...is how did someone manage to download, store and transfer 90,000 classified documents and not be noticed?
I know there will be a lot of finger-pointing at Wikileaks for publishing the data on their website, but for the information to have been leaked in the first place should raise even more questions.
That's the problem with big expensive publicly-announced efforts to protect against known attacks. The bad guys tend to not be idiots, and don't do what you expect. Come on, we can't even protect ourselves from our own stupidity, like when a trader accidentally enters an order for a billion rather than a million. If our systems are so fragile, then it doesn't take much. Oh, and what makes anyone thing that we don't have insiders willing to initiate cyber attacks? A big fire wall on the ourside doesn't help much there.
There is no conflict between the right to free speech and the exclusive rights of copyright. Just like there is no conflict to your right to free assembly and my right to prevent you from exercising that right in my back yard (private property).
Congress has the right to regulate copyright, and courts have the right to interpret the 1st amendment. Both have spoken. Some don't like what they said. That's fine. Its a free country. Elect someone else.
At first glance this sounds somewhat like what happens when a company joins a standards committee, for those organizations that develop open standards, e.g., W3C, OASIS, etc. Patents controlled by members that are necessary to implement the standard are made available to implementers of the standards (whether a member or not). I actually think this is preferable to this DPL idea. On the on hand, open standards protect all implementers of the standard, not just the smaller number of those who actually write the standard. Second, by being more targeted to a specific technological areas, you actually see big companies, e.g., IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc., participate in standards development.
But what big company will contribute ALL of their patents to a pool, not even limited by technological area? Good luck with that. Maybe you'll get some small companies, but it will have the same impact as when Trinidad signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
In any case I think FOSS needs to always keep in mind that coming together to create a standard behind your technology is a great way to set it strengthen it from the IP perspective. Most companies with patent portfolios know how to get involved with open standards.
If you are still using I.E. 6 then you do not have "Corporate IT". Someone should go into the server room and poke the guy with a stick, and see if he moves. If not, call 911 on your rotary phone.
The complexity is that a modern book can have a large number of owners, who may have come together and agreed to publish a given book, or even a given edition of the book. But republication, translation, adaption for the stage, movies, song lyrics, etc., all need to be negotiated separately. It gets even crazier with video, since then you have musician rights, composer rights, etc.
URLs map ascii codes to web pages that return characters. So http://ascii.org/65 returns a page with the character 'A'.
I can then send any possible libelous message entirely using hyperlinks, without actually publishing the message on my website.
Hmmm...
I think this is less about the technology and more about the intent. If I link to an article, I can do it in a neutral way, in a critical way, or in a supportive way. I can use it to bolster my argument or just as a reference to the reader. I think what matters is what my entire web page says, taken as a whole, including the hyperlinks in the context of that page. I believe there are ways of linking to libelous content that are defamatory. And I believe there are ways to do this that are not defamatory.
The cases that worry me more are the ones that concern linking (especially deep linking) and copyright.
This case is about defamation, apprently the written kind which is called libel.
From what I can see (and I am not a lawyer or Canadian), the following has been held:
The gist of the torts of libel and slander is the publication of matter (usually words) conveying a defamatory imputation. A defamatory imputation is one to a man's discredit, or which tends to lower him in the estimation of others, or to expose him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or to injure his reputation in his office, trade or profession, or to injure his financial credit. The standard of opinion is that of right-thinking persons generally. To be defamatory an imputation need have no actual effect on a person's reputation; the law looks only to its tendency. A true imputation may still be defamatory, although its truth may be a defence to an action brought on it; conversely untruth alone does not render an imputation defamatory.
Thomas v CBC 1981 4 WWR 289
I would be surprised if this case was decided on technical analysis of the exact nature of a hyperlink in HTML. (Of course I am often surprised) I think they might decide based on the effect of publishing the hyperlink. If it has the effect of slander, then it is slander.
Office 2010 will conform to the Transitional consumer and producer classes defined in the OOXML standards. Any bugs that are found in the shipped version of Office 2010 will be "fixed" by retroactively changing the standards to match what Office actually does, as is currently being done by Microsoft-packed SC34/WG4 committee with similar bugs found in Office 2007's OOXML support.
Office 2010 will not have conforming support for OOXML Strict producer or consumer classes.
Office 2010 will write dozens of non-interoperable, proprietary extensions into their OOXML documents, extensions which are not defined by the OOXML standards and which have not been reviewed or standardized by any standards committee and which will not be fully interoperable with other OOXML editors, or even with previous versions of MS Office.
