Folks, this is a big league PR move, and it's quite well-timed.
The oral arguments for the DeCSS case happen May 1. Given the critical decision the 2nd Circuit will be making in the next few days, the goal should be to bring the anti-DMCA sentiment to a crescendo, and Felton's action should help achieve that. By withdrawing his paper, some very negative press should be aimed at the DMCA by major news organizations.
People should keep in mind that the anti-DMCA push is very well orgainized, and that Felton has already participated in it. I have no doubt that the paper will be published in a few weeks (not counting that it has already been leaked!). Meanwhile, major media organizations have a great reason to run "The DMCA is draconian" stories soon, citing Felton's case.
The timing of this is supurb, and it's frankly a sharp tactical move. Felton will probably publish this paper in a few weeks. Hell, more people will read it because of the suspense. IMHO, he's on very sound DMCA footing as he clearly qualifies for 1201(g).
So, let's say he registers his copyright today. Do you think the infringement will stop immediately? Most copyright holders, including corporations, don't register until they need to because of some dispute.
Your argument is "no registration" => "no contingency", which is exactly why my advise is to register immediately. Step 1 in defending your copyright is to register it, he prefered to write an article about how the legal process won't help him. Why should it? He hasn't even followed step 1.
The link is slashdotted, so I couldn't read it, but you are the first person in the thread that has the slightest clue. It's quite amazing that it isn't until post 115 that somebody mentions 'contingency'.
Generally if a copyright violation is flagrant, then the court will award attourney's fees, but you have to regsister your copyright. In the worst case, the contingency fee is 40% of the judgement or settlement. If you can't find a lawyer to take the case and shelter you from the risk of losing, it is a strong hint that facts and law aren't on your side. Even weak cases often provoke settlement offers.
The idea that a "small" plaintiff can't sue a company because it costs too much is amazingly ignorant. What a bunch of crap. The truth is that it is incredibly easy to sue for a legitimate cause of action, and it is the defending company that will be paying out of pocket and have exposure to high damages. That's the sort of risk that people who control purse strings abhor. If this is a company with venture capital support, it can even be the kiss of death.
From the posts above it seems like the copyright violation is pretty obvious. The guy should register his copyright immediately and find a lawyer ask for a nice 6 figure damages claim.
Bus keys are runtime generated session dependent keys created to avoid eavesdropping on the bus. They are differnt each time and are formed by each side (host and drive) applying a modified form of CSS's linear feedback shift register algorithm to a random set of bits in a challenge and response method. After each side determines that the other knows how to decrypt the CSS LFSR, they construct the bus key from the two arbitrary bit sequences. This key is never sent over the bus, which foiles man in the middle attacks.
For more info see http://eon.law.harvard.edu/archive/dvd-discuss/msg 11603.html
If either side were to change the algorithm for constructing the bus key, then no communication could take place, so it really doesn't matter if it depends on some fixed magic number, as that number is essentially written in stone. Since the method for obtaining the bus key can't be changed, your entire argument is irrelevent.
And by the way, it is settled law that you can publish "keys" obtained by reverse engineering: Chicago Lock Co v Fanberg, 676 F.2d 400 (9th Cir. 1982), which refutes your entire argument even if you were right about the bus key.
YOu cannot read any encypted blocks on a DVD until the 8 step validation is first done to "authorize" or validate a session key.
Therefore, without the Xing key, you cannot get any other keys because I think not only are key frames of MPEG-2 streams stored within VOBs protected from reading without validation, I also believe that all blocks containing any scrambled or encrypted keys are likewise protected.
Frank Stevenson released a tool which obtains all player keys used on a particular disc. This tool uses no prior key knowledge it obtains all valid player keys **for that DVD** and thereby enables the extraction of the title key regardless of the player keys used. I runs in a few minutes.
The CSS **algorithm** has been cracked in the strongest possible way: all keys and the cleartext can be deduced from only the encrypted message and knowledge of the algorithm.
While you are correct that the original DeCSS did not use Stevenson's method and instead relied on the hard coded Xing key, you are flatly incorrect to say that "without the Xing key, you cannot get any other keys".
I think a more general and useful thing would be to modify the copy/cut/paste to add an two new features: copy and append to clipboard/cut and append to clipboard (maybe ctrl-shift-c and x?).
The clipboard should be a stack. Every time you cut or copy, it pushes your choice onto the stack. When you paste, it should pop it off, leaving your clipboard as it was before.
This allows: move to A, select files, copy, move to B, select files, copy, move to C, paste, paste.
If you think about it, you realize there is an operation missing: cut is to copy as paste is to ?? (ie you should be able to push something on and either pop it off or copy it off).
Just because you bought the disc, don't expect to use it in some way in which its owners don't approve
Since you are the owner of the disc, by copyright's first sale principle, this is a tautology, unless I suppose you have multiple personality disorder.
It's not clear. Copyright law has a big "gotcha" when contractors are involved. Without more info, I don't think the answer is clear.
The US Supreme Court gave a unanimous ruling interpreting "work for hire" in the case
COMMUNITY FOR CREATIVE NON-VIOLENCE v. REID, 490 U.S. 730 (1989)
The case discusses how to tell an employee from an independent contractor, and what standard to apply in each case to identify a work for hire. For an indendent contractor, the work for hire condition exists only "if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire." It also is only allowed for an enumerated class of works that doesn't appear to include computer programs.
