The New York legislature has been a mess for longer than you think, according to this quote from 1776.
Lewis Morris: [as John Hancock is about to swat a fly] Mr. Secretary, New York abstains, courteously. [Hancock raises his fly swatter at Morris, then draws back] John Hancock: Mr. Morris, [pause, then shouts] John Hancock: WHAT IN HELL GOES ON IN NEW YORK? Lewis Morris: I'm sorry Mr. President, but the simple fact is that our legislature has never sent us explicit instructions on anything! John Hancock: NEVER? [slams fly swatter onto his desk] John Hancock: That's impossible! Lewis Morris: Mr. President, have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature? [Hancock shakes his head "No"] Lewis Morris: They speak very fast and very loud, and nobody listens to anybody else, with the result that nothing ever gets done. [turns to the Congress as he returns to his seat] Lewis Morris: I beg the Congress's pardon. John Hancock: [grimly] My sympathies, Mr. Morris.
why would people with nothing to hide want to encrypt their conversations.
From "The Eternal Value of Privacy" by Bruce Schneier in Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html? tw=wn_index_23)
"... accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect."
The quoted report was based on the last six months of 2004. Firefox 1.0 was officially released on November 9, 2004 http://mozillazine.org/articles/article5513.html. So, the product was still in beta for four of the months covered by the report. Without further details from the report, it's impossible to say how many vulnerabilities were in Firefox when it was considered ready for production end-user use.
So the big question is: Why does Alice have so many secrets? Why does she feel compelled to tell Bob everything?
The "Alice and Bob after-dinner speech" (http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html) asks the same question and goes into a great deal of analysis.
<spoiler>
The conclusion is:
"Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organise a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimising the cost of the phone call.
A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy."
</spoiler>
I have been trying to get to cvs.winehq.com and www.winehq.com since Saturday, and I can't get to either one. I have tried from home, from work, and even from an old account at school. I'm amazed that there has been no comment on the news groups.
How do you know he has never seen MainWin? It has been a product for other versions of Unix for a while. From the MainSoft web site "MainWin currently supports: IBM AIX 4.3, HP-UX 11.00 and 10.20, IRIX 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6. Support for DEC UNIX, IRIX 6.5 and Solaris 2.7 is in development and will be available in the near future." Elsewhere "MainWin allows you to recompile and deploy your Microsoft Windows application on UNIX platforms." MainWin is not primarily an end-user product. It is a developer product that allows developers to recompile their code into a native Unix format. I'm unclear on whether you have to ship shared libraries with a recompiled application. It is clear, though, that you can not take a Windows binary and plunk it down on a system with MainWin and expect it to run.
While Project Gutenberg is a Good Thing, it is certainly not an example of open source applied to the world of words. A better example (the definitive example?) would be Open Content
I am surprised that Microsoft doesn't have the definitive book on COM. Why are there 4 books in the list about COM? I realize that if there is a Microsoft Press book about COM they probably don't buy it through Amazon, but still, they seem to need a lot of secondary references.
Site Server 3.0 is another Microsoft product. I guess it doesn't have very good documentation. Maybe they are still writing the documentation.
And Programming Microsoft Outlook and Exchange? Come on.
Anything that is "xxx-compatible" was created through reverse engineering. Do you think Microsoft published the format of Word files, to help their competitors be "Word-compatible"? People had to reverse-engineer it.
Not to defend MS, but this is actually false. Microsoft does publish it's binary file formats for all of the Office suite on its msdn web site (the Word 97 format is at link and display the TOC). And, before you say that you have to pay for it, that's wrong, too. It is available without a membership to the MSDN. Now that I've said that, I read a passage that makes the file format a little less "open". "To access data within a Word binary file, the file must be opened using the OLE 2.0 docfile APIs, and it must be read with the appropriate docfile APIs." So, it is dependent on the openness of the OLE 2.0 docfile APIs.
Anyway. Microsoft has always claimed that all of their APIs are open. I don't believe them, because WINE has not been completed and has very smart people working on it. There are undocumented APIs. Theoretically, it should have been able to create WINE without reverse engineering. Microsoft knows that even if they publish their APIs, few companies have the resources to duplicate them quickly enough to cause concern (if Corel writes an import feature 3 months after Office XX comes out, that's 3 months that Microsoft has had to sell Office XX without a compatible competitor).