Every one of these has come to pass. If the scales are falling from Alex's eyes, then great. But the rest of us saw this coming a long time ago. In fact, Microsoft told us at the SC34 meeting in Seattle last year that the "Strict" conformance class would not be supported until Office 16. Alex knows that. So it is odd that he is pretending that this is something unexpected.
The coverage of record on this story, from the beginning, through the dark days and the brighter days, and on until the very end, has been Groklaw. I highly recommend taking a look there for more commentary.
Software is not so different from other engineering disciplines that we cannot learn from the best practices of adjacent fields. Although no human endeavor -- other than being Pope -- is infallible, we do see disciplined attempts to measure, manage and improve quality levels. The point is not to reduce the quality level to zero, but to know what your quality level is and be able to hit your mark. What level of quality is needed will depend on the market, your customers, the competition, the frequency of releases, whether the software is easily updated or burned into firmware and devices, etc.
In the end, the best way to create higher quality software is not to find and fix more bugs. It is to use a disciplined approach to programming that introduces fewer bugs in the first place. If you focus on defect detection and removal, then you are fighting the wrong battle. You can't win doing it that way. Quality software comes from a disciplined process at all stages, from requirements to testing, and not just as an endgame activity to sway as many bugs as you can.
If statistical results are quoted to tenths of a percent, e.g., "1.3 percent in Italy" and there is no backup data, including a statement on sample sizes or significance, then I dismiss it as the work of a marketing department hack.
Not necessarily a bad thing. Similarly, if my house catches on fire, it is a good thing that the city sends a fire truck to put it out. But I don't call that "fire insurance". They are entirely different things.
According to Wikipedia, Insurance is, "a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss".
But with the mandate for coverage of pre-existing conditions, I don't see how there is a contingent aspect of this anymore. It is like selling "fire insurance" coverage for houses that are already on fire. That is not really "insurance".
You can call the new health care legislation many things, but it is more in the nature of a new medical welfare program than any form of insurance as we know it, since it does not appear that costs are based on actuarial risks.
160GB iPods store video and photos. That's only 200 hours of video. Many of us have enough CDs and DVDs to legitimately fill 160GB. Also, there is a lot of free content out there, podcasts, etc. Can also boot iPod as a disk and store other files, documents, etc.
Question: What happens to fines from those who are charged with illegal file sharing? Does that all go to the government's general fund? Or any of that make its way back to starving artists? If not, that might be a better way to handle this.
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in the U.S. a tax on something does not make it legal. Remember, Al Capone was finally caught for income tax evasion. That doesn't mean that his business activities were legit. And the U.S. once sold marijuana tax stamps, and I remember reading about a proposal to have a cocaine tax. It doesn't make it legal. It just gives the government another way to go after someone.
In other words, it is perfectly possible to have a tax on illegal activities.
Let's have a tax on crowbars, because some will use it to break into houses and not be caught. And a new tax on automobiles, because some will go through red lights and not be caught. And a new tax on shoes, because some people will jaywalk and not be caught. And a tax on thinking because some will commit thought crimes and not be caught.
The article quotes the IIPA recommendation on Indonesia:
Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.
I think this is is seriously flawed logic. It appears to falsely equate "value" and "intellectual creation" with a proprietary, commercial development model. Proprietary IP rights are a way to exploit the value of intellectual creations. But proprietary rights are not the source of their value. We can give "due consideration to the value of intellectual creations" without discriminating against open source. Maybe buy the developer a beer or send them a thank you note, or better yet, a bug report or patch?
We used to laud those benevolent spirits who contributed to the public good with no thought of remuneration. Now it seems we try to outlaw them. There might be a movie idea here.... The Police unions get together and sue Batman for doing pro bono work...
They make their profit on their monopoly products and lose money on almost everything else. That is why the methods they use to maintain these monopolies continue to be the subject of antitrust investigations.
This also demonstrates that they are very good at maintaining their monopoly, but not so good at successful new product development. With a stagnant pipeline, they are especially at risk as FOSS alternatives like Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice become less "alternative" and more "maintstream".
This is great news. Open standards, like other forms of openness, spreads like wildfire. In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark. A similar pattern occurred in South America, with Brazil proving to be the center of influence.
So the question is: who is next?
That's some might fine rewriting of history. When Microsoft was selling OOXML to ISO, Microsoft played up the custom XML feature as the biggest innovation since angle brackets. Whenever someone suggested they just use ODF, Microsoft would argue that ODF lacked custom XML support and that this feature was valuable and essential for business process integration. They trotted out business partner after business partner saying how important custom XML was. Now it is dismissed as a little used, obscure feature. Very interesting. So, was OOXML sold to ISO on a fraudulent premise?