In this case, Reid was a sculptor who made an oral agreement with CCNV to create a sculture for them. He did and they both tried to claim copyright on it. He was ruled an independent contractor and the contract did not create a work for hire because it was oral and because a sculpture isn't in the eligible class of works.
For this poster, it depends on what kind of employee he is. If he is an independent contractor, then he likely owns the copyright even without the agreement. If he is an employee, then he only owns the copyright if the agreement was in a written contract.
It sounds like things are even more complicated because he works for a contract agency. This presents a third possiblity. If he is an "employee" of the contracting firm, but there is no explicit written contract transfer of copyright from the contracting firm to the client as part of their contract, then the contracting firm would own the copyright.
However, a copyright licence like the GPL can be created much more easily than a transfer of copyright ownership. If the company agreed at any time to licence their copyright under the GPL, then that's probably definitive. The copyright owner can relicence the works they own, but they cannot revoke a licence already given, unless the licence specifically says so (and the GPL doesn't).
How about this: everyone knows that the formula is something like
mp3name:= md5(song_name XOR password)
and the password is emailed around until "they" figure it out and then it changes.
Oh, and you have to scramble the song itself so that you have to know the password to hear it, so that "they" can't figure out what song it is unless they know the password.
The problem is, copyright hasn't been extended to be permanent yet!
The majority obviously has never studied mathematical induction, because they today upheld the "inductive" step in the proof that Congress can pass laws which protect copyright for unlimited times.
The error in the Appeals court's reasoning is that the statement "Congress may pass a retroactive copyright extention" is mathematically equivalent to the statement that "Congress may preserve Copyright for unlimited times". Such a power *allows* the result that every 10 years Congress may (by citing this precedent) retroactively extend copyright by another 10 years. The dissent had it exactly right.
You repeat the majority's error by saying that "it" hasn't happened yet. What is "it"? "It" is the passage of a law that cites an improper use of constitutional authority as it's justification. Your view says that we actually have to wait until the end of time until we say "Gee, that didn't work the way it was supposed to because somehow no copyrights ever expired."
Gee, "sh" certainly exists in the prior art. Perhaps he is thinking that "Openssh" is meant as Open-ssh, when it's obvious to us in the know that it is really Opens-sh, which sort of describes what it does in plain old english, which is surely not trademark infringement.
I also note that he added 1 letter to a public domain program name -- "s" to "sh", wheres we added five "opens" to the same public domain program name.
We're talking about a 3 letter trademark, two-thirds of which is derivitive. It really strikes me as phenominally bizarre to then claim that the addition of four more letters is not sufficient to avoid confusion. Out of 7 letters in "Openssh", four are new, two are prior art, and only one is really original. Basing a trademark infringement on reuse of one letter seems almost laughable. Worse, the letter is "s" - that's only a single crummy point in scrabble.
I also wonder about the fact that openssh actually does have a common code base with ssh. Does that not afford it some licence to have a somewhat similar name. If a lot of the code actually is a licenced derivitive version of ssh, doesn't that implicitly grant you the right to have 42.85% of your name in common?
I'm of the opinion that the open source databases are all so substantially behind the capabilities of the proprietary market leader Oracle that I don't consider them viable replacements for enterprise grade data solutions. I work on a system that has 800 concurrent users at any given moment, and I don't see anything remotely close to worthy of consideration in the open source arena.
Worse, I see Oracle as pulling away. In the last two years, the open source databases have struggled to add features that I view as expected and required while Oracle has added 10X more. Transactions & row-level locking, nested selects, foreign keys, etc... are not optional features. In order to compete, open source needs database projects with forces comparable to the linux kernel, apache, gnome, and KDE projects. I just don't think Larry Ellison is out there worrying about GPL'd competition.
I don't think Oracle gets the proper attention in the open source community. Oracle has a greater "lock in" effect and has mostly got a free ride from the open source community so far. Oracle is a big gorilla that is rapidly becoming the most secure proprietary software vendor around.
It's not "State's Rights" -- it is "employer's rights" to set and/or restrict the duties of the employee. The fact that the employer is the State of Virginia serves only to confuse the issue.
I'm just astounded that anybody DISAGREES with this decision!
Does it have to be enumerated in the constitution for this guy to believe that people can decide for themselves what they need to access for their work?
Yes it would, because "academic freedom" for professors is not a Constitutional right, it is a contractual right (ie by agreement) between professors and their employing institutions. "Professor" is not some title of nobility (that would be unconstitutional), it's just an ordinary job title.
It is emphatically the employer's perogative to specify what is and isn't within the job description. Here the state of Virginia happens to be the employer, and they have stated that, by default, looking at porn is NOT part of a state employee's job. Those employees who wish to be exceptions to the default may "get written permission from their agency heads before accessing sexually explicit material" in order to gain status as a state supported porn viewer.
If these professors want carte blanche porn viewing discretion at work, then they can get it, but they must first negotiate "agency head" status as part of their employment contract. Until / unless they do so, they haven't achieved the "acedemic freedom" they seem to think they are entitled to. It is utterly absurd to think that obtaining a certain job title gives you the right to dictate to your employer what that job title means.
Security-enhanced Linux is being released under the conditions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The release includes documentation and source code for both the system and some system utilities that were modified to make use of the new features. Participation with comments, constructive criticism, and/or improvements is welcome.
