that a genocidal maniac would try to stop the free passage of information!
censored Internet usage is the LEAST of the troubles in Zimbabwe. How about famine? Wholesale murder of the farmers?
Censored internet usage is just one more measure that the genocidal maniac is using to try to keep the outside world from learning about the particular abuses. In that sense, it is a problem that deserves attention, because it allows the other, much more serious problems to fester and grow.
Here's a hint: you don't have to fill out accurate information on the form to get the discount card. Just ask Consuelo Rodriguez, 123 Any St., whose name is associated with my discount card. Of course, this particular store does not have the name come up when the card is scanned, so they don't question why a white male would have a hispanic female's name on the card. Also, the NYTimes (soul-sucking registration required) believes that I am an american indian born in 1900, living in zip code 10000.
In the end, we both win. The stupormarket gets the data that "a family" (indicated by purchases of milk, cereal, diapers, etc.) also buys certain things *only* when they go on sale, and I get to keep my privacy. Until the day they pop up a purchase history on-screen as I'm checking out...
I don't get these guys. How soulless do you have to be to outright lie about what you own, when you bought it, and the terms of an otherwise perfectly clear license?
Ooops, now SCO will sue me, too.
P.S. If you thought GPL was "viral," listen to SCO sometime: anyone who has ever seen the SysV source code can never work on an OS again, because that makes it a "non-literal derivative." Jeez.
So, the 2nd amendment says "the right of the people..." Who does the ACLU think "the people" are? The same "people" who are mentioned in the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 10th amendments? Surely the ACLU would not say that the freedoms in the 1st amendment actually mean that the state government can publish its own newspaper, rather than its true meaning of an individual's right?
The Bill of Rights enumerates pre-existing rights; it doesn't grant use any rights at all. And if the 2nd really meant "the states," then why does the 10th mention "states" and "people" in the same sentence?
It comes down to the truth that the rights recognized by the Bill of Rights are all individual rights. When you "define away" one of those rights (any one of them), you put the others in grave danger. And all to serve a political agenda. Sad, really.
The site has a very large hosts file that resolves many ad-serving hosts to 127.0.0.1, i.e. your local host. My browser displays a nice red X instead of a banner ad, and it just makes surfing the web so much easier. The list is updated regularly.
I'm not the maintainer, just a satisfied "customer."
Government grants - we the people benefit from music, so surely what we want is we the people to fund it.
That is wrong on so many levels I scarely know where to begin.
What the government pays for, the government expects to control. And please wake up; this is 2004. It is no longer "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Someone else is in control, not vox populi.
those in charge of issuing grants determine what music deserves to be made
We already have a system like this, sort of. It's called "the record store." The people in charge of issuing grants are the consumers. Granted, a large number of them are deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid, but their money spends just as well. Ask Britney Spears if you don't believe me.
Yes, the RIAA gets in the way. Massive media control of the airwaves also gets in the way. But that didn't stop me from discovering a lot of great bands on IUMA and MP3.com (oh, how we miss you, MP3.com).
Of course, compromises will have to be made - music about sex, politics, religion, or that uses any of the words George Carlin was fined for protesting about his inability to use on television, will obviously not be made.
Who the fuck died and made you king?
We don't want tax payer's money spent on that
That's the first thing you've said with which I agree. Consumers, not taxpayers, should decide. Let's examine: if someone is completely deaf, should they get a tax deduction for this new "music tax"? After all, it's not like they can hear it, so why should they pay for it? And then you start to open up a huge can of worms (legitimate, though) about taxes for schools when people either don't have children, or send them to private schools, tax dollars funding the military when the tax payer is a Quaker or Jehovah's Witness, tax dollars going to the NEA to produce such wondrous works of art as "Piss Christ," and so on.
if the government issuing grants means that alternative sources of funding dry up,
This is what gave us the modern welfare state. People don't give to private charity because they can't afford to (after Uncle Sam has raped them), or they figure "not my concern, the government runs a soup kitchen on the other side of town." And we all know how well the government-run welfare system works. No waste, no fraud, no political patronage there, right?
well, that's just a positive side effect that will keep America clean
Noble thought, but no. If you could magically make all "gangsta rap" disappear overnight, the little thugs would still be shooting each other the next morning. The music does not cause the behaviour; the music is made to reflect the fact that the behaviour is already occuring. Those who create and those who consume such music desire (openly or subconciously) for said behaviours to continue. Put it this way: if you didn't believe on some level that "bustin' a cap" was the way to solve a problem, would you listen to music that advocated it as the solution?
