----- Yes there are evil people in positions of power, instead of moaning about it I think that people should be encouraged to do something about it ----- You suggest becoming politically active? Maybe take a few rubber bullets for the greater good of society? In the end, what's it going to change?
Without a wholesale reevaluation of the entire political and justice systems there is no way to fix this.
You're absolutely right in terms of now. However, if cookies would never have become an acceptable standard then businesses would not have been so quick to accept methods of tracking users and spyware wouldn't have become a viable business model.
Cookies validated the corporate right to track users. Spyware and adware grew out of that.
Indeed. And, for some reason, the fact that a user has clicked the EULA negates all expectation of any sort of preexisting ethical or moral guidelines.
I think this world has degenrated to a level of: Regardless of any legal documents you may think exist, you have no rights. Now, if you'll just sign here and agree to let us hamstring you, we might give you some of those rights that you think you have. If you don't sign the dotted line then you're free to take your chances at paying rent while working as a cashier at McDonald's.
Watch out. If that client was the wife, mother, daughter, former girlfriend of a politician or well connected local money mogul, you may find all of your contracts drying up and your business run out of town.
My biggest question is,"When were the lemmings given control of the programmers?" There are more lemmings and collectively they have more social influence in the community but darnit, the programmer should still be in charge.
Commercial software should never be allowed the disclaimer,"We are not responsible if this software eats your drive." If the software is paid for there should be some liability--at least for the cost of the software. I don't agree with cost of lost data. The user accepts some risk.
----- EULAs (spyware, microsoft's, and many others) are more the equivilant of ----- Which is far above and beyond the humorous summary of GPL.
So you're agreeing with me... in an adversarial way?
I agree that people should be responsible for themselves. Let's think about this a step ahead, though.
Say some user becomes a victim of identity theft because of an IE hole in a depracated or little-known ActiveX control. Say some freshman girl commits suicide because her wealthy boyfriend back home was using a trojan to find out that she was starting to exchange online *kisses* with the poor theatre major in her advanced trig class?
Are you going to be responsible for teaching these kids security or just for the security of the campus network? Would these sorts of incidents lend credibility to lawsuits against MS or does MS get to skip out under the EULA exemption?
Can you imagine the increase of the price in software if it had to go through a federal FDA equivalent to make it to the product shelves? Pirating would go through the roof and then all of these corporate monopolists would push for Trusted Computing that much harder.
Besides, Quaker doesn't admit to adding mercury to their oats and the federal labs don't bother to test Quaker oats but once a decade, with 5 years advance notice, using a special box shipped out the side door. How would labelling requirements prevent MS from bundling spyware and exploitable backdoors with the EU version to slap them back?
There were many of us who were enraged by the introduction of cookies to the WWW environment. Venerable web browsers such as lynx will, even today, still ask you explicitly if you want to store each and every cookie while more user-friendly web browsers have cookie access controls which do little more than hide the cookies from the user.
Those of us who warned of the slippery slope of cookies were ridiculed and ostricized by starry-eyed users who were lured by promises of ease of use, functionality, and customized foot rubs.
I guess they got what they deserve--spyware, malware, adware, and spam--now they want us to do something to stop it.
Legally you're probably right. Once you sign the bottom line on a contract you're bound to it unless you can afford at least twice as many lawyers as the person holding the paper.
It's a shame, however. Consider employment. Because I'm a skilled intellectual employee the companies that I work for ask me to sign away all rights of ownership to anything that I do while I'm under their employment, _AND_ to keep them notified for up to three years of where I am and what I'm doing if I leave, _AND_ to agree never to use anything that I learned or discovered while employed with them to benefit any future employers. Strictly speaking, according to the terms of employee agreements, everything that I've done since 1999 is in breach of contract because everything that I do now was built on skills that I learned then. The only thing that saves me is that I'm not a big enough fish and haven't come up with any multi-billion dollar saleable ideas which would attract the attention of their legal vultures.
The US Constitution, specifically the parts about patenting of ideas and inventors retaining the rights to their invention, was written at a time when an individual wasn't dependent upon some communist corporate entity in order to breathe, eat, and have shelter and clothing. The spirit of those sections is being violated on a massive basis by every company in the US through employee agreements.