This is unbelievably cool! For ANY government agency to release GPL code is huge, but for the NSA to do it is a stunning precedent. I just wonder if this action will survive the change of administration.
I recommend that people write their Congressmen and express support for this.
Briefs submitted this morning by an angy Florida resident suggest that by using the product, you obtain a psychic power that gives you the clairvoyant ability to discern the text of the project gutenberg manuscript of the same name.
When you speak the words of this similar but different literary access source aloud, you are not reading in contradiction to the licence, but rather exercising the explicitly unmentioned right to use "The Product" as a psychic assistance device in full compliance with the contract.
In a bizarre twist, the Supreme Court of Florida has recently ruled that this licence conflicts with the Florida election laws and even if it didn't that the word "cannot" in the last clause of the licence implies that under some cases it "can" be read aloud and that further it would be an abuse of discretion in the case of the presence of psychic powers to inhibit the public's "right to know" which is guaranteed by the Florida and US Constitutions as well as the plain meaning of the text of the licence. Therefore, the licence must be construed, in light of the clearly overriding interest that children not be kept ignorant that the licence in fact confers an affirmative obligation to speak the words of the book aloud while receiving the psychic assistance of the device. Anyone not reading the book aloud will be forced to count ballots in Miami-Dade county.
Scholars expect that the US Supreme Court may reverse the Florida Court. The familiar 5-4 conservative majority is expected to rule that the Florida Court's remedy, which, as applied, would allows some children to hear the story, also prevents children in other counties from witnessing the psychic demonstration and thus violates the equal protection clause. Scholars agree that the fact that remote counties are clearly out of earshot will play heavily in the deliberations.
However most copyright scholars predict the justices will also rule 8-1 that the original licence violates "fair use" under even the most draconian reading of the DMCA, but Justice Ginsberg is expected to argue that the Florida Court's status as the final arbiter of state contract law precludes US Supreme Court action on that grounds.
When asked for comment, George "Dubya" Bush said that it didn't matter to him because he couldn't read anyway, although he seemed interested in having Dick Cheney read the story to him. Al Gore, who seemed on the verge of tears about something else, said that while he strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court, he would accept their ruling, and noted that if Adobe didn't want people reading the book, he had a lockbox for sale. Jesse Jackson on the other hand complained that Alice in Wonderland was a racist text and compared the issue to Selma.
Bugtraq's use might be fair use, but it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
It certainly would be fair use to create your own original description of a bug. However Microsoft's bug reports themselves may contain original expression. If so, just a movie critic's review is protected, so is their advisory. However, the factual parts of it are not protected, and fair use might also protect some copying of the advisory itself.
Fair use has four factors, as defined in 17 USC 107. Applying those here we find:
(1) BugTrac's use is noncommercial technical research, I believe. The mailing list doesn't come with any advertisements that I'm aware of.
(2) The nature of the Microsoft advisories is factual -- they aren't fictional works.
(3) The amount copied from Microsoft is presumably the whole thing, although if they used choice quotations this would help a fair use claim.
(4) The effect on the market or value of the bug advisory is the key issue. If Microsoft isn't selling these or using them to sell bundled advertising, then it's hard to see any negative effect. If they start selling access to these advisories, then this would strongly disfavor fair use. If they are given away free, but generate advertising revenue, then it's more muddled but probably disfavors fair use.
My non-lawyer "guess" is that unless Microsoft generates revenue somehow from these advisories that copying them in their entirety is actually not copyright infringement because it is fair use.
If MS does generate revenue from these, then bugtraq could probably get away with quoting the key passages, but MS would have a very tenable case to take to court if the whole thing was copied. I'd guess there was a small chance the defense could win, but it'd be a long shot with a large cost.
First of all, I have read the statute, the briefs in most of these cases, and many of the court transcripts. Secondly, you quote the sections that prove my point.
I made two contentions that you take issue with:
1) I said that a vote "may be ignored" if it is not machine readable and isn't found by a manual recount within 7 days.
Your response is that the 7 day deadline is for the "normal course of an election" and doesn't apply to "recounts". No statutory text supports this proposition. The law provides for protests and contests, but nothing in the statute indicates that the duties of the Election Canvassing Commission (ECC) defined in 102.111(1) and 102.112(1) are altered in such event. To the contrary, the absense of any such text proves that they are not modified, especially so because a contest has certification as a prerequisite.
2) I stated that manual recounts are an option, not a right, and that the choice to proceed with one is constrained by the deadline.
You disagree, citing the very text that proves my point. After the preliminary 1% recount, if an error in vote tabulation exists, then 102.166(5) gives three alternatives, which I very reasonably call "options". Only option (c) is a full manual recount of the county. Options (a) and (b) are also offered to the county, and assuredly would take less time than option (c). Thus, even if the 1% manual recount does show an "error in vote tabulation", the statute even then does NOT require a manual recount.
Your statement that "If the sample recount shows a difference that could change the outcome, the canvassing board MUST recount." flatly ignores 102.166(5)(a) and 102.166(5)(b) which provide other options. I note that you added the emphasis to the word "or" between these.
Justice Scalia mauled Tribe on this point, so you can take the issue up with him if you have further confusion on what the meaning of the word "or" is.
The Florida Supreme Court concluded at the end of their statutory construction argument only that discretion does exist. They read 102.112's "may be ignored" as taking precedence over "shall be ignored". The lower court had ruled the exact same way in supporting the Secretary of State's choice to do what the statute says she "may" do.
