Well, a CDROM with both httpd and wget on it (e.g. Slackware) could be construed under this bill to be regulated peer-to-peer software. However, the definitions specifically exclude anything that is primarily marketed as business or network infrastructure software. So httpd+wget would probably be OK. In fact you could make any kind of data exchange software and it would be OK as long as it is "legitimately marketed and distributed primarily for the operation of business and home networks, the networks of Internet access providers, or the Internet itself". Kinda like those "water pipes" they sell in stores. Everybody knows what they're really for, but you're not allowed to call them bongs because then they'd be drug paraphernalia.
Whew, it only applies to interstate commerce. So you can write some "P2P" software and give it away, or even sell it within your own state, and not violate the law. (Yeah, I know, "First they came for the commercial software vendors and I said nothing for I did not sell software; next, they came for the [etc, etc] and when they finally came for me there was nobody left to speak out.")
The injection of "interstate commerce" all throughout this bill is clearly a patch attempting to stretch federal jurisdiction over something quite clearly beyond its bounds -- that is, out of the scope of the constitution, hence literally unconstitutional. It's a pretty common and sickening tactic among corrupt legislators and their corporate owners.
Would the courts consider open source licensing (e.g. the GPL) to be "commerce"? Perhaps more important, would prosecutors and federal police even pay attention to the "interstate commerce" restriction at all...?
What the heck is that black connector on the underside of the board? PCMCIA (or Cardbus or whatever they call notebook cards these days)? For a WiFi card? Seems like a weird place for a connector, very hard to reach once the board is installed in a case.
A "USB drive" is just an IDE drive with an enclosure, power supply, and cheap IDE-USB bridge. All the control software is in the host computer.
A "storage appliance" is an IDE drive with an enclosure, power supply, ethernet controller, IDE controller, CPU, memory, network server software (usually NFS and SMB at least) and management software. These are much more complex devices than "USB drives". Until someone manages to integrate all the components (ethernet, IDE, CPU, memory, and software) onto one or two chips and get production runs up into the millions, the price is going to remain high.
It could be done, but it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem -- in order to get the price low you have to sell lots of them; but to sell lots of them the price has to be low. A company with enough capital and strong market interest might be able to pull it off. Looks like Intel is thinking about giving it a try.
I think ptomblin's ambiguous use of pronouns is confusing people -- it was the ISP's data, including ISP customer records, that got lost. The friends didn't lose any data, just connectivity when their ISP couldn't find its own ass with both hands.
But the idea of a patent is that you exchange secrecy for exclusivity. Without the exclusivity, why give up the secrecy? Seems better for Europe just to have no software patents at all.
Yes, and no need to publish either -- it will be reinvented soon whether you tell anyone about it or not. Very few algorithms require exceptional insight to create, and almost none of those are ever published as patents. 99.9% of the crap that's patented is independently invented over and over again, whenever the need for it arises.
Closed-source software is not at all easy to copy. Sure, with great effort you can step through the machine language and figure out what it's doing, but chances are if you just run the program and watch what it does you can come up with your own original code to do the same thing, and spend less time than you would have reverse-engineering. Even if you have the source code it often takes more work to shoehorn it into your program than to write original code. Look at SCO's ate_alloc example from Unix -- the Unix code was such a poor fit for Linux that it all had to be rewritten anyway.
Stealing "algorithms" is generally a waste of time.
It would generally not be in an inventor's interests to file a non-exclusive patent. Basically you're giving away your ideas to all your competitors and getting nothing in exchange. Better just to keep the idea secret; the other guys will eventually re-invent it on their own, but you don't want to give them a head start.
Do you send passwords in cleartext over a cable modem? at an Internet cafe? Same thing. You treat the wireless network as an Internet zone. Seems pretty obvious.
Always give policy-bots like these guys a sandbox to play in. Use a removable rack for your system drive, and have a spare drive with nothing but a fresh install of whatever Windows crap they expect you to have. Let them run their crapware on the sandbox drive, then when they leave take the real system drive out of your suitcase and you're ready to go.