Back to my point: government funding of anything is so very rarely the best way to go. Let them build roads, string power lines, and protect the nation. Leave the rest to the market.
My next point is that your stance is inconsistent with itself.
Conceded. Partly.
Everyone votes in his own best interest, damn the rest. So, here are the stances, grossly oversimplified:
Hardworking Joe: I vote for lower taxes and less "social justice" programs, and to hell with the people who don't want to work. Let private charity help those who want to be helped, and let the shiftless and lazy starve.
Social Justice "beneficiary": I vote for higher taxes on everybody so that I can still eat even though I don't want to work. I couldn't be arsed to stay in school, learn a useful skill, or get up and go to work. Social justice demands that I deserve money from your paycheck even though I didn't do sh*t to help you earn it.
Both are voting in their own interests to the detriment of the other, but who is morally right? The one who expects others (and himself) to be hard workers and self-reliant, or the one who expects the government to pick pockets on his behalf? Can you say "ant and grasshopper" ?
You say that voting should be based on something other than personal greed, immediately followed up by a complaint that the riches one has accumulated aren't being taken into account.
I do not define greed as the desire to keep or give away (yes, I do) as I see fit the money I have earned through my hard work. I resent that part of my paycheck is forcibly taken from me and given to causes that I would never willingly support. The point is that taxes paid are the easiest way I can think of in 5 minutes to measure contribution to this particular society, and are therefore a good first step to deciding who gets to steer the Ship of State and who should be grateful they're not cast overboard as dead weight.
Of course I realize that ST was a distopia of sorts. The larger point I was trying to make is that we need people voting based on something other than personal greed. ST presented one possible scenario, where those interested only in their own gain could not easily obtain the political power to exploit the remainder of society.
The problem, from my Ayn-Randian viewpoint, is that your single vote counts the same, regardless of whether you made a shload of money and paid millions of dollars in taxes, or if you did nothing and decided to draw welfare instead of getting off your ass and getting a job. Who contributed more to society? And therefore, who should be having more say in how the country is run?
Finally, let's shoot down your next argument, which will be that I'm only saying this because it would benefit me. It wouldn't. Because of deductions for home mortgage interest, deductions for dependents, tax credits for children, and deductions for charitable contributions, I will pay less than $1000 in taxes on my 1040 this year. (I'm ignoring the Social Security pyramid scheme.) Therefore, my vote would probably not count as much in a new system based on the very idea I'm promulgating. And there we are, back to the idea that the people willing to forgo their own personal gain for the betterment of society in general are the very ones who should be determining which way society goes.
Voting by mail is subject to coercion. Think about it; you get your ballot by mail how long before the election? Plenty of time for people to lean on you and sway your vote.
Word goes around the factory: anyone who "knows what's good for him" needs to take their ballot to their union foreman, vote the union's slate, and seal and sign it right there. Oh, it's never that obvious, and nobody comes right out and says it, but the whispers go around, nudge nudge, wink wink, and a lot of people get the message.
Absentee voting is still necessary, but it must not be the default or, even worse, only choice.
It sickens me the turnout of registered voters in the US of A is as low as it is. But at the same time, it is really such a crime against humanity that once in a while we might have to get out of our cars and step away from the keyboard and be a member of the community for a few moments?
If you're so lazy that voting from home is the only way you'll vote, I don't want you voting; you don't deserve it.
For an enlightening view on civic responsibility, read Starship Troopers sometime. Every citizen has all rights and privleges except the right to vote (and hold office). Voting is reserved for those who have served in the military. The teacher in History of Moral Philosophy explains it thusly: (paraphrased) this system ensures that every voter has demonstrated, through difficult and dangerous service, that he is willing to place the good of society above his desire for personal gain.
I don't buy into "noble sacrifice of self" for some "greater good," (I tend more towards Ayn Rand), but I think that with the federal government having so much power to intrude into our lives (and pocketbooks), it would be preferrable to have only "self-sacrificing" people voting how much money is stolen from me.