EULAs are similar. EULAs were written at a time when a few rich idiots lost their harddrives because they wanted to be cool and defrag their hard drive, didn't want to wait for it to finish, and clicked "cancel". Any half-savvy computer user knows that you don't take the disk out of the drive when the red light is on. I guess people thought that the basic premise of read/write integrity is negated by the invention of the "fixed disk".
All rants about incompetent users aside, though, the EULAs have grown to be in direct violation of basic codes of ethics with respect to product quality.
I have a strong suspicion that legitimately installed spyware programs provide gateways for illegitimate use. I have strong doubts about how interested the spyware coders are in ensuring application security.
We need to get rid of this false sense of security that comes from the EULA. I've noticed that a good portion of the public seems to think that any program with an EULA is a good quality product and any program without an EULA is a cheap home made hack.
Forget Sun-Tzu's "The Art of War", how about "The Art of Underhanded Marketing and Justifying Lies with Fingers Crossed"?
I still don't understand why the software industry gets the EULA privelege while other idustries are at least somewhat accountable for producing a quality product. EULAs are getting to be so broad that they mirror the OSS example of,"If this software eats your hard drive we are not responsible." I accept it from OSS/GPL software because I'm not paying for it and it's not using information from my system to make a profitable database for someone else.
In America, you pay for the privelege to be spied on, infiltrated, and abused? wtf?
----- People just dont seem to be aware that their individual actions while seemingly insignificant on a personal basis are instrumental in shaping the way things work as a whole ----- Or, in the case of people who are already in positions of power and are happily bleeding their customer base dry for every dollar they can get...
They just don't care.
----- no need to comment on the rest of it as I didnt notice that you made any other particularly relevent points. ----- Your pithy personal attack may help you live longer but it won't make you a better person.
----- how about something else, some wanker hacks into your computer and sets you up as the relay to spam porn all day through your university connection ----- The local police view that sort of thing as a joke. More than likely they'd cart off the student. "Oh, you were _hacked_, we get it... riiiiiggggghhhttt."
----- How about something more minor. Say, a credit card thief gets your details ----- It goes more like this,"We're sorry, sir. We'll be more than happy to remove those charges once we have a police report of the incident."
So you call the local police. "Let me get this straight. You have no idea who stole your credit card info, or how they got it, but you want us to file a stolen identity report for these extra charges on your credit card? I'm sorry, sir, first the city is going to have to ask you to talk with a city appointed psychologist at your own expense 'cuz we just don't believe you."
----- thats what they are, Criminals ----- The real criminals are the salesman, lobbyists, and marketers that convinced world governments to spend billions of taxpayer hard-earned money to put Microsoft produts and the x86 architecture in schoosl, businesses, and offices worldwide. Conveniently there's no law against flat out bald faced lies when it comes to businesses and sales. "Absolutely, Mr. Senator, sir. This really is the best quality product for the taxpayers money. Now, if you'll just sign the bottom line here, we'll promptly take a 10-year advance contract, regnegotiable at our discretion, so that we can have the money it's going to take to saddle OS/2 and Motorola with lawsuits or buy out their distributors so they won't be able to compete."
----- There are no real excuses, in the end if you feel that you are being hard done by, by a particular company then why the hell do you want to use their products in the first place? ----- Maybe it has something to do with that company lobbying my politicians to use my tax money to put those products in my schools and make them part of my curriculum without ever asking me if I agree that their product is best suited for the task. They've already been given my tax money why should I have to pay for their product again at home?
Growing up using Linux isn't going to do the kids much good when the school and the office uses MS products. Granted, the kids using Linux are going to be more innovative and more intelligent but when the boss is an MS Nazi they're more likely to get fired for being different, "not a team player", that sort of thing.
----- Piracy was one of the contributing factors to the demise of that platform ----- Just like breathing oxygen eventually contributes to death. The only thing that killed the Amiga was horrible mismanagement, the sudden rise of Microsoft, the flooding of the market with cheap x86 hardware, and the rise of Intel to kill off Motorola.
The argument from the corporate sympathizers specific to you would be,"You should've paid movers to move all of her stuff out and then she wouldn't have had to break in."
