But what about Joe Users' activeX sites? Will Firefox work with sites that use activeX? Unfortunately not. Will Joe User see this as a failing of Firefox? Probably. So what can we do to address this issue? Any thoughts?
I'm sure that MS has a shload of security vulnerabilities waiting in the wings. These will only help the argument to switch away from MS.
I got into a pretty heated argument with the help desk when their POP3 server went down. My mail client, Sylpheed, couldn't get mail, but everyone with Exchange could still get their mail over MS's proprietary protocol. "We only support Outlook 2000." I finally gave up, told him I would install it, then didn't and waited for the POP3 server to come back to life (it came back 8 hrs later). A few weeks later, it was time for the outlook virus-du-jour, and everyone except me got hit. In your face, Mr. Helpdesk.
Similarly, if you are trying to convince someone of the virtues of using non-MS solutions, either point to last week's vulnerability (there seems to be a new one each week) or wait one week for the next one. "Did you know that OpenOffice reads MS Word files, except for the virus part?" "Did you realize that Sylpheed doesn't run VBScript viruses that come in your e-mail?" "By the way, only IE is susceptible to that malformed URL exploit." Pretty soon, people come to hate your smug attitude, but deep down inside, they know you're right.
I hit the link to send a comment. What people seem to misunderstand about the F/OSS is how they propose to have free software. F/OSS says the way to have free software is to create it and give it away, but we keep getting portrayed in the press as advocating confiscation or theft of existing software.
Anyway, here's my blurb, which they will promptly ignore.
Your recent story about the MyDoom virus and its [extremely tenuous] connection to linux contained a glaring omission.
You *are* correct that many people who use linux believe that software should be "free," in both the/gratis/ (no cost) and/libre/ (I have the source code, I am free to modify it as I see fit) senses. Others categorize these distinctions as "free as in beer" and "free as in speech."
However, people in the Open Source movement "enforce" such a viewpoint by creating their own software and "freeing" it under license agreements such as the GNU General Public License, or they simply refuse to purchase or use proprietary software.
The idea that all currently existing software should be somehow confiscated and "made free" is restricted to an extremely small subset of people in the free software movement.
There's a nice double meaning in the "CAN SPAM" act. We're supposed to think the "can" means "can it," i.e. throw it in the trash can. What if the House of Misrepresentatives meant "can" as in "able to?"
Maybe the bill was originally called "Attention Scumbags: You CAN SPAM The Whole Freaking World Now," but they shortened it to "CAN SPAM" and got the cover of a double meaning, too.
There's only one problem with that data: the people who set up web servers are not as stupid as the general computer-using population.
A few years ago, number6x's assertion would have been entirely correct, as the only way to get "a lot" of bandwidth was to compromise a system with a high-speed connection, and what better way to find a system than to hit web servers? Nowadays, where DSL and cable modems are wide-spread and the self-install kits say jack about setting up any kind of firewall, it's much easier to get bandwidth for spamming, DDoS'ing, and relaying hack attacks by compromising a home system.
I helped a friend set up her brand-new Dell and the DSL. I had to dig deeper than I should have to turn on the firewall, which should have been ON by default anyway. Then I turned off file-sharing, which should have been OFF by default. THAT is why we have so many Windoze attacks. Remember the BSD mantra? "Secure by default."
Which slavic language is that? I recognize the root "yeb" ("fuck") and the root "mrt" (dead) from my three years of Russian in college. The W seems to indicate Polish - it makes heavy use of w's compared to other slavic languages that use the Roman alphabet.
It seems to says "fuck your dead mother, Darl." Did I interpret correctly?
-paul
P.S. - "ebi se v guza Darl" = "fuck you in the ear, Darl" ? I'd be very interested to know the language for all of the phrases you provided.
I remember doing clever "hacks" on computers that would get you thrown out today. Ah, the old days of Apple ]['s running UCSD pascal. We have 10 computers hooked up to a Corvus 20MB hard drive. You logged in as "STxx" (STation #xx) where x = 00..09.