And btw, "custom XML" is mentioned over 1,000 times in the OOXML specification. Further, note that Microsoft's solution for "fixing" Word is to have it strip custom XML from DOCX files when reading it. So how can you say that the patent has nothing to do with OOXML if the remedy to work around the patent involves removing custom XML from the OOXML documents?
Slashdot Mirror
...is how did someone manage to download, store and transfer 90,000 classified documents and not be noticed?
I know there will be a lot of finger-pointing at Wikileaks for publishing the data on their website, but for the information to have been leaked in the first place should raise even more questions.
That is what I really want. I can buy a Dell without a monitor, so why not without an operating system?
I have my own monitor already, and my own OS. It doesn't make sense to force me to by either of them.
That's the problem with big expensive publicly-announced efforts to protect against known attacks. The bad guys tend to not be idiots, and don't do what you expect. Come on, we can't even protect ourselves from our own stupidity, like when a trader accidentally enters an order for a billion rather than a million. If our systems are so fragile, then it doesn't take much. Oh, and what makes anyone thing that we don't have insiders willing to initiate cyber attacks? A big fire wall on the ourside doesn't help much there.
There is no conflict between the right to free speech and the exclusive rights of copyright. Just like there is no conflict to your right to free assembly and my right to prevent you from exercising that right in my back yard (private property).
Congress has the right to regulate copyright, and courts have the right to interpret the 1st amendment. Both have spoken. Some don't like what they said. That's fine. Its a free country. Elect someone else.
At first glance this sounds somewhat like what happens when a company joins a standards committee, for those organizations that develop open standards, e.g., W3C, OASIS, etc. Patents controlled by members that are necessary to implement the standard are made available to implementers of the standards (whether a member or not). I actually think this is preferable to this DPL idea. On the on hand, open standards protect all implementers of the standard, not just the smaller number of those who actually write the standard. Second, by being more targeted to a specific technological areas, you actually see big companies, e.g., IBM, Google, Microsoft, etc., participate in standards development.
But what big company will contribute ALL of their patents to a pool, not even limited by technological area? Good luck with that. Maybe you'll get some small companies, but it will have the same impact as when Trinidad signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
In any case I think FOSS needs to always keep in mind that coming together to create a standard behind your technology is a great way to set it strengthen it from the IP perspective. Most companies with patent portfolios know how to get involved with open standards.
I hope someone sees that the naming scheme is going to run into trouble when they reach the letter 'X'.
What is the best they can do? Ubuntu 24.0 (Xanthic Xerus) ?
If you are still using I.E. 6 then you do not have "Corporate IT". Someone should go into the server room and poke the guy with a stick, and see if he moves. If not, call 911 on your rotary phone.
What am I missing?
The complexity is that a modern book can have a large number of owners, who may have come together and agreed to publish a given book, or even a given edition of the book. But republication, translation, adaption for the stage, movies, song lyrics, etc., all need to be negotiated separately. It gets even crazier with video, since then you have musician rights, composer rights, etc.
I think Lessig gave us one of the best reads on this problem a couple of months ago: http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2010/02/05_lessig.html
URLs map ascii codes to web pages that return characters. So http://ascii.org/65 returns a page with the character 'A'.
I can then send any possible libelous message entirely using hyperlinks, without actually publishing the message on my website.
Hmmm... I think this is less about the technology and more about the intent. If I link to an article, I can do it in a neutral way, in a critical way, or in a supportive way. I can use it to bolster my argument or just as a reference to the reader. I think what matters is what my entire web page says, taken as a whole, including the hyperlinks in the context of that page. I believe there are ways of linking to libelous content that are defamatory. And I believe there are ways to do this that are not defamatory.
Hmmm... maybe we need a new rel attribute value.
The cases that worry me more are the ones that concern linking (especially deep linking) and copyright.
This case is about defamation, apprently the written kind which is called libel.
From what I can see (and I am not a lawyer or Canadian), the following has been held:
Thomas v CBC 1981 4 WWR 289
I would be surprised if this case was decided on technical analysis of the exact nature of a hyperlink in HTML. (Of course I am often surprised) I think they might decide based on the effect of publishing the hyperlink. If it has the effect of slander, then it is slander.
That and more from my 2009 blog post
Every one of these has come to pass. If the scales are falling from Alex's eyes, then great. But the rest of us saw this coming a long time ago. In fact, Microsoft told us at the SC34 meeting in Seattle last year that the "Strict" conformance class would not be supported until Office 16. Alex knows that. So it is odd that he is pretending that this is something unexpected.
The coverage of record on this story, from the beginning, through the dark days and the brighter days, and on until the very end, has been Groklaw. I highly recommend taking a look there for more commentary.
