To disuade them from doing it again a fine was determined that they *would* take notice of.
It *may* be the biggest fine ever imposed, but its the biggest company that such a fine has been imposed on. Microsoft have nearly $50Bn in cash reserves, its will not cripple them unless they leave compying with the request for a very long time, however I suspect Shareholders will want some answers.
Its not as if even they didnt have an easy way to get out of it.
They have 22,000 engineers and programmers working for them. If they cant split off 100 or so of them to produce documentation on the protocols and API's that the majority of the world run on. I find the fact that they *dont* appear to have this documentation already pretty close to criminal negligence, and wonder how they have managed to do this with SOX about, but thats a seperate discussion (We had to document *everything* for SOX including internal single use communication protocols between applications, and I only work for the *subsidurary* of a US company)
I personally due to the naked contempt MS seem to have for anyone who *dares* to investigate them, the browbeating of witnesses, the attempts to manipulate support through third parties, including members of the Senate, I think the fine should have been higher.
As for the threat to withdraw from the EU, Well even Microsoft havent tried that one on yet. The EU may be a smaller market than the US, but its not so insignificant that it can be ignored in such a manner, The shareholders would really make them suffer if they tried that.
However, I dont even think this would be a huge issue, but i am a terminal geek:-)
The old UK Academic network (Called JANET) used reverse nameing order.
I think they changed it to conventional DNS ordering when it got upgraded (Super JANET).
I am a bit hazy on the details (As for some reason, do most facts about my collage years in general)
This was before web browsers really took off.
I do remember it being a total Pain in the ass trying to send email anywere outside of UK academia though, you had to use special mail relays that did message translation, occasionally, very badly, and as for Attachments? forget it.
Anyway the point being, its a waste of time adding arbitary standards when there is already a defined standard unless they add something really useful. And this doesnt.
Actually I have seen sensitive business meetings held in the local pub, the people involved were discussing the firing of some contractors. Any of the people in involved could have been there.
"Systematically promoted to the place they can do the least harm" I believe is how Scott adams described it.
Chinese web censorship is well documented. (Do a google search for "chinese web censorship")
Currently there is no US web censorship. THe problem is, this proposal would allow web censorship if it was allowed.
Dont like the competitor thats undercutting your offers? All of a sudden, routing to their network takes 100 hops.
Union website you dont like? Ok, route anything going to that IP address through the 486 in the corner.
Currently they cant do this. If they are allowed to prioritise leaves the flip side, in that they can also de-prioritise other traffic, Eg, VOIP traffic. Someone has already tried this (Madison River Communications) but they got slapped down by the FCC (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1772661,00.a sp). What they want is legislation so they dont get slapped down any more.
Actually under common carrier legislation (A very good US innovation BTW), the companies *are* bound to provide channels for whatever I damn well decide to send over the internet.
of course if the content is illegal (Copied songs, Terrorist communications, child porn, ect) I may end up culpable to other people. (FBI, CIA, The Milk marketing board)
In return for this they get immunity from prosecution for stuff that goes over their networks.
Personally i think if they want to start start blocking or modify IP traffic, they should be prepared to take the responsibility for making sure the traffic isnt illegal as well.
The only other country that does this sort of thing is China, and i am no happier about my internet traffic being blocked by the Capitalist corparations than by the Communist authorities.
However this is the US. They can probably buy their way out of these requirements.
Smith, echoing recent sentiments by AT&T Inc. chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr., responded that network operators must be free to control the type and quality of service on the system in which they have invested heavily.
Now it seems to me that they have already been given a huge bung in the form of common carrier status. Despite the fact that they control and supply a form of communication that can be used for everything from disaster relief to terrorism, they have to provide almost no monitoring of what goes on, No expensive prioritisation, and they have little to no responsibility for what goes on on their networks!.
If AT&T decide to drop Common carrier status, then thats up to them, however i doubt they could afford it. Nor is it desirable.
