I recently read an article that explained how DropBox was perfect to share your KeePass database among all your devices. I've also heard of BitCoin wallets.
That is exactly the kind of thing you do need to test: not just whether correct passwords are accepted, but also whether wrong passwords are rejected. Automatic testing is all about edge cases like these.
Doesn't a service like that have a preview deployment where they can properly test it? Maybe some automated testing for their authentication system, which I believe is a pretty big part of what they're doing?
Alas, testing is much like security, in that many companies try to get away with as little as possible.
"However, there is a further section in the GPL that takes up just this point, which is quite orthogonal to any..."
Right that's it. Shut your mouth. If you use that word one more time I swear I'll... Orthogonal!? You pretentious wally.
How about "It challenges..." or "It answers this point..." or "It undermines this point..." or some other use of English which is not daft as a brush.
Orthogonal doesn't mean any of those things. Orthogonal means it's on a totally different axis. Like a x-axis is orthogonal to the y-axis. Or freedomauthoritarian is orthogonal to economically leftright. And if you mean to say something like that, "orthogonal" is a perfectly valid word to use for it.
I have no idea what feenberg (the GP) is talking about or whether he's using the word correctly, but elsewhere in this discussion, I've used the word orthogonal to say that being pro-sharing of code doesn't have to mean you're specifically pro- or anti-copyright. That's a perfectly valid way to use the word.
1. They want to provide a device which does this, and the software competes. There are several FritzBoxes which fill different niches, and AVM occasionally bring out new ones with specific features. They are actually quite cool little Linux boxes, lots of hacks for them.
Are FritzBoxes from AVM? And there's hacks and third-party software for them? I need to check that out. I have a FritzBox, but never really looked into any of that.
If people believe that information should be shared, it's perfectly consistent to support uses of copyright law that require sharing, while opposing uses of copyright law that don't require sharing.
If people believe that information must be shared, as the GPL requires, then they implicitly believe that information should be allowed to be restricted in how its used. You can't require sharing without also requiring restriction. Why is the must-share restriction better than the don't-share restriction? That's the inconsistency.
You're just arguing that sharing is better than not sharing. That's a perfectly legitimate argument to make, but it's also a completely different discussion. Consistency in copyright enforcement (or lack thereof) was the point of my original post.
The bold part is exactly the entire point of the pro-sharing position. If it didn't believe that sharing is better than not sharing, then the hell does it mean if someone believes that information should be shared? Your original post actually suggested that this was not a legitimate point to make, and now you're trying to force pro-sharers into a different standpoint than their own.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with anything, I'm just pointing out that it's entirely legitimate for a pro-sharer to be neither completely pro-copyright nor completely anti-copyright. Copyright can be considered good when it helps sharing, and bad when it hurts sharing. Copyright does both.
The problem is that even if an organization is pro-sharing, the way the GPL accomplishes that is by putting *restrictions* on what you can do with the information/software/etc. that they produce and release. If the pro-sharing groups believe it's okay for their group to restrict how someone uses their information by requiring distribution of source for derivative works (i.e. copyleft/GPL), they *have* to be okay with a different group restricting how someone uses their information by prohibiting redistribution or derivative works entirely without licensing/royalties (i.e. traditional copyright). They are all restrictions.
This is a non-sequitur, and in fact, completely false. From the pro-sharing viewpoint, sharing is good, not sharing is bad. If you sell modified GPL code, you have to share the source code. Yes, it is a restriction that forces you to share, but from a pro-sharing viewpoint, it's a good restriction, because it forces people to share. But sharing copyrighted works is also good from a pro-sharing viewpoint, simply because it's sharing.
Pro-sharing is neither the same nor the opposite as pro-copyright. It's orthogonal to it. It's how someone who's against killing can be both against murder, and against the execution of murderers, whereas your point sounds like: "if you support the law that makes murder illegal, you also have to support the law that gives murderers the death penalty." (I admit murder is rather an extreme comparison, but it does make the orthogonality of the issues at hand clear.)
