdle.
2. Better device firmware. If you have thousands of songs you need a easy way to manage and access those songs. Another big hurdle.
3. Design. They are hit and miss here. Make it cool like a mac, don't make it like a PC.
4. Mac Software. This one will kill them. Creative has missed so many opportunities to sell Mac product. Their outboard USB sound "cards" are a prime example. With just some simple software drivers their line of Exitgy and Audigy could have easily been Mac compatible. M-Audio is now making cash with basically the same thing. If they are not going to make Mac software then they will probably use some third party software like musicmatch for their PC jukebox software and not support the Mac at all.
With all the money they are throwing at it they could do it right....but past experience show, they won't.
The idea of Sender ID is a good one and it should have been a chance for Microsoft to give back to the community at large by making this a free, open standard. Of course most of the malformed email spam is sent from Microsoft based operating systems so I guess MS should make money on both side of the issue.
The fact that Microsoft is pushing this is one of the reasons it will never work. No one will trust Microsoft not to abuse their own system. If some company were taking on Microsoft all they would have to is invalidate their competitors senderID and none of their email gets through. I don't think many people will like the fact that for their email to be passed through the system it has to be okayed by Microsoft. Also add to the fact that MS does seem to understand the words "security" and "Internet" and this further dooms senderID.
Since the person behind most of these laws like the DMCA and buddy buddy laws for the likes of the RIAA is no other than Hollywood liberal democrat Howard Berman and since the people who benefit from Bermans laws are the ones out there stumping for Kerry now, he will make sure he does nothing to stomp on their toes if they help get him elected.
The fact that the browser crashes and possibly closes the hole might be a good thing. IE and its seemingly good error handling may be doing more harm than good by letting the malformed code through without error.
IE was made by design to download and execute code without the user doing much if anything.
Microsoft has been stealing code for years. The problem is that don't know how to use it properly.
Also as others have stated when you sell the pirated material then the equation changes. It does makes some convoluted sense. Stealing is stealing but stealing for profit does make you a much scummier person.
Could this be why Balmer went into the zero brain cell zone and called all iPod users "music thieves" saying the main iPod format is "stolen".
I guess Mr. Blamer has failed to notice the 0-day warez archives out there, but they do apologize good for him at Microsoft.
Here is my reply from Microsoft from an email I sent them telling them I do not liked being called a thief.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Microsoft.com Customer Support and for getting in touch with us about this.
When Steve Ballmer implied that most of the music on iPods were stolen, he absolutely did not intend to single out iPod owners for criticism. In fact, given that they have access to their very own - and very popular - online music store, they are likely among the most law-abiding consumers of digital music. But the reality is that piracy remains high in terms of illegal downloads of music, and while online music services are getting better and better and winning more customers, piracy is still a major problem both on the PC and on devices.
Microsoft Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) is a great way to limit piracy, and the main point Steve was trying to convey was that it requires a coordinated effort among many industry partners to do it right. More information on this platform is found on this page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/drm/ faq.aspx
Believe it. Like I said I made sure the both emails and letters were not slanted to either party. When the democrats did not respond to the email, I sent them a letter to the addresses listed on their own pages at the house, senate, etc. and the office in the state.
My ex-wife will attest to the fact that I did this....I got no replies...not even a form letter from the democrats. As I stated before every republican responded very quickly.
I was surprised by the results myself, considering these people claim to be helping people like me I expected at least some reply from at least one of them. This was about 2 to 3 years ago so they should have responded by now. It may be different in New York and Ohio but California Democrats seem to be in office on for themselves.
I think you are giving them too much credit. As I stated in another post the environmentalists around the 1900's though the solution to smog was to raise the factory smokestacks higher in the air. It did solve that problem but created much more widespread, more damaging ones.
It is pretty much the same here. With little information they want to make massive changes. We have made changes....not that the rest of the world has kept up. But even in their own ranks that cannot agree on what will happen to the weather say 5 years from now, 10 years from now. Each camp has their own ideas. Both can't be right.
Slashdot Mirror
It could be argued that those who print what was leaked from someone with a nondisclosure agreement could be considered an accessory to the crime.
In this case the "press" is not simply reporting the crime but is actively involved in it. If they know they are receiving information they know was part of a nondisclosure agreement for their benefit and possible profit, then they could be held liable.
