Unlike the situation under DMCA, which attempts to block reverse engineering on copyright grounds, and may be subject to overturn on the basis of fair use precedents, reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been illegal and the case law all supports that.
Actually,
reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been not only legal but pretty much pointless, since the whole point of the patent law is to have the detailed explaination publicly available for people to study so everyone could be able to implement the idea as son as the patent expires.
I can't find the links, but IIRC, at least one open source program for converting between different media formats, has withdrawn support for WMA because MS threatened them with a patent infringement lawsuit. The only real defense against an existing patent is to invalidate it in court, which can be a VERY expensive undertaking.
I want to support mp3/mp3PRO in my products. Do I need a license?
Yes.['nuff said...]
As for practically any important technology (and particularly for publicly established standards), you should know that patent rights for mp3 exist. Both Fraunhofer IIS-A and Thomson have done important work to develop mp3 audio compression (before and after it became part of the ISO/IEC MPEG standards). This work has resulted in many inventions and several patents, covering the mp3 standard. Although others may also hold patents, Fraunhofer IIS-A and Thomson have an important portfolio of patents related to mp3. [...]
That's why LAMEAin't an MP3 Encoder but a GPLed patch against the dist10 ISO demonstration source, otherwise it would be just as illegal as a GPLed WMA encoder. In other words, MP3 is as evil as WMA. That's why artists should be using Ogg Vorbis.
Anyway, there were probably worm/virus prototypes before 1983. Anyone know of them?
In 1981-1982 the first computer virus,
Elk Cloner,
started spreading in the wild
but it was not until 1983 when Fred Cohen
finally proved
that the concept of a computer virus was viable.
To my best knowledge the first worm spreading in the wild was
IBM Christmas Worm in 1987
and the first Internet worm
was Robert T. Morris' Worm in 1988.
The single speaker unit actually contains five individual speakers packed horizontally into a single case.
[emphasis added]
So in other words this in not
a single speaker.
The only news here is that the speakers are closer than usual.
The surround sound effect is achieved by playing some sophisticated psychoacoustic trickery on the human brain.
[emphasis added]
Just like with every surround sound system known to man. Somehow I doubt if the poster has ever read the linked articles, not to mention anything more about psychoacoustics. If it wasn't Slashdot I would've thought that's an advertisement instead of real news.
The gangs can *TRY* to extort money, but in the long run, it would be cheaper to hire consultants or better administrators. This will have the effect of IMPROVING security worldwide. Thanks European gangs!
Speaking as a systems security consultant,
I cannot disagree.
But keep in mind that using that logic we'll
have to thank burglars for door and windows
security improvements, while in fact those improvements are only needed to keep our homes safe from those very same burglars in the first place. They are not part of the solution, but
part of the problem, as Bruce Schneier would say.
I have really no idea why it was modded as Funny.
I had nothing but great experience with dd(1), especially the version from GNU Fileutils. If you are stuck with MS Windows and cannot use Knoppix then check out Cygwin.
One of the great advantages of dd(1) is the ability to use good old Unix-style anonymous pipes, so with Netcat or SSH it can really do miracles with filesystems cloning across the network, be it LAN (with nc(1)) or the Internet (with ssh(1) as nc(1) sends data as unencrypted).
Actually, as some people say, "What makes GNU so great is that there are so many distros I can choose Debian from." I think it makes sense. From every GNU distro (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera---you name it) Debian is the only one which is truely kernel-independent, the only one with social contract making it free as in freedom and the only one not Intel-centric, so in other words, if there is any single distro which is better than any one else, it can be only Debian. I'm proud to say that once again I can fully agree which Bruce Perens.
I'm sure (or at least, I hope) I won't be the only one who will raise this very issue, but organizations like FCC or KRRiTV make absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of Internet medium, in the opposition to common and finite mediums like ether, which we are forced to manage somehow for the common public good.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Digital Speech Project and
Public Knowledge (to which I found a link on GNU website recently) are certainly worth visiting,
not to mention our good friend Google.
