What's more astounding is that they couldn't understand exactly how it happened...
Huh? It's their network. It's outright stupid for them to not understand exactly how their network behaves. Security-by-lawyer really isn't that good of a network protocol...
Yep, that's all a digital signature can assure you of. Whoever's piece of crypto is involved did in fact sign that piece of software.
The problem is, knowing the source of the code is not the same as knowing the source code. You have only the name on the signature as information and then are asked whether you wish to grant full access to whatever that code wants to do.
Now, Microsoft's really done it. Their infamous security holes have snuck into an ActiveX element that they've signed. They can replace it with a clean version of element, however, any website that has the unpatched ActiveX control can put the unsafe version on their website, and then require it in their HTML. Even with "Always trust Microsoft Corp." disabled, the user is presented with a window to the effect of "Hey, you need an ActiveX control you don't have to read this page. You can trust it, it's from Microsoft Corp."
The "Univerisal Service Fee" is on your bill because your phone providers want you to know they're being taxed by a law that they don't particularly like.
The Universal Service rules requires that the incumbent telephone provider must provide the same price for a basic POTS (Plain-old telephone service) line to everybody in their service area. That means, if you live atop a mountain with a 10 mile driveway that leads to the top, they've got to get a phone line to you and when they do it costs the same as the person who lives next door to the phone company's switching center. The get the money to pay for the money-losing lines from the Universial Service Fund... that tax that all the easy-to-serve customers pay to fund the money-losing lines to the hard-to-serve customers.
But there is no USF for high-speed Internet... at least not yet....
Nope, but they do have information that either identifies the leaker, or starts the investigation that takes them down the path to the leaker's identity.
The DCMA demand letter asks them semi-nicely, but if they ignore the letter a court will ask them no-so-nicely to do the exact same thing. So why waste the lawyer's fees on a losing case?
Publishing trade secrets are exactly the same as distributing a copyrighted work without permission.... we're arguing over a disctiction without a difference here.
What's the latency on a cable modem on a system that hasn't been upgraded since the 1960s and a DSL connection that's 10 miles from it's termination point?
Whole lot of bandwidth down, roughly modem speed back towards the satellite. That, combined with a massive ping makes it acceptable for website browsing or receiving media streams, but no good for 2-way videophone, reaction-based games, or serving anything.
first people they should be going after are the people who violated the non-disclosure agreement
But they can't chase somebody they can't identify. That's why the demand to these sites is either to remove the offending post or tell them everything known about the person who sent the offending post which is the way you backsolve to find out who did the leake.
But the DMCA does... it requires the website operator to either remove the offending post, or to disclose any metadata they have about the post. (What IP it came from, what user it came from, anything they know about that user...) It requires the website to help in the investigation to nail the leaker.
Nope, DMCA covers all forms of intelectual property that's illegally posted to a website. Just because it says "copyright" on the label doesn't prevent the law from covering trade secrets too. Just look at all the riders that got tacked on to the Homeland Security Act with weak or no connection to homeland security...
They couldn't stop CNN from making the report, but if CNN continued to report it the store's lawyers could call CNN and say:
"Hey, we know that somebody who works for us told you that infomation, and we know that you know who. We demand you to tell us who told you so we can fire that employee, and sue them for violating their NDA they signed when they started working."
If CNN's reporter takes the high road and refuses to tell, CNN's reporter goes to jail for comtempt of court.
The DMCA addresses this situation, even though it involves "trade secrets" and the sign on the door said "copyright".
Yep, there's no rule saying the contents of a law have to have anything to do with the name of the law. Just look at what they passed today... there were several things with no connection to homeland security, yet the were in the Homeland Security Act and now are headed to be signed into law.
Would it surprise you to learn you have to pay to get into either of those price comparision sites. If you don't want CNet publishing your prices, simply don't send them the check!
Everybody who knew the planned prices was an employee who promised not to tell. Until, somebody did something illegal... somebody broke their employment contract and spilled the beans.
But the problem is, if you boycott on Buy Nothing Day, you're likely to just slowly deposit the same money into their hands in small parts throughout December... same end, different way of getting there.
How about you buy nothing from now until Dec. 26 when all the big closeouts happen anyway. What's that? You got a family? Oh...
