I had upgraded all the pc's in the building to Win2k SP4 about a month ago so we were fine. It wasn't really my job though.
Our network admin, who now works part time, got the virus on both of his home computers. They still had it when he came in the next day. Our secretary got it on her home computer as well but managed to fix it in a few minutes.
US Copyright law guarantees the right to make one backup copy. That's fair use. It does not prohibit the copyright owner from allowing more than one copy. That would be absurd and the wording of the law does not resemble that at all. I have no doubt that he knows his own argument to be utterly false, but his job is to try and prove it in court anyway.
"Your honor, these MSN/Hotmail popup advertisements are an integral part of the Windows 2005 operating system. Removing them would be next to impossible without undoing years of development. It'd be like pulling the engines off a plane to make it more aerodynamic." - future Microsoft lawyer.
I was about to say "It sounds nice at first, but what's the point of making a movie if half a viewers know it in detail before it's 20% complete? It doesn't seem to fit the open development model of 'start a cool project and let the customer base finish it.'", but then thought of something
One could, of course, produce software under a modified GPL that says that all media produced under it be free (as in speech), which would require that all imported media must have been free in the same respect. 3D models like people, cars, helicopters, building, office equipment, and such would be free to anyone who wanted to make open movies, greatly reducing the development costs to "film and plop in some premade special effects". You might occasionally see two movies with similar scenes, but as this grows, it will become less frequent.
PC's will have large amounts of nonvolatile ram. Hard disks would be used mostly for backup purposes.
Many programs will run 100 times as fast as today, but only if they are multithreaded, and only if they are optimized by today's standards. Software written in the newest high level languages will still appear to run just as slow they always have, since the late 70's.
3D desktop, but not in a first person sense. Stuff still pretty much stationary on the screen unless you move them, and your point of view rarely changes unless you have multiple desktops. Holding down ctrl while resizing a window will scale it.
Microsoft will evolve to become a hardware giant, doing business as BigHard (j/k). Their software division will produce free software that will only run on their hardware. Bill Gates will somehow still be the richest man on earth, marking the last of the super-billionaires, admired and hated by all.
There will be a growing class of minimum wage software developers with limited knowledge and experience to throw together custom software on demand from random free packages and a bits of script to serve the needs of the non-programming community. "You want source with that?" "That'll be $8."
They tried to fix it once, with those automatic reboots. Now average users don't know that windows knows that an error occurred, or what caused the error. It just reboots, everything is lost, they mumble some curses toward the hardware manufacturer, and casually re-login and redo what they've lost.
Capitalism encourages the development and distribution of cheaper, better products. In an information economy, it just so happens that you can produce something once and copy it forever it for next to nothing. With companies asking hundreds or thousands of dollars for each copy of something, there was great incentive to beat those prices. Free would be even better, as many businesses need hundreds or thousands of licenses of most of the software they use, but there wasn't an easy way to do this until the advent of the GPL, which turned the customers, mostly businesses who need fixes or improvements, into the developers. If it saves you a million in license fees, you can afford to hire some programmers to make sure that the software meets your needs, and you are bound by the license to share those modifications. Because of that sharing, those businesses can maximize their profits, and end users benefit by having cheaper, better software products.
Communism would be the exact opposite: Software developers face no competition (as is true with monopolies), and the developers gain nothing from making better software (also true with monopolies). It would probably be free of cost, but the "Free" in the "Free Software Foundation" stands for freedom, not free of cost. It's just a result of capitalism that the (soon to be) winners in a free information economy are often free.
They had already announced that they discontinued development of IE.
My predictions: Soon they will put a Hotmail icon on the standard Windows desktop which will be protected from removal or hiding by the EULA. It will come with the newest Media Player or MSN Messenger. Future versions of Windows will be cheaper, at least the home edition, but the product activation will require an ongoing passport account, which, two years later, will require a monthly membership fee.
Microsoft won the desktop war long before free operating systems like Linux were an option. It's not a matter of which is better. Switching is difficult for many businesses.
