Sorry, I thought the person I was replying to was talking about Jon, not Mitnik. Revise my earlier statement. It just goes to show one should be careful in using pronouns here: make sure all pronoun references are resolved within the context of the current post.
In regards to Mitnik: my thoughts are best summed with a quote from Heavy Metal:
Hanging's too good for him! Burning's too good for him! HE OUGHT TO BE TORN INTO LITTLE BITTY PIECES AND BURIED ALIVE!
my thinking is that using a GPL would mean that NO ONE can improve upon a GPL patent without also releasing the improvements under the GPL
Actually, this is already how it works. If your patent extends mine (say I come up with a new compresser, and you come up with an improvement to that compressor), nobody can use your patent without also using mine, and I get to say how that works.
The problem with using a GPL style, no restrictions license on a patent is that I can use your patent in my product without modification. I may not modify your patent (creating a patent based on your work). Rather, I may have some other patents that are combined in a work with yours. Example: If I use LZW and RSA to implement an encrypted, compressed chat program, I have not modified your patent, just combined it with another. The software analogy would be linking against glibc and QT: I've not modified either library, just used them.
By using a patent to force other patents into the OSS domain, I can prevent a large corporation from leaching off my patents whilst preventing me from using theirs.
I tried M13 out, and it was WORSE than slow. First, I work behind a non-transparent proxy firewall with authentication. This means I have to set my browser's proxy settings before it can do anything. Guess what: M13 said, "No by damn, I am going out to the mothersite, and you cannot stop me!". When I finally did get its attention, got it to stop asking me for my firewall password, and set the proxy, the damn thing wouldn't differentiate between the firewall asking me for authentication and the remote site asking me for authentication. Plus, the UI would cough up Javascript errors right and left when I tried to set colors, set proxy, or anything else. Mind you, this was on a fresh install on a machine that had never had Mozilla on it.
Plus, the stupid FullCircle program won't let me explain to it that it needs to go through a proxy that requires a password!
I am less than impressed with M13, and at the rate of improvement that I have seen, Mozilla won't be useful until about M30...
First of all: whatever moron moderated the above post as "insightful" should never be allowed to moderate again. I hope is shows up in my metamoderaton...
f it wasn't theft, what was it? He broke into other people's systems and downloaded software. Whether or not he did it for profit or for glory, or whatever is irrelevant. He stole from the company by making a copy.
Wrong! Jon did not "break into other people's systems", he reverse engineered an application ON HIS OWN PC! Good grief man, at least try to follow the story!
For the same reason that the "Big Guys" don't: leverage.
Let's examine 2 possible scenarios. Both start with me developing some super-cool-nifty algorithm.
I document it, post it to/. and several other places, make a registered copy of it. Now it's prior art and cannot be patented. Now, I want to build an open source system around this technology. Oh darn, I need to use LZW for some reason. Well, Unisys owns the patent on LZW, and I have nothing to force them into letting me use it.
I patent it. Now I want to make my OSS program, and I need LZW. Hmmm, looks like Unisys would like to use my algorithm. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. You let me have the rights to LZW, I let you have the rights to my algorithm.
This is the basic idea around the GPL: You want my code, you must give me yours. What we need is exactly the same thing in patent space: a series of patents that are licensed such that any OSS project may use them, but any non-OSS program must yeild any patent rights to any other technologies to the OSS movement.
Ideally, what would happen is the patent origonators would sign the patents over to some organization (I'd suggest the FSF) and they would wield them to be the "viral" licenses forcing other patents to be made available to the OSS community.
Before you flame me about being a "communist" or something, be advised: I like making money as much as the next guy. This would not stop a company from patenting their tech and preventing other companies from using it sans fees, it would just allow any OSS program to use the tech. Sort of a blanket license for the OSS community.
BTW: this would be a great way for [RedHat|Andover|VaLinux|Corel|Caldera] to spend some of that IPO money: Buy blanket licenses for some of the more critical tech for the OSS community.
I keep reading about M12 being faster than Netscape 4.7, faster than Exploiter, etc.
Great, let's give this a shot. I pull down the RPM for M12, install it, and run it. Displaying web pages isn't any faster than Netscape, the UI responds glacially, and certain sites still crash it.