The problem is that while we all know that the so called "HDTV broadcast flag" [eff.org] makes exactly as much sense as the Security Flag from RFC 3514, this is not always the case with the average drunk Joe "General Public" Sixpack, who ironically is in fact the most important target we all should make sure
those papers are carefully read and understood by, because he represents the target audience of Businessweek, not Slashdot.
CLIs were originally introduced as just another layer of abstraction. When you type "ls", you don't really think that you're sending the command directly to your CPU, do you?
I have an interesting theory on that subject.
I think that with no doubt
the GUI is the future for masses.
The "icons" will inevitably evolve, though.
From the simple pictures they are now,
they will become abstract symbols they
are already becoming to be
(for example, see the widely recognized
">>" or ">|"
symbols introduced decades ago with audio
tape players).
After few decades they will evolve into
a primitive hieroglyphic alphabet,
and keep starting to get complex, forming
phrases and whole sentences. The next step will
be simplifying the overly complex alphabet
already consisting
of thousands of abstract symbols, probably
concentrating on unification the "letters" with
"phonemes" (sounds they represent).
At that time we will have CLI
(because "text" is the ultimate interface for humans) and another
illiterate revolutionizer will start introducing
The GUI all over again.
Seriously, there was a huge cross site scripting vulnerability in Omniture's "award-winning web analytics solution for large, complex sites" (too complex for them, I guess) which was included in the famous VeriSign's Site Finder we all loved so much. It's not that VeriSign handles any sensitive data, fortunately...
(My link doesn't work any more, but the comment is still +5, Funny.:-P)
I agree with you but I'm curious, why would a public voting system be based on closed-source software?
And why would a public voting system be based on software at all, in the first place?
I'm serious. What are the advantages?
Is it that much faster? Cheaper than manual
counting of votes?
Because it's most certainly not more secure.
When I first read about the e-voting my first
reaction was: "But... Why?!"
Yep. I'm thinking about that guy in the very first Unix systems that trojaned the C compiler to trojan itself to trojan the login program.
For those who don't know,
that guy in the very first Unix
was the Unix coinventor,
Ken Thompson himself.
He wrote about this Trojan horse
(the most brilliant one in the history,
I might add) in
Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8,
August 1984 --
Reflections on Trusting Trust.
Truely outstanding article.
Let us also not forget about implementing the Security Flag from RFC 3514 while we're at it.
This is good - great reading, highly recommended.
For the uninitiated, every year on April 1, an RFC like this is released. This is the best one yet. Also, Bellovin (the author) is well-respected in the security community.
It was something like the 10th on-topic post
(out of about 400, mind you) and should definitely be modded as Score:5, Funny. The only problem was the subtleness of the humor, for which let me apologize.
So is it just not possible for a group of Free Software programmers to be non-political?
Of course it is not possible since Free Software is a political movement in the first place and has been so since at least 1984. That is actualy the reason of the recent community fork in 1998. What you are looking for is Open Source.
Let us also not forget about implementing the Security Flag from RFC 3514 while we're at it.
This is good - great reading, highly recommended.
For the uninitiated, every year on April 1, an RFC like this is released. This is the best one yet. Also, Bellovin (the author) is well-respected in the security community.
It was something like the 10th on-topic post
(out of about 400, mind you) and should definitely be modded as Score:5, Funny. The only problem was the subtleness of the humor, for which let me apologize.
I think that Broadcast Flag is exactly what we need to solve the problem of Internet piracy. Let us also not forget about implementing the Security Flag from RFC 3514 while we're at it.
You miss the point: Mozart (and Salieri and many other musicians) lived almost entirely from patronage.
Yes. They lived almost entirely from patronage,
or died from the lack thereof.
I don't know how your brain flipped into comparing Salieri with Microsoft, this is bizarre.
You don't know the history of Mozart, do you?
I didn't say that sponsoring art or free software development is a bad idea, it's a great idea,
but Mozart is probably the worst example one could find.