Plus there's there are other issues. If given the option of a windows computer or a linux computer, the latter being $50 cheaper (oem license savings), average users will buy the windows computer knowing that it'll be another $199 or more if they later find that they needed it.
Me? They gave me a free copy of XP Pro because I'm a computer science student. Visual Studio.NET too.
Very rarely, people have been arrested and convicted for "hacking" when they portscan others' computers, in the glorious United States at least. It's seen as unauthorized access. No doubt most of them appeal successfully. A conviction requires there to be complete idiots at every step in the legal process, but it has happened.
The fact that it'd be a virus doing the scanning (and infecting too) would make it look even worse. So there are legality issues. Someone would sue, simply because they'd have a chance of winning.
If there were no major legal issues an anti-virus virus may be a good idea.
From the Microsoft security bulletin on the vulnerability:
"This vulnerability only permits a denial of service attack and does not provide an attacker with the ability to modify or retrieve data on the remote machine."
Perhaps this is one of those extremely rare occasions where an anti-virus virus should be released. Windows users all agree to an EULA that says Microsoft has the right to install updates on their computer. If anyone has the legal right to create and release one, it's Microsoft. As that guy mentioned, it may be hard for many people to download the patches on their own because of reboots.
There are some legal issues associated with portscanning though.
Sun just struck a big deal with SuSE so I doubt it's them.
It could be Disney. They have a lot of their own intellectual property to protect. Rumors of IP infringement spreading among non-technical folk would be much more damaging to them, even though the rumors would be false, than news of their foolishness (if it was them) spreading among the rest of us.
Some of them can keep a record of all your emails (if you don't mind it doing so) to give you the option of reclassifying old email or rebuilding the database if it gets corrupted. I know K9 does this, and I used that feature when I realized that a small few spamish looking good emails made it into the spam folder around when I started, causing any similar good emails to also be classified as spam. It's not cross platform though. 78% doesn't sound right at all. Over 98% is very common after several hundred emails.
You know, computer crimes are considered terrorism under the USA PATRIOT Act. Until that silly law gets repealed, lets hunt down those terrorists for their, umm, denial of service attacks against innocent email users, bandwidth theft, failure to provide real opt-out links, sending email advertisements with fake return addresses, presenting obscene material to minors, etc...
I would have liked to see how my favorite bayesian spam filter, K9, would have faired in your comparison, but it failed to meet your first requirement of being cross platform. It's freeware written in C, is about a 60kb-100kb download, depending on if you get it with the self installer, is easy to use, and has a very small memory footprint. Before today it had sorted my email with over 99.8% accuracy, excluding the first couple days of training, and after only a couple weeks of use, though now it's down to 99.7%.
I have used PopFile in the past on both Windows and Linux, but found K9 to be better suited for environments where Windows is an option. It's very easy to use, having a windowed interface, and it seemed to learn much faster than PopFile did.
I haven't used SpamBayes. I'll have to give it a shot.
It seems like the need for other anti-spam techniques will decrease as these become more popular. Things like ip banning or automated server hacking just hurt more non-spammers.
I installed a free one called K9 (though I donated $20 to the author), and over my last 573 emails (392 spam) it has only made one mistake, making it over 99.8% accurate after its initial training (141 messages). I've only been using it for a few weeks. It's about a 60k download and is very flexible and well behaved. The downside is that it's closed source and built for win32. I don't know if it works under Wine.
The one spam that got through was disguised a typical personal message, except that it was offering a business relationship and contained a personalized image link to determine if I viewed the message.
I tried Mozilla's built in bayesian filter for a few months. It had about 90% accuracy, even though I corrected every single mistake it made. Something's not working there, so probably shouldn't be used to judge the accuracy bayesian filters in general.
I've tried PopFile as well. It seems to have good accuracy, but it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. It's like a full fledged anti-spam server and is best installed on a dedicated server but is not well suited for multi-user environments, and it'd not easy to correct old mistakes or rebuild the word database. It does have the benefit of being cross platform though, and it supports multiple buckets, not just spam and not spam.