I don't know if the SMB protocol is published at all. I think the Samba team does reverse engineering, but that may just be to optimize (not to do basic implementation).
It isn't as simple as this. If you sign a contract with me (e.g. an NDA) where you agree not to discuss a piece software, you can't go crying: 1st Amendment!
I thought a little bit about this at lunch. (If watching "Law and Order" can teach you anything about the law...) It seems like I, as a consumer, can not sign away my constitutional rights. What if I am a 10-year old kid with no knowledge about the law and installing software on a computer?
I guess it goes back to the fact that I don't think that buying software should be a contract. Buying a computer game seems a lot like buying a yo-yo. I don't have to sign away my constitutional rights to buy a yo-yo. And if the yo-yo is defective, the manufacturer is responsible for replacing it with one that works.
Re:Outlaw reverse engineering?
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 2
If the license forbids you from reverse engineering or talking about how the program works, I think we would all agree that this is a violation of the spirit of copyright and patent policy. UCITA does contain an exception against abuse. However, it will be up to a judge in a court to decide that matter.
If some software company were to limit free-speech by putting a clause that the software's quality cannot be discussed (no benchmarking, for instance), then this would be a violation of the First Ammendment (in the U.S.) and the UCLA should jump all over that. Since most database vendors have such clauses in their licenses, I would think there would be a case submitted to the courts shortly after UCITA finally passes (if it passes).
Re:Is reverse engineering legal?
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
No. But it is legal to look at how something works and make a duplicate. (As long as you aren't infringing on any patents, which is a different issue.)
from another article in the thread. Someone was citing a case where "reverse engineering" was basically responsible for the proliferation of clones. I don't dispute that cloning of the BIOS enabled this. I don't think that it was "reverse engineering". I may have too limited a definition of reverse engineering.
The first BIOS was written by IBM. The first people to emulate the functions of the BIOS and create the first IMB PC clone were Compaq. All PC BIOS'es rely on the fact that they are reverse engineered clones of the original IBM BIOS.
I don't think that this is correct. There were two teams involved in the "duplication effort" to clone the IBM BIOS. There was a team that wrote the specification for the protocol in the original BIOS, and there was a "clean" team that used that specification to create a new BIOS that functioned the same way. Microsoft supports Kaffe because it is a similar "clean room" implementation of Java. Microsoft's own people had seen the code for the Sun implementation, so it was not clean.
Another problem with the released code was that they had to strip out a lot of stuff. They had to strip out all security code because of export law. And, they had to strip out anything that was the result of an NDA. I don't know how much code was stripped out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to strip lines of code from all over, instead of just removing modules.
The security of unix does a huge amount to limit the damage of the virus/worm. instead of doing the equivalent of "find . -name '*.xls' -exec rm {} \;", what prevented the author of the latest worm from doing the equivalent of "rm -rf/"? On a windows 95/98 system, any user can execute that command and destroy the system. On unix, if one user is compromised, he can only delete his stuff. That is why you shouldn't run as root, even if you are on a single user system.
Also, if virus writers only attack systems with large market shares, why didn't they write virii to disable sendmail, which handles most of the e-mail on the internet (maybe they did, I don't know)? How about a virus to disable apache web servers. You could disable more than half the internet's web sites (estimate depending on the quality of the sampling done by netcraft).
Maybe I don't know the mind of the typical script kiddie, but I wonder what the real reason for virii is. Is it just the recognition factor (like the egoboo of Linux development), or the knowledge that you crashed machines (because I'm sure the writers would not want to be recognized and caught)?
I think that Linus is Swedish even though he lived in Finland. He is a member of an ethnic minority. So, his fatherland really is Sweden.
From http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/index.html :
"4. If Linus is Finnish, why is his birth language Swedish? Finland has a significant (about 6%) ethnic-Swedish minority population. They call themselves ``finlandssvensk'' or ``finlandssvenskar'' and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland's two official languages."
Now the government can say "You have all the computing power you need with all those volunteers, why should we give you any more money?" This might be bad for SETI in the long run.