Basically, if they decide to take more control of what goes on their network, they need to be prepared to take the responsibility that that control puts in their hands, and that includes being responsible for everything that goes across their networks.
I believe he was getting paid monthly, and he stayed on for a week believing the "oh it will be in the bank tomorrow." spiel.
At the start of the 6th week, he got there and found the shop locked up and a crowd of other employees outside the door.
Personally i probably would have done the same, however i have worked at a number of small businesses where I didnt always get paid on time, and actualy once did get paid a week late. However at the time, the problem wasnt so urgent for me (I was still living with my parents at the time and didnt have to deal with Mortgages, bills et al)
Yeah, a friend of mine worked in the tiny branch in Manchester.
He was stiffed for 5 weeks wages. He has been told that he is unlikely to get any of it. This put him in a very difficult financial position. Fortunately he has friends willing and able to help him out.
1 By doing business from a country with reasonable laws. (Putting this first because I think it is already true for some of them, so it really means they don't have to do anything.)
I would include the country the scumware manafacturers reside in as well. If they think the UK courts will allow this, they are in for a bit of a shock. (Even though apparently the Sony DRM thing would probably be legal in the UK)
As this would be a Civil issue, the benefit to the public good would be taken into account, and I think they would have trouble arguing the public good wouldnt be harmed.
Google for an opportunist piece of scum called
William R. Della Croce, Jr. who registered the trademark back in 1994. It took quite a while to get that registration invalidated
This is why this entire trademark thing has come up.
Linus has to enforce the trademark or he will loose it, then some the next Della-Croce will come along and try to abuse the system and grab the trademark.
Actually it may have been the water. Different regions of the UK have different water addatives depending on the distance it has to come, and Water for London has to come quite a distance through 150 year old pipes.
I used to work in a Civil engineering consultancy that was used by thames, and it was a bit of a nightmare because its very difficult to get permission for the water companies to dig up London to replace them unless they are actually broken or made of something dangerous like Lead
Personally I cant drink the water around the Thames area and have to use bottled water instead. My cats didnt like it much either. Their hair was a lot more wiry when they used to live down there
Its especially noticable if you live in Yorkshire, where its usually only pumped a few miles, and very little gets added. I actually prefer the yorkshire tapwater to bottled water.
Your right, in most cases, nothing would have changed, but if for instance a DRAM module was removed which contained some part of a process, the system would crash on restore. (because as the process is already linked, it cant easilly be moved in memory)
Some things need to be re-initialised if left for any length of time (Ie, DHCP usually has a timeout)
All open Sockets would probably have to die (But not nesseserilly normal file handles)
There are probably other things as well, but these are the main things that occur to me.
Any processes which rely on hardware parameters would have to be re-initialised, eg PCI bindings, Ram size. Also any hardware state would have to be reset because you can pretty much garantee it wont be in the same state as when you suspended.
There are a whole world of things that can go wrong there.
Personally would prefer a long boot-up time (Providing the boot-up is reliable) and a long uptime. Then again, i do tend to leave computers on more than is environmentally friendly.:-)
These sites are illigal. If the owners take the crackers who hacked them to court, you can garantee that the banks would then immediately sue them.
The banks have enough lawyers around to make what IBM is currently doing to SCO look like a cheap sideshow.
The FBI have lots of things to worry about, and i suspect under the circumstances, they would choose to deal with crackers they actually consider are dangerous.
That doesnt make this legal, however I cant see any prosecutions resulting from it.
Agreed, nor is it particularly difficult to use an email server under these conditions.
You just need to use something like Fetchmail to get your mail from your ISP's account on a regular basis and set your local sendmailer to forward your email via your ISP's local email relay.
Once its set up, its pretty transparent. I do it because i prefer IMAP rather than POP3 because i dont like loosing all my emails every time my desktop machine dies a death.