If they point out which code is their's, everyone will gladly remove it, and the violators will be caught and punished, assuming there's a record of who checked in the modifications. Anyone who continues building kernels with the stolen source may face hefty lawsuits or prison.
But at the moment, while SCO claims that one or more programmers violated their copyrights, SCO has violated the copyrights (stolen the IP) of the over 400 programmers who have contributed to linux. By not agreeing to the GPL they forfeit the right to create or distribute modified GPL'd software, but they'd rather commit hundreds of counts of copyright infringement, even while suing others for lesser infringements against themselves, than break some of their support contracts with past customers.
For them to be "legal", they must either stop distributing the kernel source code altogether, or agree to the terms under which they are distributing it. Though there's still the problem of crimes already commited. They've been commiting copyright infringement for several months now, there's all the libel, the false and threatening emails and phone calls to the customers of their competitors, the attempts to sell licenses for something they don't own, threatening lawsuits against those who don't buy them, etc.
I hope to see some of the countersuits pierce the corporate veil and drain some SCO executives, those who don't flee to mexico with the money earned from selling their inflated stock.
Their Indiana Jones ride uses it as well, to create the illusion of rats jumping down onto the ride vehicle passengers. It was a fun experience, but the lines are long and it's over in just a few seconds.
I'd be very surprised if most of the shareholders are not expecting a bailout. SCO's low and high stock prices over the past year were $0.78 and about $15. I doubt it'll exceed $15 again though, so for all you Slashdot users who decided to take advantage of the situation, now might be the time to get out.
Right now I'm beating myself up for not buying some when I saw it for $1 and thought "This is really going to go through the roof. Maybe I should buy some." I could have bought a new car. I will never forgive myself. Non-buyer's remorse...
Slashdot Mirror
I had upgraded all the pc's in the building to Win2k SP4 about a month ago so we were fine. It wasn't really my job though.
Our network admin, who now works part time, got the virus on both of his home computers. They still had it when he came in the next day. Our secretary got it on her home computer as well but managed to fix it in a few minutes.
US Copyright law guarantees the right to make one backup copy. That's fair use. It does not prohibit the copyright owner from allowing more than one copy. That would be absurd and the wording of the law does not resemble that at all. I have no doubt that he knows his own argument to be utterly false, but his job is to try and prove it in court anyway.
"Your honor, these MSN/Hotmail popup advertisements are an integral part of the Windows 2005 operating system. Removing them would be next to impossible without undoing years of development. It'd be like pulling the engines off a plane to make it more aerodynamic." - future Microsoft lawyer.
I was about to say "It sounds nice at first, but what's the point of making a movie if half a viewers know it in detail before it's 20% complete? It doesn't seem to fit the open development model of 'start a cool project and let the customer base finish it.'", but then thought of something
One could, of course, produce software under a modified GPL that says that all media produced under it be free (as in speech), which would require that all imported media must have been free in the same respect. 3D models like people, cars, helicopters, building, office equipment, and such would be free to anyone who wanted to make open movies, greatly reducing the development costs to "film and plop in some premade special effects". You might occasionally see two movies with similar scenes, but as this grows, it will become less frequent.
PC's will have large amounts of nonvolatile ram. Hard disks would be used mostly for backup purposes.
Many programs will run 100 times as fast as today, but only if they are multithreaded, and only if they are optimized by today's standards. Software written in the newest high level languages will still appear to run just as slow they always have, since the late 70's.
3D desktop, but not in a first person sense. Stuff still pretty much stationary on the screen unless you move them, and your point of view rarely changes unless you have multiple desktops. Holding down ctrl while resizing a window will scale it.
Microsoft will evolve to become a hardware giant, doing business as BigHard (j/k). Their software division will produce free software that will only run on their hardware. Bill Gates will somehow still be the richest man on earth, marking the last of the super-billionaires, admired and hated by all.