I worked the polls in CA for the recall election last October. Per the training, it is flat-out ILLEGAL to ask any voter for identification if they state a name and address that is on the rolls and has not already voted. If they are not on the rolls, or get the address wrong, we have procedures that involve ID (some picture, some not), but as long as they get the name and address right, they get a ballot.
The excuse is that asking for ID "intimidates" minorities, and thereby violates their civil rights, but the real reason is that it makes it easier for non-citizens and dead people to vote. We rank slightly behind Chicago in our voter turnout from cemetaries.
Of course, I would be much more upset about illegals and dead people voting if I thought that voting could change anything. I still vote; I just feel like Sisyphus when I do it.
-paul
Re:You obviously never played a DOS game, did you?
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OS Independent Games?
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· Score: 1
Developer's don't want to be hamstrung with driver nightmare and only 650MBs (minus space for an OS and drivers) of space.
Aside from your misuse of the apostrophe (the plural does not use an apostrophe), I'd like to point out your flagrant mischaracterization of a CD's capacity: "only 650MB." This is the problem with games today: cram more crap into the CD to make up for the fact that it's basically a recycled game. You see it in the movies, too: special effects to compensate (they don't) for the lack of a plot or character depth and richness.
I recently dug an old Atari 800XL out of storage, dusted it off, and played some games: Boulder Dash, Galaxian, World Karate Championship, MULE, Pastfinder, and so on. Any of those games fit on an 88KB floppy; some fit on an 8KB cartridge. Back when quality of your code mattered, because you couldn't count on Joe User having the latest 3.0 GHz chip to compensate for all the bloatware.
"Why back in my day, they said 640KB was enough for anybody! And I used to dream of having 640KB, because my 6502-based machine only had 64KB total, and 16KB of that was for the system ROMs!"
political speech which gets a much higher level of protection.
Ummm, you missed that Campaign Finance "Reform" law, didn't you? A felony to state the name of a candidate for federal office 60 days before the election, unless you happen to be a newspaper or TV station.
I'm getting very worried about my nick coming true sooner rather than later.
Well, since you are French, there is only one thing you can do:
SURRENDER to the authorities.
Seriously, though, this sucks ass.
However, I'm quite sure that you're a terrorist, because we all know that terrorists publish the exploits they find. Why, back in June of 2001, I saw an article about how to smuggle knives onto airplanes. I also remember seeing an article shortly after that about putting plastic explosive in your shoes (i.e. Richard Reid). Come on, folks, people who find and PUBLISH weaknesses in software are not the problem.
In 1996, I stumbled across IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive. The service provided free downloads from bands that had paid to put up a page and a free song or two. I found a song I really liked. I ordered the album, and loved it. So, I ordered the band's catalog to date. With each new release, I bought it: seven CD's in all. I bought a poster and two t-shirts as well. Plus three more CD's from the artist's side project. All because of an "evil" MP3 (actually, MP2!) file. I can re-tell that story with MP3.com and a few other bands.
But none of those bands were RIAA whores, and that's what scares the suits at the RIAA. Loss of control. It's been said about guns, but we'll adapt and say it about copyright, too: "copyright control mechanisms are not about copyright; it's all about control."
This leads to the conclusion that firewall/AV software should be included as part of the baseline system
That's a very good suggestion, except that in this case, the firewall software was the vulnerable component. No BlackICE, no Witty worm.
I'm deeply troubled by this; we piss and moan about how the average windoze luser doesn't have a firewall or AV software, and then this pops up.
Much as I would like to, I can't blame this on Microsoft. It's just sloppy programming, the sort of practice that M$ has made prevalent. There, I blamed M$ after all. Still, changing the permission model of Windoze wouldn't have helped this; BlackICE is exactly the sort of software that needs access to the network protocol stacks; it's supposed to be one of the trusted portion of the system, as compared to all those VBScript viruses that run as admin/root, but shouldn't.
If I were designing a new CPU, I would think about including some hard-core stack protection. A no-execute bit in the MMU is a very good start, but still not bullet-proof. I'm thinking something (with OS assistance) to disallow all access beyond the link pointer for the current function call. Every CALL sets a new boundary, and every RET pops back to the last boundary. Try to write past the boundary, and you get a machine exception. Much finer granularity than 4K pages that most 32-bit MMU's provide.