There probably won't be any boxes at MS running Linux/unix _for this project_ because "Microsoft is working with a third company..." This probably means that they are paying someone to write the software (like they licensed Spyglass Mosaic when they needed to "develop" a browser).
Where is a bunch of volunteers supposed to find the resources to buy a US$50,000+ (I'm guessing at the hardware cost, but it's a lot) computer just to refute one set of benchmark numbers? When Mindcraft does it's next set of benchmarks on a 8 way server, is the community then supposed to buy another box for one set of benchmarks? Even saying that some company like RedHat should shell out for the hardware is ridiculous. They may be the golden boys, but they don't have infinite resources. The point is, Mindcraft has acknowledged that they didn't have the expertise to run this comparison, and yet they don't indicate that they plan to retract any of their findings. It is their responsibility to do the test right in the first place, or lose credibility in the IT industry.
The whole business of certification is controversial. It is doubtful to some if certification means anything, regardless of who provides the certification. Does anyone think that CmdrTaco can't administer a Linux box? (I think that he is/was the primary administrator of/.) Personally, I don't like the practice of certification. It lets HR people be more lazy in hiring people, and it may make it more difficult for them to fire people ("We can't fire him, because he's our only CNE/MSCE/...").
The certification debate is similar to the "Do geeks need to go to college?" debate. I actually think that they do need to, just for learning the basics which one is less likely to learn on ones own. In that way, going through a certification course may be useful for learning the basics. I'll repeat, though, that I don't think that it should have a lot of effect on the perceived value of a new employee. AFAIK, MSCE certification doesn't expire, meaning that someone who received it on NT 3.51 would have the same certification as someone who received it on NT 4.0. I'm not an expert on either of these systems, but I know that they are significantly different, and I wouldn't immediately say that a person fluent with 3.51 would be able to be fluent with 4.0.
Are all the applications listed proprietary? On the word processor page, there was no mention of Lyx. On the scientific page, there was no mention of gnuplot. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The New York legislature has been a mess for longer than you think, according to this quote from 1776.
Lewis Morris: [as John Hancock is about to swat a fly] Mr. Secretary, New York abstains, courteously.
[Hancock raises his fly swatter at Morris, then draws back]
John Hancock: Mr. Morris,
[pause, then shouts]
John Hancock: WHAT IN HELL GOES ON IN NEW YORK?
Lewis Morris: I'm sorry Mr. President, but the simple fact is that our legislature has never sent us explicit instructions on anything!
John Hancock: NEVER?
[slams fly swatter onto his desk]
John Hancock: That's impossible!
Lewis Morris: Mr. President, have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature?
[Hancock shakes his head "No"]
Lewis Morris: They speak very fast and very loud, and nobody listens to anybody else, with the result that nothing ever gets done.
[turns to the Congress as he returns to his seat]
Lewis Morris: I beg the Congress's pardon.
John Hancock: [grimly] My sympathies, Mr. Morris.
They tried it before. http://thedoghousediaries.com/974 It must be been before the camera was upgraded.
Sad. From the comments, it seems nobody even remembers what a hypercube computer is.
And Bookpool is even cheaper at $21.95.
From "The Eternal Value of Privacy" by Bruce Schneier in Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html
"... accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect."
"Oh look! It has more vulnerabilities than IE!"
The quoted report was based on the last six months of 2004. Firefox 1.0 was officially released on November 9, 2004 http://mozillazine.org/articles/article5513.html. So, the product was still in beta for four of the months covered by the report. Without further details from the report, it's impossible to say how many vulnerabilities were in Firefox when it was considered ready for production end-user use.
The "Alice and Bob after-dinner speech" (http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html) asks the same question and goes into a great deal of analysis.
<spoiler>
The conclusion is: "Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organise a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimising the cost of the phone call.
A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy."
</spoiler>
I have been trying to get to cvs.winehq.com and www.winehq.com since Saturday, and I can't get to either one. I have tried from home, from work, and even from an old account at school. I'm amazed that there has been no comment on the news groups.
