It's about technology curves and the cost of software. The cost of technology tends to zero along time. Software is no exception. OSS is that zero. This hurts a lot of vested interests, yes, but it's a rule of life.
The EU convention on cybercrime, which is law in most (all?) EU countries since 2000 prohibits the interception of private electronic communications. A key logger would certainly fall into this category.
However, there have been very few convictions under these laws, only a couple of "hacking" cases in the UK afaiaa.
It's not only about domestic/workplace espionage. Spyware vendors (a species that rates somewhere between slimemolds and spammers) use similar techniques to spy on and report back on people's use of their computer.
If the presentation of your documents is important, send your customer PDFs, not doc files. Oh, forgot, MSO doesn't produce PDFs with one click like OOorg does.
Fining Microsoft sounds fine but it's the wrong tool for several reasons. First, it will force Microsoft to raise prices in other ways, so the fine is a hidden tax on consumers. Second, it does not change the underlying problem, which is that Microsoft have been allowed over the last decade to establish a position from which they can control prices in a market almost devoid of real competition. Third, the timing is poor, since the EU and US are on the edge of a trade war, and the US will certainly use this as an excuse to raise barriers on EU businesses. Lastly, Microsoft will appeal and this will take years, during which there will be much argument and hostility, with no positive changes to show for it.
I don't believe for a second that Microsoft will take this fine as a warning that merits a change in behaviour. They will simply spin it into an advantage, one way or another.
What needs to be done is establish and enforce international free-competition standards via the WTO. Then, if a US company is found to be breaking these, the problem can be addressed to the right place, namely the US government.
The EU could achieve much more in the arena of competition by correcting the injustices of the patent system (which turns it into a tool for market control by large businesses), and by mandating the use of OSS licenses in all software that is developed for the EU bodies themselves.
Electronic voting has been used in parts of Belgium for over a decade, with little fuss or controversy.
The system is simple, robust, secure and verifiable. Each voter gets a smart card (magstripe card in the older days) when they present their papers; they take this smart card into the voting booth and insert it, much like using an ATM (and everyone knows how to do this). The voting machines use a touch screen like an ATM (in the older days, using a light pen), and let you select your candidate/party. The vote is registered to the card, which is then ejected, and inserted into a ballot box that counts the vote as the card is entered.
The ballot boxes are locked, so tampering with the cards is impossible. The card readers in the box cannot write to the cards. The voting booths are stupid, with no memory or network connections.
Redundant means kicked out of a job where I come from. "I was made redundant by a computer." Actually exactly the same as obsolete.
Redundant also means excess to requirements, which is a twist on the previous meaning. "Those cables are redundant."
Redundant also means _deliberately_ excess to requirements, which is yet another twist. "We use redundant cabling to ensure scalability."
So, "redundant" as a designed attribute of a system is almost purely opposed to "redundant" as an unfortunate circumstance of change. But both meanings are correct, and while you may think of RAID disks when you read "redundant", using it in a sense similar to "obsolete" is not incorrect, just original and somewhat poetic.
And, you have to admit, it provoked some interesting and stimulating discussion.
1. AMD64 is better for games 2. Intel Northwood P4 3.4 is good for general use. 3. Intel's new Prescott is too hot. 4. Whatever you buy will be redundant in 2 months.
I remember a story about a computer surviving a Slashdotting. Windows 95, 120 Mhz, 96,000 hits in 12 hours. It was running a funky fast little web server called Xitami.
If a Win95/120Mhz server can survive being slashdotted in 2002, there's no excuse with today's systems.
Most people with something to say dream of being slashdotted. Yes, your server melts and your pipes burn, but it's worth it to get 100,000 geeks talking about your project.
So, which brilliant head of marketing thought "hey, they're linking to our pages, giving us free publicity... the bastards, block 'em!"
Exactly _how_ would you go around hacking this ATM? OK, you can open windows and possibly run simply batch files. Does Windows XP have a built in assembler or other language that can be programmed to control the cash dispenser? Have you any other way to introduce the code you'd need to take control of the devices? Someone mentioned smartcard readers, but _exactly_ how do you introduce a smartcard via a touch screen? Has anyone _ever_ demonstrated an exploit on WinXP that is done by typing printable text into the regular user interface?