The conflict that lead SCOFL to find abuse of discretion was that of enforcing the deadline when doing so deprives people of "the right of sufferage" guaranteed by the FL Constitution. That contention is flawed because there is no such right and even if there where it was the County boards who abused their discretion by choosing option (c) which could not be completed in time when (a) or (b) could have been.
If not counting a machine unreadable hanging or dimpled chad is a violation of this supposed right to vote, then the only tenable conclusion would be to ALWAYS do a manual recount in all counties using punchcard ballots. That clearly is not consistent with a statute that does not even allow manual recounts in Counties unless there is a protest. You would have to conclude that the Florida Legislature passed an election law that inherently thwarted the very idea of this imaginary "right to vote". The correct remedy to this absurdity would be to throw out the whole election as inconclusive, which is precisely what the Florida Legislature is about to do.
By the way, I did not vote for Bush, but it's clear to me that there is no scenario in which Gore will win, nor in which Gore "should" win.
Well it looks like George W's brother and Katherine Harris succeeded in undermining democracy.
Yes they did, and good for them, because the US is a republic, not a democracy, and that is PRECISELY the issue in this case.
The democrats, true to their name, believe that the US is a democracy and that "the right to vote" for president transcends all else. Unfortunately for them, there is no right to vote in a presidential election other than that created by statutory enactment of the state legislature.
In particular under Florida's election statute, your vote "may be ignored" if it isn't expressed as a machine readable ballot and if an *optional* manual recount doesn't find it within 7 days. Scalia demolished the "right to a recount" idea during the oral arguments by reading the statue.
The Florida Supreme Court said that ignoring such votes violates the right to sufferage, but we can know see that this statute defines and creates all aspects of the limited right to vote. Once you chop off all extra-statutory avenues to recognize a conflicting concept of voting rights, the Florida Supreme Court's opinion crumbles.
The beauty of today's order is that it forces the Florida Court to try to ground their bogus concept of voting rights back in the statute that they invalidated because of it. Today's order is a brilliant salvo -- they avoid looking political, but ennunciate principles that assure the result.
They sort of said to SCOFL "Demonstrate how your perpetual motion machine works again without using the secret power supply that is hidden under the table." It's almost sadistic: everyone will now look to SCOFL as they try to demonstrate the impossible.
My credentials: MS in math, 4 years experience as a quality control statistician.
Here are some "flaws" in the analysis at http://web.mit.edu/norstadt/Public/election.pdf
1. The data at best supports the proposition that the Bush/Buchanan voting ratio for Palm Beach is significantly different than other Florida counties (but maybe not, see 5 below), but not that it is different from the "desired voting" ratio for Palm Beach.
2. Using Bush/Buchanan ratio is very weird - should use Buchanan/All ratio. Trying to introduce outside knowledge inherent in focusing on how "conservative" voters split introduces preconceptions that are non-statistical in nature. Why not Buchanan/Nader?
3. Normalization set chosen to be Florida. Why? Why not all US? Why not all of the South?
4. Expected distribution of Buchanan support rates by county is not known and cannot be determined by choosing a model. You must provide a non-statistical argument for why you believe the model holds.
5. In particular, even if the counties are normally distributed (doubtful), the maximum value should be chosen from an extreme value distribution, not a normal distribution. Extreme value distributions have very heavy tails. The fact that the choice of Palm Beach was made post hoc changes how the analysis should be done.
6. The basic premise is flawed because the vote rate might actually be from a different distribution than other counties. For example consider the distribution of voters born in Palm Beach. You cannot look at a model to infer that the emperical distribution is "wrong". In other words, maybe Palm Beach really does have more Buchanan supporters.
7. If the hypothesis is "the butterfly ballot causes confusion between candidate 2 and candidate 3", then it would be proper to test that hypothesis on ALL races using that ballot. In particular the Senate race on the same ballot did not display any anomoly despite having 3 candidates and comparable total votes.
I am not saying that the result is not anamolous, just that it is very easy to conclude that it is for the wrong reasons.
I actually voted last week. I don't understand why anyone would wait to election day. It was SO easy. I did it at my grocery store. I didn't even know I could do it until I got there. All I had to show was my drivers licence (you have to have already registered to vote).
I voted for Browne. Here in Texas the LP was on a LOT of local races - way more than any other 3rd party. I voted LP in every race I could, except for one where I personally know (and like) the candidate.
I urge Slashdot readers not to vote for either Gore or Bush. If you do this you are supporting the corrupt system. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think either of these folks give a DAMN about you. (That is unless you've given several thousand dollars).
You may not realize that if 3rd parties get 5%, they qualify for federal funding in the next election. When they get 1%, the "media" will track them. Voting for a 3rd party is extremely valuable because these are thresholds that lead to greater credibility and greater opportunity to launch a viable candidate later.
Moreover when the election winner gets less than 50% of the popular vote, they do not have a mandate to do anything, which means they are less able to implement the corrupt objectives of their big bucks contributors. The lower the better.
I'm curious: How do the best open source programs fair against the deep blue's of the world? How do they stack up on equal hardware against commercially available programs?
Slashdot Mirror
Folks, this is a big league PR move, and it's quite well-timed.
The oral arguments for the DeCSS case happen May 1. Given the critical decision the 2nd Circuit will be making in the next few days, the goal should be to bring the anti-DMCA sentiment to a crescendo, and Felton's action should help achieve that. By withdrawing his paper, some very negative press should be aimed at the DMCA by major news organizations.