Some of the highlights included:
Discovering that if you logged in as the same user on two stations and compiled at the same time, the hard drive would crash, requiring a 6-hour restore from tape.
When we found the disassembler "hidden" on the hard drive, and proceeded to step through the log-on program to figure out how to get "admin" rights. (Admin wasn't all that powerful, just a few extra privs. It was mainly the thrill of finding it.)
When we left a program running that repeatedly printed "[Principal's name] is a melon-head. So sayeth the shepherd, so sayeth the flock."
And lest you think I've outgrown it, I was at a seminar last year where a vendor was demonstrating their neat-o solution for adding a web server to your product. We had a complete set up at each seat, including network access. I telnet'ed to the main system (hooked up to a projector) and killed the http task. "Ooops, having a little problem here, let me restart." He restarted, brought up the home page, and then I connected and killed again. That's what happens when there is no security on a system.
Funny, I think you're right. I went and RTFL (L = law) and could not find an exception for research or personal use.
This is where I fall back on a patent version of what LawMeme (IIRC) calls "CopyNorms," the social norms of copyright and what we think it should say, regardless of what the law actually says.
My father was a research chemist, with approximately 40 patents to his name when he retired. I do remember him telling us all about patents (BOOOOOORING) and he said that the whole purpose of publishing a patent after it is granted was so that everybody else could dink around with it and decide if they wanted to license it. Ergo, you are "doing research" to decide if the method/invention patented is worth a license. Now, that is most certainly not in the text of the law, but apparently, this happens quite a bit at the commercial level. And yes, the patent holder is quite likely to find out about it if you decide to make your product without licensing the patent: witness Polaroid's successful suit against Kodak over instant cameras.
As a personal user, a patent holder will not find out about you using their patents in your own stuff. Of course, if you set up a web page to tell others how to do it, it will eventually crop up on their radar screen.
In conclusion, this particular patent appears to heavily suck bollocks.
Yes, because if you roll your own, and unknowingly implement a feature some company has patented, then you don't get the feature yanked out from under you - you get your bank account raided by litigation lawyers.
Only if you commercialize it. You are explicitly allowed to copy something in a patent for your own personal and/or research use. It's when you sell it that you need a license.
Case in point: I will be rolling my own, without the record feature. I plan to digitize our library of tapes (lots of kids' movies and shows) and have playback from an interactive menu. The MPEG's are on a RAID system, which the media player accesses read-only over the network. Turning the player off and on can't corrupt the data, nor can the kids delete videos accidentally. When I want to add something, I'll fire up the video capture on another machine, digitize, edit, etc. and then dump it on the server.
I don't care whose patents I may or may not "infringe" because I'm doing this only for my family. There won't be a new startup company, I won't be selling them on e-bay, and I probably won't even put up a webpage on sourceforge. Ergo, the patents don't matter because I'm not marketing the system.
That's why roll-your-own is still viable, no matter how many "look and feel" or software patents a company has.
Funny, I have an address which I have NEVER put on-line anywhere, yet I get about 10 spams daily, mostly from.ru and.ro domains, but of course the obligatory hjkfdlashjkdfhak@yahoo.com stuff, too.
And no, the address it isn't a dictionary word, nor is is <8 characters, so I doubt they used a dictionary attack. Since my DSL is with PacBell, I bet they sold my e-mail just like they sell my phone number. Bastards.
My older address (since 1996) has a few hundred spams per day caught by Earthlink's Spaminator, and another 50 or 60 every day that get caught by POPFile. That one was put on-line, and used in Usenet (back before Usenet became useless), so it's on every bloody spammer's list. Actual desirable mail is <10 pieces per day.
I haven't had a false positive in over a month. False negatives are a little more frequent, so I still check the spam bucket. Just last night, my "thanks for subscribing" message from Consumer Reports hit the spam bucket, but I grabbed the e-mail address and whitelisted it.
I favour the death penalty for spammer. Publicly. After the first few botched executions, maybe the spam torrent will subside.