If they have no contacts with people that have signed these agreements and have used other deductive means to garner their information then there is nothing wrong with that. Apple is protecting itself, as do most other software and computer companies by making employees and contractors sign these. If the person is disclosing this information they are violating their agreement and possibly the law. If they are disclosing this to a journalist then that journalist could be considered an accessory.
Freedom of the press does not give the journalist the right to break the law.
Sure, MS is still making a profit but they are slipping on the slope they had no problem climbing before. Microsoft has its grubby little hands in a lot of ventures. Many of those are wildly unsuccessful. MSN and Xbox have been great ways for Microsoft to lose money. Neither of those divisions has shown a profit. The deep pockets of the other divisions can fund them for some time but for how long?
Microsofts search engine in years past would have had the tech journalists creaming in their jeans but most see it for what it actually is, a rip off of Google with more ads. What has really changed over these last few years is that journalists are not giving Microsoft a "pass" on any product they release just because it comes from redmond. They are treating MS as just another software company and this is long overdue.
I do see harder days ahead for MS. They company will never disappear but they do major problems that are not being addressed.
I think this pretty much sums up Microsofts problems. A friend of mine was a die hard PC user. He was always giving me a bad time for using Macs. I use both platforms but because I had a Mac he was always harping on that. He would bring up the tired old facts, no software.....expensive...etc. I always told him that if he ever tried one for more than a week he would never touch a PC again. He would laugh and say "Yeah right". He surprised me two years ago by getting a Mac, for his kids. Problem was his kids never got it. After about a week he stopped using his PC.
He had all the software he used on the PC...better versions in fact and he did not spend time keeping Window running and healthy. Even he started laughing when he heard another Windows virus was tramping around causing damage. He just ordered his second Mac. A brand new 15 inch powerbook and he is a very happy camper. He will never go back.
Since Microsoft has never really developed anything original themselves they were probably feeling left out. If they can copy software the can sure copy everything else.
I am working on my 70-217 for my MCSE and I admit the there is a lot of power in Active Directory. I ripped XP of my PC and installed Win2000. It is has less problems then XP and is much faster. As good as AD is Microsoft could have done better with a lot of it. With OS X playing nice with AD and with the next Mac OS, Tiger, coming out soon which plays even better with AD it will be nice to see how well it ties in.
Still, home users have no need for the power of AD and with any windows OS viri are the main problem. I will not check email with my Window box, I do most of my web surfing and all of my email on my Mac. Why take the chance. Even with a firewall and up to date virus checkers I still managed to get a virus on the PC. I caught it in time before any damage was done.
Microsoft needs to rethink security.....or at least really think about it the first time. As far as why people still use Windows, well some have to. Gamers won't switch till the games are there and the game developers won't write unless they have sales. The Mac makes a fine game machine it just needs the developers to write for it. I have managed to get some Windows users to switch. If they give the Mac a fair shake they almost always switch.
I know an ex-PC user who used to give me a bad time about using Macs. He bought one to try out and now has dumped his PCs and is shopping for a powerbook to go with his desktop mac.
Mpeg4 produces some of the best video around. It adapts well to streaming and when compressed correctly produces superior output.
Xvid does a good job if not overly compressed.
Stay away from real based formats. Real based codecs produce some of the worst video on the web I have seen.
You almost got it right. If you were a true AOL users it would have been typed in all-caps.
ME-TOO!!!!!!
I have been saying for months now that Apple is going to fool everyone and announce that 10.4 tiger will ship at Macworld expo. I think they will announce that Tiger will ship by the end of January and they pre-orders start the day of the expo. If this does happen it will be one secret that Apple has kept under raps and that no one....besides me....expects.
This maybe the reason for the blackout. Although the blackout does not make a whole lot of sense....There will be plenty of Mac news sites that broadcast up to the minute text based websites of the keynote events. So Apple will only be able to keep a lid on the keynote on the visual side of things. Even though I managed to snag some free tickets to the expo this year I don't think I will be able to attend because of my back injury. I have not been able to attend for 5 years now because of it.
They actually gave the processor away to major companies for free in hopes that they would adopt it for major applications like huge database processing.
When it came time to report how the processor did the companies handed it back them say even though it was free it still costs too much.