People should keep in mind that the anti-DMCA push is very well orgainized, and that Felton has already participated in it. I have no doubt that the paper will be published in a few weeks (not counting that it has already been leaked!). Meanwhile, major media organizations have a great reason to run "The DMCA is draconian" stories soon, citing Felton's case.
The timing of this is supurb, and it's frankly a sharp tactical move. Felton will probably publish this paper in a few weeks. Hell, more people will read it because of the suspense. IMHO, he's on very sound DMCA footing as he clearly qualifies for 1201(g).
Did the patent office even try a Google search before stamping its approval on this patent?
Obviously not: http://www.google.com/search?q=web+checksum
Hit #2 is prior art: "BIBLINK.Checksum - an MD5 message digest for Web pages" . Note that: "This article last updated/links checked on 23-Sept-1998"
So, let's say he registers his copyright today. Do you think the infringement will stop immediately? Most copyright holders, including corporations, don't register until they need to because of some dispute.
Your argument is "no registration" => "no contingency", which is exactly why my advise is to register immediately. Step 1 in defending your copyright is to register it, he prefered to write an article about how the legal process won't help him. Why should it? He hasn't even followed step 1.
The link is slashdotted, so I couldn't read it, but you are the first person in the thread that has the slightest clue. It's quite amazing that it isn't until post 115 that somebody mentions 'contingency'.
Generally if a copyright violation is flagrant, then the court will award attourney's fees, but you have to regsister your copyright. In the worst case, the contingency fee is 40% of the judgement or settlement. If you can't find a lawyer to take the case and shelter you from the risk of losing, it is a strong hint that facts and law aren't on your side. Even weak cases often provoke settlement offers.
The idea that a "small" plaintiff can't sue a company because it costs too much is amazingly ignorant. What a bunch of crap. The truth is that it is incredibly easy to sue for a legitimate cause of action, and it is the defending company that will be paying out of pocket and have exposure to high damages. That's the sort of risk that people who control purse strings abhor. If this is a company with venture capital support, it can even be the kiss of death.
From the posts above it seems like the copyright violation is pretty obvious. The guy should register his copyright immediately and find a lawyer ask for a nice 6 figure damages claim.
Bus keys are runtime generated session dependent keys created to avoid eavesdropping on the bus. They are differnt each time and are formed by each side (host and drive) applying a modified form of CSS's linear feedback shift register algorithm to a random set of bits in a challenge and response method. After each side determines that the other knows how to decrypt the CSS LFSR, they construct the bus key from the two arbitrary bit sequences. This key is never sent over the bus, which foiles man in the middle attacks.
g 11603.html
For more info see http://eon.law.harvard.edu/archive/dvd-discuss/ms
If either side were to change the algorithm for constructing the bus key, then no communication could take place, so it really doesn't matter if it depends on some fixed magic number, as that number is essentially written in stone. Since the method for obtaining the bus key can't be changed, your entire argument is irrelevent.
And by the way, it is settled law that you can publish "keys" obtained by reverse engineering: Chicago Lock Co v Fanberg, 676 F.2d 400 (9th Cir. 1982), which refutes your entire argument even if you were right about the bus key.
YOu cannot read any encypted blocks on a DVD until the 8 step validation is first done to "authorize" or validate a session key.
Therefore, without the Xing key, you cannot get any other keys because I think not only are key frames of MPEG-2 streams stored within VOBs protected from reading without validation, I also believe that all blocks containing any scrambled or encrypted keys are likewise protected.
Frank Stevenson released a tool which obtains all player keys used on a particular disc. This tool uses no prior key knowledge it obtains all valid player keys **for that DVD** and thereby enables the extraction of the title key regardless of the player keys used. I runs in a few minutes.
The CSS **algorithm** has been cracked in the strongest possible way: all keys and the cleartext can be deduced from only the encrypted message and knowledge of the algorithm.
While you are correct that the original DeCSS did not use Stevenson's method and instead relied on the hard coded Xing key, you are flatly incorrect to say that "without the Xing key, you cannot get any other keys".
I think a more general and useful thing would be to modify the copy/cut/paste to add an two new features: copy and append to clipboard/cut and append to clipboard (maybe ctrl-shift-c and x?).
The clipboard should be a stack. Every time you cut or copy, it pushes your choice onto the stack. When you paste, it should pop it off, leaving your clipboard as it was before.
This allows: move to A, select files, copy, move to B, select files, copy, move to C, paste, paste.
If you think about it, you realize there is an operation missing: cut is to copy as paste is to ?? (ie you should be able to push something on and either pop it off or copy it off).
Just because you bought the disc, don't expect to use it in some way in which its owners don't approve
Since you are the owner of the disc, by copyright's first sale principle, this is a tautology, unless I suppose you have multiple personality disorder.
It IS encrypted using rot-0 :-]
It's not clear. Copyright law has a big "gotcha" when contractors are involved. Without more info, I don't think the answer is clear.
The US Supreme Court gave a unanimous ruling interpreting "work for hire" in the case
COMMUNITY FOR CREATIVE NON-VIOLENCE v. REID, 490 U.S. 730 (1989)
The case discusses how to tell an employee from an independent contractor, and what standard to apply in each case to identify a work for hire. For an indendent contractor, the work for hire condition exists only "if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire." It also is only allowed for an enumerated class of works that doesn't appear to include computer programs.