Someone has mentioned having insider access to the ATM, but this hardly needs a touchscreen keyboard and Windows. Stealing from your own bank is a long tradition that predates ATMs, and banks tend to guard pretty well against this.
So, how?
I'm not an MS astroturfer, but I don't like sensationalism and hype. If the Windows user interface presents a real security risk, someone will be able to explain the 'how'.
BTW, to answer my own question, if the cash dispenser itself was controlled by simple command-line programs, it would be easy. Start | Run program | "c:\bin\gimmecash 1000". But somehow I don't think so...
Hmmm, I did read the article (I'm new to Slashdot, sorry!). The charmap was clearly so painful to work with that they could do nothing except play some existing sound samples and speak one message. You would need a lot better control than that to hack a machine in realtime. And if it's not in realtime, then the machine must have a network connection, or be able to save state in some way. ATMs seem designed without either of these, and so I'd regard them as "pretty unhackable" in the traditional sense. Attaching fake front-ends and spycams is much more feasible but this hardly depends on the OS used.
It's not immediately evident how Windows XP opens a security risk on an ATM, nor how this means that Diebold voting machines are somehow hackable.
ATMs not connected to the Internet and without keyboard are pretty much unhackable unless you can pry open the case and attach a keyboard and/or wireless connection. And if you could do that, I suspect pretty much any ATM would be hackable. There is a reason why ATMs are built from heavy steel and anchored in concrete.
Diebold systems raise paranoiac hackles for another reason: control and oversight. You don't need to invoke security flaws and Windows XP to realize that ballot boxes represent power and money. Whoever controls the counting process controls billions, trillions of $, and this is a temptation that few, if any, people can resist.
The argument against paperless touch-screen voting systems comes from the fact that such systems open the way to serious internal fraud, rather than hacking through any hardware or software weakness. Election fraud is done by incumbent politicians, not by hackers exploiting BSoDs.
The nightmare scenario for future US elections is where after a largely electronic and unverifiable poll, the governing party gets 55% of the vote despite exit polls showing that it got 45%. What would happen after such an event is anyone's guess, but it would not be pleasant.
You could just as well say that war in Iraq increases music sales, or that global warming increases music sales, or that virus activity, spam, Howard Dean, networking web sites, slashdot dupes, and thongs on MTV improve music sales!
Actually, the thongs-on-MTV theory is the best one.
The argument that p2p influences music sales either way misses the point. Consumers spend their money, one way or another. When times are hard, they spend less. When times are good, they spend more. If albums represent a good deal they will buy them. When music all feels shit, they won't.
The anti-piracy argument assumes that consumers have elastic wallets but this is simply wrong, and trying to say that p2p increases appetite for music is just entering into a falacious discussion.
The music industry should take an example from the movie industry, which is making record profits from DVD sales. Product, product, product. Make it amazing. Make it collectible. Make it rich. People _will_ buy it, when they can't.
Australia is a boom market for music most probably because the boom in house prices makes everyone feel afluent. Wait until the house market collapses, and wow! the music market will follow.
Punishing Microsoft for monopolistic behavior is hardly... uhm... post-Christian marxist-fascist-existentialist nihilist behaviour.
It's straight-forward execution of the state's obligation to enforce rules of fair play as defined by consensus and trial-and-error through the ages. One of those is to prevent manipulation of markets by parties powerful enough to take a monopoly position.
Monopolists distort the markets and supress free competition so as to extract maximum resources from consumers. This is bad for innovation, for economic performance and for society as a whole. There is only one organ that we grant the right to raise taxes, and that is the State itself.
The EU are doing their job. The US have failed to do this perhaps because the State and Business are too close together.
BTW, wtf does p-C m-f-e-n actually mean? I mean, wtfffff??
The GPL serves a purpose (though I'm not sure what)
Perhaps you should read it some time. The GPL is a license that software authors employ to grant others the rights to use and modify their software codes. In other words, if I spend a year developing some software, I can then distribute it under the GPL. The specific advantage of the GPL as compared to BSD-style licenses is that it gives other free software developers (who I presumably share some common interests with) an advantage over commercial competitors who might take my hard work and turn it into a commercial product that competes with me.
