Why should proprietary software makers be held liable and OSS makers not liable? The answer is simple. OSS is open for examination. There are no "hidden" defects (unknown perhaps, but not hidden). Proprietary software is not open for examination and may contain hidden defects. You have to take the vendors word that proprietary software does what it is advertised to do and nothing more. You are relying upon the vendor's word, so that should carry some legal responsibility for the vendor. OSS should not carry a warrenty because the public is free to find and fix the defects themselves. You don't have to rely upon the distributor's word. You can examine it (or hire somebody to examine it).
So... all us people with tin-foil hats aren't so crazy afterall.
Seriously though, I can just see the lawyers falling all over themselves to be the first through the courthouse door with a class action law-suit for the residents who live within X-mile radius of the towers. This will be bigger with the lawyers than listening to police scanners and chasing ambulances. Cell-phone companys almost always have deep pockets to pick. Cha-Ching Cha-Ching!
And so if your server is compromised and becomes a spam-spewer, DDOS zombie, cracker relay, or other public menace, its going to be hard contacting you because of the bogus information and a potentially dormant yahoo account.
The internet is part of the public sphere. Courts in the USA (and everywhere else AFAIK) have held that when you leave your house and enter the public sphere (or in this case operate a sever connected to the internet), you volunatarily give up some of your privacy.
If the e-mail address is not "admin@yourdomain", you probably use that e-mail for other things too. So I think there is a higher probability that the spammers harvested your address from one of those other uses, instead of WHOIS. Claiming that spammers got your address off from WHOIS would only be valid logic if the WHOIS email address is unique and there was no other opportunity for a spammer to stumble upon it elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but you have *NO* right to an anonymous domain, nor should you because the opportunity for fraud on the internet is too high. Having everything out front at least keeps a modicum of openness and honesty (although admittadly not a lot).Besides, if I remember properly, you can update the e-mail address to be admin@your-new-domain if you don't want spam going to your personal email.
If you want relative anonymity, get a hotmail or yahoo account.
Although this kind of threat to workers' health is an outrage, in the real world, companies just move overseas when the US cracks down with safety/anti-pollution regulations or if the lawsuits start to pile up. Instead of fixing the problem, it is much cheaper to just move overseas and keep on doing what they have always been doing. There is practically *ZERO* enforcement of workplace safety regulations, environmental pollution regulations, and workers rights in China. The right to sue your employer in China only exists on paper and there are no independent labor unions.
What is needed here is both strict safety regulation and a ban or heavy tariff on goods from countries that do not enforce a basic level of similar reguations. This will force IBM and others to clean up their act and prevent them from just transfering the plants overseas.
A slashdot article from August last year mentioned that the MS OEM contracts prohibit an OEM from shipping any box without an OS. Dell got around this by throwing in a FreeDOS diskette. The target audience was corporations that have volumn licensing agreements and who wanted to install their own licensed copy of Windows without paying for a redundent version. Looks HP is adopting a similar trick to sell OS-less boxes for corporations who will then install their own OS of choice, probably WinXP-Pro or Win2k-Pro. I think the Mandrake CD's might just be trick to get around the MS contracts, similiar to Dell's use of FreeDOS. If these are being sold for corporate networks, most will probably end up running windows.
To use IRM features, businesses will need a server running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system and Windows Rights Management Services software. The server software will record permission rules set by the document creator, such as other people authorized to view the document and expiration dates for any permissions. When another person receives that document, they briefly log in to the Windows Rights Management server--over the Internet or a corporate network--to validate the permissions.
So now you will have to open a port on the firewall and let outsiders into your network so they can authenticate against the Rights Managment Service? I can just visualize the worms now... they invade through this "service" port, crash the server, lock up all the documents, and you loose all your "protected" data. ROTFLMAO.
When I read in the article that "embedded" objects that link to data "external to the document", I get the bad feeling that this might apply to java-based front ends for databases. Is that true? Do this make a java app that links to oracle require a license from these guys?
The DoD has their own spectrum of freqs and they use frequency hopping and encryption (a la SINCGARS field radios) to limit both interception and jamming. The field radios are only on a particualar freq for a fraction of a second before they cycle to the next random freq. I would also surmise that the networking protocol is probably proprietary and not widely known, so even if you interecepted and decrypted the packets, you wouldn't know how to put them back togather.