In this case, Reid was a sculptor who made an oral agreement with CCNV to create a sculture for them. He did and they both tried to claim copyright on it. He was ruled an independent contractor and the contract did not create a work for hire because it was oral and because a sculpture isn't in the eligible class of works.
For this poster, it depends on what kind of employee he is. If he is an independent contractor, then he likely owns the copyright even without the agreement. If he is an employee, then he only owns the copyright if the agreement was in a written contract.
It sounds like things are even more complicated because he works for a contract agency. This presents a third possiblity. If he is an "employee" of the contracting firm, but there is no explicit written contract transfer of copyright from the contracting firm to the client as part of their contract, then the contracting firm would own the copyright.
However, a copyright licence like the GPL can be created much more easily than a transfer of copyright ownership. If the company agreed at any time to licence their copyright under the GPL, then that's probably definitive. The copyright owner can relicence the works they own, but they cannot revoke a licence already given, unless the licence specifically says so (and the GPL doesn't).
How about this: everyone knows that the formula is something like := md5(song_name XOR password)
mp3name
and the password is emailed around until "they" figure it out and then it changes.
Oh, and you have to scramble the song itself so that you have to know the password to hear it, so that "they" can't figure out what song it is unless they know the password.
The problem is, copyright hasn't been extended to be permanent yet!
The majority obviously has never studied mathematical induction, because they today upheld the "inductive" step in the proof that Congress can pass laws which protect copyright for unlimited times.
The error in the Appeals court's reasoning is that the statement "Congress may pass a retroactive copyright extention" is mathematically equivalent to the statement that "Congress may preserve Copyright for unlimited times". Such a power *allows* the result that every 10 years Congress may (by citing this precedent) retroactively extend copyright by another 10 years. The dissent had it exactly right.
You repeat the majority's error by saying that "it" hasn't happened yet. What is "it"? "It" is the passage of a law that cites an improper use of constitutional authority as it's justification. Your view says that we actually have to wait until the end of time until we say "Gee, that didn't work the way it was supposed to because somehow no copyrights ever expired."
Gee, "sh" certainly exists in the prior art. Perhaps he is thinking that "Openssh" is meant as Open-ssh, when it's obvious to us in the know that it is really Opens-sh, which sort of describes what it does in plain old english, which is surely not trademark infringement.
I also note that he added 1 letter to a public domain program name -- "s" to "sh", wheres we added five "opens" to the same public domain program name.
We're talking about a 3 letter trademark, two-thirds of which is derivitive. It really strikes me as phenominally bizarre to then claim that the addition of four more letters is not sufficient to avoid confusion. Out of 7 letters in "Openssh", four are new, two are prior art, and only one is really original. Basing a trademark infringement on reuse of one letter seems almost laughable. Worse, the letter is "s" - that's only a single crummy point in scrabble.
I also wonder about the fact that openssh actually does have a common code base with ssh. Does that not afford it some licence to have a somewhat similar name. If a lot of the code actually is a licenced derivitive version of ssh, doesn't that implicitly grant you the right to have 42.85% of your name in common?
I'm of the opinion that the open source databases are all so substantially behind the capabilities of the proprietary market leader Oracle that I don't consider them viable replacements for enterprise grade data solutions. I work on a system that has 800 concurrent users at any given moment, and I don't see anything remotely close to worthy of consideration in the open source arena.
Worse, I see Oracle as pulling away. In the last two years, the open source databases have struggled to add features that I view as expected and required while Oracle has added 10X more. Transactions & row-level locking, nested selects, foreign keys, etc... are not optional features. In order to compete, open source needs database projects with forces comparable to the linux kernel, apache, gnome, and KDE projects. I just don't think Larry Ellison is out there worrying about GPL'd competition.
I don't think Oracle gets the proper attention in the open source community. Oracle has a greater "lock in" effect and has mostly got a free ride from the open source community so far. Oracle is a big gorilla that is rapidly becoming the most secure proprietary software vendor around.
It's not "State's Rights" -- it is "employer's rights" to set and/or restrict the duties of the employee. The fact that the employer is the State of Virginia serves only to confuse the issue.
I'm just astounded that anybody DISAGREES with this decision!
Does it have to be enumerated in the constitution for this guy to believe that people can decide for themselves what they need to access for their work?
Yes it would, because "academic freedom" for professors is not a Constitutional right, it is a contractual right (ie by agreement) between professors and their employing institutions. "Professor" is not some title of nobility (that would be unconstitutional), it's just an ordinary job title.
It is emphatically the employer's perogative to specify what is and isn't within the job description. Here the state of Virginia happens to be the employer, and they have stated that, by default, looking at porn is NOT part of a state employee's job. Those employees who wish to be exceptions to the default may "get written permission from their agency heads before accessing sexually explicit material" in order to gain status as a state supported porn viewer.
If these professors want carte blanche porn viewing discretion at work, then they can get it, but they must first negotiate "agency head" status as part of their employment contract. Until / unless they do so, they haven't achieved the "acedemic freedom" they seem to think they are entitled to. It is utterly absurd to think that obtaining a certain job title gives you the right to dictate to your employer what that job title means.
First the NSA releases GPL'd security code and now this. It is officially a Good Day (TM).
I almost can't believe it. My natural inclination is to look for some cynical motive, but I just can't find one.
Merry Xmas, Slashdoters...