This is great news that Compiere finally went DB-independent. As a Perl DBI/DBD user I find DB-independence almost a prerequisite for any software I use, almost as important as its free software license.
(Still, I'd like to see
SQLite
support, my favorite DB-apps prototyping DB.)
Now, when it doesn't depand on Oracle any more, I will probably finally install it in my lab. How is PostgreSQL and MySQL comparing to each other speed-, flexibility- and security-wise?
Which one would you suggest using with Compiere?
Is that true that with MySQL Compiere is faster for the most simple tasks, but anything more than that requires PostgreSQL, which is slower in the short run but better choice in the long run? I'm asking because I want to have a flexible and long-term maintainable solution, where performance (via the hardware budget) is one of the most important factors, and the best security is a must. Thanks.
In software, why not something along the lines of "such and such paid for this feature", an eternal mention of one's contribution to the project. It worked for Bach and Mozart, why not for OSS today?
Just yesterday I saw Amadeus by Peter Shaffer (it was a fourth time I've seen this play, one of the best versions I might add) and I can assure you that it didn't work for Mozart at all.
Of course we could seek parallels of
Antonio Salieri to Bill Gates and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Richard Stallman,
but I think we've already gone way too far with that misleading analogy.
If we keep comparing Mozart to free software then absolutely no one who knows history would ever want to be involved with free software.
[...] Thus, if you perform automatic updates without using HTTP or HTML (say, XML and SCP), this patent does not affect you. In essence, this patent is easy to work around, so it should have much of a long-term effect on the world as we know it.
So, in other words, does it mean that Debian is safe after running:
Without a warrant but not without a reason? Sorry, I don't follow your drift.
Too bad. I've already said too much.
Please stop asking.
Take this as flamebait if you must, but why the hell are you bragging on slashdot?
I find this tripe of yours pompous and boring. If you are involved in anything of this nature, you wouldn't be shouting about it on slashdot.
You find my comments "pompous and boring" and yet you waste your precious time reading them and replying to them? Might I suggest you getting a life maybe? Or is that your hobby
to answer "pompus and boring [comments]"
asking people "why the hell are [they] bragging on slashdot" every time you find something especially boring? What an exciting hobby. I do really wish my life was so exciting.
(ducks)I see that you have bipolar disorder.:P
Yes, I have bipolar disorder.
Do you find it funny?
Do you realize how much does it tell
about your intelligence?
It also somehow explains the rest of your comment.
You're apparently some sort of boastful security consultant. Whatever, man. If you want to prove it somehow, then put up, otherwise shut up.
But of course. Let me prove everyting I write on Slashdot, just like all of other fellow slashdotters do.
Please give me a mailing address so I could send you video tapes and timestamped Snort logs
proving that what I'm saying is true.
I'm sorry I forgot to click this little "attach the evidence" button next to "submit" and "preview."
Please take no offense but what are you nuts?!
I've been waiting for a mini PDA for quite a long time now. My old, huge PDA is certainly too easy to operate. I can even read the screen without a magnifying glass! It's not "cool" at all.
You might suggest to them that next time you will be more careful - if you knew it was government snooping in your private network you would have called the newspaper. The CIA can't legally do this to any US citican, and no police force can do this type of invesitgation without a warrent. The so called patriot act doesn't give everything away.
You are right, it could've been a great news but, well, let's just say that none of us would've liked the newspapers to know about that incident. They spied on us without a warrant but not without a reason, if you follow my drift. Fortunately all of us agreed to
just forget about the whole "cyber-battle," as they called my defensive DDoSing counter-attack and their own counter-counter-attack (quite harmless to my network, I might add -- except the "real world" part).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, reverse engineering of patented techniques has always been not only legal but pretty much pointless, since the whole point of the patent law is to have the detailed explaination publicly available for people to study so everyone could be able to implement the idea as son as the patent expires.
The same is the case with MP3. See mp3/mp3PRO Patent and Software Licensing Information. From the developer FAQ:
That's why LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder but a GPLed patch against the dist10 ISO demonstration source, otherwise it would be just as illegal as a GPLed WMA encoder. In other words, MP3 is as evil as WMA. That's why artists should be using Ogg Vorbis.
