The Sci-Fi "Hall of Fame" part of the museum is comprised completely of authors. Later, it will be expanded to include those involved with film and television. This is because Paul Allen took over the existing Sci-Fi Hall of Fame, which has been around for a while. It had no actual building, it just awarded plaques to inductees each year. It started out as a SciFi/Fantasy Hall of Fame, but fortunatley for the SciFi museum, all the inductees had at least some sci-fi in their bodies of work. They were able to make it into sci-fi only without kicking anyone out.
I don't think the Dreamcast game Headhunter was ever released in the US. You can find PAL versions on eBay, and some game websites have old stories on the game, (for example, gamespot.com), but the stories don't indicate a release date, or if the game ever actually came out. Only in Europe and Japan apparently, although the sequel, Headhunter: Redemption is slated for US release on PS2 and XBox
Let's also be clear--browsing records are still largely anonymous--at least at all the public libraries I've used computers at--maybe you have a different experience?
In the King County library system in Seattle, you have to enter your library card number to log onto a library's internet terminals. I don't know what kind of logs the servers store, but there is no anonymity if you have to enter an personally identifying number.
The difference is PUBLIC and PRIVATE. A library funded by the government is PUBLIC. A cybercafe is PRIVATE.
Now, the reason I think you're confused is, that while a cybercafe is open to the public, it is a private institution--this can be a tricky concept, but I think if you reason it through it'll make sense. Now, having understood the issue, would you like to restate your position?
Actually, no. I don't understand why you think it's okay to restrict public internet use as long as you don't restrict private use. By doing so, you only subject those who can't afford computers and connnections to surviellance. Now, the cost of an old computer and a dial-up connection (or even a few hours at an internet cafe) may be cheap for most, the whole point of the library system is to ensure that everyone has access to information, regardless of financial status. Restricting internet use in the one place where absolutely anyone can have access is worse than restricting it in places where only people who can afford it have access.
Believe me, if the government were requiring PRIVATE cafes or ISPs to keep records, etc, I would be up in arms, but that simply isn't the case.
While libraries are the most obvious example of the PATRIOT act's egregious invasion of privacy, private ISP's are not immune from it's requirements. According the the EPIC website, the law expanded the use of pen register and trap and trace devices. While these used to be limited to keeping records of phone numbers dialed, the PATRIOT act expanded their use to any form of electronic communication including web surfing and email. While the law is designed to restrict data collection to URL's, email headers, and other forms of "addressing information," and it specifically prohibits the collection of "content," it is vaguely worded and open to broad interpretation. Does this URL contain "content" or merely "addressing information": http://www.dogbone.com/form.pl?Name=Bob&Lastname=S mith&Password=momsmaidenname&Submission=My+Secret+ words ?
Beyond which, we can of course get into a discussion of intent. The intent of the PATRIOT act is to stop terrorist--which we can all agree is a good thing
China's stated intent is to protect children from pornography and the dangers of online video games, and I'm sure we can mostly agree that at least the first one is a good thing. But just as the practice in China also curbs any anti-government discussion, so the PATRIOT act in the US leads to a host of other unintended restrictions. This Slashdot discussion is about how the Department of Justice is giving seminars to law enforcement on how to use the PATRIOT act's provision against people suspected of crimes completely unrelated to terrorism.
I stand by my position that, while we certainly don't live in a totalitarian state like China, the PATRIOT act is subjecting people in the US to some pretty scary chilling effects.
Um, how about the PATRIOT act? According to the American Library Association's website, the law now permits the FBI to compel libraries to produce library Internet use records without a warrant.
While it doesn't directly close down those library terminals, it is certainly comparable to the Chinese practice of requiring video surveillance of cybercafe patrons. And that goes a long way toward discouraging use of the internet for anything that the government doesn't like.
While ICANN has been authorized by Congress, Congress has no legitimate authority to create such a monopoly organization.
Congress is authorized to regulate interstate commerce. There is no monopoly in the domain registar space. There are 193 companies that ICANN has accredited as registars. ICANN regulates these registars, and it is well within congressional authority to set up such a regulatory organization.