----- The solution is to enforce all of the laws we had on the books already ----- And we need to add more laws. Thousands more laws each year. We should have a special group in Congress which has fast track status to enact any law that could potentially be a Good Idea. All Good Ideas should become law. All bad ideas should be changed into Good Ideas.
Then, when we have laws which address everything from clothing and how you comb your hair up to quality controls on your car and which software is acceptable to use on your home PC... only then might the statistical reality of selective enforcement and abuse become apparent to the world.
Piracy is illegal for FairLight but if Microsoft wants a piece of code for their own they'll just take it and let the lawyers deal with the rest.
----- I can't believe nobody has shot you out of anger yet ----- It just goes to show that you pro-government types can talk big and bully people but you never have the nads to follow through with your threats.
People like me, on the other hand, don't bother making threats because bullying and violence is not in the best interest of society.
I agree but we can clearly see that it's easier to get good media ratings out of busting a few computer programmers than trying to set up against the politically well connected CEOs.
This is another reason why the digital revolution sucks. Digital processing does wonders for mathematical manipulations and systems modeling but it definitely is inferior technology for real world entertainment.
If we could've spent half the money on vacuum tubes and improving analog quality as we've spent on silicon transistors and digital conversion we'd have HD analog TVs with no sync problems at all unless the broadcaster didn't wind the reels correctly.
Reality is analog. Brain chemistry is more about transition states and steady states than it is about finite pulses.
Bully tactics always sound stronger than original thought.
Remember the four minute mile that couldn't be broken? The world is flat? Flight is impossible? Humans cannot travel in space? The atom cannot be split? There were no examples to prove these concepts until they were actually done.
Slashdot Mirror
-----
Yes there are evil people in positions of power, instead of moaning about it I think that people should be encouraged to do something about it
-----
You suggest becoming politically active? Maybe take a few rubber bullets for the greater good of society? In the end, what's it going to change?
Without a wholesale reevaluation of the entire political and justice systems there is no way to fix this.
You're absolutely right in terms of now. However, if cookies would never have become an acceptable standard then businesses would not have been so quick to accept methods of tracking users and spyware wouldn't have become a viable business model.
Cookies validated the corporate right to track users. Spyware and adware grew out of that.
Oh, wait. Sorry, you're right. I thought that a few credits in the mathematics department were required for nearly everything.
Indeed. And, for some reason, the fact that a user has clicked the EULA negates all expectation of any sort of preexisting ethical or moral guidelines.
I think this world has degenrated to a level of: Regardless of any legal documents you may think exist, you have no rights. Now, if you'll just sign here and agree to let us hamstring you, we might give you some of those rights that you think you have. If you don't sign the dotted line then you're free to take your chances at paying rent while working as a cashier at McDonald's.
Watch out. If that client was the wife, mother, daughter, former girlfriend of a politician or well connected local money mogul, you may find all of your contracts drying up and your business run out of town.
My biggest question is,"When were the lemmings given control of the programmers?" There are more lemmings and collectively they have more social influence in the community but darnit, the programmer should still be in charge.
Commercial software should never be allowed the disclaimer,"We are not responsible if this software eats your drive." If the software is paid for there should be some liability--at least for the cost of the software. I don't agree with cost of lost data. The user accepts some risk.
-----
EULAs (spyware, microsoft's, and many others) are more the equivilant of
-----
Which is far above and beyond the humorous summary of GPL.
So you're agreeing with me... in an adversarial way?
I agree that people should be responsible for themselves. Let's think about this a step ahead, though.
Say some user becomes a victim of identity theft because of an IE hole in a depracated or little-known ActiveX control. Say some freshman girl commits suicide because her wealthy boyfriend back home was using a trojan to find out that she was starting to exchange online *kisses* with the poor theatre major in her advanced trig class?
Are you going to be responsible for teaching these kids security or just for the security of the campus network? Would these sorts of incidents lend credibility to lawsuits against MS or does MS get to skip out under the EULA exemption?
Oooooh bad idea.
Can you imagine the increase of the price in software if it had to go through a federal FDA equivalent to make it to the product shelves? Pirating would go through the roof and then all of these corporate monopolists would push for Trusted Computing that much harder.