However, people on slashdot are not universally pro-pirate. * Many are for more reasonable copyright laws (14/28 years). * Many don't view it as a lost sale if the person couldn't afford to purchase the product in the first place. (Yes it is piracy- but with no real damage to the creator. Less damage than libraries (which are legal) in fact..
There is one huge difference between this case and "piracy". Here, money is involved. AVM sells other people's code for money in a way that violates the license. They're nor merely breaking the law, they're trying to profit from it. And that is, in my opinion, what makes this criminal.
But the UK should. Is this even a criminal case in the UK? I doubt they can extradite him for a civil matter. And if it is a crime in the UK, and he committed the act in the UK, he should be tried there. The only reason for extradition is if the crime was committed in another country.
I often wonder what people mean by "ROM" when they're talking about Android distributions (because that's what they are). I've always hoped it meant something other than "read-only memory". But if Android modders get even that basic bit of computer terminology wrong, it's no surprise they don't understand public key encryption either.
But does that mean there are really no competent Android modders? I was actually expecting a bit more from that community.
This isn't about average Joes. It's about people who create OS distribution (not something the average Joe does), and then sign them with a private key that's not private.
Any programmer worth his salt should know at least the very basics of public key encryption, especially if he's actually going to make use of it. Why would you sign software when you don't even know why you're signing it?
But Cyanogen Mod is a pretty big project by now, isn't it? I can't believe nobody involved in it has any basic knowledge of public key encryption.
How can people who know enough about encryption to root a phone, not know about public key encryption? I completely fail to understand the world today.
'There is still a $25 million reward that no one has collected, and the reward says dead or alive, well, if -- in fact -- he is dead, then I could collect the $25 million reward. Why not?'
He's got a point there. But the sea is pretty big. Finding a single body there is much like catching one very specific fish. Not to mention that I'm sure there are lots of critters down there that love to eat dead bodies.
Why would you keep that type of cash in bitcoin? Anyone with half a brain would at least put that kind of money in a savings account to get interest.
Bank interest is laughable compared to the speed with which the Bitcoin bubble is inflating (or should I say deflating?) at the moment. I believe a Bitcoin was worth $7 around the time of the last Bitcoin story here (a few weeks ago), and if this story is to be believed, then it's now $20 per Bitcoin. If you like to gamble on pyramid schemes, this is a pretty good return on investment.
Various people on the Bitcoin forums have seen that money move around and end up at one of the exchanges. Of course it could still be fraud: maybe transferred the bitcoins to another account of himself, sells his bitcoins on an exchange, and claims they were stolen. It can't be verified or disproven until somehow people manage to link bitcoin accounts to real people, and that's supposed to be impossible.
But no, they would rather punk on the defenseless.
Are you talking about LulzSec? I don't think I've heard from any attack on the defenseless by them. They attack mostly really big corporations and government agencies. If anyone should be able to defend themselves against such attacks, it's them.
I agree for single player. But for multiplayer, it becomes crowded when four players' mice keyboards are plugged into a PC, and the "Raw Input API" for reading multiple mice and keyboards is a bit more obscure than the traditional DirectInput API for reading four joystick.
What are you talking about? Get your own PC, man!
For party games, consoles are obviously better. Sitting 4 people at a single desk is also not terribly comfortable. Couches are more suitable for that. But then you're talking about a totally different kind of game experience, not terribly suited to hardcore RPGs like The Witcher.
I'd rather see a Mac and Linux port than a console port.
I agree here too in principle. But due to the state of graphics on Linux, that might not be easy. Case in point: Fedora recommends Intel
Only for ideological reasons, according to that link. No need for a gamer to care about that.
And how easily can a single binary package be used across multiple distributions, both RPM-based and Debian-based?
Who cares? Just install the game. There are a lot of games, big titles even (just not my favourites, unfortunately), available for PC, Mac and Linux. Seems to work fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently read an article that explained how DropBox was perfect to share your KeePass database among all your devices. I've also heard of BitCoin wallets.
That is exactly the kind of thing you do need to test: not just whether correct passwords are accepted, but also whether wrong passwords are rejected. Automatic testing is all about edge cases like these.
Doesn't a service like that have a preview deployment where they can properly test it? Maybe some automated testing for their authentication system, which I believe is a pretty big part of what they're doing?
