Intelligent writing coming from a young and attractive female... it can and does happen from time to time.
I'm not sure the ACs here are going to be able to handle this...
On the other hand, AOL did act very quickly to take the software off of the website. A court might feel that this was sufficient to nullify the rights granted under the GPL to those who downloaded the software. Or a court might feel that it was AOL's internal responsibility to assure proper security procedures to prevent unwanted posting of software under GPL terms, and that the rights granted under the GPL to recipients cannot be revoked.
DANGER: Landmark test case lawsuit ahead...
If AOL wins: The GPL suddenly becomes revokable after the fact... which could help SCO in their profit-by-lawsuit business plan, and will likely prompt somebody into trying a GPL-and-run scam.
If AOL loses: They're now stuck with it... they just wrote and released a P2P client. Their only hope will be to try to push Nullsoft far enough away so the multibillion dollar Napster-style lawsuits only bankrupt Nullsoft and not the AOL/TW mothership. If that doesn't work, it's a horrible death for a megacompany.
Wow... high stakes here... who thought a simple piece of software could cause so much trouble?
If you can convince a court that you were honestly unable to determine the legitimacy of their demands (not sure you could use this as a defense against AOL, it would be watertight against SCO), then you are also OK for keeping and distributing this code despite requests from them to remove it.
This is the big question. AOL's takedown notices claim that the GPL release was "unauthorized" but provide none of the backstory as to how it happened. If they don't tell us that, why should we beleive them now and what we saw before wasn't true...
The problem is that soureforge.net or freshmeat.net will get a DMCA Takedown Notice(TM) that claims that they're distributing software which they have no right to possess that was obtained from an unathorized leak that just looked like but really wasn't a GPL release of software.
I'm glad to see that there are so many people willing to post the software and invite the AOL/TW lawyers to sue them because this is going to be a big test case for the GPL that certainly has a chance of being won, but I'm a little concerned some of these volunteers aren't quite prepared for the legal bills.
The problem here is that there's no way to authenticate which of the two versions of the site is the "real one".
For all we know right now, Nullsoft may have had the right to release WASTE under the GPL, and it's the AOL legal team's takeover of the site that's unauthorized and out-of-line.
AOL needs to be a little more convincing in saying that what looked like a planned official release was in fact not one. They need to make the takedown more credible than the original release, they need to give us more details...
If parent AOL says they had approval authority over Nullsoft's releases, then that approval or disappoval should have happened before the release hit the www.nullsoft.com servers.
If AOL was really scared of Nullsoft making unauthorized releases, they could have required that Nullsoft not have a website under their direct control, and that they'd have to send all web content to the people who run www.aol.com who would of course send the content to headquarters for approval before putting it up. The fact that such a process doesn't exist tends to indicate that somebody at Nullsoft has the authority to post software.
Ownership of the equipment and the fact that Justin developed the software during his work time as an employee gives them the rights to the IP.
Justin can do whatever he wants when he's not working, but if he developed software at home that wasn't sponsored by Nullsoft then he should have released it somewhere other than Nullsoft's servers...
The site that's there now claims that WASTE is owned by Nullsoft, and whomever posted WASTE on the server with a GPL license lacked the authority to do. As a result, AOL's view is that the GPL doesn't stick to the software because only Nullsoft held the copyright and Nullsoft didn't attach the GPL.
What a mess here... something that's really lacking from the new page is anything that says just how "unauthorized software" appeared on the nullsoft.com site.
- If they're claiming that they were hacked, this would have to go down as the hack of the century... I doubt that happened. - If they're claiming an employee acted outside of their authority, aren't they responsible for restraining that employee's actions so they don't become visible to the public? - If AOL's trying to overrule a decsion made by their Nullsoft division after learning about it, isn't that too little too late?
This has got to be one of the most interesting test cases of how the GPL works ever.
The problem is, the average user doesn't read/. and doesn't know that Gator or Bonzi is a known offender of all things trustworthy. That's why there's a need for an easy-to-subscribe to trustworthy blacklist.
Unfortunately, as we see with most of the spam-blocking services they always end up caught with gray-zone cases where they either block somebody they shouldn't or won't block somebody they should and lose that trust.
And the only people who can really do it easily on Windows would be Microsoft by integrating it into the OS in a default-on position... but who's gonna accept Microsoft as the trustworthy authority for anything? Anybody else would have to convince users to download an always-on program...
