It's difficult to find the local street value of crack in Utah. But I wonder - just how many kilos can $50M buy? Also, I assume SCO's huge demand has driven prices up. Perhaps that's part of the pump-n-dump also - does Darl own stock in any other organized crime rings?
Although it's taken far too long, I think the mainstream media (Forbes, in this case) is beginning to catch on. Before, they just parroted SCO ("SCO, owner of Unix, has sued IBM, and the free Unix derivative Linux is at risk.") Now, however, we see the media going under the surface, creating quotes like "[SCO] didn't even play a role in creating Unix," and, "McBride's assault on the "peace and love" Linux movement already has made SCO the most hated villain in the computer industry. Now he wants to shake down the people who make cartoons for kids." I expect that in a month or so, the media will be overtly telling people how much of a farce this really is.
This article was mostly good, but I wish they had picked apart McBride's "'Boy, this free stuff is sure cool!'" lie - the difference is that the creators of movies don't want them to be free, while the creators of Linux do, and McBride's the one usurping our copyrights. Also, the author slipped up and called Linux freeware, but that's a minor distinction to everyone but us. And there was quite a bit of emphasis on people investing in SCO, but hey, this is Forbes, so what a company does is secondary to how its stock will react.
As for SCO itself, it's difficult to understand why they are so suicidal. They've ruined their defense against RedHat by explicitly threatening to sue their customers (assuming RedHat has at least one customer in Hollywood.) They're extorting from companies even bigger than IBM, companies which might have more to lose, companies that exert some control on the media, which SCO desperately needs. Everyone assumes Microsoft, but one would think Microsoft could buy higher-quality FUD, and hide its ties better. Pump-n-dump doesn't quite fit either - McBride isn't making any attempt to appear like he has a case anymore. Anyone who can't tell he's a raving lunatic isn't looking hard enough. I remain frustrated at our incredibly slow legal system, which won't do anything about this for at least two more years.
Our friend the DMCA, of course. Becomming root with wait4(3<<30) could clearly be used to copy files to which you don't have read access, thus circumventing an effective copy control mechanism. Heck, I'm a criminal for telling you that.
Seriously, though - there are probably many laws by which it would be illegal. The cracker gained unauthorized access to a system and he vandalized data. And the obvious intent was to create a backdoor in many more systems. If they find this guy, he'll be in serious trouble. The guy he pretended to be could probably also sue him for something.
If you change that to if((c=1));, the error will be supressed - the extra parenthesis show that the assignment was intentional. Which it was, in a way.
GCC will normally catch assignment in a conditional, but because some people insist on being clever, there's a way around that. Putting parenthesis around the assignment stops the warning, which is exactly what this trojan does.
I don't see why this is flamebait. There is a lot of money to be made by selling pseudo-scientific alternative medicine crap to people, including in braceletform. The first link sells bracelets with "a minimum of six neodymium north facing unipole & permanent (1500 gauss) magnets." The second link is almost what the parent describes - it has two quarter-inch gold-plated balls ("terminals") and sells for $80 to $130. The point is, there's no limit to what you can sell to stupid people, and it's a pity this can get in the way of real research.
Here's another interesting thought on probablity. Suppose you flip a coin 10 times, and the result is HHHHHHHHHH. The chance of that occuring is 1/2^10, pretty small. Now you flip it 10 more times, and you get HTTHHTHTHH. Again, the chance of getting exactly that is 1/2^10, very low. But it still happened.
Saying life is improbable is like looking at the past record of coinflips, noticing that the probability of everything occuring exactly as it did is astronomically low, and concluding that it didn't happen. Yes, life being exactly, down to the smallest detail, like it is now is low. The chances of sentient beings existing is much higher - they just might have been different from us. And as measured by a sentient being, the chance of existance of sentient beings is 1.
And finally, chance isn't the only factor. Why are there no huge raindrops? Raindrops form and combine by chance, right? No, when they get to big, they die, just like unfit individuals in a population. Other factors, aerodynamics in the case of raindrops, the environment in the case of animals, organize the chance happenings. Design them, if you will.