A common ancestor - perhaps, but....
He specifically mentioned SMP and NUMA. If you are looking at BSD as the common ancestor, chances are you will be disappointed and I don't know of any other common ancestors besides BSD. AFAIK, the BSDs are still struggling with their SMP implementation, so I find it unlikely that either SysV or Linux would have ripped off the BSD SMP code. I think we have to start asking where the Linux SMP and NUMA code might have come from.
We might find out during the discovery process of the Redhat suit. Redhat can use a subpeona to discover when the code in question was put in Unix and then check that date against the Linux commit logs and archives. The earlier implementation wins. Somewhere, somebody (perhaps Sun or IBM, if not SCO itself) has archived versions of the old Sys V code, so it should be fairly easy to see when this stuff first showed up in Sys V vs. Linux. Redhat will just have to apply the subpeona to date the code.
Since NUMA and SMP are mentioned specifically, I think somebody should take a second look at the recent work that SGI did on NUMA and make sure there is no infringement there.
You might be right. SGI is exactly what I was thinking. The article mentioned "another hardware vendor" (Who is not IBM or HP) that contributed Unix Sys V code for SMP. I immediately thought about SGI's recent work on NUMA to get Linux up to 32 processors. Can anybody substaniate or shed light on that? Apologies to SGI, I don't want to FUD you guys, but that seems to be where SCO is pointing.
You are reversing the logic to launch a "strawman" attack. I did not say he is a terrorist because he looked like one, but I did say he looked like one because he is a terrorist and chose to outwardly express it.
Secondly, anytime someone bears arms against his country, he becomes a traitor, regardless of the strength of his convictions. That is a crime, punishable by death. So no wonder this guy copped a plea agreement and cooperated with the authorities, because otherwise he would have gotten much harsher punishment.
Well.. the big difference is that pratically all male Sikhs where a turban and are named Singh. Its not a mark of extremist belief, simply of faith and culture. I've never met anybody who described himself as a devout Sihk who did not wear a turban. However, I've met many devout muslims who do not wear a beard at all or wear a neat trimmed beard. Not all muslims wear this style of beard. Only a certain sub-set do. Again it does not mean they are guilty of anything. It just helps express what they believe and not all beliefs are equal nor are all beliefs innoculous and peaceful.
Perhaps he is pleading guilty because he *really is* guilty and the government has enough evidence to get him convicted and executed for treason. The fact that he *chooses* to grow a taliban-style beard and *chooses* to look like a "jihadi" extremist (while irrelevent to actual criminal guilt) *is* very indicative of what his belief system is. A man projects the image that he chooses to project, it is a form of self-expression. He chooses to express extremism. Because he is a member of a ethnic minority does not make him guilty or innocent or persecuted. But... because he chose to subscribe to a belief system of jihad against the west, and because he then actually took steps to carry it out by giving aid to active combantants, he is guilty.
If you are working with such small samples with nothing exta to verify against, how do you know you got a good sample? You don't. And the older the sample, or more public the collection location, the more like that there will be contamination. Reasonable doubt. Defendant Aquitted. Case Closed.
IMHO, we are quickly meeting a saturation point where we are retiring and replacing IP devices more so than adding new ones anyway. A billion will probably last us a while.
Yes a predictive tool. Basicially, this a way to measure the current "worth" of a particualar idea by using a market-type game theory. As ideas become more likely, their worth rises so they will be bid-up by the masses (of analysts). The most likely will float to the top. The theory is that no one person has perfect (or infinite) insight and information, but thousands of people - each acting independently in a common market - will distill some insight by their collective action. That is classical political-economic theory.
Take the "money and morality" part out and you can see the academic value in a theory like this. Can anybody suggest a better option? Perhaps a bunch of ivory-tower professors and analysts making wild-a** guesses (WAGs) around a conference table? Which WAG is more "valuable" than the others?
The article mentioned that MacOS X worked well, but I think MacOS X also is running a hacked-up version of samba in the background. The grand-parent post said his Mandrake box played well too. So the problem is not in Linux or even the basic technology of Samba. The problem is having a good common widely distributed front end for Samba that asks the user some basic questions about his account (user, passwd, domain) and then interrogates the windows network to find out what the appropriate settings should be and runs a background script to do the configuration without the user ever having to open a shell or edit a.conf file. It sounds like Apple and Mandrake have this problem licked, now the solution just has to be propagated accross the community.