Add to the fact that the Register in the UK never had a good thing to say about it and the chip was doomed from the start. Might be good for a collectors item but not for actual use. The only problem....they never sold a whole lot of them.
If it were up to the telcos service would stop at the city limit signs....like many cable companies do. Since nearly all rural telephone lines were subsidized telcos have always taken the cheapest route in giving them service. While I was in high school in the late 70's I went to visit my mother who at the time was living in the Nampa-Boise-Caldwell area of Idaho. The only phone service they could get in their "rural" area was a party line. This was cheapest for the telcos to provide even though they got the same money for laying copper the first foot out of town as they did to run it to their house.
Being a California boy I had never used a party line before....even being every bit as rural than they were. Not far from where I live today is one town that bucked the bell and started their own telephone company. For many years it was behind what Bell offered and before 1996 to call out of the county required that you dialed a lot of extra digits.....PacBells, now SBC, way of saying don't start your own company.
Most of the copper in this country was laid at tax payers expense and thus came out of our pockets. Instead of pissing and moaning and trying to block the competition they should do what other business have to do to stay in business.....offer better services and better bang for your buck.
One of the simplest way to enhance security on the Windows platform is for the OS to require the users password for ALL software installs.
While it would not prevent people from infecting themselves if they OK the installation it would stop programs from installing themselves without the user knowing or by clicking a simple link on a web page or email.
As far as digitally signed drivers go it would be nice if companies actually use them.....most don't. This is one of the funniest parts of my MCSE course...they really harp on driver signing for a stable system....it would work because you would not be able to install 90 percent of the drivers out there!
I think it is some kind of BS since the article did not mention which iPods were affected. My 3G iPod shipped with OS 2.2 and even with all the iPod updates released since I bought it have never updated the OS.
I think Apple should break reals songs for a number of reasons. Chiefly the Real whines about choice but does not offer these songs to Mac owners. Also Apples deals with the record companies depend on the DRM not being broken. Real found a way around this and gets off by not paying Apple fees for the DRM. So if it does wind up being unplayable Real should refund their customers money.
What iPods have been updated not to work with Real Purchased songs? I bought my 3G ipod in May of this year and it is still running the same OS v2.2 that it shipped with....which is also the current version in all iPod updaters released since that time. Any updater I have downloaded did not update my iPod. I assume if Apple were going to make the Real tunes unavailable and I think they should, then how come they did not do it across the board on all models?
Actually you have it right! These people are doing what the have the right to do, complain to the FCC. The fact that they are about the only ones doing it is the problem. You never hear of a deluge of letters supporting the way things are now.
Freedom of speech is what the country is built on....often that means that if PETA can speak out then the nazi party can too. I don't want to curtail anyones right to free speech...I want to encourage it in those who don't use it often enough!
The Mac actually did this to prevent shared disks from being removed from the computer. That way the shared resources would be there for the people that are using them.
Windows of course lets you take any disk out while it is being used or shared and when information is requested from that drive it will fail miserably. Actually the bug, and I call it a bug, is that Windows programs map the drive letter in the program from the drive it was installed on. Say you have CD drives lettered E: and F:, if you installed a program from CD on drive E: it will always expect the CD to be in drive E:, the program will not be able to find it if the CD is in drive F:.
Ballmer wanted to get all lawsuits out of the way. The best way to do that was pay off everyone. Ballmer laid out his top 10 plans in order of importance.
1. Pay off all litigants.
2. Buy a new shirt, all the my others have pit stains.
3. Investigate what antiperspirant is
4. Attend next class of the Howard Dean speech school
5. Hostile take-over of The Hair Club for men for their technology.
6. Steal Apples ideas, rebrand as Microsofts.
7. Portray everyone who uses a non-microsoft MP3 player as thieves. Portray Windows users as honest folk...ignore questions about product activation that contacts our servers.
8. Buy another shirt, this one is pit stained already.
9. Say I saw linux developers dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight.
10. Fix security in Windows, if we can.
If Creative wants to get more of the market from the iPod they are going to have to do a few things, some of which they probably won't do, so the are doomed to fail from the start.
1. Quit making cheap, crappy players. Since they don't understand what makes the iPod so popular this one is going to be a big hurdle.