The company has not made available for export, directly or indirectly, any part of UNIX covered by their agreement to any country that is currently prohibited from receiving supercomputing technology, including Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and any other such country, through a distribution under the General Public License (GPL) for Linux, or otherwise.
That's right, boys and girls, the GPL is a tool for TERRORISTS and COMMUNISTS!
Every day I see SCO's stock price and I mutter to myself, "it's just not fair."
Don't bring up a specific example of "Person X having to pay lots of taxes," because there will always be someone who doesn't like Person X and thinks it's quite alright that he had to pay a lot of taxes.
It needs to be first considered in the abstract: is it fair that I paid more money, both in $ and %, to several levels of government, than about 50% of the population? I certainly did not receive anything extra from the government for my extra money.
We live in a [mostly] capitalist society. For just about everything but government "services," the more you consume, the more you must pay. Do you want lobster instead of chicken? Pay up. Do you want two meals instead of one? Pay up. A mansion instead of a house? Pay up.
But with government services, all you have to do is keep screaming about your "right" to a living wage, to housing subsidies, free health care, etc. and the Senators and Misrepresentatives will hand it to you on a silver platter. But oh no, they didn't put it on the platter - I did. It was my hard work that was indirectly confiscated to put the money into the government's bank accounts to pay for these government programs.
Finally, a concrete example. I received a bonus of $20K last year. In one day, the government received an extra $9K in taxes. They did bugger all to deserve most of it. Is that fair?
If we had an ammendment in the constitution that clarified the constitution, that the federal government shall not make laws that seek to control the behavior of a person not explicitly harming another person, then what is left for the tyranny of the majority to affect?
Taxes.
The unproductive majority will claim that the wealthier minority must pay for all the social programs. Social programs, are, of course, not in conflict with your proposed amendment, because they aren't trying to control anyone's behaviour (other than "donations" to those programs by the wealthy minority).
Until the government restricts itself, or is restricted, to the specific powers granted it by We The People via the Constitution, we will always have a problem of tyranny - tyranny of the majority, tyranny of the lobbyists, or tyranny of one of the two major parties.
If a few hundred thousand americans showed up on the doorstep of the whitehouse, weapons and ballots raised, and demanded that their voting system be put back into order, and demanded that they don't fuck with them, the congressman would do it or order mass genocide.
My money's on the "mass genocide" option. Handgun possession is completely illegal in D.C. (bye-bye 2nd amendment since 1977), and any rifle or shotgun must not only be unloaded, but at least partially disassembled. The crowd would last all of 2 minutes 30 seconds before the cops started machine-gunning them down.
And of course, it's all in the name of the "war on terror" because the only reason to possess a firearm (thanks, Herr Schumer, Fraulein Clinton, und Fraulein Feinstein!) is for terrorism. Al Qaeda operatives will of course come to the US to buy machine guns, where it takes 6 months and $10K, rather than pay $100 cash at a street market in Kandahar. Fucking Nazis. (Sorry, Godwin.)
-paul
Payment in stock == swirling the bowl
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
The last place I worked offered the "exciting opportunity to receive part of your pay in stock" when the company hit a cash crunch. Looking back, it was just the last in a series of signs that we were swirling the bowl.
We can only hope that this is true for SCO as well, especially when it's their lawyers that they're paying with stock. Talk about making a pact with the devil.
They have fixed the link. Love this weasel-language:
Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.
"May have patents"??? Come right out and say it, f***wads, do you or do you not have patents on this stuff. They're sounding like SCO.
SCO: our code is copied into linux. Pay us. No, we won't say which code, just pay us $699 and we'll give you a binary license.
MS: we may have patents covering the Office ML. We won't say if we do or don't, so just accept this [for now] royalty-free license.
Do I get extra points for linking MS and SCO in the same comment?
Would somebody please get their facts straight? Blockbuster rents R-rated movies everywhere in the country, including Utah. BB (not Utah) demands editted-down versions of some flicks, such as Showgirls and Basic Instinct.