How do you know he has never seen MainWin? It has been a product for other versions of Unix for a while. From the MainSoft web site "MainWin currently supports: IBM AIX 4.3, HP-UX 11.00 and 10.20, IRIX 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6. Support for DEC UNIX, IRIX 6.5 and Solaris 2.7 is in development and will be available in the near future." Elsewhere "MainWin allows you to recompile and deploy your Microsoft Windows application on UNIX platforms." MainWin is not primarily an end-user product. It is a developer product that allows developers to recompile their code into a native Unix format. I'm unclear on whether you have to ship shared libraries with a recompiled application. It is clear, though, that you can not take a Windows binary and plunk it down on a system with MainWin and expect it to run.
While Project Gutenberg is a Good Thing, it is certainly not an example of open source applied to the world of words. A better example (the definitive example?) would be Open Content
I am surprised that Microsoft doesn't have the definitive book on COM. Why are there 4 books in the list about COM? I realize that if there is a Microsoft Press book about COM they probably don't buy it through Amazon, but still, they seem to need a lot of secondary references.
Site Server 3.0 is another Microsoft product. I guess it doesn't have very good documentation. Maybe they are still writing the documentation.
And Programming Microsoft Outlook and Exchange? Come on.
Anything that is "xxx-compatible" was created through reverse engineering. Do you think Microsoft published the format of Word files, to help their competitors be "Word-compatible"? People had to reverse-engineer it.
Not to defend MS, but this is actually false. Microsoft does publish it's binary file formats for all of the Office suite on its msdn web site (the Word 97 format is at link and display the TOC). And, before you say that you have to pay for it, that's wrong, too. It is available without a membership to the MSDN. Now that I've said that, I read a passage that makes the file format a little less "open". "To access data within a Word binary file, the file must be opened using the OLE 2.0 docfile APIs, and it must be read with the appropriate docfile APIs." So, it is dependent on the openness of the OLE 2.0 docfile APIs.
Anyway. Microsoft has always claimed that all of their APIs are open. I don't believe them, because WINE has not been completed and has very smart people working on it. There are undocumented APIs. Theoretically, it should have been able to create WINE without reverse engineering. Microsoft knows that even if they publish their APIs, few companies have the resources to duplicate them quickly enough to cause concern (if Corel writes an import feature 3 months after Office XX comes out, that's 3 months that Microsoft has had to sell Office XX without a compatible competitor).
I don't know if the SMB protocol is published at all. I think the Samba team does reverse engineering, but that may just be to optimize (not to do basic implementation).
I meant to say ACLU (not UCLA) in my first post.
It isn't as simple as this. If you sign a contract with me (e.g. an NDA) where you agree not to discuss a piece software, you can't go crying: 1st Amendment!
I thought a little bit about this at lunch. (If watching "Law and Order" can teach you anything about the law...) It seems like I, as a consumer, can not sign away my constitutional rights. What if I am a 10-year old kid with no knowledge about the law and installing software on a computer?
I guess it goes back to the fact that I don't think that buying software should be a contract. Buying a computer game seems a lot like buying a yo-yo. I don't have to sign away my constitutional rights to buy a yo-yo. And if the yo-yo is defective, the manufacturer is responsible for replacing it with one that works.
If the license forbids you from reverse engineering or talking about how the program works, I think we would all agree that this is a violation of the spirit of copyright and patent policy. UCITA does contain an exception against abuse. However, it will be up to a judge in a court to decide that matter.
If some software company were to limit free-speech by putting a clause that the software's quality cannot be discussed (no benchmarking, for instance), then this would be a violation of the First Ammendment (in the U.S.) and the UCLA should jump all over that. Since most database vendors have such clauses in their licenses, I would think there would be a case submitted to the courts shortly after UCITA finally passes (if it passes).
No. But it is legal to look at how something works and make a duplicate. (As long as you aren't infringing on any patents, which is a different issue.)
from another article in the thread. Someone was citing a case where "reverse engineering" was basically responsible for the proliferation of clones. I don't dispute that cloning of the BIOS enabled this. I don't think that it was "reverse engineering". I may have too limited a definition of reverse engineering.
The first BIOS was written by IBM. The first people to emulate the functions of the BIOS and create the first IMB PC clone were Compaq. All PC BIOS'es rely on the fact that they are reverse engineered clones of the original IBM BIOS.