Besides, Quaker doesn't admit to adding mercury to their oats and the federal labs don't bother to test Quaker oats but once a decade, with 5 years advance notice, using a special box shipped out the side door. How would labelling requirements prevent MS from bundling spyware and exploitable backdoors with the EU version to slap them back?
There were many of us who were enraged by the introduction of cookies to the WWW environment. Venerable web browsers such as lynx will, even today, still ask you explicitly if you want to store each and every cookie while more user-friendly web browsers have cookie access controls which do little more than hide the cookies from the user.
Those of us who warned of the slippery slope of cookies were ridiculed and ostricized by starry-eyed users who were lured by promises of ease of use, functionality, and customized foot rubs.
I guess they got what they deserve--spyware, malware, adware, and spam--now they want us to do something to stop it.
Legally you're probably right. Once you sign the bottom line on a contract you're bound to it unless you can afford at least twice as many lawyers as the person holding the paper.
It's a shame, however. Consider employment. Because I'm a skilled intellectual employee the companies that I work for ask me to sign away all rights of ownership to anything that I do while I'm under their employment, _AND_ to keep them notified for up to three years of where I am and what I'm doing if I leave, _AND_ to agree never to use anything that I learned or discovered while employed with them to benefit any future employers. Strictly speaking, according to the terms of employee agreements, everything that I've done since 1999 is in breach of contract because everything that I do now was built on skills that I learned then. The only thing that saves me is that I'm not a big enough fish and haven't come up with any multi-billion dollar saleable ideas which would attract the attention of their legal vultures.
The US Constitution, specifically the parts about patenting of ideas and inventors retaining the rights to their invention, was written at a time when an individual wasn't dependent upon some communist corporate entity in order to breathe, eat, and have shelter and clothing. The spirit of those sections is being violated on a massive basis by every company in the US through employee agreements.
EULAs are similar. EULAs were written at a time when a few rich idiots lost their harddrives because they wanted to be cool and defrag their hard drive, didn't want to wait for it to finish, and clicked "cancel". Any half-savvy computer user knows that you don't take the disk out of the drive when the red light is on. I guess people thought that the basic premise of read/write integrity is negated by the invention of the "fixed disk".
All rants about incompetent users aside, though, the EULAs have grown to be in direct violation of basic codes of ethics with respect to product quality.
I have a strong suspicion that legitimately installed spyware programs provide gateways for illegitimate use. I have strong doubts about how interested the spyware coders are in ensuring application security.
We need to get rid of this false sense of security that comes from the EULA. I've noticed that a good portion of the public seems to think that any program with an EULA is a good quality product and any program without an EULA is a cheap home made hack.
Forget Sun-Tzu's "The Art of War", how about "The Art of Underhanded Marketing and Justifying Lies with Fingers Crossed"?
I still don't understand why the software industry gets the EULA privelege while other idustries are at least somewhat accountable for producing a quality product. EULAs are getting to be so broad that they mirror the OSS example of,"If this software eats your hard drive we are not responsible." I accept it from OSS/GPL software because I'm not paying for it and it's not using information from my system to make a profitable database for someone else.
In America, you pay for the privelege to be spied on, infiltrated, and abused? wtf?
-----
People just dont seem to be aware that their individual actions while seemingly insignificant on a personal basis are instrumental in shaping the way things work as a whole
-----
Or, in the case of people who are already in positions of power and are happily bleeding their customer base dry for every dollar they can get...
They just don't care.
-----
no need to comment on the rest of it as I didnt notice that you made any other particularly relevent points.
-----
Your pithy personal attack may help you live longer but it won't make you a better person.
-----
how about something else, some wanker hacks into your computer and sets you up as the relay to spam porn all day through your university connection
-----
The local police view that sort of thing as a joke. More than likely they'd cart off the student. "Oh, you were _hacked_, we get it... riiiiiggggghhhttt."
-----
How about something more minor. Say, a credit card thief gets your details
-----
It goes more like this,"We're sorry, sir. We'll be more than happy to remove those charges once we have a police report of the incident."
So you call the local police. "Let me get this straight. You have no idea who stole your credit card info, or how they got it, but you want us to file a stolen identity report for these extra charges on your credit card? I'm sorry, sir, first the city is going to have to ask you to talk with a city appointed psychologist at your own expense 'cuz we just don't believe you."