Show me someone who rants about fair use, and I will show you someone who 99.9% of the time owns a ps2 hacked to play illegal copies, has gigs of non-fair use mp3's, or watches copied dvd's from friends.
Surely you knew you'd be flamed for that, so I ask, where did you get your association between fair use and copyright infringement? Have you been brainwashed? I'm the second reply, so it's 50%, not 99.9%. I do none of those things. But I'll still rant about fair use, because it's very important.
iTunes does a good job of making people think they still have fair use. People don't realize that they're now at the mercy of Apple. Ask yourself, since allowing CD burning makes piracy easy, what is the purpose of Apple's DRM? I think it's an attempt to put more DRM infrastructure in place - don't think your fair use will be safe in the future. After everything supports your "flexible" phone-home DRM systems, it will be easy to increase the restrictions. Again, piracy will remain unaffected, but fair use will suffer.
I agree that DRM should not be illegal, but there are two huge problems currently. First, there is no competition in the music industry, so DRM is being forced upon us by the only powerful group. Unless it can be succesful in an open market, it isn't meant to be. Second, I don't think DRM should be legally protected with the DMCA. We already have copyright laws that are perfectly sufficient to punish infringement, and that could be strengthened if necessary. By making DRM circumvention illegal, the only new action that becomes illegal is excercising fair use rights.
True, but I don't think that should be the case. Keeping secrets, exactly what patents are supposed to prevent, is bad enough - trade secret law is even uglier.
What I think Linux really needs to conquer the desktop in the long term is something besides X, and OSX may be instrumental in showing people that you can make a desktop by combining a Linux-like kernel with a not-X GUI. Obviously, I'd want whatever wins over X to be open source, however.
I'm not talking about toolkit competion on top of X - that's somewhat a bad thing, because there's tons of repetition of effort, and the end result is inconsistency. That X allows this is its major shortcoming. I'm also not talking about eliminating X's network transparency - that's its best aspect, and must be preserved at all cost.
I want something with server-side widget rendering. This should be plugable and themeable, so their could still be competition. But since clients would communicate on the level of "put a button here" instead of "draw a grey rectangle with text here," it would be easy for all the programs on a display to have a consistent UI. There are some attempts to do this, PicoGUI and Fresco, but I want them to become popular, to compete, and to retain X compatibility (by having clients which are rootless X servers). It would take a few years, but the Linux status quo could move to something better than X, and we'd win in the long run.
Soon, I expect to hear people dissing Ability because it's commercial. This is counterproductive, however - even if it's not OpenOffice, it still brings diversity, which brings tolerance. Besides, there is a Linux/WINELib port. (www.uk.ability.com isn't Slashdotted yet.)
The process to make this material is patented, right? If so, wouldn't hacking a network to steal the manufacturing details be superfluous? Couldn't they just look at the patent? The whole point of patents is that you get a temporary monopoly in return for not keeping secrets.
Granted, making this material would be a violation of US patent law (and Chinese patent law, to the extent it exists), but you're making it sound like the patent has been obfuscated, which shouldn't be.
This is clearly the best technology ever developed, because it can close the analog hole. We can implant two speakers, one for each ear, just inside the skull. Each speaker will have a DAC and a decryptor chip, and a secure digital pathway leading out the ear canal. The pathway will block the ear canal to restrict unauthorized listening. The speakers will connect to a wearable Microsoft Music Center device, which will manage the user's listening rights. Later versions might include a microphone, so that the user can listen to sounds in the environment, after a short delay to ensure they aren't watermarked.
Although some cyber-terrorists may consider this a drastic method, it's the only way to protect the content industries, which are vital to America's economy, from rampant piracy and theft. Therefore, I'm proposing legislation requiring these devices to be implanted in each child before they turn two. Please join my crusade of consumer protection and write your congressman today!
Or, you could close the lid before flushing and keep the toothbrush on the opposite side of the sink. Say, that gives me an idea - put a sensor in the toilet seat so it flushes whenever you put the seat down, unless you hold down the override button. (There'd still be a manual flusher.) This way, no crappy toothbrushes, no females complaining about the seat being up, and no females leaving the seat in the middle.