Software is not so different from other engineering disciplines that we cannot learn from the best practices of adjacent fields. Although no human endeavor -- other than being Pope -- is infallible, we do see disciplined attempts to measure, manage and improve quality levels. The point is not to reduce the quality level to zero, but to know what your quality level is and be able to hit your mark. What level of quality is needed will depend on the market, your customers, the competition, the frequency of releases, whether the software is easily updated or burned into firmware and devices, etc.
In the end, the best way to create higher quality software is not to find and fix more bugs. It is to use a disciplined approach to programming that introduces fewer bugs in the first place. If you focus on defect detection and removal, then you are fighting the wrong battle. You can't win doing it that way. Quality software comes from a disciplined process at all stages, from requirements to testing, and not just as an endgame activity to sway as many bugs as you can.
If statistical results are quoted to tenths of a percent, e.g., "1.3 percent in Italy" and there is no backup data, including a statement on sample sizes or significance, then I dismiss it as the work of a marketing department hack.
Not necessarily a bad thing. Similarly, if my house catches on fire, it is a good thing that the city sends a fire truck to put it out. But I don't call that "fire insurance". They are entirely different things.
According to Wikipedia, Insurance is, "a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss".
But with the mandate for coverage of pre-existing conditions, I don't see how there is a contingent aspect of this anymore. It is like selling "fire insurance" coverage for houses that are already on fire. That is not really "insurance".
You can call the new health care legislation many things, but it is more in the nature of a new medical welfare program than any form of insurance as we know it, since it does not appear that costs are based on actuarial risks.
160GB iPods store video and photos. That's only 200 hours of video. Many of us have enough CDs and DVDs to legitimately fill 160GB. Also, there is a lot of free content out there, podcasts, etc. Can also boot iPod as a disk and store other files, documents, etc. Question: What happens to fines from those who are charged with illegal file sharing? Does that all go to the government's general fund? Or any of that make its way back to starving artists? If not, that might be a better way to handle this.
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in the U.S. a tax on something does not make it legal. Remember, Al Capone was finally caught for income tax evasion. That doesn't mean that his business activities were legit. And the U.S. once sold marijuana tax stamps, and I remember reading about a proposal to have a cocaine tax. It doesn't make it legal. It just gives the government another way to go after someone. In other words, it is perfectly possible to have a tax on illegal activities.
Let's have a tax on crowbars, because some will use it to break into houses and not be caught. And a new tax on automobiles, because some will go through red lights and not be caught. And a new tax on shoes, because some people will jaywalk and not be caught. And a tax on thinking because some will commit thought crimes and not be caught.
I think this is is seriously flawed logic. It appears to falsely equate "value" and "intellectual creation" with a proprietary, commercial development model. Proprietary IP rights are a way to exploit the value of intellectual creations. But proprietary rights are not the source of their value. We can give "due consideration to the value of intellectual creations" without discriminating against open source. Maybe buy the developer a beer or send them a thank you note, or better yet, a bug report or patch?
We used to laud those benevolent spirits who contributed to the public good with no thought of remuneration. Now it seems we try to outlaw them. There might be a movie idea here.... The Police unions get together and sue Batman for doing pro bono work...
They make their profit on their monopoly products and lose money on almost everything else. That is why the methods they use to maintain these monopolies continue to be the subject of antitrust investigations.
This also demonstrates that they are very good at maintaining their monopoly, but not so good at successful new product development. With a stagnant pipeline, they are especially at risk as FOSS alternatives like Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice become less "alternative" and more "maintstream".
This is great news. Open standards, like other forms of openness, spreads like wildfire. In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark. A similar pattern occurred in South America, with Brazil proving to be the center of influence. So the question is: who is next?
That's some might fine rewriting of history. When Microsoft was selling OOXML to ISO, Microsoft played up the custom XML feature as the biggest innovation since angle brackets. Whenever someone suggested they just use ODF, Microsoft would argue that ODF lacked custom XML support and that this feature was valuable and essential for business process integration. They trotted out business partner after business partner saying how important custom XML was. Now it is dismissed as a little used, obscure feature. Very interesting. So, was OOXML sold to ISO on a fraudulent premise? And btw, "custom XML" is mentioned over 1,000 times in the OOXML specification. Further, note that Microsoft's solution for "fixing" Word is to have it strip custom XML from DOCX files when reading it. So how can you say that the patent has nothing to do with OOXML if the remedy to work around the patent involves removing custom XML from the OOXML documents?
Even King Hammurabi got it better than this. At least he ensured the laws were open to all.