I have to use outlook at work, much as I do not like it.
My work also has a "standard load" of software programs which includes Outhouse, Turd, and Exhell. But, thanks to our policy of "everyone has local admin privs on their machine" (WTF?), I had no trouble installing Sylpheed and OpenOffice.
Guess who didn't get hit with the latest outbreak? Yes, people get tired of hearing you gloat about "gee, your e-mail is down, hmmm, could it be that piece of shite MS Outhouse you still insist on using?" but really, it's quite fun to rub it in to the fanboi's faces that MS bent them over again.
Sorry for bringing up SCO, but in light of the parent pointing out the true nature of "Trust" in TCPA, consider SCO claiming to terminate IBM's license. SCO updates a few settings in their auth servers, and then the next time your AIX box phones home, you're dead in the water. And instead of blaming SCO for being asshats, most lusers would blame IBM for not settling with SCO sooner.
Consider also the Viacom vs. Dish squabble, when Dish went nuclear and pulled the channels. SCO could have done the same thing to IBM if TCPA were pervasive. I for one will not be purchasing any system that includes TCPA.
The company sees itself as educating people about its rights in the same way that the RIAA - the US music industry body - has sued individuals in an attempt to prevent the free trade in copyrighted music.
We all know how well the RIAA is faring in public opinion.
Watch the stuporbowl commercials next year:
IBM will have 12-year-old kids saying, "I'm one of the many people sued by SCO for using Linux, but we're here to tell the world, we will still use free software!"
How about you just use a format that doesn't leak this kind of information, and is not filled with macro viruses? I can think of several, some "free beer" and others "free speech." PDF and PostScript come to mind first, but there's also OpenOffice and SGML. I'm sure there's a shload more.
I've never understood why people send out an edittable format (yes, OOo and SGML are edittable; I prefer to send a PDF) when they're disseminating what is conceptually read-only information. Does anyone who receives these lawsuit documents have any reason to edit them?
[dons asbestos underwear] While the death penalty may not serve as a deterrent, it has one very redeeming feature: the recividism rate is precisely ZERO.
I don't care about deterrence; I want the low-life removed from society permanently and irrevocably.
Imagine, total invasion of privacy, random searches, mandatory ID checks, and a large hit on our right to travel, all to counteract something that has killed about 3,000 people in the US in the past five or so years, and has killed exactly zero people in the US in the past two years.
Careful, there. The proponents of such heavy-handed police-state tactics point to the fact that no-one in the U.S. has died from terrorism in the last two years as incontestible proof that the invasion of privacy, restrictions of rights, and nearly strip-searching large-breasted young adult women in public at the airport does, in fact WORK and protect us from evil terrorists.
Just this morning on the news, the talking heads were yammering on about the alleged leak of NT source code. On comment jumped out at me: "some [security researchers] are worried that hackers will be able to use the source code to find new vulnerabilities."
Chew on that for a moment. If the only thing keeping Windows from being 0WN3D on a daily basis is that hackers can't see the source code so they know exactly what function is vulnerable, then how secure is the code? We call that "security through obscurity," and it's really no security at all.
Of course, Open Source means that those same hackers can read the Linux or *BSD code to look for vulnerabilities, but so can a lot of people who are interested in making the system more secure.
Consider the scenario: a F/OSS developer discovers a huge security hole in the code for the FooBar 1.1 release. It will take a huge amount of effort to fix, and so the F/OSS community will have to continue using FooBar 1.0 for 3 more months. Irritating, but manageable.
Now consider if it's a programmer at MS or any other commercial software outfit. Will your customers wait 3 more months? Will your boss appreciate the impact you just had on the company's finances? Might the bug be "papered over" in order to not impact delivery to customers? Is that really in the best interest of the customer, especially if the customer is a large finance company?
-paul
Re:Scooby Snacks: Think of the butter
on
SCOoby Snacks
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls. But I think this guy isn't quite trolling; he may have drunk the kool-aid.
IANAL, the contract between Novell and SCO seems pretty iron-clad as far as allowing Novell to direct SCO to waive any rights that Novell sees fit for them to waive. So, it seems that regardless of whether or not "SCO's [man]butter" was used to "bake the cake," (per your analogy) SCO doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Argue all you want about derivative works or stolen code, it appears that SCO is little more than a middleman, and Novell holds all the power. Now we just have to pray that Novell doesn't abuse it.