Indeed. I wonder if scrolls at the bottom of the Simpson's TV (showing the borders of the TV) would still be allowed? Knowing Fox, they'd need a focus group to determine whether their viewers would be fooled.
Hint: we Slashdotters aren't all the same person, and as such, we don't all have the same opinion. Obviously there are some hypocrites, but for the most part, the people who advocate mass copyright infringement (not me) aren't the same people who want to call SCO on doing this similar thing. Also, consider how many of us make a living producing copyrighted material - I think it's fair to say that in general, we respect copyrights.
The real question is whether a blog is responsible for anonymous cowards - the article it's several AC comment that are considered libelous. The obvious analogy is, is VA Linux liable for Anonymous Coward's comments? I would hope not, because as Slashdot (and presumeably this guy's blog) doesn't censor, it ought to be a common carrier. Granted, both Slashdot and the guy could censor, but they ought to be allowed to choose not to. IOW, providing a forum for free speech shouldn't be risky, regardless of what people say.
Slashdot Mirror
It's difficult to find the local street value of crack in Utah. But I wonder - just how many kilos can $50M buy? Also, I assume SCO's huge demand has driven prices up. Perhaps that's part of the pump-n-dump also - does Darl own stock in any other organized crime rings?
This article was mostly good, but I wish they had picked apart McBride's "'Boy, this free stuff is sure cool!'" lie - the difference is that the creators of movies don't want them to be free, while the creators of Linux do, and McBride's the one usurping our copyrights. Also, the author slipped up and called Linux freeware, but that's a minor distinction to everyone but us. And there was quite a bit of emphasis on people investing in SCO, but hey, this is Forbes, so what a company does is secondary to how its stock will react.
As for SCO itself, it's difficult to understand why they are so suicidal. They've ruined their defense against RedHat by explicitly threatening to sue their customers (assuming RedHat has at least one customer in Hollywood.) They're extorting from companies even bigger than IBM, companies which might have more to lose, companies that exert some control on the media, which SCO desperately needs. Everyone assumes Microsoft, but one would think Microsoft could buy higher-quality FUD, and hide its ties better. Pump-n-dump doesn't quite fit either - McBride isn't making any attempt to appear like he has a case anymore. Anyone who can't tell he's a raving lunatic isn't looking hard enough. I remain frustrated at our incredibly slow legal system, which won't do anything about this for at least two more years.
Sorry to blow your cover.
Yes, by whoever put it in.
Why, oh why did I register with Insta-Trace?
Seriously, though - there are probably many laws by which it would be illegal. The cracker gained unauthorized access to a system and he vandalized data. And the obvious intent was to create a backdoor in many more systems. If they find this guy, he'll be in serious trouble. The guy he pretended to be could probably also sue him for something.
If you change that to if((c=1));, the error will be supressed - the extra parenthesis show that the assignment was intentional. Which it was, in a way.
GCC will normally catch assignment in a conditional, but because some people insist on being clever, there's a way around that. Putting parenthesis around the assignment stops the warning, which is exactly what this trojan does.
I don't see why this is flamebait. There is a lot of money to be made by selling pseudo-scientific alternative medicine crap to people, including in bracelet form. The first link sells bracelets with "a minimum of six neodymium north facing unipole & permanent (1500 gauss) magnets." The second link is almost what the parent describes - it has two quarter-inch gold-plated balls ("terminals") and sells for $80 to $130. The point is, there's no limit to what you can sell to stupid people, and it's a pity this can get in the way of real research.
Please elaborate. What does ID predict?
Saying life is improbable is like looking at the past record of coinflips, noticing that the probability of everything occuring exactly as it did is astronomically low, and concluding that it didn't happen. Yes, life being exactly, down to the smallest detail, like it is now is low. The chances of sentient beings existing is much higher - they just might have been different from us. And as measured by a sentient being, the chance of existance of sentient beings is 1.
And finally, chance isn't the only factor. Why are there no huge raindrops? Raindrops form and combine by chance, right? No, when they get to big, they die, just like unfit individuals in a population. Other factors, aerodynamics in the case of raindrops, the environment in the case of animals, organize the chance happenings. Design them, if you will.