Alas, testing is much like security, in that many companies try to get away with as little as possible.
"However, there is a further section in the GPL that takes up just this point, which is quite orthogonal to any..."
Right that's it. Shut your mouth. If you use that word one more time I swear I'll... Orthogonal!? You pretentious wally.
How about "It challenges..." or "It answers this point..." or "It undermines this point..." or some other use of English which is not daft as a brush.
Orthogonal doesn't mean any of those things. Orthogonal means it's on a totally different axis. Like a x-axis is orthogonal to the y-axis. Or freedomauthoritarian is orthogonal to economically leftright. And if you mean to say something like that, "orthogonal" is a perfectly valid word to use for it.
I have no idea what feenberg (the GP) is talking about or whether he's using the word correctly, but elsewhere in this discussion, I've used the word orthogonal to say that being pro-sharing of code doesn't have to mean you're specifically pro- or anti-copyright. That's a perfectly valid way to use the word.
I believe EULAs have been killed in several countries.
1. They want to provide a device which does this, and the software competes. There are several FritzBoxes which fill different niches, and AVM occasionally bring out new ones with specific features. They are actually quite cool little Linux boxes, lots of hacks for them.
Are FritzBoxes from AVM? And there's hacks and third-party software for them? I need to check that out. I have a FritzBox, but never really looked into any of that.
If people believe that information should be shared, it's perfectly consistent to support uses of copyright law that require sharing, while opposing uses of copyright law that don't require sharing.
If people believe that information must be shared, as the GPL requires, then they implicitly believe that information should be allowed to be restricted in how its used. You can't require sharing without also requiring restriction. Why is the must-share restriction better than the don't-share restriction? That's the inconsistency.
You're just arguing that sharing is better than not sharing. That's a perfectly legitimate argument to make, but it's also a completely different discussion. Consistency in copyright enforcement (or lack thereof) was the point of my original post.
The bold part is exactly the entire point of the pro-sharing position. If it didn't believe that sharing is better than not sharing, then the hell does it mean if someone believes that information should be shared? Your original post actually suggested that this was not a legitimate point to make, and now you're trying to force pro-sharers into a different standpoint than their own.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with anything, I'm just pointing out that it's entirely legitimate for a pro-sharer to be neither completely pro-copyright nor completely anti-copyright. Copyright can be considered good when it helps sharing, and bad when it hurts sharing. Copyright does both.
The problem is that even if an organization is pro-sharing, the way the GPL accomplishes that is by putting *restrictions* on what you can do with the information/software/etc. that they produce and release. If the pro-sharing groups believe it's okay for their group to restrict how someone uses their information by requiring distribution of source for derivative works (i.e. copyleft/GPL), they *have* to be okay with a different group restricting how someone uses their information by prohibiting redistribution or derivative works entirely without licensing/royalties (i.e. traditional copyright). They are all restrictions.
This is a non-sequitur, and in fact, completely false. From the pro-sharing viewpoint, sharing is good, not sharing is bad. If you sell modified GPL code, you have to share the source code. Yes, it is a restriction that forces you to share, but from a pro-sharing viewpoint, it's a good restriction, because it forces people to share. But sharing copyrighted works is also good from a pro-sharing viewpoint, simply because it's sharing.
Pro-sharing is neither the same nor the opposite as pro-copyright. It's orthogonal to it. It's how someone who's against killing can be both against murder, and against the execution of murderers, whereas your point sounds like: "if you support the law that makes murder illegal, you also have to support the law that gives murderers the death penalty." (I admit murder is rather an extreme comparison, but it does make the orthogonality of the issues at hand clear.)
However, people on slashdot are not universally pro-pirate.
* Many are for more reasonable copyright laws (14/28 years).
* Many don't view it as a lost sale if the person couldn't afford to purchase the product in the first place. (Yes it is piracy- but with no real damage to the creator. Less damage than libraries (which are legal) in fact..
There is one huge difference between this case and "piracy". Here, money is involved. AVM sells other people's code for money in a way that violates the license. They're nor merely breaking the law, they're trying to profit from it. And that is, in my opinion, what makes this criminal.