Sorry, I meant Melissa virus. Man, that was around 5 years ago, and I worked at a different company. I don't have that email hanging around.
I remember the tone was snide and he said that there were better ways to do what the form was trying to accomplish without using macros, if I really knew how to use Word.
I clearly remember thinking two things. First, that it's messed up that an MS employee was telling me that it was bad to use his company's product as designed, and second, I'm never using stupid Word gimmicks again.
This quote made me stop: I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough." In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
It reminded me of an incident that happened several years ago. I was working at a company with close ties to Microsoft when the "I Love You" virus struck. Both Microsoft and our company were hit hard by it. A couple days after the messy cleanup, I sent a Word doc to a Microsoft employee. It was a form we used often and it had a macro that allowed the recipient to fill in some check boxes.
I got a nasty reply from the microsoft employee about how it was irresponsible to send word docs with macros in this time of virus vulnerability. Since then, I have used as few of the gimmicky features that MS Office supplies. They don't add much to your documents, and they set you up for virus and incompatibility problems. Only using basic features isn't something you should settle for, it is a good rule to follow to avoid lots of nasty problems.
If an artist doesn't want something to be copied, they shouldn't release it.
-- I can honestly say I've never heard this argument used.
I don't think this argument is as ridiculous as it sounds at first blush. During the controversy over the book The Wind Done Gone, I heard the author of the "authorized" sequel to Gone With the Wind say something along the lines of books are the children of an author, and as the book's parent, the author has a right to do anything she wants to do with her child, up to and including killing it, and no one has a right to stop her. Though her analogy is full of flawed logic, I don't think the equation of a work of art with a child is inappropriate. For one thing, our children go out into the world and interact with others, and change them and are changed by them. So too with art.
When you put ideas out into the public, people think about these ideas. They draw conclusions and are led to new lines of thinking that branch off of the original idea. To claim that the author should have some kind of control over these conclusions or new lines of thinking is idiotic, but that didn't stop the estate of Margaret Mitchell to squelch the publishing of The Wind Done Gone.
Some of the new thinking a work may inspire can be antithetical to what the artist was originally trying to convey. I remember hearing an interview with Matt Groening, and he talked about seeing bootleg Simpsons T-shirts with a rastafarian Bart on it. He found them funny and only mildly annoying that they were taking theoretical money from him. But he had also seen his characters used in a comic strip in a white supremacist pamphlet, and found it truly sickening to see his ideas twisted in that way. He said that it was just part of the price you have to pay for putting your ideas out in public.
I admit this doesn't have a lot to do with the wholesale plagerism of websites, but it goes to the argument over the extent of fair use rights. Where does one draw the line between parody, quotation, creative use, and "theft" of "intellectual property?" Perhaps this kind of plagerism is the price we must pay to have an open and dynamic forum like the web to present and discuss ideas.
The problem isn't simply bogus, er, standard software industry release dates, and waiting until a product is ready.The problem is taking money for vaporware. Microsoft sold companies "upgrade" contracts, and then hasn't upgraded the software before the contracts expire.
Now, legally, the companies getting screwed have no recourse. The contracts are worded so Microsoft doesn't have to actually provide the upgrades they announced. But there was a lot of implying that Software Assurance would cover your next round of upgrades. Since it hasn't for most customers, it is going to be a hard sell to get these customers to renew.
I don't think the two situations (hijacker's approved visas and db developer posting confidential data to the internet) are analogous. Yes, they are both screw-ups by people working for the government. But I would argue that the visa screw-up was made because the INS was not set up to fight terrorists. Since 9/11, it's mission has changed dramatically to add that responsibility. But it takes a long time to turn a huge organization around, and 6 months isn't long enough. Previously, the INS mission has fluctuated depending on the whims of the administration in the white house, alternately cracking down on illegal immigration or working to streamline legal immigration, depending on the political winds. Before 9/11, President Bush was interested in making it simpler to acquire a green card and was working on an immigration amnesty for Mexican and other illegal immigrants. The latter was put on hold after 9/11, but was finalized recently. While there is glaring irony in the fact that dead terrorists' visas were approved 6 months after their notorious attack, catching them was not until very recently the job of the INS, and it is wrong to fault them for not changing gears so quickly.