Companies developing routers have a simple choice: write the software from scratch, buy commercial software, or use free software. If they buy commercial software, they must respect those license conditions imposed. If they use free software, they must also respect the license. If it's GPL, that means making the source code available.
A business has no right to take GPL software (representing, I remind you, a significant investment of someone's time) and break the license. They should do what everyone else has to do in business: invest themselves in their own products.
How far do you think that the internet will be responsible for creating a de-facto international legal system? Property rights, shared criminal databases, shared economic systems,... it seems that the influence of TCP/IP packets has no limits on our society. Will we one day see a world government to enforce international law? And lastly, will this be the US?
Just assign every possible file a name, let's call it... hmmm... a "universal resource locator". Now, instead of exchanging huge files, you just exchange these universal resource locators, or "URLs". Imagine the savings! The only slight problem is that you can't actually read the file without downloading / transferring it.
Hint: transmitting the names of things is not the same as transmitting the things themselves.
Reminds me of the old trick in which you could turn a single-sided diskette into a double-sided one by punching a hole through one corner.
Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.
The trick with this hard disk "expansion" is to reclaim space that has been reserved for error correction, or which failed quality control.
It's a lot like over-clocking a CPU, with a big difference: when it fails, you can't just reboot, you lose all your data. Personally, with HD prices so cheap, it hardly seems worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
It's about technology curves and the cost of software. The cost of technology tends to zero along time. Software is no exception. OSS is that zero. This hurts a lot of vested interests, yes, but it's a rule of life.
Period.
The EU convention on cybercrime, which is law in most (all?) EU countries since 2000 prohibits the interception of private electronic communications. A key logger would certainly fall into this category.
However, there have been very few convictions under these laws, only a couple of "hacking" cases in the UK afaiaa.
It's not only about domestic/workplace espionage. Spyware vendors (a species that rates somewhere between slimemolds and spammers) use similar techniques to spy on and report back on people's use of their computer.
If the presentation of your documents is important, send your customer PDFs, not doc files. Oh, forgot, MSO doesn't produce PDFs with one click like OOorg does.
Fining Microsoft sounds fine but it's the wrong tool for several reasons. First, it will force Microsoft to raise prices in other ways, so the fine is a hidden tax on consumers. Second, it does not change the underlying problem, which is that Microsoft have been allowed over the last decade to establish a position from which they can control prices in a market almost devoid of real competition. Third, the timing is poor, since the EU and US are on the edge of a trade war, and the US will certainly use this as an excuse to raise barriers on EU businesses. Lastly, Microsoft will appeal and this will take years, during which there will be much argument and hostility, with no positive changes to show for it.
I don't believe for a second that Microsoft will take this fine as a warning that merits a change in behaviour. They will simply spin it into an advantage, one way or another.
What needs to be done is establish and enforce international free-competition standards via the WTO. Then, if a US company is found to be breaking these, the problem can be addressed to the right place, namely the US government.
The EU could achieve much more in the arena of competition by correcting the injustices of the patent system (which turns it into a tool for market control by large businesses), and by mandating the use of OSS licenses in all software that is developed for the EU bodies themselves.
Electronic voting has been used in parts of Belgium for over a decade, with little fuss or controversy.
The system is simple, robust, secure and verifiable. Each voter gets a smart card (magstripe card in the older days) when they present their papers; they take this smart card into the voting booth and insert it, much like using an ATM (and everyone knows how to do this). The voting machines use a touch screen like an ATM (in the older days, using a light pen), and let you select your candidate/party. The vote is registered to the card, which is then ejected, and inserted into a ballot box that counts the vote as the card is entered.
The ballot boxes are locked, so tampering with the cards is impossible. The card readers in the box cannot write to the cards. The voting booths are stupid, with no memory or network connections.
So what's the big deal in the US?
We Eurocits can get a tax rebate too! Thanks, BG!
Hang on. This is all going to pay for around 4 days of the CAP. Big deal.
Yup, J&R is fantastic.
Also for music, electronics. I've been shopping there since the 1980's and only stopped when the USD got too high.