Its pretty trivial to anyone who knows about these things, and will prevent you from becomming a Spam generator. (for which ISPs get blacklisted rather quickly)
Blocking Web service is a bit naughty though, and i cant figure out why they would want to do that, other than to force you to buy web space on their servers.
You obviously have a very different set of experiences than I do.
Even trying to get my parents to install a virus checker was an uphill struggle even though my mum used to program PDP8's before she got married and is definately not non-techie.
Then you get the idiot gamer types like my brother who dont bother turning it on because they think it slows Quake 3 down.
I have come across people who's response to a computer so chocked full of spyware and viruses that it gets really slow is to BUY A NEW ONE.
These people far outnumber the people who have asked me what virus checker and/or firewall i use. I suspect thats true in the case of most people.
Wierd, personally havent had much of a problem with Norton.
You can set it up to automatically download updates as they become available.
Of course, as my Windows box doesnt get a great deal of use these days, and mostly offline/hardware firewalled use even then, i'm probably not a greatly descerning user of Windows VC's any more.
While the big hardware companies persist in forcing micro$haft Windows down everyones throats, this isnt a very practical solution.
Most users dont tinker with their operating systems for the same reason most users dont tinker with the inside of the TV sets. They dont understand whats under the hood, and they are afraid of damaging it.
In most end-user cases, you *can* equate computers with Windows.
There are exceptions, but not enough to make a difference as yet.
Were dealing with the real world here unfortunately, and it sucks.
Strangely enough, i *do* run debian, (Except for the occasional game of MW4) however, i am in a minority.
Yes, the best solution is for everyone to use less hackable systems/Microsoft to actually fix their OS. However as either of these things are unlikely to happen any time soon, Virus checkers and such like are an easy solution to deal with the problem now.
Slashdot Mirror
You have missed a fundemental point.
:-)
They broke the law.
To disuade them from doing it again a fine was determined that they *would* take notice of.
It *may* be the biggest fine ever imposed, but its the biggest company that such a fine has been imposed on. Microsoft have nearly $50Bn in cash reserves, its will not cripple them unless they leave compying with the request for a very long time, however I suspect Shareholders will want some answers.
Its not as if even they didnt have an easy way to get out of it.
They have 22,000 engineers and programmers working for them. If they cant split off 100 or so of them to produce documentation on the protocols and API's that the majority of the world run on. I find the fact that they *dont* appear to have this documentation already pretty close to criminal negligence, and wonder how they have managed to do this with SOX about, but thats a seperate discussion (We had to document *everything* for SOX including internal single use communication protocols between applications, and I only work for the *subsidurary* of a US company)
I personally due to the naked contempt MS seem to have for anyone who *dares* to investigate them, the browbeating of witnesses, the attempts to manipulate support through third parties, including members of the Senate, I think the fine should have been higher.
As for the threat to withdraw from the EU, Well even Microsoft havent tried that one on yet. The EU may be a smaller market than the US, but its not so insignificant that it can be ignored in such a manner, The shareholders would really make them suffer if they tried that.
However, I dont even think this would be a huge issue, but i am a terminal geek
The old UK Academic network (Called JANET) used reverse nameing order.
I think they changed it to conventional DNS ordering when it got upgraded (Super JANET).
I am a bit hazy on the details (As for some reason, do most facts about my collage years in general)
This was before web browsers really took off.
I do remember it being a total Pain in the ass trying to send email anywere outside of UK academia though, you had to use special mail relays that did message translation, occasionally, very badly, and as for Attachments? forget it.
Anyway the point being, its a waste of time adding arbitary standards when there is already a defined standard unless they add something really useful. And this doesnt.
Actually I have seen sensitive business meetings held in the local pub, the people involved were discussing the firing of some contractors. Any of the people in involved could have been there.
"Systematically promoted to the place they can do the least harm" I believe is how Scott adams described it.
Ho hum.
Sorry, Mea Culpa, you are correct.
Chinese web censorship is well documented. (Do a google search for "chinese web censorship") Currently there is no US web censorship. THe problem is, this proposal would allow web censorship if it was allowed.
a sp). What they want is legislation so they dont get slapped down any more.