Slashdot Mirror
Censored internet usage is just one more measure that the genocidal maniac is using to try to keep the outside world from learning about the particular abuses. In that sense, it is a problem that deserves attention, because it allows the other, much more serious problems to fester and grow.
-paul
In the end, we both win. The stupormarket gets the data that "a family" (indicated by purchases of milk, cereal, diapers, etc.) also buys certain things *only* when they go on sale, and I get to keep my privacy. Until the day they pop up a purchase history on-screen as I'm checking out ...
-paul
-paul
I don't get these guys. How soulless do you have to be to outright lie about what you own, when you bought it, and the terms of an otherwise perfectly clear license?
Ooops, now SCO will sue me, too.
P.S. If you thought GPL was "viral," listen to SCO sometime: anyone who has ever seen the SysV source code can never work on an OS again, because that makes it a "non-literal derivative." Jeez.
-paul
The Bill of Rights enumerates pre-existing rights; it doesn't grant use any rights at all. And if the 2nd really meant "the states," then why does the 10th mention "states" and "people" in the same sentence?
It comes down to the truth that the rights recognized by the Bill of Rights are all individual rights. When you "define away" one of those rights (any one of them), you put the others in grave danger. And all to serve a political agenda. Sad, really.
-paul
I'm not the maintainer, just a satisfied "customer."
-paul
That is wrong on so many levels I scarely know where to begin.
What the government pays for, the government expects to control. And please wake up; this is 2004. It is no longer "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Someone else is in control, not vox populi.
We already have a system like this, sort of. It's called "the record store." The people in charge of issuing grants are the consumers. Granted, a large number of them are deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid, but their money spends just as well. Ask Britney Spears if you don't believe me.
Yes, the RIAA gets in the way. Massive media control of the airwaves also gets in the way. But that didn't stop me from discovering a lot of great bands on IUMA and MP3.com (oh, how we miss you, MP3.com).
Who the fuck died and made you king?
That's the first thing you've said with which I agree. Consumers, not taxpayers, should decide. Let's examine: if someone is completely deaf, should they get a tax deduction for this new "music tax"? After all, it's not like they can hear it, so why should they pay for it? And then you start to open up a huge can of worms (legitimate, though) about taxes for schools when people either don't have children, or send them to private schools, tax dollars funding the military when the tax payer is a Quaker or Jehovah's Witness, tax dollars going to the NEA to produce such wondrous works of art as "Piss Christ," and so on.
This is what gave us the modern welfare state. People don't give to private charity because they can't afford to (after Uncle Sam has raped them), or they figure "not my concern, the government runs a soup kitchen on the other side of town." And we all know how well the government-run welfare system works. No waste, no fraud, no political patronage there, right?
Noble thought, but no. If you could magically make all "gangsta rap" disappear overnight, the little thugs would still be shooting each other the next morning. The music does not cause the behaviour; the music is made to reflect the fact that the behaviour is already occuring. Those who create and those who consume such music desire (openly or subconciously) for said behaviours to continue. Put it this way: if you didn't believe on some level that "bustin' a cap" was the way to solve a problem, would you listen to music that advocated it as the solution?
Back to my point: government funding of anything is so very rarely the best way to go. Let them build roads, string power lines, and protect the nation. Leave the rest to the market.
-paul
Conceded. Partly.
Everyone votes in his own best interest, damn the rest. So, here are the stances, grossly oversimplified:
Hardworking Joe: I vote for lower taxes and less "social justice" programs, and to hell with the people who don't want to work. Let private charity help those who want to be helped, and let the shiftless and lazy starve.
Social Justice "beneficiary": I vote for higher taxes on everybody so that I can still eat even though I don't want to work. I couldn't be arsed to stay in school, learn a useful skill, or get up and go to work. Social justice demands that I deserve money from your paycheck even though I didn't do sh*t to help you earn it.
Both are voting in their own interests to the detriment of the other, but who is morally right? The one who expects others (and himself) to be hard workers and self-reliant, or the one who expects the government to pick pockets on his behalf? Can you say "ant and grasshopper" ?