Am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong? I'm running these tests on a PPro 200 with 288M of RAM, running RH6.1. From all the comments I've heard, M12 should have flown on my system. Has anyone else seen this? Do I have a stale library?
I plan on pulling M13 down later today (at work, over the fat pipe, rather than my 28.8 link at home) but, really, is M13 really better than M12?
If I had moderator points, I'd just moderate up the other replies. Since I don't...
First, the article described 2 systems: One used GPS (and that is the section you quote), and the other used passive reception of the signal. There is no way to turn off the passive system without turning off the phone (not such a bad idea: drive now, talk later). Now, as part of a standard AMPS cell call, the mobile sends out its MIN (mobile identification number). That's the phone number to you and me. It is the actual telephone #, not just a serial #. So, with a commonly available reverse phone book (i.e. a phone book sorted on numbers, not names) you can look up the number and get a name. You can also look up the person you want to track's name, get the phone number (with a regular phone book), and track that person as long as they talk.
What people find so scary about this sort of thing is the fact that it can be abused. And if history is any guide, what can be abused shall be abused. Here in the States we have had various forms of electronic monitoring added to our computer networks, telephone switches, etc. to make it easier (read: trivial) for the various agencies of the various government levels to spy on citizens. If you do not think that the FBI will go to the makers of the passive system and say "You will put in code to allow us to track individual callers.", then you do not know our law enforcement agencies very well.
You've not tried an X server with DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure). I am running XFree 3.9.17, with the DRI for the Voodoo 3. DRI removes the last advantage Windows had over Linux as a game platform: Q3A runs as fast under Linux as it does under Windows. Further, because Linux will support SMP (and Windows 9X won't) we have the advantage over Windows.
And as for 3D sound, IIRC wasn't A3D ported to the SBLive driver for Linux?
Yes, but this assumes that the path to the domain works.
Example: Your domain is narf.foo (I'm deliberatly picking an invalid domain to avoid/.'ing some poor shmuck). The server for.foo gets mis-configured, and no longer points to your name servers for narf.foo (this happens with distressing frequency). Yes, your name servers are OK, and if I could point my machine at your servers all would be well, but since the link from the.foo servers to your server is hosed, you cannot get from here to there.
The simple fact of the matter is that in good system design of any sort, you don't want to have a single point of failure. If, for what ever reason, your domain cannot be resolved, you want to be able to be notified about it.
This assumes the DNS server is working. If it goes down, then nobody can get the MX records to find your mail service. That's why your site contact should be in some other domain: If you DNS service fails, you can still be mailed.
Well, people still have to be able to read and write their own documents, so the encryption key has to be somewhere accessible to the user's copy of office, which means that a determined user could still get at it.
Yes, but now you have to disassemble Office to get the key. If the MSOffice disk is packaged in such a way that you have to agree not to reverse-engineer it to install it, then you cannot legally disassemble it, thus no key.
The same argument applies to DeCSS. The DVD consortium's crypto gaffes made life easier for the authors from DeCSS, by my impression from the discussion surrounding the event was that it would have happened eventually anyhow because the DVD player itself has to contain all the information necessary to decrypt a disk.
To decrypt a disk, yes. However, if they had gone with an asymmetric key system (a.k.a. public key) then the data needed to encode a disk wouldn't be there. Thus, they could prevent anybody who wasn't "in the club" from creating their own content.
My choices were made to relate to current "hot" topics on/. and to illustrate my point that there could be some (minor) downsides to everybody using strong encryption.
First, I want to say that, in general, removing export restrictions is a great thing. I work in the telecom industry, and not being able to export encryption code it a galloping bitch.
However (there's always a however)
Would DeCSS exists if the DVD companies had been able to use strong encryption?
What if MacroSloth could use strong encryption in the document format on the next verion of Orifice?
What if QuickTime V5.0 uses strong encryption on the streaming protocol?
In other words, what if strong encryption is used by TheBigCorps to prevent reverse engineering (and thus, compatibility by Open Source Software)?
Again, I'm all in favor of nuking the munitions restrictions (BTW, this is how you spoof the NSA folks, work the keywords into your message) but it could have side effects...