Surely you knew you'd be flamed for that, so I ask, where did you get your association between fair use and copyright infringement? Have you been brainwashed? I'm the second reply, so it's 50%, not 99.9%. I do none of those things. But I'll still rant about fair use, because it's very important.
iTunes does a good job of making people think they still have fair use. People don't realize that they're now at the mercy of Apple. Ask yourself, since allowing CD burning makes piracy easy, what is the purpose of Apple's DRM? I think it's an attempt to put more DRM infrastructure in place - don't think your fair use will be safe in the future. After everything supports your "flexible" phone-home DRM systems, it will be easy to increase the restrictions. Again, piracy will remain unaffected, but fair use will suffer.
I agree that DRM should not be illegal, but there are two huge problems currently. First, there is no competition in the music industry, so DRM is being forced upon us by the only powerful group. Unless it can be succesful in an open market, it isn't meant to be. Second, I don't think DRM should be legally protected with the DMCA. We already have copyright laws that are perfectly sufficient to punish infringement, and that could be strengthened if necessary. By making DRM circumvention illegal, the only new action that becomes illegal is excercising fair use rights.
Also, such hard drives have many times the storage capacity of regular drives. The count double.
True, but I don't think that should be the case. Keeping secrets, exactly what patents are supposed to prevent, is bad enough - trade secret law is even uglier.
I'm not talking about toolkit competion on top of X - that's somewhat a bad thing, because there's tons of repetition of effort, and the end result is inconsistency. That X allows this is its major shortcoming. I'm also not talking about eliminating X's network transparency - that's its best aspect, and must be preserved at all cost.
I want something with server-side widget rendering. This should be plugable and themeable, so their could still be competition. But since clients would communicate on the level of "put a button here" instead of "draw a grey rectangle with text here," it would be easy for all the programs on a display to have a consistent UI. There are some attempts to do this, PicoGUI and Fresco, but I want them to become popular, to compete, and to retain X compatibility (by having clients which are rootless X servers). It would take a few years, but the Linux status quo could move to something better than X, and we'd win in the long run.
Soon, I expect to hear people dissing Ability because it's commercial. This is counterproductive, however - even if it's not OpenOffice, it still brings diversity, which brings tolerance. Besides, there is a Linux/WINELib port. (www.uk.ability.com isn't Slashdotted yet.)
Granted, making this material would be a violation of US patent law (and Chinese patent law, to the extent it exists), but you're making it sound like the patent has been obfuscated, which shouldn't be.
Although some cyber-terrorists may consider this a drastic method, it's the only way to protect the content industries, which are vital to America's economy, from rampant piracy and theft. Therefore, I'm proposing legislation requiring these devices to be implanted in each child before they turn two. Please join my crusade of consumer protection and write your congressman today!
Or, you could close the lid before flushing and keep the toothbrush on the opposite side of the sink. Say, that gives me an idea - put a sensor in the toilet seat so it flushes whenever you put the seat down, unless you hold down the override button. (There'd still be a manual flusher.) This way, no crappy toothbrushes, no females complaining about the seat being up, and no females leaving the seat in the middle.
Indeed. I wonder if scrolls at the bottom of the Simpson's TV (showing the borders of the TV) would still be allowed? Knowing Fox, they'd need a focus group to determine whether their viewers would be fooled.
Hint: we Slashdotters aren't all the same person, and as such, we don't all have the same opinion. Obviously there are some hypocrites, but for the most part, the people who advocate mass copyright infringement (not me) aren't the same people who want to call SCO on doing this similar thing. Also, consider how many of us make a living producing copyrighted material - I think it's fair to say that in general, we respect copyrights.
Shift happens.
The real question is whether a blog is responsible for anonymous cowards - the article it's several AC comment that are considered libelous. The obvious analogy is, is VA Linux liable for Anonymous Coward's comments? I would hope not, because as Slashdot (and presumeably this guy's blog) doesn't censor, it ought to be a common carrier. Granted, both Slashdot and the guy could censor, but they ought to be allowed to choose not to. IOW, providing a forum for free speech shouldn't be risky, regardless of what people say.