I do not define greed as the desire to keep or give away (yes, I do) as I see fit the money I have earned through my hard work. I resent that part of my paycheck is forcibly taken from me and given to causes that I would never willingly support. The point is that taxes paid are the easiest way I can think of in 5 minutes to measure contribution to this particular society, and are therefore a good first step to deciding who gets to steer the Ship of State and who should be grateful they're not cast overboard as dead weight.
-paul
The problem, from my Ayn-Randian viewpoint, is that your single vote counts the same, regardless of whether you made a shload of money and paid millions of dollars in taxes, or if you did nothing and decided to draw welfare instead of getting off your ass and getting a job. Who contributed more to society? And therefore, who should be having more say in how the country is run?
Finally, let's shoot down your next argument, which will be that I'm only saying this because it would benefit me. It wouldn't. Because of deductions for home mortgage interest, deductions for dependents, tax credits for children, and deductions for charitable contributions, I will pay less than $1000 in taxes on my 1040 this year. (I'm ignoring the Social Security pyramid scheme.) Therefore, my vote would probably not count as much in a new system based on the very idea I'm promulgating. And there we are, back to the idea that the people willing to forgo their own personal gain for the betterment of society in general are the very ones who should be determining which way society goes.
-paul
Word goes around the factory: anyone who "knows what's good for him" needs to take their ballot to their union foreman, vote the union's slate, and seal and sign it right there. Oh, it's never that obvious, and nobody comes right out and says it, but the whispers go around, nudge nudge, wink wink, and a lot of people get the message.
Absentee voting is still necessary, but it must not be the default or, even worse, only choice.
-paul
If you're so lazy that voting from home is the only way you'll vote, I don't want you voting; you don't deserve it.
For an enlightening view on civic responsibility, read Starship Troopers sometime. Every citizen has all rights and privleges except the right to vote (and hold office). Voting is reserved for those who have served in the military. The teacher in History of Moral Philosophy explains it thusly: (paraphrased) this system ensures that every voter has demonstrated, through difficult and dangerous service, that he is willing to place the good of society above his desire for personal gain.
I don't buy into "noble sacrifice of self" for some "greater good," (I tend more towards Ayn Rand), but I think that with the federal government having so much power to intrude into our lives (and pocketbooks), it would be preferrable to have only "self-sacrificing" people voting how much money is stolen from me.
-paul
The excuse is that asking for ID "intimidates" minorities, and thereby violates their civil rights, but the real reason is that it makes it easier for non-citizens and dead people to vote. We rank slightly behind Chicago in our voter turnout from cemetaries.
Of course, I would be much more upset about illegals and dead people voting if I thought that voting could change anything. I still vote; I just feel like Sisyphus when I do it.
-paul
Aside from your misuse of the apostrophe (the plural does not use an apostrophe), I'd like to point out your flagrant mischaracterization of a CD's capacity: "only 650MB." This is the problem with games today: cram more crap into the CD to make up for the fact that it's basically a recycled game. You see it in the movies, too: special effects to compensate (they don't) for the lack of a plot or character depth and richness.
I recently dug an old Atari 800XL out of storage, dusted it off, and played some games: Boulder Dash, Galaxian, World Karate Championship, MULE, Pastfinder, and so on. Any of those games fit on an 88KB floppy; some fit on an 8KB cartridge. Back when quality of your code mattered, because you couldn't count on Joe User having the latest 3.0 GHz chip to compensate for all the bloatware.
"Why back in my day, they said 640KB was enough for anybody! And I used to dream of having 640KB, because my 6502-based machine only had 64KB total, and 16KB of that was for the system ROMs!"
-paul
Ummm, you missed that Campaign Finance "Reform" law, didn't you? A felony to state the name of a candidate for federal office 60 days before the election, unless you happen to be a newspaper or TV station.
I'm getting very worried about my nick coming true sooner rather than later.
-paul
SURRENDER to the authorities.
Seriously, though, this sucks ass.
However, I'm quite sure that you're a terrorist, because we all know that terrorists publish the exploits they find. Why, back in June of 2001, I saw an article about how to smuggle knives onto airplanes. I also remember seeing an article shortly after that about putting plastic explosive in your shoes (i.e. Richard Reid). Come on, folks, people who find and PUBLISH weaknesses in software are not the problem.