Public blacklists, whether they have instant accountability or not, are very much in your favor. At least you have some hope of getting delisted, though it may not be quick or easy or convenient. The alternative is thousands of independent private blacklists implemented in complete secrecy by thousands of individual admins, which you have to deal with one at a time, each with all the same problems of an "unresponsive" public list.
Maintenance of the blacklists is NOT geared toward making life easy for ISPs that host spammers. Sorry, I know you can't help it, but that's just the way it is. It's another cost of doing business for an ISP. Blacklists are a drastic measure, because spam has become a severe problem.
Either email can be used for commercial purposes, or it cannot. Anti-spam folks want to ban all commercial use of email.
WTF???
I'm a pretty rabid anti-spammer and I use email for commercial purposes all the time! Spam has nothing to do with commerce!
Spam is: Unsolicited Bulk Email
You see commerce in there anywhere? Ever been spammed by a Jesus-freak or a time-traveller-hunter? It's still spam, even if it's not trying to sell you bigger tits.
I live in a small town with exactly one feasible ISP
... and that ISP hosts spammers. In other words, you live in a town with exactly zero reputable ISPs. Hurts to be you. Really, I'm sympathetic, it sucks not to have good Internet access available. But sometimes you have to realize that the entire world doesn't revolve around your needs. The fact that you have to live in some dirtbag backwater infested with spammers does not in any way imply that everybody else must share in the sleaze by guaranteeing full connectivity to those spammers.
Oh, you want SPEWS to whitelist you -- a simple, elegant solution that requires almost no effort. Sorry, whitelisting within spam-friendly netblocks does not work. (And your ISP has proven itself to be very spam-friendly, or there wouldn't be listed netblocks big enough to include you.) The ISP just moves the spammers into the whitelisted block, even if it means moving you out. Sure you could come up with some kind of crypto-signed daily update to the blacklist/whitelist that makes sure you're always clear no matter how much they shuffle you around with the spammers... But apparently people would prefer to avoid that added complexity, even if it means losing mail from you. Again, hurts to be you, sorry.
Suck it up and hire yourself an MTA outside the spam haven where you're "forced" to live. You can still host all your stuff on the Only ISP In Town -- your website, DNS, MX hosts -- you just have to relay your outgoing mail through someone in a more reputable area. I know, it sucks to pay yet another $X a month that Those Other People don't have to pay, but that's what you get for living in a one-ISP town. Your problem, not mine.
We don't get an uncensored Net, we only get to choose the censors.
What do you mean "we"? My Internet access is "censored" by me, and me alone -- in the form of a firewall and a spam blocker -- and I'm pretty damn happy to have that particular censorship. My ISP cheerfully passes every packet with my IP address on it, unfiltered and uncensored.
So the hoi polloi get their "Internet" (web, email, maybe some "chat rooms") filtered by AOL. So what? It's not like they had Better, More Free Internet ten years ago. Maybe there was a brief period during the late 1990s when the ignorant masses had free and open access to the full Internet... but why should I care? There will always be free and open networks (to the same extent there ever were, which is probably much less than you believe) even if it means we have to run tunnelling protocols over wireless meshes or resurrect Fidonet.
The Internet is a network of networks. Some of those networks aren't "free" but that doesn't mean other networks can't be. If the "slaves" are happy enough on AOL to keep up their subscriptions, then good for them. Maybe it bothers you that some networks won't accept everything you send them? Would you rather have some sufficiently powerful agency force every network to accept every packet from every other network, in the name of "Freedom"? Does that really make sense? Is that the "spirit of the Internet"?
Those pages discuss Usenet, though the same idea certainly does apply to the Internet. People have been making silly predictions about its imminent demise since before it existed.
I bought a Delerium CD mail order and when it arrived I noticed the dreaded "this is not a CD" sticker on it. Sure enough, cdparanoia couldn't rip it. So I had a look at the data side of the disc and noticed two separate bands with a narrow gap between them: a multi-session CD. Cdparanoia was looking at the second session, an ISO9660 image containing about 50 megabytes of data. Since those data consisted of some worthless WMVs and EXEs, I took a Sharpie pen and blacked out that part of the disc (everything within about 8mm of the outer edge). Tried cdparanoia again, and it ripped all 12 music tracks just fine.