Of course, it would help if MS would be more open with their network protocols and stop making "updates" to the protocols to break competitor's products.
Does anybody really think this will make MS or its monopolies on the Desktop OS/Office go away? No, MS will simply have to pay a royalty and they will pass the cost onto the consumer in the form of higher prices. You will still have to pay the "MicroSoft Tax" when you buy a computer, but now you will also have to pay the "InterTrust Tax" too.
Probably no grounds for lawsuits because SCO will be careful about how they write the contracts.
However, there are plenty of clueless CTO's, managers, and pointy-haired-bosses who will think of this as a relatively cheap form of protection (racket?). PHBs will buy, because in thier mis-informed minds, this will seem like a good idea. There are also lots of legal departments out there are very risk adverse and they will counsel their firms that this is a cheap insurance policy.
Instead campaign donations should be limited to registered voters in the district that the election is being held. If you do not have the right vote in an election, then you have no business trying to influence it with money. There is no reason why californians or new yorkers or englishmen or germans or anybody else should influence an election in North Dakota or Georgia. Only the people who can vote (by right of living there as citizens) should be able to influence the election. The outside money is just too corrupting. This would also have the effect of cutting off "special interest" groups like corporations, labor unions, and political action committiees who are not individual citizens of the district in which the election is being held.
Perhaps this will be a useful test case to go all the way up to the Federal Supreme Court and get the DMCA thrown out on anti-trust or other grounds. Or perhaps it will generate enough publicity to get the public worked up in a lather of rage at being ripped-offed by Lexmark (and others). Either way, its good news and we can hope it comes off well.
Does this mean that AOL/Netscape will not release anymore browsers under the "Netscape" banner? I know mozilla will continue to live, but what about Netscape Navigator?
What I find interesting is if AOL is going to exclusively use IE as a browser for upto seven years and if IE will no longer exist independently of Windows, what will AOL do for non-windows platforms? Will they contain a gecko-based browser on those platforms? I think I've read somewhere that the AOL Mac client is gecko based.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should proprietary software makers be held liable and OSS makers not liable? The answer is simple. OSS is open for examination. There are no "hidden" defects (unknown perhaps, but not hidden). Proprietary software is not open for examination and may contain hidden defects. You have to take the vendors word that proprietary software does what it is advertised to do and nothing more. You are relying upon the vendor's word, so that should carry some legal responsibility for the vendor. OSS should not carry a warrenty because the public is free to find and fix the defects themselves. You don't have to rely upon the distributor's word. You can examine it (or hire somebody to examine it).
So... all us people with tin-foil hats aren't so crazy afterall.
Seriously though, I can just see the lawyers falling all over themselves to be the first through the courthouse door with a class action law-suit for the residents who live within X-mile radius of the towers. This will be bigger with the lawyers than listening to police scanners and chasing ambulances. Cell-phone companys almost always have deep pockets to pick. Cha-Ching Cha-Ching!
And so if your server is compromised and becomes a spam-spewer, DDOS zombie, cracker relay, or other public menace, its going to be hard contacting you because of the bogus information and a potentially dormant yahoo account.
The internet is part of the public sphere. Courts in the USA (and everywhere else AFAIK) have held that when you leave your house and enter the public sphere (or in this case operate a sever connected to the internet), you volunatarily give up some of your privacy.
If the e-mail address is not "admin@yourdomain", you probably use that e-mail for other things too. So I think there is a higher probability that the spammers harvested your address from one of those other uses, instead of WHOIS. Claiming that spammers got your address off from WHOIS would only be valid logic if the WHOIS email address is unique and there was no other opportunity for a spammer to stumble upon it elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but you have *NO* right to an anonymous domain, nor should you because the opportunity for fraud on the internet is too high. Having everything out front at least keeps a modicum of openness and honesty (although admittadly not a lot).Besides, if I remember properly, you can update the e-mail address to be admin@your-new-domain if you don't want spam going to your personal email.
If you want relative anonymity, get a hotmail or yahoo account.
Although this kind of threat to workers' health is an outrage, in the real world, companies just move overseas when the US cracks down with safety/anti-pollution regulations or if the lawsuits start to pile up. Instead of fixing the problem, it is much cheaper to just move overseas and keep on doing what they have always been doing. There is practically *ZERO* enforcement of workplace safety regulations, environmental pollution regulations, and workers rights in China. The right to sue your employer in China only exists on paper and there are no independent labor unions.