There will be a growing class of minimum wage software developers with limited knowledge and experience to throw together custom software on demand from random free packages and a bits of script to serve the needs of the non-programming community. "You want source with that?" "That'll be $8."
They tried to fix it once, with those automatic reboots. Now average users don't know that windows knows that an error occurred, or what caused the error. It just reboots, everything is lost, they mumble some curses toward the hardware manufacturer, and casually re-login and redo what they've lost.
FSF = Capitalism to the 100%!!
Capitalism encourages the development and distribution of cheaper, better products. In an information economy, it just so happens that you can produce something once and copy it forever it for next to nothing. With companies asking hundreds or thousands of dollars for each copy of something, there was great incentive to beat those prices. Free would be even better, as many businesses need hundreds or thousands of licenses of most of the software they use, but there wasn't an easy way to do this until the advent of the GPL, which turned the customers, mostly businesses who need fixes or improvements, into the developers. If it saves you a million in license fees, you can afford to hire some programmers to make sure that the software meets your needs, and you are bound by the license to share those modifications. Because of that sharing, those businesses can maximize their profits, and end users benefit by having cheaper, better software products.
Communism would be the exact opposite: Software developers face no competition (as is true with monopolies), and the developers gain nothing from making better software (also true with monopolies). It would probably be free of cost, but the "Free" in the "Free Software Foundation" stands for freedom, not free of cost. It's just a result of capitalism that the (soon to be) winners in a free information economy are often free.
They had already announced that they discontinued development of IE.
My predictions:
Soon they will put a Hotmail icon on the standard Windows desktop which will be protected from removal or hiding by the EULA. It will come with the newest Media Player or MSN Messenger. Future versions of Windows will be cheaper, at least the home edition, but the product activation will require an ongoing passport account, which, two years later, will require a monthly membership fee.
Indents, bracing, "/* */" vs "//" comments, naming convention... :)
Microsoft won the desktop war long before free operating systems like Linux were an option. It's not a matter of which is better. Switching is difficult for many businesses.
.NET too.
Plus there's there are other issues. If given the option of a windows computer or a linux computer, the latter being $50 cheaper (oem license savings), average users will buy the windows computer knowing that it'll be another $199 or more if they later find that they needed it.
Me? They gave me a free copy of XP Pro because I'm a computer science student. Visual Studio
Very rarely, people have been arrested and convicted for "hacking" when they portscan others' computers, in the glorious United States at least. It's seen as unauthorized access. No doubt most of them appeal successfully. A conviction requires there to be complete idiots at every step in the legal process, but it has happened.
The fact that it'd be a virus doing the scanning (and infecting too) would make it look even worse. So there are legality issues. Someone would sue, simply because they'd have a chance of winning.
If there were no major legal issues an anti-virus virus may be a good idea.
From the Microsoft security bulletin on the vulnerability:
"This vulnerability only permits a denial of service attack and does not provide an attacker with the ability to modify or retrieve data on the remote machine."
Perhaps this is one of those extremely rare occasions where an anti-virus virus should be released. Windows users all agree to an EULA that says Microsoft has the right to install updates on their computer. If anyone has the legal right to create and release one, it's Microsoft. As that guy mentioned, it may be hard for many people to download the patches on their own because of reboots.
There are some legal issues associated with portscanning though.
Sun just struck a big deal with SuSE so I doubt it's them.
It could be Disney. They have a lot of their own intellectual property to protect. Rumors of IP infringement spreading among non-technical folk would be much more damaging to them, even though the rumors would be false, than news of their foolishness (if it was them) spreading among the rest of us.
Some of them can keep a record of all your emails (if you don't mind it doing so) to give you the option of reclassifying old email or rebuilding the database if it gets corrupted. I know K9 does this, and I used that feature when I realized that a small few spamish looking good emails made it into the spam folder around when I started, causing any similar good emails to also be classified as spam. It's not cross platform though. 78% doesn't sound right at all. Over 98% is very common after several hundred emails.