State foster care and child protection services, on the other hand, are set up to protect children. From long experience these agencies are aware of the dangers of giving a mother's new address out to her ex-husband with the history of domestic violence and a restraining order. They have policies in place for that that took years of trial and error and experience to develop. An outsourced developer has no experience with these kinds of risks. A good coder is used to posting questions on the internet asking for suggestions. But that doesn't make him a good coder for sensitive family services data. That is the point the article is making about outsourcing. Sometimes it takes more than just being able to write code cheaply to do the job.
Government agencies deal with sensitive data all the time, and have carefully developed practices and policies in place. These have been developed over years and are part of the culture of the workplace.
When you outsource to a company that specializes in IT work, and that gets outsourced to a database contractor, the sensitive data is no longer in an institution used to handling it. Yes, you might have an unscrupulous or incompetent coder in your orginzation, but you are far more likely to have a problem when you hire someone because they are cheap and they can code. The instititional controls and culture that protect the data are not in place after 3 degrees of outsourcing.
Well, IANAL, so I can't point you to any legal precedents, but I can take your analogy and expand on it.
If you were to give me $10,000 to kill your neighbor, and I knew it was an illegal contract so I didn't kill your neighbor, could I keep the $10,000? Not likely, so I doubt that it would be okay to retain copyright under such a deal either.
They generally work on infringement issues with software to which they hold the copyright, but they consult for and advise others in infringment situations as well.
On the other hand, it's kind of entertaining. Like rooting against Johnny Fairplay on Survivor, we tune in every week hoping to finally see SCO get their comeuppance.
I accept it as the way companies act today, nothing unusual.
This is what is really bad, and why Belkin thought they could get away with this crap. We have become used to the abuse. We need to stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"
The incredibly onerous and annoying contracts that have become standard parts of software licenses are starting to creep out of the fine print of click-through EULA's that no one ever reads and into everyday life. I think hardware companies look enviously at software companies, with their "no responsiblity for the company/no rights for the user" legal disclaimers. They are increasingly trying to get the same kind of weasely deals for themselves.
But actual physical products are a different animal, and you can't hide how you're screwing the customer behind an "agree" button. If EULA's weren't such confusing legalese, and people actually bothered to understand what they are actually "agreeing" to, I believe we'd all make a bigger stink about it. Fortunately, it's more obvious when physical items try to act like virtual ones.
I was in the process of cutting and pasting Belkin's message into a story submission earlier today when it changed, so I have the original text. The message earlier today read:
Belkin is aware of some recent postings that claim that Belkin wireless routers are spamming users during the setup process and periodically thereafter. It is not now, nor has it ever been, the policy of Belkin to intentionally spam our customers or anyone else. Belkin offers a free trial of our parental control feature in our routers, and to make our customers aware of the feature itself and to give them the opportunity to take advantage of the free trial, we have tried to direct users to the information regarding the parental control features. However, since this has become a source of concern to our users, and it is Belkin policy to address the concerns of our users quickly, Belkin has decided to remove this function from the routers. Each router's firmware that incorporates parental control as an option will be changed.
Please expect more detailed information to follow early next week. Thank you.
Now we have the more concise and concilliatory
We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We will be offering firmware fixes available for download early next week. We do not have exact details yet but we can tell you now that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed.
Please expect more detailed information to follow early next week. Thank you.
What's next? Will the phone you buy occasionaly redirect your call to a telemarketer? Will your TV remote automatically switch channels to an infomercial? Maybe your car radio could redirect your listening to a clear channel station every 8 hours. These are business models I need to patent...
Bandai makes toys for most of the biggest Japanese licenses. Not just Gundam, but Ultraman, Power Rangers, Digimon, Ultimate Muscle, Hello Kitty, and a lot more. They make DVD's of tons of popular anime, including various Gundam series and Cowboy Bebop. While most of this stuff isn't so big in the US, outside of the otaku community, it is giant in Japan. If Nintendo is able to leverage their ownership into more licensed games for the Japanese market, it could help them sell a lot of consoles and gain back some market share from Sony. I don't think it will have much effect in the US, however.