Dont like the competitor thats undercutting your offers? All of a sudden, routing to their network takes 100 hops.
Union website you dont like? Ok, route anything going to that IP address through the 486 in the corner.
Currently they cant do this. If they are allowed to prioritise leaves the flip side, in that they can also de-prioritise other traffic, Eg, VOIP traffic. Someone has already tried this (Madison River Communications) but they got slapped down by the FCC (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1772661,00.
Actually under common carrier legislation (A very good US innovation BTW), the companies *are* bound to provide channels for whatever I damn well decide to send over the internet.
of course if the content is illegal (Copied songs, Terrorist communications, child porn, ect) I may end up culpable to other people. (FBI, CIA, The Milk marketing board)
In return for this they get immunity from prosecution for stuff that goes over their networks.
Personally i think if they want to start start blocking or modify IP traffic, they should be prepared to take the responsibility for making sure the traffic isnt illegal as well.
The only other country that does this sort of thing is China, and i am no happier about my internet traffic being blocked by the Capitalist corparations than by the Communist authorities.
However this is the US. They can probably buy their way out of these requirements.
w0w, a 286, u wr Truly L33t! My Speccy was much bettr.
Now it seems to me that they have already been given a huge bung in the form of common carrier status. Despite the fact that they control and supply a form of communication that can be used for everything from disaster relief to terrorism, they have to provide almost no monitoring of what goes on, No expensive prioritisation, and they have little to no responsibility for what goes on on their networks!.
If AT&T decide to drop Common carrier status, then thats up to them, however i doubt they could afford it. Nor is it desirable.
Basically, if they decide to take more control of what goes on their network, they need to be prepared to take the responsibility that that control puts in their hands, and that includes being responsible for everything that goes across their networks.
I believe he was getting paid monthly, and he stayed on for a week believing the "oh it will be in the bank tomorrow." spiel.
At the start of the 6th week, he got there and found the shop locked up and a crowd of other employees outside the door.
Personally i probably would have done the same, however i have worked at a number of small businesses where I didnt always get paid on time, and actualy once did get paid a week late. However at the time, the problem wasnt so urgent for me (I was still living with my parents at the time and didnt have to deal with Mortgages, bills et al)
Yeah, a friend of mine worked in the tiny branch in Manchester. He was stiffed for 5 weeks wages. He has been told that he is unlikely to get any of it. This put him in a very difficult financial position. Fortunately he has friends willing and able to help him out.
I would include the country the scumware manafacturers reside in as well. If they think the UK courts will allow this, they are in for a bit of a shock. (Even though apparently the Sony DRM thing would probably be legal in the UK) As this would be a Civil issue, the benefit to the public good would be taken into account, and I think they would have trouble arguing the public good wouldnt be harmed.
However IANAL.
[spodula@splodge spodula]$ telnet sun-01.xxx.com
Trying 10.xxx.xxx.15...
Connected to sun-01.xxx.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
SunOS 5.9
login:
Yes however, I personally suspect there will be a ODF plugin for MS office before the end of the week available to "Selected OEMs"
That appears to be a fantastic argument for DRM on music.
I assume that is also not an acceptable solution?
Actually option C is that they dont sell anything at all. Not sure this would fix things either, but feel free to discuss.
It will certainly make an interesting resource for future archeologists.
Someone already tried this.
Google for an opportunist piece of scum called William R. Della Croce, Jr. who registered the trademark back in 1994. It took quite a while to get that registration invalidated
This is why this entire trademark thing has come up.
Linus has to enforce the trademark or he will loose it, then some the next Della-Croce will come along and try to abuse the system and grab the trademark.
I'm afraid they have got too much already. Thats why they send Darl out every so often to dispense it out to journalists.
Actually it may have been the water. Different regions of the UK have different water addatives depending on the distance it has to come, and Water for London has to come quite a distance through 150 year old pipes.