Are there any RBL checkers that don't do that? I wrote my own and that failure mode was just about the first thing I thought of, so I made sure it failed safe (not blocking) on a lookup error. The spam it let through would be my "error message" for using an unreliable RBL. I assumed all RBL checkers work like that.
If they win they won't just be a $2B company, they'll be more like a $10B+ company. They'll have $1B in cash up front plus the demonstrated ability to get huge amounts of money from giant corporations for the use of Unix. They'll basically control all server operating systems, and collect big fees from everybody forever.
At least, that's how the investors see it. Historically SCO-sized companies do not take on IBM-sized companies over big-money IP issues like this without a very very solid case, so the a priori assumption is that their case must be very very solid. E.g. Intergraph got a $300M settlement from Intel over patent infringement in the Itanium, and will probably get another big settlement or judgment in their next suit. Investors look at SCO and think "Intergraph", they look at IBM and think "Intel". But SCO has a lot more to win than just money.
What's not very clear to investors is just how sleazy, dishonest and simply incompetent SCO management is. It takes some pretty deep technical insight to see just how empty their case really is.
Slashdot Mirror
Spews doesn't block anything. It lists persistently spam-friendly networks, that's all. Any lawsuit against SPEWS would be frivolous and stupid.
Good point. That makes a lot of sense!
Well, a CDROM with both httpd and wget on it (e.g. Slackware) could be construed under this bill to be regulated peer-to-peer software. However, the definitions specifically exclude anything that is primarily marketed as business or network infrastructure software. So httpd+wget would probably be OK. In fact you could make any kind of data exchange software and it would be OK as long as it is "legitimately marketed and distributed primarily for the operation of business and home networks, the networks of Internet access providers, or the Internet itself". Kinda like those "water pipes" they sell in stores. Everybody knows what they're really for, but you're not allowed to call them bongs because then they'd be drug paraphernalia.
The injection of "interstate commerce" all throughout this bill is clearly a patch attempting to stretch federal jurisdiction over something quite clearly beyond its bounds -- that is, out of the scope of the constitution, hence literally unconstitutional. It's a pretty common and sickening tactic among corrupt legislators and their corporate owners.
Would the courts consider open source licensing (e.g. the GPL) to be "commerce"? Perhaps more important, would prosecutors and federal police even pay attention to the "interstate commerce" restriction at all...?
picture
(It's not mini-PCI; that's on the top-side of the board, next to the regular PCI slot.)
A "storage appliance" is an IDE drive with an enclosure, power supply, ethernet controller, IDE controller, CPU, memory, network server software (usually NFS and SMB at least) and management software. These are much more complex devices than "USB drives". Until someone manages to integrate all the components (ethernet, IDE, CPU, memory, and software) onto one or two chips and get production runs up into the millions, the price is going to remain high.
It could be done, but it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem -- in order to get the price low you have to sell lots of them; but to sell lots of them the price has to be low. A company with enough capital and strong market interest might be able to pull it off. Looks like Intel is thinking about giving it a try.
That's a big if. Have you seen the Red Flag source code?
Right?
But the idea of a patent is that you exchange secrecy for exclusivity. Without the exclusivity, why give up the secrecy? Seems better for Europe just to have no software patents at all.
Closed-source software is not at all easy to copy. Sure, with great effort you can step through the machine language and figure out what it's doing, but chances are if you just run the program and watch what it does you can come up with your own original code to do the same thing, and spend less time than you would have reverse-engineering. Even if you have the source code it often takes more work to shoehorn it into your program than to write original code. Look at SCO's ate_alloc example from Unix -- the Unix code was such a poor fit for Linux that it all had to be rewritten anyway.
Stealing "algorithms" is generally a waste of time.