That's the whole thing with piracy. You are never going to eliminate it because there is a small group of people who will break copy protection just for the intellectual challenge.
What you can do is minimize it. It seems like they did a good job with the GameCube. You can play pirated games on it, but it is such a hassle to do so that the average gamer won't. Only the hardcore hacker.
Incidentally, you to play GameCube ISO's, you need a broadband adapter and a copy of Phantasy Star Online, neither of which were made in large quantities. They will be making more broadband adapters for Mario Kart:Double Dash, but if you want to pirate games, you better be checking ebay or GameStop for a used copy of PSO.
A while back, someone hacked the GameCube disc format. They found a way to get the raw data off of GameCube discs. This data then could be posted to the internet or saved on your computer hard drive. However, that was a pretty useless trick, piracy-wise. You couldn't burn that data to a blank CD and put it into a GameCube and play your pirated games. GameCube discs are custom sized. You can't get a spindle of GCD's at CompUSA, and conventional burning software wouldn't write to it properly if you did. So it was a neat mental excercise, but with no practical applications.
Until now. Now these guys have hacked the GameCube broadband adapter. These adapters are hard to find, and currently the only game that supprots them is Phantasy Star Online (although the new version of Mario Cart coming soon will support it, and they should make more broadband adapters available for that). So now, you can load a game over the GameCube broadband adapter.
Those GameCube discs you previously could rip to your computer, now you can load them to your GameCube over the broadband adapter. That opens the door for piracy pretty wide. It also opens the door for you to load just about any code you want to the GameCube, hence the remarks about a Linux version for the console. So now it is possible to play pirated games our custom software on the cube. It is still a pretty involved and difficult process, involving hard-to-find hardware and requiring a lot of technical know-how, but it is possible.
I think they should have an IQ test before they issue credit cards. Anyone who would input their cc# into an anonymous website would be too stupid to get a credit card.
But I think you are being generous when you refer to the polish "company." It is some hackers who troll for business in IRC chat. What they are doing is probably illegal, but try to get the FBI to expend a ton of resources tracking down an international group of criminal emailers. Boycotting Polish sausage would be like boycotting pizza to protest the mafia.
The article is talking about spam with a link to a web page. The web page has a form to input your credit card number, your address, and how many penis enlargers or cases of viagra you want.
Now, let's look at the removeform.com example. If you do a tracert, you do get an invalid IP address of 1.1.1.1 . However, if you ping www.removeform.com, you get a changing IP address. When I tried it a moment ago, it showed an IP address of 160.81.229.205 . A whois lookup shows that this IP address is owned by Sprint, and is probably a cable modem.
How does it work that a tracert gives one IP address result and a ping give a different result? Because the spammers/hackers have their own DNS nameservers. Their nameservers give out different information depending on the type of request the server receives. If it looks like a request from someone trying to reach a webpage, it gives out an address of a zombie machine with an open proxy. This zombie machine passes the request to either another zombie machine to help further obfuscate the trail, or onto the actual webpage. If it looks like a tracrt request, it can send out an invalid address or other misleading garbage.
I don't understand DNS enough to know why your webbrowser would go to the spammer/hacker's DNS server, rather than your ISP's or one of the root nameservers. Or, more likely, why your ISP's nameserver would go to the spammer/hacker's nameserver and not the root nameserver. How is that spoofed?
Are the zone transfers from the spammer/hacker's domain constantly changing the routes in your ISP's DNS? how often do zone transfers occur? Is it set with a TTL value, and the spammer/hacker's nameserver have a very low TTL?
The article says that the spammer/hackers change their DNS servers frequently, but it seems to me that would be the traceable point. Any smart people out there understand how this might be done?