Oh well, nothing on the Internet is ever as easy as it should be...
You sure aren't a lawyer. Settlements have no precedent setting abilities whatsoever. If they did, I could sue my brother claiming I'm the king of town, have him settle out of court in my favor, then I would be the king of town?
Legally, it'd still be an undecided question.
In the court of public opinion, you will be found to be the laughingstock of the town and have no appeal left on that.
I don't think settlements have any value as far as precedent goes.
IANAL, but they do...
See, this settlement means that it's not correct to say that Bonzi lost the lawsuit, but it does allow somebody to say that Bonzi didn't win either. They gave up, indicating that Bonzi didn't believe enough in its own argument to bother to take it to a judge or jury.
So, to the next Bonzi-like company that comes along the message is that FUI isn't likely to be defendable in court. Yeah, there's a chance somebody else could defend the use of FUI in court and end up a winner because in the eyes of the court this is still an undecided question. However, in the eyes of the greedy businessman there's already a precedent logged in the world's history that says the first company to try to use FUI in a bold way got a public embarassment and was forced to accept an agreement that made them promise to never use FUI again.
Will there eventually be somebody willing to take the chance that FUI will stand up in court, of course. However, there's a good number of business people who when shown what happened to Bonzi will take that information and conclude that "somebody already tried that and failed" and take their company's marketing in a differnt direction, so it's going to be a good long time before somebody bold enough to make heavy use of FUI comes along.
FUI's not dead, but this settlement has it hospitalized.
That is an interesting "what if" but it's also a highly unlikely one.
If you have even the slightest understanding of how these games work, the most likely way that "everybody winds up at the bottom of the ocean" is that somebody ran an update query on a key database table with values that almost certainly would have never occured in normal gameplay.
Nobody's stupid enough to allow an up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-select-start sequence in the client to grant table-level control of the database... at least I hope not.
Which is exactly why when the hacker's identity becomes known, he/she/it will be found to have the emotional age of a fifteen year old.
The fact is, the value of everything is based on other people's perceptions. If I think something is of value and you don't, I'll end up buying that something from you and allow you to "3. profit!"... and that's exactly what that elusive "2. ???????" is so sought after, it's the process that turns something of little value into something that other people value highly.
Yeah, there are many people take their MUD games far too seriously for their own good, being willing to buy high-status characters on eBay if the game owners are willing allow that to happen. Those sale prices might look insane to you and me, but to the buyer and seller it's a fair price and that's why they did the deal.
The damage to the game in terms of "market value" of the lost characters is astronomical. Hopefully the admins are smart enough to have a safe rollback they can go to, but if they don't then the value has been destroied forever and those who lost that value certainly should have a right to sue to get it back.
But in any MUD game, the ultimate root of authority is the owners of the game servers, who got to decide how "god status" or "admin rights" are awarded. Any "evil god" should be out there to police the game, and if they saw somebody running up a score by the letter of the rules but not the "spirit of the game" they could adjust that score.
That's the problem here. Somebody clearly got more access than they should have to the game's database, and were able to make table-level changes that created game sitations that the rules of the game made unlikely or impossible to occur. That had nothing to do with the playing of the game, the changes were severe enough break the game.
The list of reasons for why a hacker would want to do this is pretty short.
A: The hacker has a dislike for the company because he/she/it works for a competitor, and knows that this kind of an embarassment will nearly wipe-out this game. B: The hacker has a dislike for the company because he/she/it was fired or otherwise feels wronged by the company, and knows that this kind of an embarassment will nearly wipe-out this game. C: The hacker is immature and just wanted to play god in the game, because that would allow him/her/it to "win" by beating people who had worked hard to attain high status in the game.
No matter which situation turns out to be true, the hacker(s) need to be delivered to law enforcement to be shown that you just don't do this to other people's systems even if you have the technical ability to do so.
This happens so often in grade school I'm surprised the computer industry hasn't caught on to it yet. If you give students a copy of the exam the night before the exam, the only material they are going to bother to study the question-answer pairs on that exam, and may just remember what the answer to #6 is rather than even try to understand the question.
In order for a driver benchmark to be useful at all, it needs to be kept absolutely secret from the chip manufacturers before the test, and then once it is used and revealed that benchmark needs to be retired, because the next generation of testing should be designed to concentrate on the new features that the graphic card developers are expected to put in their next generation of cards that will be used in the next generation of games.