You know, computer crimes are considered terrorism under the USA PATRIOT Act. Until that silly law gets repealed, lets hunt down those terrorists for their, umm, denial of service attacks against innocent email users, bandwidth theft, failure to provide real opt-out links, sending email advertisements with fake return addresses, presenting obscene material to minors, etc...
I would have liked to see how my favorite bayesian spam filter, K9, would have faired in your comparison, but it failed to meet your first requirement of being cross platform. It's freeware written in C, is about a 60kb-100kb download, depending on if you get it with the self installer, is easy to use, and has a very small memory footprint. Before today it had sorted my email with over 99.8% accuracy, excluding the first couple days of training, and after only a couple weeks of use, though now it's down to 99.7%.
I have used PopFile in the past on both Windows and Linux, but found K9 to be better suited for environments where Windows is an option. It's very easy to use, having a windowed interface, and it seemed to learn much faster than PopFile did.
I haven't used SpamBayes. I'll have to give it a shot.
It seems like the need for other anti-spam techniques will decrease as these become more popular. Things like ip banning or automated server hacking just hurt more non-spammers.
I installed a free one called K9 (though I donated $20 to the author), and over my last 573 emails (392 spam) it has only made one mistake, making it over 99.8% accurate after its initial training (141 messages). I've only been using it for a few weeks. It's about a 60k download and is very flexible and well behaved. The downside is that it's closed source and built for win32. I don't know if it works under Wine.
The one spam that got through was disguised a typical personal message, except that it was offering a business relationship and contained a personalized image link to determine if I viewed the message.
I tried Mozilla's built in bayesian filter for a few months. It had about 90% accuracy, even though I corrected every single mistake it made. Something's not working there, so probably shouldn't be used to judge the accuracy bayesian filters in general.
I've tried PopFile as well. It seems to have good accuracy, but it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. It's like a full fledged anti-spam server and is best installed on a dedicated server but is not well suited for multi-user environments, and it'd not easy to correct old mistakes or rebuild the word database. It does have the benefit of being cross platform though, and it supports multiple buckets, not just spam and not spam.
That sounds an awful lot like the warranty notice I found in the shrink wrapped box that my new hard disk came in.
How low... ...can you go?
If they point out which code is their's, everyone will gladly remove it, and the violators will be caught and punished, assuming there's a record of who checked in the modifications. Anyone who continues building kernels with the stolen source may face hefty lawsuits or prison.
But at the moment, while SCO claims that one or more programmers violated their copyrights, SCO has violated the copyrights (stolen the IP) of the over 400 programmers who have contributed to linux. By not agreeing to the GPL they forfeit the right to create or distribute modified GPL'd software, but they'd rather commit hundreds of counts of copyright infringement, even while suing others for lesser infringements against themselves, than break some of their support contracts with past customers.
For them to be "legal", they must either stop distributing the kernel source code altogether, or agree to the terms under which they are distributing it. Though there's still the problem of crimes already commited. They've been commiting copyright infringement for several months now, there's all the libel, the false and threatening emails and phone calls to the customers of their competitors, the attempts to sell licenses for something they don't own, threatening lawsuits against those who don't buy them, etc.
I hope to see some of the countersuits pierce the corporate veil and drain some SCO executives, those who don't flee to mexico with the money earned from selling their inflated stock.
Their Indiana Jones ride uses it as well, to create the illusion of rats jumping down onto the ride vehicle passengers. It was a fun experience, but the lines are long and it's over in just a few seconds.
I'm half expecting there to be a /asm directory on the site, though it'd probably be best if I don't find out.
If you check the domain's whois record, the administrative contact's fax number ends with 007.
I'd be very surprised if most of the shareholders are not expecting a bailout. SCO's low and high stock prices over the past year were $0.78 and about $15. I doubt it'll exceed $15 again though, so for all you Slashdot users who decided to take advantage of the situation, now might be the time to get out.
Right now I'm beating myself up for not buying some when I saw it for $1 and thought "This is really going to go through the roof. Maybe I should buy some." I could have bought a new car. I will never forgive myself. Non-buyer's remorse...