Slashdot Mirror
The Sci-Fi "Hall of Fame" part of the museum is comprised completely of authors. Later, it will be expanded to include those involved with film and television. This is because Paul Allen took over the existing Sci-Fi Hall of Fame, which has been around for a while. It had no actual building, it just awarded plaques to inductees each year. It started out as a SciFi/Fantasy Hall of Fame, but fortunatley for the SciFi museum, all the inductees had at least some sci-fi in their bodies of work. They were able to make it into sci-fi only without kicking anyone out.
The McLaren website has an interesting flash doo-dad that explains the steering wheel. Go here and click on "interactive steering wheel.
I don't think the Dreamcast game Headhunter was ever released in the US. You can find PAL versions on eBay, and some game websites have old stories on the game, (for example, gamespot.com), but the stories don't indicate a release date, or if the game ever actually came out. Only in Europe and Japan apparently, although the sequel, Headhunter: Redemption is slated for US release on PS2 and XBox
Let's also be clear--browsing records are still largely anonymous--at least at all the public libraries I've used computers at--maybe you have a different experience?
S mith&Password=momsmaidenname&Submission=My+Secret+ words ?
In the King County library system in Seattle, you have to enter your library card number to log onto a library's internet terminals. I don't know what kind of logs the servers store, but there is no anonymity if you have to enter an personally identifying number.
The difference is PUBLIC and PRIVATE. A library funded by the government is PUBLIC. A cybercafe is PRIVATE.
Now, the reason I think you're confused is, that while a cybercafe is open to the public, it is a private institution--this can be a tricky concept, but I think if you reason it through it'll make sense. Now, having understood the issue, would you like to restate your position?
Actually, no. I don't understand why you think it's okay to restrict public internet use as long as you don't restrict private use. By doing so, you only subject those who can't afford computers and connnections to surviellance. Now, the cost of an old computer and a dial-up connection (or even a few hours at an internet cafe) may be cheap for most, the whole point of the library system is to ensure that everyone has access to information, regardless of financial status. Restricting internet use in the one place where absolutely anyone can have access is worse than restricting it in places where only people who can afford it have access.
Believe me, if the government were requiring PRIVATE cafes or ISPs to keep records, etc, I would be up in arms, but that simply isn't the case.
While libraries are the most obvious example of the PATRIOT act's egregious invasion of privacy, private ISP's are not immune from it's requirements. According the the EPIC website, the law expanded the use of pen register and trap and trace devices. While these used to be limited to keeping records of phone numbers dialed, the PATRIOT act expanded their use to any form of electronic communication including web surfing and email. While the law is designed to restrict data collection to URL's, email headers, and other forms of "addressing information," and it specifically prohibits the collection of "content," it is vaguely worded and open to broad interpretation. Does this URL contain "content" or merely "addressing information": http://www.dogbone.com/form.pl?Name=Bob&Lastname=
Beyond which, we can of course get into a discussion of intent. The intent of the PATRIOT act is to stop terrorist--which we can all agree is a good thing
China's stated intent is to protect children from pornography and the dangers of online video games, and I'm sure we can mostly agree that at least the first one is a good thing. But just as the practice in China also curbs any anti-government discussion, so the PATRIOT act in the US leads to a host of other unintended restrictions. This Slashdot discussion is about how the Department of Justice is giving seminars to law enforcement on how to use the PATRIOT act's provision against people suspected of crimes completely unrelated to terrorism.
I stand by my position that, while we certainly don't live in a totalitarian state like China, the PATRIOT act is subjecting people in the US to some pretty scary chilling effects.
Um, how about the PATRIOT act? According to the American Library Association's website, the law now permits the FBI to compel libraries to produce library Internet use records without a warrant.
While it doesn't directly close down those library terminals, it is certainly comparable to the Chinese practice of requiring video surveillance of cybercafe patrons. And that goes a long way toward discouraging use of the internet for anything that the government doesn't like.
While ICANN has been authorized by Congress, Congress has no legitimate authority to create such a monopoly organization.
Congress is authorized to regulate interstate commerce. There is no monopoly in the domain registar space. There are 193 companies that ICANN has accredited as registars. ICANN regulates these registars, and it is well within congressional authority to set up such a regulatory organization.