In short, the best benchmark will always be based on "that sure-to-hit game that's just about to come out."
This is a sure fire recipe for data loss of critical data. All the server backups you can make would become worthless if the seashell/encryption key falls into the hands of a three year old with crayon or is lost/ruined in any other way.
It's a nice novelty for encrypting your digital little black book, but it's not going to be useful at all for business databases.
The problem is, 802.11b's standard for posting "no tresspassing" is by using WEP. There's just nowhere to hang that sign that it will be seen by everybody without putting up the fence...
Fact: If you watch your CBS on cable, your cable supplier is paying for it. Yeah, even if they're retransmitting a free over-the-air signal, they have to pay.
Today at 12:30 pm I was at my grandmother's house who does not have anything other than over-the-air TV. The same Ronco infomerical was running on both the Fox and UPN stations in town. In fact, the only stations that were not showing infomericals were PBS, the ABC affiliate who had barely-watchale public interest drivel, and the three Spanish-speaking networks running in an area where most of the population doesn't speak that language.
It's over for the purely commercial-supported TV. Over the air TV now consists of local news and access to the "major networks". At times when there is no news or national program, the station effectively puts on a program of negative value just to keep the tower warm.
We're already paying subscription rates for most of the TV programs we get. The loss of ad revenue to the TiVo-ish technologies is simply going to mean that they'll have to raise those subscription rates a bit, and that some of the marginal projects that are going forward today won't be able to go forward in the future. (Does the world really need ESPNews?)
Just because there's a change in business models forced by technology doesn't mean it should be blocked, the businesses involved just need to learn to adjust.
If this turns into the death of SMTP, I won't cry.
The fact is, SMTP is based on the flawed assumptions that every e-mail sent is one that the recipient wants to see because nobody would ever spam, and that there's no harm in letting the message travel unencrypted because nobody would ever snoop.
It's time for reform in the overall e-mail system, the only problem is that there's a huge installed user base that'd be forced to upgrade in order for a new e-mail protocol to work. It's gonna take something silly like this to get out of hand for that to happen.
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Intelligent writing coming from a young and attractive female... it can and does happen from time to time. I'm not sure the ACs here are going to be able to handle this...
On the other hand, AOL did act very quickly to take the software off of the website. A court might feel that this was sufficient to nullify the rights granted under the GPL to those who downloaded the software. Or a court might feel that it was AOL's internal responsibility to assure proper security procedures to prevent unwanted posting of software under GPL terms, and that the rights granted under the GPL to recipients cannot be revoked.
DANGER: Landmark test case lawsuit ahead...
If AOL wins: The GPL suddenly becomes revokable after the fact... which could help SCO in their profit-by-lawsuit business plan, and will likely prompt somebody into trying a GPL-and-run scam.
If AOL loses: They're now stuck with it... they just wrote and released a P2P client. Their only hope will be to try to push Nullsoft far enough away so the multibillion dollar Napster-style lawsuits only bankrupt Nullsoft and not the AOL/TW mothership. If that doesn't work, it's a horrible death for a megacompany.
Wow... high stakes here... who thought a simple piece of software could cause so much trouble?
If you can convince a court that you were honestly unable to determine the legitimacy of their demands (not sure you could use this as a defense against AOL, it would be watertight against SCO), then you are also OK for keeping and distributing this code despite requests from them to remove it.
This is the big question. AOL's takedown notices claim that the GPL release was "unauthorized" but provide none of the backstory as to how it happened. If they don't tell us that, why should we beleive them now and what we saw before wasn't true...
The problem is that soureforge.net or freshmeat.net will get a DMCA Takedown Notice(TM) that claims that they're distributing software which they have no right to possess that was obtained from an unathorized leak that just looked like but really wasn't a GPL release of software.
I'm glad to see that there are so many people willing to post the software and invite the AOL/TW lawyers to sue them because this is going to be a big test case for the GPL that certainly has a chance of being won, but I'm a little concerned some of these volunteers aren't quite prepared for the legal bills.
The problem here is that there's no way to authenticate which of the two versions of the site is the "real one".
For all we know right now, Nullsoft may have had the right to release WASTE under the GPL, and it's the AOL legal team's takeover of the site that's unauthorized and out-of-line.
AOL needs to be a little more convincing in saying that what looked like a planned official release was in fact not one. They need to make the takedown more credible than the original release, they need to give us more details...