What is needed here is both strict safety regulation and a ban or heavy tariff on goods from countries that do not enforce a basic level of similar reguations. This will force IBM and others to clean up their act and prevent them from just transfering the plants overseas.
A slashdot article from August last year mentioned that the MS OEM contracts prohibit an OEM from shipping any box without an OS. Dell got around this by throwing in a FreeDOS diskette. The target audience was corporations that have volumn licensing agreements and who wanted to install their own licensed copy of Windows without paying for a redundent version. Looks HP is adopting a similar trick to sell OS-less boxes for corporations who will then install their own OS of choice, probably WinXP-Pro or Win2k-Pro. I think the Mandrake CD's might just be trick to get around the MS contracts, similiar to Dell's use of FreeDOS. If these are being sold for corporate networks, most will probably end up running windows.
To use IRM features, businesses will need a server running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system and Windows Rights Management Services software. The server software will record permission rules set by the document creator, such as other people authorized to view the document and expiration dates for any permissions. When another person receives that document, they briefly log in to the Windows Rights Management server--over the Internet or a corporate network--to validate the permissions.
So now you will have to open a port on the firewall and let outsiders into your network so they can authenticate against the Rights Managment Service? I can just visualize the worms now... they invade through this "service" port, crash the server, lock up all the documents, and you loose all your "protected" data. ROTFLMAO.
When I read in the article that "embedded" objects that link to data "external to the document", I get the bad feeling that this might apply to java-based front ends for databases. Is that true? Do this make a java app that links to oracle require a license from these guys?
The DoD has their own spectrum of freqs and they use frequency hopping and encryption (a la SINCGARS field radios) to limit both interception and jamming. The field radios are only on a particualar freq for a fraction of a second before they cycle to the next random freq. I would also surmise that the networking protocol is probably proprietary and not widely known, so even if you interecepted and decrypted the packets, you wouldn't know how to put them back togather.
A common ancestor - perhaps, but.... He specifically mentioned SMP and NUMA. If you are looking at BSD as the common ancestor, chances are you will be disappointed and I don't know of any other common ancestors besides BSD. AFAIK, the BSDs are still struggling with their SMP implementation, so I find it unlikely that either SysV or Linux would have ripped off the BSD SMP code. I think we have to start asking where the Linux SMP and NUMA code might have come from.
We might find out during the discovery process of the Redhat suit. Redhat can use a subpeona to discover when the code in question was put in Unix and then check that date against the Linux commit logs and archives. The earlier implementation wins. Somewhere, somebody (perhaps Sun or IBM, if not SCO itself) has archived versions of the old Sys V code, so it should be fairly easy to see when this stuff first showed up in Sys V vs. Linux. Redhat will just have to apply the subpeona to date the code.
Since NUMA and SMP are mentioned specifically, I think somebody should take a second look at the recent work that SGI did on NUMA and make sure there is no infringement there.
You might be right. SGI is exactly what I was thinking. The article mentioned "another hardware vendor" (Who is not IBM or HP) that contributed Unix Sys V code for SMP. I immediately thought about SGI's recent work on NUMA to get Linux up to 32 processors. Can anybody substaniate or shed light on that? Apologies to SGI, I don't want to FUD you guys, but that seems to be where SCO is pointing.
You are reversing the logic to launch a "strawman" attack. I did not say he is a terrorist because he looked like one, but I did say he looked like one because he is a terrorist and chose to outwardly express it.
Secondly, anytime someone bears arms against his country, he becomes a traitor, regardless of the strength of his convictions. That is a crime, punishable by death. So no wonder this guy copped a plea agreement and cooperated with the authorities, because otherwise he would have gotten much harsher punishment.
Well.. the big difference is that pratically all male Sikhs where a turban and are named Singh. Its not a mark of extremist belief, simply of faith and culture. I've never met anybody who described himself as a devout Sihk who did not wear a turban. However, I've met many devout muslims who do not wear a beard at all or wear a neat trimmed beard. Not all muslims wear this style of beard. Only a certain sub-set do. Again it does not mean they are guilty of anything. It just helps express what they believe and not all beliefs are equal nor are all beliefs innoculous and peaceful.