-----
thats what they are, Criminals
-----
The real criminals are the salesman, lobbyists, and marketers that convinced world governments to spend billions of taxpayer hard-earned money to put Microsoft produts and the x86 architecture in schoosl, businesses, and offices worldwide. Conveniently there's no law against flat out bald faced lies when it comes to businesses and sales. "Absolutely, Mr. Senator, sir. This really is the best quality product for the taxpayers money. Now, if you'll just sign the bottom line here, we'll promptly take a 10-year advance contract, regnegotiable at our discretion, so that we can have the money it's going to take to saddle OS/2 and Motorola with lawsuits or buy out their distributors so they won't be able to compete."
-----
There are no real excuses, in the end if you feel that you are being hard done by, by a particular company then why the hell do you want to use their products in the first place?
-----
Maybe it has something to do with that company lobbying my politicians to use my tax money to put those products in my schools and make them part of my curriculum without ever asking me if I agree that their product is best suited for the task. They've already been given my tax money why should I have to pay for their product again at home?
Growing up using Linux isn't going to do the kids much good when the school and the office uses MS products. Granted, the kids using Linux are going to be more innovative and more intelligent but when the boss is an MS Nazi they're more likely to get fired for being different, "not a team player", that sort of thing.
-----
Piracy was one of the contributing factors to the demise of that platform
-----
Just like breathing oxygen eventually contributes to death. The only thing that killed the Amiga was horrible mismanagement, the sudden rise of Microsoft, the flooding of the market with cheap x86 hardware, and the rise of Intel to kill off Motorola.
I empathize.
The argument from the corporate sympathizers specific to you would be,"You should've paid movers to move all of her stuff out and then she wouldn't have had to break in."
-----
The solution is to enforce all of the laws we had on the books already
-----
And we need to add more laws. Thousands more laws each year. We should have a special group in Congress which has fast track status to enact any law that could potentially be a Good Idea. All Good Ideas should become law. All bad ideas should be changed into Good Ideas.
Then, when we have laws which address everything from clothing and how you comb your hair up to quality controls on your car and which software is acceptable to use on your home PC... only then might the statistical reality of selective enforcement and abuse become apparent to the world.
Piracy is illegal for FairLight but if Microsoft wants a piece of code for their own they'll just take it and let the lawyers deal with the rest.
-----
depends on all laws being enforced
-----
Ignoring the possibility that laws can be skewed in favor of special interests...
-----
I can't believe nobody has shot you out of anger yet
-----
It just goes to show that you pro-government types can talk big and bully people but you never have the nads to follow through with your threats.
People like me, on the other hand, don't bother making threats because bullying and violence is not in the best interest of society.
I agree but we can clearly see that it's easier to get good media ratings out of busting a few computer programmers than trying to set up against the politically well connected CEOs.
My boss not only fixed the internet but he decided it would be funny to get everyone else to label me as a buck passer.
You are a mean person. While America does not like mean people like you mean people like you have taken over America.
This is another reason why the digital revolution sucks. Digital processing does wonders for mathematical manipulations and systems modeling but it definitely is inferior technology for real world entertainment.
If we could've spent half the money on vacuum tubes and improving analog quality as we've spent on silicon transistors and digital conversion we'd have HD analog TVs with no sync problems at all unless the broadcaster didn't wind the reels correctly.
Reality is analog. Brain chemistry is more about transition states and steady states than it is about finite pulses.
And even if they could tear down New York it would be nearly impossible to plough a parking lot into cultivatable earth.
Overpopulation tops global warming on my list of things to worry about, though both sit at an overall rank of greater than 10.
1. Temperate
2. Breathing
3. Clothing
4. Shelter
5. Water
6. Employment
7. Linuxfromscratch
8. Food
9. Beer
10.
.
.
.
1027. Overpopulation
1028. Global warming
Bully tactics always sound stronger than original thought.
Remember the four minute mile that couldn't be broken? The world is flat? Flight is impossible? Humans cannot travel in space? The atom cannot be split? There were no examples to prove these concepts until they were actually done.