Sorry, I meant Melissa virus. Man, that was around 5 years ago, and I worked at a different company. I don't have that email hanging around.
I remember the tone was snide and he said that there were better ways to do what the form was trying to accomplish without using macros, if I really knew how to use Word.
I clearly remember thinking two things. First, that it's messed up that an MS employee was telling me that it was bad to use his company's product as designed, and second, I'm never using stupid Word gimmicks again.
This quote made me stop:
I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
It reminded me of an incident that happened several years ago. I was working at a company with close ties to Microsoft when the "I Love You" virus struck. Both Microsoft and our company were hit hard by it. A couple days after the messy cleanup, I sent a Word doc to a Microsoft employee. It was a form we used often and it had a macro that allowed the recipient to fill in some check boxes.
I got a nasty reply from the microsoft employee about how it was irresponsible to send word docs with macros in this time of virus vulnerability. Since then, I have used as few of the gimmicky features that MS Office supplies. They don't add much to your documents, and they set you up for virus and incompatibility problems. Only using basic features isn't something you should settle for, it is a good rule to follow to avoid lots of nasty problems.
If an artist doesn't want something to be copied, they shouldn't release it.
-- I can honestly say I've never heard this argument used.
I don't think this argument is as ridiculous as it sounds at first blush. During the controversy over the book The Wind Done Gone, I heard the author of the "authorized" sequel to Gone With the Wind say something along the lines of books are the children of an author, and as the book's parent, the author has a right to do anything she wants to do with her child, up to and including killing it, and no one has a right to stop her. Though her analogy is full of flawed logic, I don't think the equation of a work of art with a child is inappropriate. For one thing, our children go out into the world and interact with others, and change them and are changed by them. So too with art.
When you put ideas out into the public, people think about these ideas. They draw conclusions and are led to new lines of thinking that branch off of the original idea. To claim that the author should have some kind of control over these conclusions or new lines of thinking is idiotic, but that didn't stop the estate of Margaret Mitchell to squelch the publishing of The Wind Done Gone.
Some of the new thinking a work may inspire can be antithetical to what the artist was originally trying to convey. I remember hearing an interview with Matt Groening, and he talked about seeing bootleg Simpsons T-shirts with a rastafarian Bart on it. He found them funny and only mildly annoying that they were taking theoretical money from him. But he had also seen his characters used in a comic strip in a white supremacist pamphlet, and found it truly sickening to see his ideas twisted in that way. He said that it was just part of the price you have to pay for putting your ideas out in public.
I admit this doesn't have a lot to do with the wholesale plagerism of websites, but it goes to the argument over the extent of fair use rights. Where does one draw the line between parody, quotation, creative use, and "theft" of "intellectual property?" Perhaps this kind of plagerism is the price we must pay to have an open and dynamic forum like the web to present and discuss ideas.
The problem isn't simply bogus, er, standard software industry release dates, and waiting until a product is ready.The problem is taking money for vaporware. Microsoft sold companies "upgrade" contracts, and then hasn't upgraded the software before the contracts expire.
Now, legally, the companies getting screwed have no recourse. The contracts are worded so Microsoft doesn't have to actually provide the upgrades they announced. But there was a lot of implying that Software Assurance would cover your next round of upgrades. Since it hasn't for most customers, it is going to be a hard sell to get these customers to renew.
This sure reminds me of my favortie Christmas present of 1979, this, although the modern one is so big it must include an expansion set.
I don't think the two situations (hijacker's approved visas and db developer posting confidential data to the internet) are analogous. Yes, they are both screw-ups by people working for the government. But I would argue that the visa screw-up was made because the INS was not set up to fight terrorists. Since 9/11, it's mission has changed dramatically to add that responsibility. But it takes a long time to turn a huge organization around, and 6 months isn't long enough. Previously, the INS mission has fluctuated depending on the whims of the administration in the white house, alternately cracking down on illegal immigration or working to streamline legal immigration, depending on the political winds. Before 9/11, President Bush was interested in making it simpler to acquire a green card and was working on an immigration amnesty for Mexican and other illegal immigrants. The latter was put on hold after 9/11, but was finalized recently. While there is glaring irony in the fact that dead terrorists' visas were approved 6 months after their notorious attack, catching them was not until very recently the job of the INS, and it is wrong to fault them for not changing gears so quickly.