While you're in NYC, don't forget to visit Korean town around 40th and have some sushi.
That's 640k songs, right, like 2TB of music? You can't possibly mean 640k movies, that'd be way too much.
Redundant means kicked out of a job where I come from. "I was made redundant by a computer." Actually exactly the same as obsolete.
Redundant also means excess to requirements, which is a twist on the previous meaning. "Those cables are redundant."
Redundant also means _deliberately_ excess to requirements, which is yet another twist. "We use redundant cabling to ensure scalability."
So, "redundant" as a designed attribute of a system is almost purely opposed to "redundant" as an unfortunate circumstance of change. But both meanings are correct, and while you may think of RAID disks when you read "redundant", using it in a sense similar to "obsolete" is not incorrect, just original and somewhat poetic.
And, you have to admit, it provoked some interesting and stimulating discussion.
OK, DAMN YOU ALL, I JUST USED THE WRONG WORD!!!
Shit. Mondays are the worst.
1. AMD64 is better for games
2. Intel Northwood P4 3.4 is good for general use.
3. Intel's new Prescott is too hot.
4. Whatever you buy will be redundant in 2 months.
Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose.
I remember a story about a computer surviving a Slashdotting. Windows 95, 120 Mhz, 96,000 hits in 12 hours. It was running a funky fast little web server called Xitami.
If a Win95/120Mhz server can survive being slashdotted in 2002, there's no excuse with today's systems.
Most people with something to say dream of being slashdotted. Yes, your server melts and your pipes burn, but it's worth it to get 100,000 geeks talking about your project.
So, which brilliant head of marketing thought "hey, they're linking to our pages, giving us free publicity... the bastards, block 'em!"
Good job, Jimmy!
ROTFL.
About two days, before you smash your wrist into desk or corner as you're walking, and little pieces of LCD dribble down your arm.
"No, the screen is not warrantied against accidental damage."
And the device is not suit-compatible. Great for t-shirts, lousy with long sleeves.
Needs more work.
Just one question, in many parts.
Exactly _how_ would you go around hacking this ATM? OK, you can open windows and possibly run simply batch files. Does Windows XP have a built in assembler or other language that can be programmed to control the cash dispenser? Have you any other way to introduce the code you'd need to take control of the devices? Someone mentioned smartcard readers, but _exactly_ how do you introduce a smartcard via a touch screen? Has anyone _ever_ demonstrated an exploit on WinXP that is done by typing printable text into the regular user interface?
Someone has mentioned having insider access to the ATM, but this hardly needs a touchscreen keyboard and Windows. Stealing from your own bank is a long tradition that predates ATMs, and banks tend to guard pretty well against this.
So, how?
I'm not an MS astroturfer, but I don't like sensationalism and hype. If the Windows user interface presents a real security risk, someone will be able to explain the 'how'.
BTW, to answer my own question, if the cash dispenser itself was controlled by simple command-line programs, it would be easy. Start | Run program | "c:\bin\gimmecash 1000". But somehow I don't think so...
Hmmm, I did read the article (I'm new to Slashdot, sorry!). The charmap was clearly so painful to work with that they could do nothing except play some existing sound samples and speak one message.
You would need a lot better control than that to hack a machine in realtime. And if it's not in realtime, then the machine must have a network connection, or be able to save state in some way. ATMs seem designed without either of these, and so I'd regard them as "pretty unhackable" in the traditional sense. Attaching fake front-ends and spycams is much more feasible but this hardly depends on the OS used.
It's not immediately evident how Windows XP opens a security risk on an ATM, nor how this means that Diebold voting machines are somehow hackable.
ATMs not connected to the Internet and without keyboard are pretty much unhackable unless you can pry open the case and attach a keyboard and/or wireless connection. And if you could do that, I suspect pretty much any ATM would be hackable. There is a reason why ATMs are built from heavy steel and anchored in concrete.
Diebold systems raise paranoiac hackles for another reason: control and oversight. You don't need to invoke security flaws and Windows XP to realize that ballot boxes represent power and money. Whoever controls the counting process controls billions, trillions of $, and this is a temptation that few, if any, people can resist.