If parent AOL says they had approval authority over Nullsoft's releases, then that approval or disappoval should have happened before the release hit the www.nullsoft.com servers.
If AOL was really scared of Nullsoft making unauthorized releases, they could have required that Nullsoft not have a website under their direct control, and that they'd have to send all web content to the people who run www.aol.com who would of course send the content to headquarters for approval before putting it up. The fact that such a process doesn't exist tends to indicate that somebody at Nullsoft has the authority to post software.
Ownership of the equipment and the fact that Justin developed the software during his work time as an employee gives them the rights to the IP.
Justin can do whatever he wants when he's not working, but if he developed software at home that wasn't sponsored by Nullsoft then he should have released it somewhere other than Nullsoft's servers...
The site that's there now claims that WASTE is owned by Nullsoft, and whomever posted WASTE on the server with a GPL license lacked the authority to do. As a result, AOL's view is that the GPL doesn't stick to the software because only Nullsoft held the copyright and Nullsoft didn't attach the GPL.
What a mess here... something that's really lacking from the new page is anything that says just how "unauthorized software" appeared on the nullsoft.com site.
- If they're claiming that they were hacked, this would have to go down as the hack of the century... I doubt that happened.
- If they're claiming an employee acted outside of their authority, aren't they responsible for restraining that employee's actions so they don't become visible to the public?
- If AOL's trying to overrule a decsion made by their Nullsoft division after learning about it, isn't that too little too late?
This has got to be one of the most interesting test cases of how the GPL works ever.
The problem is, the average user doesn't read /. and doesn't know that Gator or Bonzi is a known offender of all things trustworthy. That's why there's a need for an easy-to-subscribe to trustworthy blacklist.
Unfortunately, as we see with most of the spam-blocking services they always end up caught with gray-zone cases where they either block somebody they shouldn't or won't block somebody they should and lose that trust.
And the only people who can really do it easily on Windows would be Microsoft by integrating it into the OS in a default-on position... but who's gonna accept Microsoft as the trustworthy authority for anything? Anybody else would have to convince users to download an always-on program...
Oh well, nothing on the Internet is ever as easy as it should be...
You sure aren't a lawyer. Settlements have no precedent setting abilities whatsoever. If they did, I could sue my brother claiming I'm the king of town, have him settle out of court in my favor, then I would be the king of town?
Legally, it'd still be an undecided question.
In the court of public opinion, you will be found to be the laughingstock of the town and have no appeal left on that.
I don't think settlements have any value as far as precedent goes.
IANAL, but they do...
See, this settlement means that it's not correct to say that Bonzi lost the lawsuit, but it does allow somebody to say that Bonzi didn't win either. They gave up, indicating that Bonzi didn't believe enough in its own argument to bother to take it to a judge or jury.
So, to the next Bonzi-like company that comes along the message is that FUI isn't likely to be defendable in court. Yeah, there's a chance somebody else could defend the use of FUI in court and end up a winner because in the eyes of the court this is still an undecided question. However, in the eyes of the greedy businessman there's already a precedent logged in the world's history that says the first company to try to use FUI in a bold way got a public embarassment and was forced to accept an agreement that made them promise to never use FUI again.
Will there eventually be somebody willing to take the chance that FUI will stand up in court, of course. However, there's a good number of business people who when shown what happened to Bonzi will take that information and conclude that "somebody already tried that and failed" and take their company's marketing in a differnt direction, so it's going to be a good long time before somebody bold enough to make heavy use of FUI comes along.
FUI's not dead, but this settlement has it hospitalized.
That is an interesting "what if" but it's also a highly unlikely one.
t sequence in the client to grant table-level control of the database... at least I hope not.
If you have even the slightest understanding of how these games work, the most likely way that "everybody winds up at the bottom of the ocean" is that somebody ran an update query on a key database table with values that almost certainly would have never occured in normal gameplay.
Nobody's stupid enough to allow an up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-select-star
Is too. (Why do I get the feeling I'm debating an Anon Cow who doesn't know the meaning of the word "immaturity"?)
Which is exactly why when the hacker's identity becomes known, he/she/it will be found to have the emotional age of a fifteen year old.
The fact is, the value of everything is based on other people's perceptions. If I think something is of value and you don't, I'll end up buying that something from you and allow you to "3. profit!"... and that's exactly what that elusive "2. ???????" is so sought after, it's the process that turns something of little value into something that other people value highly.