-paul
But none of those bands were RIAA whores, and that's what scares the suits at the RIAA. Loss of control. It's been said about guns, but we'll adapt and say it about copyright, too: "copyright control mechanisms are not about copyright; it's all about control."
-paul
That's a very good suggestion, except that in this case, the firewall software was the vulnerable component. No BlackICE, no Witty worm.
I'm deeply troubled by this; we piss and moan about how the average windoze luser doesn't have a firewall or AV software, and then this pops up.
Much as I would like to, I can't blame this on Microsoft. It's just sloppy programming, the sort of practice that M$ has made prevalent. There, I blamed M$ after all. Still, changing the permission model of Windoze wouldn't have helped this; BlackICE is exactly the sort of software that needs access to the network protocol stacks; it's supposed to be one of the trusted portion of the system, as compared to all those VBScript viruses that run as admin/root, but shouldn't.
If I were designing a new CPU, I would think about including some hard-core stack protection. A no-execute bit in the MMU is a very good start, but still not bullet-proof. I'm thinking something (with OS assistance) to disallow all access beyond the link pointer for the current function call. Every CALL sets a new boundary, and every RET pops back to the last boundary. Try to write past the boundary, and you get a machine exception. Much finer granularity than 4K pages that most 32-bit MMU's provide.
-paul
Guess who didn't get hit with the latest outbreak? Yes, people get tired of hearing you gloat about "gee, your e-mail is down, hmmm, could it be that piece of shite MS Outhouse you still insist on using?" but really, it's quite fun to rub it in to the fanboi's faces that MS bent them over again.
-paul
Consider also the Viacom vs. Dish squabble, when Dish went nuclear and pulled the channels. SCO could have done the same thing to IBM if TCPA were pervasive. I for one will not be purchasing any system that includes TCPA.
-paul
We all know how well the RIAA is faring in public opinion.
Watch the stuporbowl commercials next year: IBM will have 12-year-old kids saying, "I'm one of the many people sued by SCO for using Linux, but we're here to tell the world, we will still use free software!"
-paul
I've never understood why people send out an edittable format (yes, OOo and SGML are edittable; I prefer to send a PDF) when they're disseminating what is conceptually read-only information. Does anyone who receives these lawsuit documents have any reason to edit them?
-paul
I don't care about deterrence; I want the low-life removed from society permanently and irrevocably.
-paul
Careful, there. The proponents of such heavy-handed police-state tactics point to the fact that no-one in the U.S. has died from terrorism in the last two years as incontestible proof that the invasion of privacy, restrictions of rights, and nearly strip-searching large-breasted young adult women in public at the airport does, in fact WORK and protect us from evil terrorists.
-paul
Just this morning on the news, the talking heads were yammering on about the alleged leak of NT source code. On comment jumped out at me: "some [security researchers] are worried that hackers will be able to use the source code to find new vulnerabilities."
Chew on that for a moment. If the only thing keeping Windows from being 0WN3D on a daily basis is that hackers can't see the source code so they know exactly what function is vulnerable, then how secure is the code? We call that "security through obscurity," and it's really no security at all.
Of course, Open Source means that those same hackers can read the Linux or *BSD code to look for vulnerabilities, but so can a lot of people who are interested in making the system more secure.
Consider the scenario: a F/OSS developer discovers a huge security hole in the code for the FooBar 1.1 release. It will take a huge amount of effort to fix, and so the F/OSS community will have to continue using FooBar 1.0 for 3 more months. Irritating, but manageable.
Now consider if it's a programmer at MS or any other commercial software outfit. Will your customers wait 3 more months? Will your boss appreciate the impact you just had on the company's finances? Might the bug be "papered over" in order to not impact delivery to customers? Is that really in the best interest of the customer, especially if the customer is a large finance company?
-paul
IANAL, the contract between Novell and SCO seems pretty iron-clad as far as allowing Novell to direct SCO to waive any rights that Novell sees fit for them to waive. So, it seems that regardless of whether or not "SCO's [man]butter" was used to "bake the cake," (per your analogy) SCO doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Argue all you want about derivative works or stolen code, it appears that SCO is little more than a middleman, and Novell holds all the power. Now we just have to pray that Novell doesn't abuse it.
-paul