The object of the game on Black Friday is to get people to go to your store first, and then keep the shoppers in the store for as long as possible. The more of the shopper's time they can capture that morning, the more likely they're going to catch that shopper's dollars as they start marking off relatives one-by-one from their list. The theory is, it's the first good gift for Uncle Tom that you see that you're going to buy, the second good gift for Uncle Tom that you see you'll pass on because you already got him something.
The problem is that this infomation isn't available right now by walking into the store in question, visiting its website, or calling and asking. This is infomation about a future sale price that has not yet been offered to the public.
The only people who should have this infomation are the employees of the store, and in fact only the management, the sales drones don't need to know this info so even they haven't yet been told. All of those in-the-know employees know that this is secret infomation, and they're not supposed to leak it.
But guess what, somebody didn't listen and leaked it anyway. So, all the DMCA is allowing the store to do is to contain the leak by requring sites that have the illegal-to-have infomation to remove it.
Once this infomation becomes released to the public, the sites can post it all they want. But they have to wait for the sale to be revealed to the public first.
Published facts cannot be copyrighted. That's correct.
The problem is, these sales have not yet been published. There are no ads touting these sales yet, that won't happen until next week.
These sites are getting this infomation from people who are preparing the ads that haven't yet been released, all of whom are under non-disclosure agreements to not tell what's in the ads that they're working on.
If these sites post the same infomation once the ads ads published, they're in the clear. But again, these ads are at this moment trade secrets.
Buy Nothing Day is an outright failure. Friday-after-Thanksgiving remains the largest shopping day of the year despite their efforts. Furthermore, the sales that are offered on that day are often the lowest prices of the year on the targetted blow-out items. Therefore, not shopping on that day causes the people to buy things on a day when the price is higher, putting more money in the store's wallets.
It'd be more effective if AdBusters advocated not buying things on any day in the holiday season, but who'd go along with that?
Slashdot Mirror
What's more astounding is that they couldn't understand exactly how it happened...
Huh? It's their network. It's outright stupid for them to not understand exactly how their network behaves. Security-by-lawyer really isn't that good of a network protocol...
Yes, but from that point they have a short period of time to bring you to a judge where they must convince him why they want to keep you.
There's a process, and if they don't follow it exactly that's when rights start eroding.
Yep, that's all a digital signature can assure you of. Whoever's piece of crypto is involved did in fact sign that piece of software.
The problem is, knowing the source of the code is not the same as knowing the source code. You have only the name on the signature as information and then are asked whether you wish to grant full access to whatever that code wants to do.
Now, Microsoft's really done it. Their infamous security holes have snuck into an ActiveX element that they've signed. They can replace it with a clean version of element, however, any website that has the unpatched ActiveX control can put the unsafe version on their website, and then require it in their HTML. Even with "Always trust Microsoft Corp." disabled, the user is presented with a window to the effect of "Hey, you need an ActiveX control you don't have to read this page. You can trust it, it's from Microsoft Corp."
So much for ActiveX security....
The "Univerisal Service Fee" is on your bill because your phone providers want you to know they're being taxed by a law that they don't particularly like.
The Universal Service rules requires that the incumbent telephone provider must provide the same price for a basic POTS (Plain-old telephone service) line to everybody in their service area. That means, if you live atop a mountain with a 10 mile driveway that leads to the top, they've got to get a phone line to you and when they do it costs the same as the person who lives next door to the phone company's switching center. The get the money to pay for the money-losing lines from the Universial Service Fund... that tax that all the easy-to-serve customers pay to fund the money-losing lines to the hard-to-serve customers.
But there is no USF for high-speed Internet... at least not yet....
Nope, but they do have information that either identifies the leaker, or starts the investigation that takes them down the path to the leaker's identity.
The DCMA demand letter asks them semi-nicely, but if they ignore the letter a court will ask them no-so-nicely to do the exact same thing. So why waste the lawyer's fees on a losing case?
Publishing trade secrets are exactly the same as distributing a copyrighted work without permission.... we're arguing over a disctiction without a difference here.
What's the latency on a cable modem on a system that hasn't been upgraded since the 1960s and a DSL connection that's 10 miles from it's termination point?
The fact is, it works as a high-bandwidth high-delay connection.
It's not as good as cable modem, not as good as DSL, but certainly better than nothing when neither of those are availalbe.
Where's Universal Service when we need it?
It's a one-and-a-half-way-link.