It would generally not be in an inventor's interests to file a non-exclusive patent. Basically you're giving away your ideas to all your competitors and getting nothing in exchange. Better just to keep the idea secret; the other guys will eventually re-invent it on their own, but you don't want to give them a head start.
Do you send passwords in cleartext over a cable modem? at an Internet cafe? Same thing. You treat the wireless network as an Internet zone. Seems pretty obvious.
Always give policy-bots like these guys a sandbox to play in. Use a removable rack for your system drive, and have a spare drive with nothing but a fresh install of whatever Windows crap they expect you to have. Let them run their crapware on the sandbox drive, then when they leave take the real system drive out of your suitcase and you're ready to go.
Who got caught up in the joke? Wait a minute, who am I talking to?
Maintenance of the blacklists is NOT geared toward making life easy for ISPs that host spammers. Sorry, I know you can't help it, but that's just the way it is. It's another cost of doing business for an ISP. Blacklists are a drastic measure, because spam has become a severe problem.
I'm a pretty rabid anti-spammer and I use email for commercial purposes all the time! Spam has nothing to do with commerce!
Spam is:
Unsolicited
Bulk
Email
You see commerce in there anywhere? Ever been spammed by a Jesus-freak or a time-traveller-hunter? It's still spam, even if it's not trying to sell you bigger tits.
Oh, you want SPEWS to whitelist you -- a simple, elegant solution that requires almost no effort. Sorry, whitelisting within spam-friendly netblocks does not work. (And your ISP has proven itself to be very spam-friendly, or there wouldn't be listed netblocks big enough to include you.) The ISP just moves the spammers into the whitelisted block, even if it means moving you out. Sure you could come up with some kind of crypto-signed daily update to the blacklist/whitelist that makes sure you're always clear no matter how much they shuffle you around with the spammers... But apparently people would prefer to avoid that added complexity, even if it means losing mail from you. Again, hurts to be you, sorry.
Suck it up and hire yourself an MTA outside the spam haven where you're "forced" to live. You can still host all your stuff on the Only ISP In Town -- your website, DNS, MX hosts -- you just have to relay your outgoing mail through someone in a more reputable area. I know, it sucks to pay yet another $X a month that Those Other People don't have to pay, but that's what you get for living in a one-ISP town. Your problem, not mine.
So the hoi polloi get their "Internet" (web, email, maybe some "chat rooms") filtered by AOL. So what? It's not like they had Better, More Free Internet ten years ago. Maybe there was a brief period during the late 1990s when the ignorant masses had free and open access to the full Internet... but why should I care? There will always be free and open networks (to the same extent there ever were, which is probably much less than you believe) even if it means we have to run tunnelling protocols over wireless meshes or resurrect Fidonet.
The Internet is a network of networks. Some of those networks aren't "free" but that doesn't mean other networks can't be. If the "slaves" are happy enough on AOL to keep up their subscriptions, then good for them. Maybe it bothers you that some networks won't accept everything you send them? Would you rather have some sufficiently powerful agency force every network to accept every packet from every other network, in the name of "Freedom"? Does that really make sense? Is that the "spirit of the Internet"?
Disasters sell newspapers.
Does this message violate the DMCA?
Unfortunately he's not being funny either.
Are there any RBL checkers that don't do that? I wrote my own and that failure mode was just about the first thing I thought of, so I made sure it failed safe (not blocking) on a lookup error. The spam it let through would be my "error message" for using an unreliable RBL. I assumed all RBL checkers work like that.
Please, let us not cheapen the concept of summary execution by wasting it on anyone other than spammers.
At least, that's how the investors see it. Historically SCO-sized companies do not take on IBM-sized companies over big-money IP issues like this without a very very solid case, so the a priori assumption is that their case must be very very solid. E.g. Intergraph got a $300M settlement from Intel over patent infringement in the Itanium, and will probably get another big settlement or judgment in their next suit. Investors look at SCO and think "Intergraph", they look at IBM and think "Intel". But SCO has a lot more to win than just money.
What's not very clear to investors is just how sleazy, dishonest and simply incompetent SCO management is. It takes some pretty deep technical insight to see just how empty their case really is.