State foster care and child protection services, on the other hand, are set up to protect children. From long experience these agencies are aware of the dangers of giving a mother's new address out to her ex-husband with the history of domestic violence and a restraining order. They have policies in place for that that took years of trial and error and experience to develop. An outsourced developer has no experience with these kinds of risks. A good coder is used to posting questions on the internet asking for suggestions. But that doesn't make him a good coder for sensitive family services data. That is the point the article is making about outsourcing. Sometimes it takes more than just being able to write code cheaply to do the job.
Government agencies deal with sensitive data all the time, and have carefully developed practices and policies in place. These have been developed over years and are part of the culture of the workplace.
When you outsource to a company that specializes in IT work, and that gets outsourced to a database contractor, the sensitive data is no longer in an institution used to handling it. Yes, you might have an unscrupulous or incompetent coder in your orginzation, but you are far more likely to have a problem when you hire someone because they are cheap and they can code. The instititional controls and culture that protect the data are not in place after 3 degrees of outsourcing.
Well, IANAL, so I can't point you to any legal precedents, but I can take your analogy and expand on it.
If you were to give me $10,000 to kill your neighbor, and I knew it was an illegal contract so I didn't kill your neighbor, could I keep the $10,000? Not likely, so I doubt that it would be okay to retain copyright under such a deal either.
Here is a link to the FSF's enforcement philosophy:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
They generally work on infringement issues with software to which they hold the copyright, but they consult for and advise others in infringment situations as well.
On the other hand, it's kind of entertaining. Like rooting against Johnny Fairplay on Survivor, we tune in every week hoping to finally see SCO get their comeuppance.
I accept it as the way companies act today, nothing unusual.
This is what is really bad, and why Belkin thought they could get away with this crap. We have become used to the abuse. We need to stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"
The incredibly onerous and annoying contracts that have become standard parts of software licenses are starting to creep out of the fine print of click-through EULA's that no one ever reads and into everyday life. I think hardware companies look enviously at software companies, with their "no responsiblity for the company/no rights for the user" legal disclaimers. They are increasingly trying to get the same kind of weasely deals for themselves.
But actual physical products are a different animal, and you can't hide how you're screwing the customer behind an "agree" button. If EULA's weren't such confusing legalese, and people actually bothered to understand what they are actually "agreeing" to, I believe we'd all make a bigger stink about it. Fortunately, it's more obvious when physical items try to act like virtual ones.
I was in the process of cutting and pasting Belkin's message into a story submission earlier today when it changed, so I have the original text. The message earlier today read:
Belkin is aware of some recent postings that claim that Belkin wireless routers are spamming users during the setup process and periodically thereafter. It is not now, nor has it ever been, the policy of Belkin to intentionally spam our customers or anyone else. Belkin offers a free trial of our parental control feature in our routers, and to make our customers aware of the feature itself and to give them the opportunity to take advantage of the free trial, we have tried to direct users to the information regarding the parental control features. However, since this has become a source of concern to our users, and it is Belkin policy to address the concerns of our users quickly, Belkin has decided to remove this function from the routers. Each router's firmware that incorporates parental control as an option will be changed.
Please expect more detailed information to follow early next week. Thank you.
Now we have the more concise and concilliatory
We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We will be offering firmware fixes available for download early next week. We do not have exact details yet
but we can tell you now that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed.
Please expect more detailed information to follow early next week. Thank you.
What's next? Will the phone you buy occasionaly redirect your call to a telemarketer? Will your TV remote automatically switch channels to an infomercial? Maybe your car radio could redirect your listening to a clear channel station every
8 hours. These are business models I need to patent...