They Casio site wouldn't let me in until I allowed HTTP_USER_AGENT through my proxy. The dastards! We should all nuke their site for having the temerity to invade our privacy like that! </funny >
Seriously though, with all these single function wrist gadgets, you'd have to be an octopus to have everything: PCS phone (Swatch), Camera (Casio), MP3 player (Casio), AM/FM Radio (various), TV (Casio), PIM (Casio). Why don't they combine them all into one uber-gadget that you wear like a bracer. That way, not only do you have all your toys, you also have AC +1 on one arm!
Actually, in all cases of tunneling, the speed of light limit wasn't broken.
The thing that matters is transfer of information. In one case of so-called FTL tunneling, while the leading edge of the wave front arrived before light, the body of the wave front, where all the information is, arrived at speed of light.
In other cases of "quantum teleportation" using entangled particles, while the particle may have been "teleported" instantaniously by measuring the other entagled particle, the measurement itself had to be communicated via normal means, at lightspeed.
So far, Einstein is still the winner and champion. Pretty good for a theory coming up on its eighties.
The danger to this mindset is that many people leap before they look. Consider this scenario:
Someone steals your car, takes a joyride, and leaves in parked out in front of my house. You find your car, knock on my door, and beat me up.
The reason society discourages undo response to a crime is that some people won't check, recheck and check again the "facts" before acting.
I'm all for a citizen stopping a crime in progress (try breaking into my home whilst I'm there, and you'll be given a very good demonstration of my belief), but if the immediate threat is over, then we should use due deliberation before action. After all, once you've beaten somebody up, you cannot "unbeat them down".
And besides, you never know if the person you are about to beat up is tougher and better trained than you.
Finding a copy of K9&Co that wasn't a 2000th generation copy of somebody pointing their NTSC camera at a PAL TV playing a 20th generation copy of an off-the-air broadcast has been impossible. You know a good source for [NTSC|MPEG] of it?
Wrong. In all military operations, there are two parts: objective and implementation. The objective states what you want to do ("Crack that system"), the implementation then states the initial plan for doing so ("go in on port x.y.z.a"). However, in any case like this the specialist will make the final call on the implementation, not the C.O. So the example you used was wrong from the start. No C.O. would second-guess his specialist as long as the specialist was still going after the objective!
The military does this because they have learned, from millennia of experience, that all plans fall apart once battle is joined. So, tell your soldiers what you want to happen, and then they can make it happen however. One of Murphy's rules of combat: "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid." Correllary: "If it's not stupid but it doesn't work, it's stupid."
Also, any soldier is expected to refuse any unlawful order. "Take those P.O.W.'s out and shoot them. That's an order." "With all due respect, sir, that is a violation of the rules of engagement, and I cannot accept that order." The old excuse of "I was only following orders" is not accepted in the military.
The toilet is just the outgrowth of the OSHA rulings and the current trend in business to wring every bit of work out of an employee. This way, they can work you 24/7 (by bringing you food), with no risks of carpal tunnel syndrome, or time lost due to potty breaks.
Besides, the way some flamers on the 'Net write, this is perfect for the potty mouths.
Caution: This post contains humor, and should not be read by the humor impaired.
Like many others, I think that too many people have too much karma. I routinely see posts that don't deserve to be a 2 but are because the poster has a high enough karma to get the +1 automatically (like me???). Have you give thought to any system to reduce the karma inflation (having karma "decay") or to reduce the abuse of the high karma +1 (perhaps a limited number of +1 points per time period, so people will think about whether this post needs to be +1).
Note: I'm posting this at +1 so that others who do as I do and read at 2 will see it and hopefully comment upon it.
Slashdot Mirror
In regards to Mitnik: my thoughts are best summed with a quote from Heavy Metal:
Actually, this is already how it works. If your patent extends mine (say I come up with a new compresser, and you come up with an improvement to that compressor), nobody can use your patent without also using mine, and I get to say how that works.
By using a patent to force other patents into the OSS domain, I can prevent a large corporation from leaching off my patents whilst preventing me from using theirs.
Plus, the stupid FullCircle program won't let me explain to it that it needs to go through a proxy that requires a password!