In 1981-1982 the first computer virus, Elk Cloner, started spreading in the wild but it was not until 1983 when Fred Cohen finally proved that the concept of a computer virus was viable. To my best knowledge the first worm spreading in the wild was IBM Christmas Worm in 1987 and the first Internet worm was Robert T. Morris' Worm in 1988.
So in other words this in not a single speaker. The only news here is that the speakers are closer than usual.
Just like with every surround sound system known to man. Somehow I doubt if the poster has ever read the linked articles, not to mention anything more about psychoacoustics. If it wasn't Slashdot I would've thought that's an advertisement instead of real news.
Speaking as a systems security consultant, I cannot disagree. But keep in mind that using that logic we'll have to thank burglars for door and windows security improvements, while in fact those improvements are only needed to keep our homes safe from those very same burglars in the first place. They are not part of the solution, but part of the problem, as Bruce Schneier would say.
I have really no idea why it was modded as Funny. I had nothing but great experience with dd(1), especially the version from GNU Fileutils. If you are stuck with MS Windows and cannot use Knoppix then check out Cygwin. One of the great advantages of dd(1) is the ability to use good old Unix-style anonymous pipes, so with Netcat or SSH it can really do miracles with filesystems cloning across the network, be it LAN (with nc(1)) or the Internet (with ssh(1) as nc(1) sends data as unencrypted).
Dear Sony,
As much as I hate to break it to you, the so called "copy-protection" (or more accurately "copy-prevention") will not (I repeat, NOT) work.
Other topics which you might also reconsider wasting your money on "Testing" include, but are not limited to:
Thank you for your attention.
Yours truely,
Pan T. Hose, PhD
Actually, as some people say, "What makes GNU so great is that there are so many distros I can choose Debian from." I think it makes sense. From every GNU distro (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera---you name it) Debian is the only one which is truely kernel-independent, the only one with social contract making it free as in freedom and the only one not Intel-centric, so in other words, if there is any single distro which is better than any one else, it can be only Debian. I'm proud to say that once again I can fully agree which Bruce Perens.
I'm sure (or at least, I hope) I won't be the only one who will raise this very issue, but organizations like FCC or KRRiTV make absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of Internet medium, in the opposition to common and finite mediums like ether, which we are forced to manage somehow for the common public good.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Digital Speech Project and Public Knowledge (to which I found a link on GNU website recently) are certainly worth visiting, not to mention our good friend Google. The problem is that while we all know that the so called "HDTV broadcast flag" [eff.org] makes exactly as much sense as the Security Flag from RFC 3514, this is not always the case with the average drunk Joe "General Public" Sixpack, who ironically is in fact the most important target we all should make sure those papers are carefully read and understood by, because he represents the target audience of Businessweek, not Slashdot.
I have an interesting theory on that subject. I think that with no doubt the GUI is the future for masses. The "icons" will inevitably evolve, though. From the simple pictures they are now, they will become abstract symbols they are already becoming to be (for example, see the widely recognized ">>" or ">|" symbols introduced decades ago with audio tape players). After few decades they will evolve into a primitive hieroglyphic alphabet, and keep starting to get complex, forming phrases and whole sentences. The next step will be simplifying the overly complex alphabet already consisting of thousands of abstract symbols, probably concentrating on unification the "letters" with "phonemes" (sounds they represent). At that time we will have CLI (because "text" is the ultimate interface for humans) and another illiterate revolutionizer will start introducing The GUI all over again.
This article somehow reminds me about the old VeriSign's ad campaign with naked women by which I was outrageously offended once.
Seriously, there was a huge cross site scripting vulnerability in Omniture's "award-winning web analytics solution for large, complex sites" (too complex for them, I guess) which was included in the famous VeriSign's Site Finder we all loved so much. It's not that VeriSign handles any sensitive data, fortunately...