Developed and implemented first at NASA. Let's see SCO reconcile that
Perhaps he is pleading guilty because he *really is* guilty and the government has enough evidence to get him convicted and executed for treason. The fact that he *chooses* to grow a taliban-style beard and *chooses* to look like a "jihadi" extremist (while irrelevent to actual criminal guilt) *is* very indicative of what his belief system is. A man projects the image that he chooses to project, it is a form of self-expression. He chooses to express extremism. Because he is a member of a ethnic minority does not make him guilty or innocent or persecuted. But... because he chose to subscribe to a belief system of jihad against the west, and because he then actually took steps to carry it out by giving aid to active combantants, he is guilty.
If you are working with such small samples with nothing exta to verify against, how do you know you got a good sample? You don't. And the older the sample, or more public the collection location, the more like that there will be contamination. Reasonable doubt. Defendant Aquitted. Case Closed.
IMHO, we are quickly meeting a saturation point where we are retiring and replacing IP devices more so than adding new ones anyway. A billion will probably last us a while.
Yes a predictive tool. Basicially, this a way to measure the current "worth" of a particualar idea by using a market-type game theory. As ideas become more likely, their worth rises so they will be bid-up by the masses (of analysts). The most likely will float to the top. The theory is that no one person has perfect (or infinite) insight and information, but thousands of people - each acting independently in a common market - will distill some insight by their collective action. That is classical political-economic theory.
Take the "money and morality" part out and you can see the academic value in a theory like this. Can anybody suggest a better option? Perhaps a bunch of ivory-tower professors and analysts making wild-a** guesses (WAGs) around a conference table? Which WAG is more "valuable" than the others?
The article mentioned that MacOS X worked well, but I think MacOS X also is running a hacked-up version of samba in the background. The grand-parent post said his Mandrake box played well too. So the problem is not in Linux or even the basic technology of Samba. The problem is having a good common widely distributed front end for Samba that asks the user some basic questions about his account (user, passwd, domain) and then interrogates the windows network to find out what the appropriate settings should be and runs a background script to do the configuration without the user ever having to open a shell or edit a .conf file. It sounds like Apple and Mandrake have this problem licked, now the solution just has to be propagated accross the community.
Of course, it would help if MS would be more open with their network protocols and stop making "updates" to the protocols to break competitor's products.
Does anybody really think this will make MS or its monopolies on the Desktop OS/Office go away? No, MS will simply have to pay a royalty and they will pass the cost onto the consumer in the form of higher prices. You will still have to pay the "MicroSoft Tax" when you buy a computer, but now you will also have to pay the "InterTrust Tax" too.
Probably no grounds for lawsuits because SCO will be careful about how they write the contracts.
However, there are plenty of clueless CTO's, managers, and pointy-haired-bosses who will think of this as a relatively cheap form of protection (racket?). PHBs will buy, because in thier mis-informed minds, this will seem like a good idea. There are also lots of legal departments out there are very risk adverse and they will counsel their firms that this is a cheap insurance policy.
Really... why have a public dole for politicians?
Instead campaign donations should be limited to registered voters in the district that the election is being held. If you do not have the right vote in an election, then you have no business trying to influence it with money. There is no reason why californians or new yorkers or englishmen or germans or anybody else should influence an election in North Dakota or Georgia. Only the people who can vote (by right of living there as citizens) should be able to influence the election. The outside money is just too corrupting. This would also have the effect of cutting off "special interest" groups like corporations, labor unions, and political action committiees who are not individual citizens of the district in which the election is being held.
Perhaps this will be a useful test case to go all the way up to the Federal Supreme Court and get the DMCA thrown out on anti-trust or other grounds. Or perhaps it will generate enough publicity to get the public worked up in a lather of rage at being ripped-offed by Lexmark (and others). Either way, its good news and we can hope it comes off well.
Does this mean that AOL/Netscape will not release anymore browsers under the "Netscape" banner? I know mozilla will continue to live, but what about Netscape Navigator?
What I find interesting is if AOL is going to exclusively use IE as a browser for upto seven years and if IE will no longer exist independently of Windows, what will AOL do for non-windows platforms? Will they contain a gecko-based browser on those platforms? I think I've read somewhere that the AOL Mac client is gecko based.