I don't think that this is correct. There were two teams involved in the "duplication effort" to clone the IBM BIOS. There was a team that wrote the specification for the protocol in the original BIOS, and there was a "clean" team that used that specification to create a new BIOS that functioned the same way. Microsoft supports Kaffe because it is a similar "clean room" implementation of Java. Microsoft's own people had seen the code for the Sun implementation, so it was not clean.
Another problem with the released code was that they had to strip out a lot of stuff. They had to strip out all security code because of export law. And, they had to strip out anything that was the result of an NDA. I don't know how much code was stripped out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to strip lines of code from all over, instead of just removing modules.
The security of unix does a huge amount to limit the damage of the virus/worm. instead of doing the equivalent of "find . -name '*.xls' -exec rm {} \;", what prevented the author of the latest worm from doing the equivalent of "rm -rf /"? On a windows 95/98 system, any user can execute that command and destroy the system. On unix, if one user is compromised, he can only delete his stuff. That is why you shouldn't run as root, even if you are on a single user system.
Also, if virus writers only attack systems with large market shares, why didn't they write virii to disable sendmail, which handles most of the e-mail on the internet (maybe they did, I don't know)? How about a virus to disable apache web servers. You could disable more than half the internet's web sites (estimate depending on the quality of the sampling done by netcraft).
Maybe I don't know the mind of the typical script kiddie, but I wonder what the real reason for virii is. Is it just the recognition factor (like the egoboo of Linux development), or the knowledge that you crashed machines (because I'm sure the writers would not want to be recognized and caught)?
Bill Gates has even earned an Honorary Doctorate from some university.
I think that Linus is Swedish even though he lived in Finland. He is a member of an ethnic minority. So, his fatherland really is Sweden.
From http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/index.html :
"4. If Linus is Finnish, why is his birth language Swedish?
Finland has a significant (about 6%) ethnic-Swedish minority population. They call themselves ``finlandssvensk'' or ``finlandssvenskar'' and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland's two official languages."
Now the government can say "You have all the computing power you need with all those volunteers, why should we give you any more money?" This might be bad for SETI in the long run.
There probably won't be any boxes at MS running Linux/unix _for this project_ because "Microsoft is working with a third company..." This probably means that they are paying someone to write the software (like they licensed Spyglass Mosaic when they needed to "develop" a browser).
Where is a bunch of volunteers supposed to find the resources to buy a US$50,000+ (I'm guessing at the hardware cost, but it's a lot) computer just to refute one set of benchmark numbers? When Mindcraft does it's next set of benchmarks on a 8 way server, is the community then supposed to buy another box for one set of benchmarks? Even saying that some company like RedHat should shell out for the hardware is ridiculous. They may be the golden boys, but they don't have infinite resources. The point is, Mindcraft has acknowledged that they didn't have the expertise to run this comparison, and yet they don't indicate that they plan to retract any of their findings. It is their responsibility to do the test right in the first place, or lose credibility in the IT industry.
The whole business of certification is controversial. It is doubtful to some if certification means anything, regardless of who provides the certification. Does anyone think that CmdrTaco can't administer a Linux box? (I think that he is/was the primary administrator of /.) Personally, I don't like the practice of certification. It lets HR people be more lazy in hiring people, and it may make it more difficult for them to fire people ("We can't fire him, because he's our only CNE/MSCE/...").
The certification debate is similar to the "Do geeks need to go to college?" debate. I actually think that they do need to, just for learning the basics which one is less likely to learn on ones own. In that way, going through a certification course may be useful for learning the basics. I'll repeat, though, that I don't think that it should have a lot of effect on the perceived value of a new employee. AFAIK, MSCE certification doesn't expire, meaning that someone who received it on NT 3.51 would have the same certification as someone who received it on NT 4.0. I'm not an expert on either of these systems, but I know that they are significantly different, and I wouldn't immediately say that a person fluent with 3.51 would be able to be fluent with 4.0.
Enough rambling. I hope I've made my point.
Are all the applications listed proprietary? On the word processor page, there was no mention of Lyx. On the scientific page, there was no mention of gnuplot. Etc.