From their web page:
Security-enhanced Linux is being released under the conditions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The release includes documentation and source code for both the system and some system utilities that were modified to make use of the new features. Participation with comments, constructive criticism, and/or improvements is welcome.
This is unbelievably cool! For ANY government agency to release GPL code is huge, but for the NSA to do it is a stunning precedent. I just wonder if this action will survive the change of administration.
I recommend that people write their Congressmen and express support for this.
Briefs submitted this morning by an angy Florida resident suggest that by using the product, you obtain a psychic power that gives you the clairvoyant ability to discern the text of the project gutenberg manuscript of the same name.
When you speak the words of this similar but different literary access source aloud, you are not reading in contradiction to the licence, but rather exercising the explicitly unmentioned right to use "The Product" as a psychic assistance device in full compliance with the contract.
In a bizarre twist, the Supreme Court of Florida has recently ruled that this licence conflicts with the Florida election laws and even if it didn't that the word "cannot" in the last clause of the licence implies that under some cases it "can" be read aloud and that further it would be an abuse of discretion in the case of the presence of psychic powers to inhibit the public's "right to know" which is guaranteed by the Florida and US Constitutions as well as the plain meaning of the text of the licence. Therefore, the licence must be construed, in light of the clearly overriding interest that children not be kept ignorant that the licence in fact confers an affirmative obligation to speak the words of the book aloud while receiving the psychic assistance of the device. Anyone not reading the book aloud will be forced to count ballots in Miami-Dade county.
Scholars expect that the US Supreme Court may reverse the Florida Court. The familiar 5-4 conservative majority is expected to rule that the Florida Court's remedy, which, as applied, would allows some children to hear the story, also prevents children in other counties from witnessing the psychic demonstration and thus violates the equal protection clause. Scholars agree that the fact that remote counties are clearly out of earshot will play heavily in the deliberations.
However most copyright scholars predict the justices will also rule 8-1 that the original licence violates "fair use" under even the most draconian reading of the DMCA, but Justice Ginsberg is expected to argue that the Florida Court's status as the final arbiter of state contract law precludes US Supreme Court action on that grounds.
When asked for comment, George "Dubya" Bush said that it didn't matter to him because he couldn't read anyway, although he seemed interested in having Dick Cheney read the story to him. Al Gore, who seemed on the verge of tears about something else, said that while he strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court, he would accept their ruling, and noted that if Adobe didn't want people reading the book, he had a lockbox for sale. Jesse Jackson on the other hand complained that Alice in Wonderland was a racist text and compared the issue to Selma.
Bugtraq's use might be fair use, but it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
It certainly would be fair use to create your own original description of a bug. However Microsoft's bug reports themselves may contain original expression. If so, just a movie critic's review is protected, so is their advisory. However, the factual parts of it are not protected, and fair use might also protect some copying of the advisory itself.
Fair use has four factors, as defined in 17 USC 107. Applying those here we find:
(1) BugTrac's use is noncommercial technical research, I believe. The mailing list doesn't come with any advertisements that I'm aware of.
(2) The nature of the Microsoft advisories is factual -- they aren't fictional works.
(3) The amount copied from Microsoft is presumably the whole thing, although if they used choice quotations this would help a fair use claim.
(4) The effect on the market or value of the bug advisory is the key issue. If Microsoft isn't selling these or using them to sell bundled advertising, then it's hard to see any negative effect. If they start selling access to these advisories, then this would strongly disfavor fair use. If they are given away free, but generate advertising revenue, then it's more muddled but probably disfavors fair use.
My non-lawyer "guess" is that unless Microsoft generates revenue somehow from these advisories that copying them in their entirety is actually not copyright infringement because it is fair use.
If MS does generate revenue from these, then bugtraq could probably get away with quoting the key passages, but MS would have a very tenable case to take to court if the whole thing was copied. I'd guess there was a small chance the defense could win, but it'd be a long shot with a large cost.
First of all, I have read the statute, the briefs in most of these cases, and many of the court transcripts. Secondly, you quote the sections that prove my point.
I made two contentions that you take issue with:
1) I said that a vote "may be ignored" if it is not machine readable and isn't found by a manual recount within 7 days.
Your response is that the 7 day deadline is for the "normal course of an election" and doesn't apply to "recounts". No statutory text supports this proposition. The law provides for protests and contests, but nothing in the statute indicates that the duties of the Election Canvassing Commission (ECC) defined in 102.111(1) and 102.112(1) are altered in such event. To the contrary, the absense of any such text proves that they are not modified, especially so because a contest has certification as a prerequisite.
2) I stated that manual recounts are an option, not a right, and that the choice to proceed with one is constrained by the deadline.
You disagree, citing the very text that proves my point. After the preliminary 1% recount, if an error in vote tabulation exists, then 102.166(5) gives three alternatives, which I very reasonably call "options". Only option (c) is a full manual recount of the county. Options (a) and (b) are also offered to the county, and assuredly would take less time than option (c). Thus, even if the 1% manual recount does show an "error in vote tabulation", the statute even then does NOT require a manual recount.
Your statement that "If the sample recount shows a difference that could change the outcome, the canvassing board MUST recount." flatly ignores 102.166(5)(a) and 102.166(5)(b) which provide other options. I note that you added the emphasis to the word "or" between these.
Justice Scalia mauled Tribe on this point, so you can take the issue up with him if you have further confusion on what the meaning of the word "or" is.