Which is why it's legally valid. It twists something that restricts sharing into something that encourages sharing.
Why would anyone mod this up? It's completely off-topic, with no redeeming value that I can tell.
You make a good point, though. Instead of posting, I should have modded all of this down.Too late now, I'm afraid.
I don't know what your issue is with Tom Hudson, and I don't want to know, but you're insane, man. Get some help.
If you can't work this out in a private manner, just drop it. There's no need to behave like an ass in public.
They can't; they live in China.
The US doesn't give two shits about jurisdiction
But the UK should. Is this even a criminal case in the UK? I doubt they can extradite him for a civil matter. And if it is a crime in the UK, and he committed the act in the UK, he should be tried there. The only reason for extradition is if the crime was committed in another country.
I often wonder what people mean by "ROM" when they're talking about Android distributions (because that's what they are). I've always hoped it meant something other than "read-only memory". But if Android modders get even that basic bit of computer terminology wrong, it's no surprise they don't understand public key encryption either.
But does that mean there are really no competent Android modders? I was actually expecting a bit more from that community.
This isn't about average Joes. It's about people who create OS distribution (not something the average Joe does), and then sign them with a private key that's not private.
Any programmer worth his salt should know at least the very basics of public key encryption, especially if he's actually going to make use of it. Why would you sign software when you don't even know why you're signing it?
This is the winner.
Keeping your private key non-private is the same as giving everybody access to your car key.
But Cyanogen Mod is a pretty big project by now, isn't it? I can't believe nobody involved in it has any basic knowledge of public key encryption.
How can people who know enough about encryption to root a phone, not know about public key encryption? I completely fail to understand the world today.
'There is still a $25 million reward that no one has collected, and the reward says dead or alive, well, if -- in fact -- he is dead, then I could collect the $25 million reward. Why not?'
He's got a point there. But the sea is pretty big. Finding a single body there is much like catching one very specific fish. Not to mention that I'm sure there are lots of critters down there that love to eat dead bodies.
Why would you keep that type of cash in bitcoin? Anyone with half a brain would at least put that kind of money in a savings account to get interest.
Bank interest is laughable compared to the speed with which the Bitcoin bubble is inflating (or should I say deflating?) at the moment. I believe a Bitcoin was worth $7 around the time of the last Bitcoin story here (a few weeks ago), and if this story is to be believed, then it's now $20 per Bitcoin. If you like to gamble on pyramid schemes, this is a pretty good return on investment.
Rumour has it it also attracts drug traders and money launderers.
Various people on the Bitcoin forums have seen that money move around and end up at one of the exchanges. Of course it could still be fraud: maybe transferred the bitcoins to another account of himself, sells his bitcoins on an exchange, and claims they were stolen. It can't be verified or disproven until somehow people manage to link bitcoin accounts to real people, and that's supposed to be impossible.
You've got a good point with Minecraft. Obviously Minecraft is not comparable to Sony or the FBI.
But no, they would rather punk on the defenseless.
Are you talking about LulzSec? I don't think I've heard from any attack on the defenseless by them. They attack mostly really big corporations and government agencies. If anyone should be able to defend themselves against such attacks, it's them.
I agree for single player. But for multiplayer, it becomes crowded when four players' mice keyboards are plugged into a PC, and the "Raw Input API" for reading multiple mice and keyboards is a bit more obscure than the traditional DirectInput API for reading four joystick.
What are you talking about? Get your own PC, man!
For party games, consoles are obviously better. Sitting 4 people at a single desk is also not terribly comfortable. Couches are more suitable for that. But then you're talking about a totally different kind of game experience, not terribly suited to hardcore RPGs like The Witcher.
I'd rather see a Mac and Linux port than a console port.
I agree here too in principle. But due to the state of graphics on Linux, that might not be easy. Case in point: Fedora recommends Intel
Only for ideological reasons, according to that link. No need for a gamer to care about that.
And how easily can a single binary package be used across multiple distributions, both RPM-based and Debian-based?
Who cares? Just install the game. There are a lot of games, big titles even (just not my favourites, unfortunately), available for PC, Mac and Linux. Seems to work fine.