2. Better device firmware. If you have thousands of songs you need a easy way to manage and access those songs. Another big hurdle.
3. Design. They are hit and miss here. Make it cool like a mac, don't make it like a PC.
4. Mac Software. This one will kill them. Creative has missed so many opportunities to sell Mac product. Their outboard USB sound "cards" are a prime example. With just some simple software drivers their line of Exitgy and Audigy could have easily been Mac compatible. M-Audio is now making cash with basically the same thing. If they are not going to make Mac software then they will probably use some third party software like musicmatch for their PC jukebox software and not support the Mac at all.
With all the money they are throwing at it they could do it right....but past experience show, they won't.
It is called MacOS X!
What could be better. You have unix, you have a better MS Office than the PC platform. Built in web, ftp, mail server. No viri.
The idea of Sender ID is a good one and it should have been a chance for Microsoft to give back to the community at large by making this a free, open standard. Of course most of the malformed email spam is sent from Microsoft based operating systems so I guess MS should make money on both side of the issue.
The fact that Microsoft is pushing this is one of the reasons it will never work. No one will trust Microsoft not to abuse their own system. If some company were taking on Microsoft all they would have to is invalidate their competitors senderID and none of their email gets through. I don't think many people will like the fact that for their email to be passed through the system it has to be okayed by Microsoft. Also add to the fact that MS does seem to understand the words "security" and "Internet" and this further dooms senderID.
Since the person behind most of these laws like the DMCA and buddy buddy laws for the likes of the RIAA is no other than Hollywood liberal democrat Howard Berman and since the people who benefit from Bermans laws are the ones out there stumping for Kerry now, he will make sure he does nothing to stomp on their toes if they help get him elected.
The fact that the browser crashes and possibly closes the hole might be a good thing. IE and its seemingly good error handling may be doing more harm than good by letting the malformed code through without error.
IE was made by design to download and execute code without the user doing much if anything.
Microsoft has been stealing code for years. The problem is that don't know how to use it properly.
Also as others have stated when you sell the pirated material then the equation changes. It does makes some convoluted sense. Stealing is stealing but stealing for profit does make you a much scummier person.
Could this be why Balmer went into the zero brain cell zone and called all iPod users "music thieves" saying the main iPod format is "stolen".
/ faq.aspx
I guess Mr. Blamer has failed to notice the 0-day warez archives out there, but they do apologize good for him at Microsoft.
Here is my reply from Microsoft from an email I sent them telling them I do not liked being called a thief.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Microsoft.com Customer Support and for getting in touch with us about this.
When Steve Ballmer implied that most of the music on iPods were stolen, he absolutely did not intend to single out iPod owners for criticism. In fact, given that they have access to their very own - and very popular - online music store, they are likely among the most law-abiding consumers of digital music. But the reality is that piracy remains high in terms of illegal downloads of music, and while online music services are getting better and better and winning more customers, piracy is still a major problem both on the PC and on devices.
Microsoft Windows Media digital rights management (DRM) is a great way to limit piracy, and the main point Steve was trying to convey was that it requires a coordinated effort among many industry partners to do it right. More information on this platform is found on this page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/drm
Believe it. Like I said I made sure the both emails and letters were not slanted to either party. When the democrats did not respond to the email, I sent them a letter to the addresses listed on their own pages at the house, senate, etc. and the office in the state.
My ex-wife will attest to the fact that I did this....I got no replies...not even a form letter from the democrats. As I stated before every republican responded very quickly.
I was surprised by the results myself, considering these people claim to be helping people like me I expected at least some reply from at least one of them. This was about 2 to 3 years ago so they should have responded by now. It may be different in New York and Ohio but California Democrats seem to be in office on for themselves.
I was worried I was becoming addicted to coffee. I guess I will have to stop and just keep the cigarettes, amphetamines and opiates.
I think you are giving them too much credit. As I stated in another post the environmentalists around the 1900's though the solution to smog was to raise the factory smokestacks higher in the air. It did solve that problem but created much more widespread, more damaging ones.
It is pretty much the same here. With little information they want to make massive changes. We have made changes....not that the rest of the world has kept up. But even in their own ranks that cannot agree on what will happen to the weather say 5 years from now, 10 years from now. Each camp has their own ideas. Both can't be right.