Bandai makes toys for most of the biggest Japanese licenses. Not just Gundam, but Ultraman, Power Rangers, Digimon, Ultimate Muscle, Hello Kitty, and a lot more. They make DVD's of tons of popular anime, including various Gundam series and Cowboy Bebop. While most of this stuff isn't so big in the US, outside of the otaku community, it is giant in Japan. If Nintendo is able to leverage their ownership into more licensed games for the Japanese market, it could help them sell a lot of consoles and gain back some market share from Sony. I don't think it will have much effect in the US, however.
That's the whole thing with piracy. You are never going to eliminate it because there is a small group of people who will break copy protection just for the intellectual challenge.
What you can do is minimize it. It seems like they did a good job with the GameCube. You can play pirated games on it, but it is such a hassle to do so that the average gamer won't. Only the hardcore hacker.
Incidentally, you to play GameCube ISO's, you need a broadband adapter and a copy of Phantasy Star Online, neither of which were made in large quantities. They will be making more broadband adapters for Mario Kart:Double Dash, but if you want to pirate games, you better be checking ebay or GameStop for a used copy of PSO.
Here's the link to the article about breaking the GameCube disc format:= 03/06/16/ 119233&tid=213
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid
A while back, someone hacked the GameCube disc format. They found a way to get the raw data off of GameCube discs. This data then could be posted to the internet or saved on your computer hard drive. However, that was a pretty useless trick, piracy-wise. You couldn't burn that data to a blank CD and put it into a GameCube and play your pirated games. GameCube discs are custom sized. You can't get a spindle of GCD's at CompUSA, and conventional burning software wouldn't write to it properly if you did. So it was a neat mental excercise, but with no practical applications.
Until now. Now these guys have hacked the GameCube broadband adapter. These adapters are hard to find, and currently the only game that supprots them is Phantasy Star Online (although the new version of Mario Cart coming soon will support it, and they should make more broadband adapters available for that). So now, you can load a game over the GameCube broadband adapter.
Those GameCube discs you previously could rip to your computer, now you can load them to your GameCube over the broadband adapter. That opens the door for piracy pretty wide. It also opens the door for you to load just about any code you want to the GameCube, hence the remarks about a Linux version for the console. So now it is possible to play pirated games our custom software on the cube. It is still a pretty involved and difficult process, involving hard-to-find hardware and requiring a lot of technical know-how, but it is possible.
I think they should have an IQ test before they issue credit cards. Anyone who would input their cc# into an anonymous website would be too stupid to get a credit card.
But I think you are being generous when you refer to the polish "company." It is some hackers who troll for business in IRC chat. What they are doing is probably illegal, but try to get the FBI to expend a ton of resources tracking down an international group of criminal emailers. Boycotting Polish sausage would be like boycotting pizza to protest the mafia.
The article is talking about spam with a link to a web page. The web page has a form to input your credit card number, your address, and how many penis enlargers or cases of viagra you want.
Now, let's look at the removeform.com example. If you do a tracert, you do get an invalid IP address of 1.1.1.1 . However, if you ping www.removeform.com, you get a changing IP address. When I tried it a moment ago, it showed an IP address of 160.81.229.205 . A whois lookup shows that this IP address is owned by Sprint, and is probably a cable modem.
How does it work that a tracert gives one IP address result and a ping give a different result? Because the spammers/hackers have their own DNS nameservers. Their nameservers give out different information depending on the type of request the server receives. If it looks like a request from someone trying to reach a webpage, it gives out an address of a zombie machine with an open proxy. This zombie machine passes the request to either another zombie machine to help further obfuscate the trail, or onto the actual webpage. If it looks like a tracrt request, it can send out an invalid address or other misleading garbage.
I don't understand DNS enough to know why your webbrowser would go to the spammer/hacker's DNS server, rather than your ISP's or one of the root nameservers. Or, more likely, why your ISP's nameserver would go to the spammer/hacker's nameserver and not the root nameserver. How is that spoofed?
Are the zone transfers from the spammer/hacker's domain constantly changing the routes in your ISP's DNS? how often do zone transfers occur? Is it set with a TTL value, and the spammer/hacker's nameserver have a very low TTL?
The article says that the spammer/hackers change their DNS servers frequently, but it seems to me that would be the traceable point. Any smart people out there understand how this might be done?