The Florida Supreme Court concluded at the end of their statutory construction argument only that discretion does exist. They read 102.112's "may be ignored" as taking precedence over "shall be ignored". The lower court had ruled the exact same way in supporting the Secretary of State's choice to do what the statute says she "may" do.
The conflict that lead SCOFL to find abuse of discretion was that of enforcing the deadline when doing so deprives people of "the right of sufferage" guaranteed by the FL Constitution. That contention is flawed because there is no such right and even if there where it was the County boards who abused their discretion by choosing option (c) which could not be completed in time when (a) or (b) could have been.
If not counting a machine unreadable hanging or dimpled chad is a violation of this supposed right to vote, then the only tenable conclusion would be to ALWAYS do a manual recount in all counties using punchcard ballots. That clearly is not consistent with a statute that does not even allow manual recounts in Counties unless there is a protest. You would have to conclude that the Florida Legislature passed an election law that inherently thwarted the very idea of this imaginary "right to vote". The correct remedy to this absurdity would be to throw out the whole election as inconclusive, which is precisely what the Florida Legislature is about to do.
By the way, I did not vote for Bush, but it's clear to me that there is no scenario in which Gore will win, nor in which Gore "should" win.
Well it looks like George W's brother and Katherine Harris succeeded in undermining democracy.
Yes they did, and good for them, because the US is a republic, not a democracy, and that is PRECISELY the issue in this case.
The democrats, true to their name, believe that the US is a democracy and that "the right to vote" for president transcends all else. Unfortunately for them, there is no right to vote in a presidential election other than that created by statutory enactment of the state legislature.
In particular under Florida's election statute, your vote "may be ignored" if it isn't expressed as a machine readable ballot and if an *optional* manual recount doesn't find it within 7 days. Scalia demolished the "right to a recount" idea during the oral arguments by reading the statue.
The Florida Supreme Court said that ignoring such votes violates the right to sufferage, but we can know see that this statute defines and creates all aspects of the limited right to vote. Once you chop off all extra-statutory avenues to recognize a conflicting concept of voting rights, the Florida Supreme Court's opinion crumbles.
The beauty of today's order is that it forces the Florida Court to try to ground their bogus concept of voting rights back in the statute that they invalidated because of it. Today's order is a brilliant salvo -- they avoid looking political, but ennunciate principles that assure the result.
They sort of said to SCOFL "Demonstrate how your perpetual motion machine works again without using the secret power supply that is hidden under the table." It's almost sadistic: everyone will now look to SCOFL as they try to demonstrate the impossible.
My credentials: MS in math, 4 years experience as a quality control statistician.
Here are some "flaws" in the analysis at http://web.mit.edu/norstadt/Public/election.pdf
1. The data at best supports the proposition that the Bush/Buchanan voting ratio for Palm Beach is significantly different than other Florida counties (but maybe not, see 5 below), but not that it is different from the "desired voting" ratio for Palm Beach.
2. Using Bush/Buchanan ratio is very weird - should use Buchanan/All ratio. Trying to introduce outside knowledge inherent in focusing on how "conservative" voters split introduces preconceptions that are non-statistical in nature. Why not Buchanan/Nader?
3. Normalization set chosen to be Florida. Why? Why not all US? Why not all of the South?
4. Expected distribution of Buchanan support rates by county is not known and cannot be determined by choosing a model. You must provide a non-statistical argument for why you believe the model holds.
5. In particular, even if the counties are normally distributed (doubtful), the maximum value should be chosen from an extreme value distribution, not a normal distribution. Extreme value distributions have very heavy tails. The fact that the choice of Palm Beach was made post hoc changes how the analysis should be done.
6. The basic premise is flawed because the vote rate might actually be from a different distribution than other counties. For example consider the distribution of voters born in Palm Beach. You cannot look at a model to infer that the emperical distribution is "wrong". In other words, maybe Palm Beach really does have more Buchanan supporters.
7. If the hypothesis is "the butterfly ballot causes confusion between candidate 2 and candidate 3", then it would be proper to test that hypothesis on ALL races using that ballot. In particular the Senate race on the same ballot did not display any anomoly despite having 3 candidates and comparable total votes.
I am not saying that the result is not anamolous, just that it is very easy to conclude that it is for the wrong reasons.
I actually voted last week. I don't understand why anyone would wait to election day. It was SO easy. I did it at my grocery store. I didn't even know I could do it until I got there. All I had to show was my drivers licence (you have to have already registered to vote).
I voted for Browne. Here in Texas the LP was on a LOT of local races - way more than any other 3rd party. I voted LP in every race I could, except for one where I personally know (and like) the candidate.
I urge Slashdot readers not to vote for either Gore or Bush. If you do this you are supporting the corrupt system. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think either of these folks give a DAMN about you. (That is unless you've given several thousand dollars).
You may not realize that if 3rd parties get 5%, they qualify for federal funding in the next election. When they get 1%, the "media" will track them. Voting for a 3rd party is extremely valuable because these are thresholds that lead to greater credibility and greater opportunity to launch a viable candidate later.
Moreover when the election winner gets less than 50% of the popular vote, they do not have a mandate to do anything, which means they are less able to implement the corrupt objectives of their big bucks contributors. The lower the better.
I'm curious: How do the best open source programs fair against the deep blue's of the world? How do they stack up on equal hardware against commercially available programs?