I am less than impressed with M13, and at the rate of improvement that I have seen, Mozilla won't be useful until about M30...
A pity, since I'd love to see Mozilla win....
Wrong! Jon did not "break into other people's systems", he reverse engineered an application ON HIS OWN PC! Good grief man, at least try to follow the story!
Let's examine 2 possible scenarios. Both start with me developing some super-cool-nifty algorithm.
This is the basic idea around the GPL: You want my code, you must give me yours. What we need is exactly the same thing in patent space: a series of patents that are licensed such that any OSS project may use them, but any non-OSS program must yeild any patent rights to any other technologies to the OSS movement.
Ideally, what would happen is the patent origonators would sign the patents over to some organization (I'd suggest the FSF) and they would wield them to be the "viral" licenses forcing other patents to be made available to the OSS community.
Before you flame me about being a "communist" or something, be advised: I like making money as much as the next guy. This would not stop a company from patenting their tech and preventing other companies from using it sans fees, it would just allow any OSS program to use the tech. Sort of a blanket license for the OSS community.
BTW: this would be a great way for [RedHat|Andover|VaLinux|Corel|Caldera] to spend some of that IPO money: Buy blanket licenses for some of the more critical tech for the OSS community.
Great, let's give this a shot. I pull down the RPM for M12, install it, and run it. Displaying web pages isn't any faster than Netscape, the UI responds glacially, and certain sites still crash it.
Am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong? I'm running these tests on a PPro 200 with 288M of RAM, running RH6.1. From all the comments I've heard, M12 should have flown on my system. Has anyone else seen this? Do I have a stale library?
I plan on pulling M13 down later today (at work, over the fat pipe, rather than my 28.8 link at home) but, really, is M13 really better than M12?
The best scenario I can see is:
At which point I'll think about getting a DVD drive and some DVD movies. However, it won't be a done deal: I want the MPAA to apoligize to all of us.
Please tell us where the beta for NDS for Linux is. I work in a Novell shop and have several Linux servers that I'd love to do NDS sync on.
First, the article described 2 systems: One used GPS (and that is the section you quote), and the other used passive reception of the signal. There is no way to turn off the passive system without turning off the phone (not such a bad idea: drive now, talk later). Now, as part of a standard AMPS cell call, the mobile sends out its MIN (mobile identification number). That's the phone number to you and me. It is the actual telephone #, not just a serial #. So, with a commonly available reverse phone book (i.e. a phone book sorted on numbers, not names) you can look up the number and get a name. You can also look up the person you want to track's name, get the phone number (with a regular phone book), and track that person as long as they talk.
What people find so scary about this sort of thing is the fact that it can be abused. And if history is any guide, what can be abused shall be abused. Here in the States we have had various forms of electronic monitoring added to our computer networks, telephone switches, etc. to make it easier (read: trivial) for the various agencies of the various government levels to spy on citizens. If you do not think that the FBI will go to the makers of the passive system and say "You will put in code to allow us to track individual callers.", then you do not know our law enforcement agencies very well.
You've not tried an X server with DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure). I am running XFree 3.9.17, with the DRI for the Voodoo 3. DRI removes the last advantage Windows had over Linux as a game platform: Q3A runs as fast under Linux as it does under Windows. Further, because Linux will support SMP (and Windows 9X won't) we have the advantage over Windows.
And as for 3D sound, IIRC wasn't A3D ported to the SBLive driver for Linux?
Suggestion: Live in the Now, not the past.
Yes, but this assumes that the path to the domain works.
/.'ing some poor shmuck). The server for .foo gets mis-configured, and no longer points to your name servers for narf.foo (this happens with distressing frequency). Yes, your name servers are OK, and if I could point my machine at your servers all would be well, but since the link from the .foo servers to your server is hosed, you cannot get from here to there.
Example: Your domain is narf.foo (I'm deliberatly picking an invalid domain to avoid
The simple fact of the matter is that in good system design of any sort, you don't want to have a single point of failure. If, for what ever reason, your domain cannot be resolved, you want to be able to be notified about it.
This assumes the DNS server is working. If it goes down, then nobody can get the MX records to find your mail service. That's why your site contact should be in some other domain: If you DNS service fails, you can still be mailed.