Yeah, there are many people take their MUD games far too seriously for their own good, being willing to buy high-status characters on eBay if the game owners are willing allow that to happen. Those sale prices might look insane to you and me, but to the buyer and seller it's a fair price and that's why they did the deal.
The damage to the game in terms of "market value" of the lost characters is astronomical. Hopefully the admins are smart enough to have a safe rollback they can go to, but if they don't then the value has been destroied forever and those who lost that value certainly should have a right to sue to get it back.
That was also covered under C: Immaturity.
That was covered under C: Immaturity.
But in any MUD game, the ultimate root of authority is the owners of the game servers, who got to decide how "god status" or "admin rights" are awarded. Any "evil god" should be out there to police the game, and if they saw somebody running up a score by the letter of the rules but not the "spirit of the game" they could adjust that score.
That's the problem here. Somebody clearly got more access than they should have to the game's database, and were able to make table-level changes that created game sitations that the rules of the game made unlikely or impossible to occur. That had nothing to do with the playing of the game, the changes were severe enough break the game.
The list of reasons for why a hacker would want to do this is pretty short.
A: The hacker has a dislike for the company because he/she/it works for a competitor, and knows that this kind of an embarassment will nearly wipe-out this game.
B: The hacker has a dislike for the company because he/she/it was fired or otherwise feels wronged by the company, and knows that this kind of an embarassment will nearly wipe-out this game.
C: The hacker is immature and just wanted to play god in the game, because that would allow him/her/it to "win" by beating people who had worked hard to attain high status in the game.
No matter which situation turns out to be true, the hacker(s) need to be delivered to law enforcement to be shown that you just don't do this to other people's systems even if you have the technical ability to do so.
This happens so often in grade school I'm surprised the computer industry hasn't caught on to it yet. If you give students a copy of the exam the night before the exam, the only material they are going to bother to study the question-answer pairs on that exam, and may just remember what the answer to #6 is rather than even try to understand the question.
In order for a driver benchmark to be useful at all, it needs to be kept absolutely secret from the chip manufacturers before the test, and then once it is used and revealed that benchmark needs to be retired, because the next generation of testing should be designed to concentrate on the new features that the graphic card developers are expected to put in their next generation of cards that will be used in the next generation of games.
In short, the best benchmark will always be based on "that sure-to-hit game that's just about to come out."
This is a sure fire recipe for data loss of critical data. All the server backups you can make would become worthless if the seashell/encryption key falls into the hands of a three year old with crayon or is lost/ruined in any other way.
It's a nice novelty for encrypting your digital little black book, but it's not going to be useful at all for business databases.
The problem is, 802.11b's standard for posting "no tresspassing" is by using WEP. There's just nowhere to hang that sign that it will be seen by everybody without putting up the fence...
Fact: If you watch your CBS on cable, your cable supplier is paying for it. Yeah, even if they're retransmitting a free over-the-air signal, they have to pay.
Today at 12:30 pm I was at my grandmother's house who does not have anything other than over-the-air TV. The same Ronco infomerical was running on both the Fox and UPN stations in town. In fact, the only stations that were not showing infomericals were PBS, the ABC affiliate who had barely-watchale public interest drivel, and the three Spanish-speaking networks running in an area where most of the population doesn't speak that language.
It's over for the purely commercial-supported TV. Over the air TV now consists of local news and access to the "major networks". At times when there is no news or national program, the station effectively puts on a program of negative value just to keep the tower warm.
We're already paying subscription rates for most of the TV programs we get. The loss of ad revenue to the TiVo-ish technologies is simply going to mean that they'll have to raise those subscription rates a bit, and that some of the marginal projects that are going forward today won't be able to go forward in the future. (Does the world really need ESPNews?)
Just because there's a change in business models forced by technology doesn't mean it should be blocked, the businesses involved just need to learn to adjust.
Have you ever heard of spoofing?
If this turns into the death of SMTP, I won't cry.
The fact is, SMTP is based on the flawed assumptions that every e-mail sent is one that the recipient wants to see because nobody would ever spam, and that there's no harm in letting the message travel unencrypted because nobody would ever snoop.
It's time for reform in the overall e-mail system, the only problem is that there's a huge installed user base that'd be forced to upgrade in order for a new e-mail protocol to work. It's gonna take something silly like this to get out of hand for that to happen.