The argument against paperless touch-screen voting systems comes from the fact that such systems open the way to serious internal fraud, rather than hacking through any hardware or software weakness. Election fraud is done by incumbent politicians, not by hackers exploiting BSoDs.
The nightmare scenario for future US elections is where after a largely electronic and unverifiable poll, the governing party gets 55% of the vote despite exit polls showing that it got 45%. What would happen after such an event is anyone's guess, but it would not be pleasant.
You could just as well say that war in Iraq increases music sales, or that global warming increases music sales, or that virus activity, spam, Howard Dean, networking web sites, slashdot dupes, and thongs on MTV improve music sales!
Actually, the thongs-on-MTV theory is the best one.
But HTF can anyone claim that p2p is the cause?
The argument that p2p influences music sales either way misses the point. Consumers spend their money, one way or another. When times are hard, they spend less. When times are good, they spend more. If albums represent a good deal they will buy them. When music all feels shit, they won't.
The anti-piracy argument assumes that consumers have elastic wallets but this is simply wrong, and trying to say that p2p increases appetite for music is just entering into a falacious discussion.
The music industry should take an example from the movie industry, which is making record profits from DVD sales. Product, product, product. Make it amazing. Make it collectible. Make it rich. People _will_ buy it, when they can't.
Australia is a boom market for music most probably because the boom in house prices makes everyone feel afluent. Wait until the house market collapses, and wow! the music market will follow.
No news for Kazaa! at all, I'd say.
By NostrabertusCoward:
Plague...
Punishing Microsoft for monopolistic behavior is hardly ... uhm ... post-Christian marxist-fascist-existentialist nihilist behaviour.
It's straight-forward execution of the state's obligation to enforce rules of fair play as defined by consensus and trial-and-error through the ages. One of those is to prevent manipulation of markets by parties powerful enough to take a monopoly position.
Monopolists distort the markets and supress free competition so as to extract maximum resources from consumers. This is bad for innovation, for economic performance and for society as a whole. There is only one organ that we grant the right to raise taxes, and that is the State itself.
The EU are doing their job. The US have failed to do this perhaps because the State and Business are too close together.
BTW, wtf does p-C m-f-e-n actually mean? I mean, wtfffff??
I am pleased to announce:
ProjectGutenburg 3
(not affiliated with any other PG).
E-books for FREE!
Come & get'm while they're hot!
The GPL serves a purpose (though I'm not sure what)
Perhaps you should read it some time. The GPL is a license that software authors employ to grant others the rights to use and modify their software codes. In other words, if I spend a year developing some software, I can then distribute it under the GPL. The specific advantage of the GPL as compared to BSD-style licenses is that it gives other free software developers (who I presumably share some common interests with) an advantage over commercial competitors who might take my hard work and turn it into a commercial product that competes with me.
Companies developing routers have a simple choice: write the software from scratch, buy commercial software, or use free software. If they buy commercial software, they must respect those license conditions imposed. If they use free software, they must also respect the license. If it's GPL, that means making the source code available.
A business has no right to take GPL software (representing, I remind you, a significant investment of someone's time) and break the license. They should do what everyone else has to do in business: invest themselves in their own products.
How far do you think that the internet will be responsible for creating a de-facto international legal system? Property rights, shared criminal databases, shared economic systems,... it seems that the influence of TCP/IP packets has no limits on our society. Will we one day see a world government to enforce international law? And lastly, will this be the US?
Just assign every possible file a name, let's call it... hmmm... a "universal resource locator". Now, instead of exchanging huge files, you just exchange these universal resource locators, or "URLs". Imagine the savings! The only slight problem is that you can't actually read the file without downloading / transferring it.
Hint: transmitting the names of things is not the same as transmitting the things themselves.
Reminds me of the old trick in which you could turn a single-sided diskette into a double-sided one by punching a hole through one corner.
Slight problem: the diskette usually failed a few weeks later.
The trick with this hard disk "expansion" is to reclaim space that has been reserved for error correction, or which failed quality control.
It's a lot like over-clocking a CPU, with a big difference: when it fails, you can't just reboot, you lose all your data. Personally, with HD prices so cheap, it hardly seems worthwhile.