(My link doesn't work any more, but the comment is still +5, Funny. :-P)
And why would a public voting system be based on software at all, in the first place? I'm serious. What are the advantages? Is it that much faster? Cheaper than manual counting of votes? Because it's most certainly not more secure. When I first read about the e-voting my first reaction was: "But... Why?!"
For those who don't know, that guy in the very first Unix was the Unix coinventor, Ken Thompson himself. He wrote about this Trojan horse (the most brilliant one in the history, I might add) in Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984 -- Reflections on Trusting Trust. Truely outstanding article.
It was something like the 10th on-topic post (out of about 400, mind you) and should definitely be modded as Score:5, Funny. The only problem was the subtleness of the humor, for which let me apologize.
I got this fabulous Slashdot Message:
Of course it is not possible since Free Software is a political movement in the first place and has been so since at least 1984. That is actualy the reason of the recent community fork in 1998. What you are looking for is Open Source.
It was something like the 10th on-topic post (out of about 400, mind you) and should definitely be modded as Score:5, Funny. The only problem was the subtleness of the humor, for which let me apologize.
I think that Broadcast Flag is exactly what we need to solve the problem of Internet piracy. Let us also not forget about implementing the Security Flag from RFC 3514 while we're at it.
Yes. They lived almost entirely from patronage, or died from the lack thereof.
You don't know the history of Mozart, do you? I didn't say that sponsoring art or free software development is a bad idea, it's a great idea, but Mozart is probably the worst example one could find.
This is great news that Compiere finally went DB-independent. As a Perl DBI/DBD user I find DB-independence almost a prerequisite for any software I use, almost as important as its free software license. (Still, I'd like to see SQLite support, my favorite DB-apps prototyping DB.) Now, when it doesn't depand on Oracle any more, I will probably finally install it in my lab. How is PostgreSQL and MySQL comparing to each other speed-, flexibility- and security-wise? Which one would you suggest using with Compiere? Is that true that with MySQL Compiere is faster for the most simple tasks, but anything more than that requires PostgreSQL, which is slower in the short run but better choice in the long run? I'm asking because I want to have a flexible and long-term maintainable solution, where performance (via the hardware budget) is one of the most important factors, and the best security is a must. Thanks.
Just yesterday I saw Amadeus by Peter Shaffer (it was a fourth time I've seen this play, one of the best versions I might add) and I can assure you that it didn't work for Mozart at all. Of course we could seek parallels of Antonio Salieri to Bill Gates and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Richard Stallman, but I think we've already gone way too far with that misleading analogy. If we keep comparing Mozart to free software then absolutely no one who knows history would ever want to be involved with free software.
So, in other words, does it mean that Debian is safe after running:
Right?
Too bad. I've already said too much. Please stop asking.
You find my comments "pompous and boring" and yet you waste your precious time reading them and replying to them? Might I suggest you getting a life maybe? Or is that your hobby to answer "pompus and boring [comments]" asking people "why the hell are [they] bragging on slashdot" every time you find something especially boring? What an exciting hobby. I do really wish my life was so exciting.
Yes, I have bipolar disorder. Do you find it funny? Do you realize how much does it tell about your intelligence? It also somehow explains the rest of your comment.
But of course. Let me prove everyting I write on Slashdot, just like all of other fellow slashdotters do. Please give me a mailing address so I could send you video tapes and timestamped Snort logs proving that what I'm saying is true. I'm sorry I forgot to click this little "attach the evidence" button next to "submit" and "preview." Please take no offense but what are you nuts?!
I've been waiting for a mini PDA for quite a long time now. My old, huge PDA is certainly too easy to operate. I can even read the screen without a magnifying glass! It's not "cool" at all.
You are right, it could've been a great news but, well, let's just say that none of us would've liked the newspapers to know about that incident. They spied on us without a warrant but not without a reason, if you follow my drift. Fortunately all of us agreed to just forget about the whole "cyber-battle," as they called my defensive DDoSing counter-attack and their own counter-counter-attack (quite harmless to my network, I might add -- except the "real world" part).