Whole lot of bandwidth down, roughly modem speed back towards the satellite. That, combined with a massive ping makes it acceptable for website browsing or receiving media streams, but no good for 2-way videophone, reaction-based games, or serving anything.
Echostar's going it alone, and that's been known for a while. They broke up their relationship with Starband earlier this year, then went to court over who owned the customer database.
first people they should be going after are the people who violated the non-disclosure agreement
But they can't chase somebody they can't identify. That's why the demand to these sites is either to remove the offending post or tell them everything known about the person who sent the offending post which is the way you backsolve to find out who did the leake.
But the DMCA does... it requires the website operator to either remove the offending post, or to disclose any metadata they have about the post. (What IP it came from, what user it came from, anything they know about that user...) It requires the website to help in the investigation to nail the leaker.
Nope, DMCA covers all forms of intelectual property that's illegally posted to a website. Just because it says "copyright" on the label doesn't prevent the law from covering trade secrets too. Just look at all the riders that got tacked on to the Homeland Security Act with weak or no connection to homeland security...
They couldn't stop CNN from making the report, but if CNN continued to report it the store's lawyers could call CNN and say: "Hey, we know that somebody who works for us told you that infomation, and we know that you know who. We demand you to tell us who told you so we can fire that employee, and sue them for violating their NDA they signed when they started working." If CNN's reporter takes the high road and refuses to tell, CNN's reporter goes to jail for comtempt of court.
The DMCA addresses this situation, even though it involves "trade secrets" and the sign on the door said "copyright". Yep, there's no rule saying the contents of a law have to have anything to do with the name of the law. Just look at what they passed today... there were several things with no connection to homeland security, yet the were in the Homeland Security Act and now are headed to be signed into law.
Or mark the fact that the majority of the public isn't listening to you and goes shopping on that day anyway.
Would it surprise you to learn you have to pay to get into either of those price comparision sites. If you don't want CNet publishing your prices, simply don't send them the check!
Non-disclosure agreement.
Everybody who knew the planned prices was an employee who promised not to tell. Until, somebody did something illegal... somebody broke their employment contract and spilled the beans.
If somebody breaks into your house, finds your bank statement, and the publishes your account number and balance... is that fair use?
That's the problem here... this is stolen infomation that shouldn't be published yet.
But the problem is, if you boycott on Buy Nothing Day, you're likely to just slowly deposit the same money into their hands in small parts throughout December... same end, different way of getting there.
How about you buy nothing from now until Dec. 26 when all the big closeouts happen anyway. What's that? You got a family? Oh...
The object of the game on Black Friday is to get people to go to your store first, and then keep the shoppers in the store for as long as possible. The more of the shopper's time they can capture that morning, the more likely they're going to catch that shopper's dollars as they start marking off relatives one-by-one from their list. The theory is, it's the first good gift for Uncle Tom that you see that you're going to buy, the second good gift for Uncle Tom that you see you'll pass on because you already got him something.
The problem is that this infomation isn't available right now by walking into the store in question, visiting its website, or calling and asking. This is infomation about a future sale price that has not yet been offered to the public.
The only people who should have this infomation are the employees of the store, and in fact only the management, the sales drones don't need to know this info so even they haven't yet been told. All of those in-the-know employees know that this is secret infomation, and they're not supposed to leak it.
But guess what, somebody didn't listen and leaked it anyway. So, all the DMCA is allowing the store to do is to contain the leak by requring sites that have the illegal-to-have infomation to remove it.
Once this infomation becomes released to the public, the sites can post it all they want. But they have to wait for the sale to be revealed to the public first.
Published facts cannot be copyrighted. That's correct.
The problem is, these sales have not yet been published. There are no ads touting these sales yet, that won't happen until next week.
These sites are getting this infomation from people who are preparing the ads that haven't yet been released, all of whom are under non-disclosure agreements to not tell what's in the ads that they're working on.
If these sites post the same infomation once the ads ads published, they're in the clear. But again, these ads are at this moment trade secrets.
Buy Nothing Day is an outright failure. Friday-after-Thanksgiving remains the largest shopping day of the year despite their efforts. Furthermore, the sales that are offered on that day are often the lowest prices of the year on the targetted blow-out items. Therefore, not shopping on that day causes the people to buy things on a day when the price is higher, putting more money in the store's wallets. It'd be more effective if AdBusters advocated not buying things on any day in the holiday season, but who'd go along with that?