Yes, but now you have to disassemble Office to get the key. If the MSOffice disk is packaged in such a way that you have to agree not to reverse-engineer it to install it, then you cannot legally disassemble it, thus no key.
To decrypt a disk, yes. However, if they had gone with an asymmetric key system (a.k.a. public key) then the data needed to encode a disk wouldn't be there. Thus, they could prevent anybody who wasn't "in the club" from creating their own content.
My choices were made to relate to current "hot" topics on
However (there's always a however)
In other words, what if strong encryption is used by TheBigCorps to prevent reverse engineering (and thus, compatibility by Open Source Software)?
Again, I'm all in favor of nuking the munitions restrictions (BTW, this is how you spoof the NSA folks, work the keywords into your message) but it could have side effects...
Of course, your arm would get very tired....
< funny >
/funny >
They Casio site wouldn't let me in until I allowed HTTP_USER_AGENT through my proxy. The dastards! We should all nuke their site for having the temerity to invade our privacy like that!
<
Seriously though, with all these single function wrist gadgets, you'd have to be an octopus to have everything: PCS phone (Swatch), Camera (Casio), MP3 player (Casio), AM/FM Radio (various), TV (Casio), PIM (Casio). Why don't they combine them all into one uber-gadget that you wear like a bracer. That way, not only do you have all your toys, you also have AC +1 on one arm!
Well, duh! Once I'm in, you have big problems. So, DON'T LET ME IN
It is not as though this is a new means to attack a server and gain access, just a way, once you have access, to find what you want.
And, if you store a bunch of data in compressed format (which also looks pretty random), then the search will be confused.
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Any modern journalist.
The thing that matters is transfer of information. In one case of so-called FTL tunneling, while the leading edge of the wave front arrived before light, the body of the wave front, where all the information is, arrived at speed of light.
In other cases of "quantum teleportation" using entangled particles, while the particle may have been "teleported" instantaniously by measuring the other entagled particle, the measurement itself had to be communicated via normal means, at lightspeed.
So far, Einstein is still the winner and champion. Pretty good for a theory coming up on its eighties.
Someone steals your car, takes a joyride, and leaves in parked out in front of my house. You find your car, knock on my door, and beat me up.
The reason society discourages undo response to a crime is that some people won't check, recheck and check again the "facts" before acting.
I'm all for a citizen stopping a crime in progress (try breaking into my home whilst I'm there, and you'll be given a very good demonstration of my belief), but if the immediate threat is over, then we should use due deliberation before action. After all, once you've beaten somebody up, you cannot "unbeat them down".
And besides, you never know if the person you are about to beat up is tougher and better trained than you.
Finding a copy of K9&Co that wasn't a 2000th generation copy of somebody pointing their NTSC camera at a PAL TV playing a 20th generation copy of an off-the-air broadcast has been impossible. You know a good source for [NTSC|MPEG] of it?
The military does this because they have learned, from millennia of experience, that all plans fall apart once battle is joined. So, tell your soldiers what you want to happen, and then they can make it happen however. One of Murphy's rules of combat: "If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid." Correllary: "If it's not stupid but it doesn't work, it's stupid."
Also, any soldier is expected to refuse any unlawful order. "Take those P.O.W.'s out and shoot them. That's an order." "With all due respect, sir, that is a violation of the rules of engagement, and I cannot accept that order." The old excuse of "I was only following orders" is not accepted in the military.
Besides, the way some flamers on the 'Net write, this is perfect for the potty mouths.
Caution: This post contains humor, and should not be read by the humor impaired.
Like many others, I think that too many people have too much karma. I routinely see posts that don't deserve to be a 2 but are because the poster has a high enough karma to get the +1 automatically (like me???). Have you give thought to any system to reduce the karma inflation (having karma "decay") or to reduce the abuse of the high karma +1 (perhaps a limited number of +1 points per time period, so people will think about whether this post needs to be +1).
Note: I'm posting this at +1 so that others who do as I do and read at 2 will see it and hopefully comment upon it.
Oh, you mean where Hamvention is held once a year?
That'd be attractive to some geeks.
73 de N0YKG