I used to work in a Civil engineering consultancy that was used by thames, and it was a bit of a nightmare because its very difficult to get permission for the water companies to dig up London to replace them unless they are actually broken or made of something dangerous like Lead
Personally I cant drink the water around the Thames area and have to use bottled water instead.
My cats didnt like it much either. Their hair was a lot more wiry when they used to live down there
Its especially noticable if you live in Yorkshire, where its usually only pumped a few miles, and very little gets added. I actually prefer the yorkshire tapwater to bottled water.
Good point well made.
Your right, in most cases, nothing would have changed, but if for instance a DRAM module was removed which contained some part of a process, the system would crash on restore. (because as the process is already linked, it cant easilly be moved in memory)
:-)
Some things need to be re-initialised if left for any length of time (Ie, DHCP usually has a timeout)
All open Sockets would probably have to die (But not nesseserilly normal file handles)
There are probably other things as well, but these are the main things that occur to me.
Any processes which rely on hardware parameters would have to be re-initialised, eg PCI bindings, Ram size. Also any hardware state would have to be reset because you can pretty much garantee it wont be in the same state as when you suspended. There are a whole world of things that can go wrong there. Personally would prefer a long boot-up time (Providing the boot-up is reliable) and a long uptime. Then again, i do tend to leave computers on more than is environmentally friendly.
And who is going to take them to court exactly?
These sites are illigal. If the owners take the crackers who hacked them to court, you can garantee that the banks would then immediately sue them.
The banks have enough lawyers around to make what IBM is currently doing to SCO look like a cheap sideshow.
The FBI have lots of things to worry about, and i suspect under the circumstances, they would choose to deal with crackers they actually consider are dangerous.
That doesnt make this legal, however I cant see any prosecutions resulting from it.
Agreed, nor is it particularly difficult to use an email server under these conditions.
You just need to use something like Fetchmail to get your mail from your ISP's account on a regular basis and set your local sendmailer to forward your email via your ISP's local email relay.
Once its set up, its pretty transparent. I do it because i prefer IMAP rather than POP3 because i dont like loosing all my emails every time my desktop machine dies a death.
Its pretty trivial to anyone who knows about these things, and will prevent you from becomming a Spam generator. (for which ISPs get blacklisted rather quickly)
Blocking Web service is a bit naughty though, and i cant figure out why they would want to do that, other than to force you to buy web space on their servers.
You obviously have a very different set of experiences than I do.
Even trying to get my parents to install a virus checker was an uphill struggle even though my mum used to program PDP8's before she got married and is definately not non-techie.
Then you get the idiot gamer types like my brother who dont bother turning it on because they think it slows Quake 3 down.
I have come across people who's response to a computer so chocked full of spyware and viruses that it gets really slow is to BUY A NEW ONE.
These people far outnumber the people who have asked me what virus checker and/or firewall i use. I suspect thats true in the case of most people.
Wierd, personally havent had much of a problem with Norton.
You can set it up to automatically download updates as they become available.
Of course, as my Windows box doesnt get a great deal of use these days, and mostly offline/hardware firewalled use even then, i'm probably not a greatly descerning user of Windows VC's any more.
While the big hardware companies persist in forcing micro$haft Windows down everyones throats, this isnt a very practical solution.
Most users dont tinker with their operating systems for the same reason most users dont tinker with the inside of the TV sets. They dont understand whats under the hood, and they are afraid of damaging it.
In most end-user cases, you *can* equate computers with Windows.
There are exceptions, but not enough to make a difference as yet.
Were dealing with the real world here unfortunately, and it sucks.
Strangely enough, i *do* run debian, (Except for the occasional game of MW4) however, i am in a minority.
Yes, the best solution is for everyone to use less hackable systems/Microsoft to actually fix their OS.
However as either of these things are unlikely to happen any time soon, Virus checkers and such like are an easy solution to deal with the problem now.