There are companies in Utah which will sell you an editted version of a movie, if that's what you want to buy. It started with Titanic, where people thought it was a great movie (it wasn't) except for Kate Winslet's nude scene. So a company sprang up to sell original VHS tapes that had a little editting applied to them to remove the naughty bits. The key was that the tapes were shrink-wrap packages straight off the shelf, for which everybody got paid (copyright respected), but then the store cut down the tape to remove the "offensive" part. This is exactly what I do with my kids' Disney tapes, except it's the 15 minutes of previews at the beginning that I cut out; open the tape, cut, respool, and presto! the movie starts as soon as I plunk it in the VCR.
Reminds me of the Co$ documents being included in a court filing in Sweden. Suddenly, the "trade secrets" are publicly available from the Swedish courts to anyone anywhere who will pay the [small] copying fee.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that MS has a shload of security vulnerabilities waiting in the wings. These will only help the argument to switch away from MS.
I got into a pretty heated argument with the help desk when their POP3 server went down. My mail client, Sylpheed, couldn't get mail, but everyone with Exchange could still get their mail over MS's proprietary protocol. "We only support Outlook 2000." I finally gave up, told him I would install it, then didn't and waited for the POP3 server to come back to life (it came back 8 hrs later). A few weeks later, it was time for the outlook virus-du-jour, and everyone except me got hit. In your face, Mr. Helpdesk.
Similarly, if you are trying to convince someone of the virtues of using non-MS solutions, either point to last week's vulnerability (there seems to be a new one each week) or wait one week for the next one. "Did you know that OpenOffice reads MS Word files, except for the virus part?" "Did you realize that Sylpheed doesn't run VBScript viruses that come in your e-mail?" "By the way, only IE is susceptible to that malformed URL exploit." Pretty soon, people come to hate your smug attitude, but deep down inside, they know you're right.
And right is more important than being popular.
-paul
I hit the link to send a comment. What people seem to misunderstand about the F/OSS is how they propose to have free software. F/OSS says the way to have free software is to create it and give it away, but we keep getting portrayed in the press as advocating confiscation or theft of existing software.
Anyway, here's my blurb, which they will promptly ignore.
-paulMaybe the bill was originally called "Attention Scumbags: You CAN SPAM The Whole Freaking World Now," but they shortened it to "CAN SPAM" and got the cover of a double meaning, too.
-paul
A few years ago, number6x's assertion would have been entirely correct, as the only way to get "a lot" of bandwidth was to compromise a system with a high-speed connection, and what better way to find a system than to hit web servers? Nowadays, where DSL and cable modems are wide-spread and the self-install kits say jack about setting up any kind of firewall, it's much easier to get bandwidth for spamming, DDoS'ing, and relaying hack attacks by compromising a home system.
I helped a friend set up her brand-new Dell and the DSL. I had to dig deeper than I should have to turn on the firewall, which should have been ON by default anyway. Then I turned off file-sharing, which should have been OFF by default. THAT is why we have so many Windoze attacks. Remember the BSD mantra? "Secure by default."
-paul
Which slavic language is that? I recognize the root "yeb" ("fuck") and the root "mrt" (dead) from my three years of Russian in college. The W seems to indicate Polish - it makes heavy use of w's compared to other slavic languages that use the Roman alphabet.
It seems to says "fuck your dead mother, Darl." Did I interpret correctly?
-paul
P.S. - "ebi se v guza Darl" = "fuck you in the ear, Darl" ? I'd be very interested to know the language for all of the phrases you provided.
Some of the highlights included:
And lest you think I've outgrown it, I was at a seminar last year where a vendor was demonstrating their neat-o solution for adding a web server to your product. We had a complete set up at each seat, including network access. I telnet'ed to the main system (hooked up to a projector) and killed the http task. "Ooops, having a little problem here, let me restart." He restarted, brought up the home page, and then I connected and killed again. That's what happens when there is no security on a system.
-paul
This is where I fall back on a patent version of what LawMeme (IIRC) calls "CopyNorms," the social norms of copyright and what we think it should say, regardless of what the law actually says.
My father was a research chemist, with approximately 40 patents to his name when he retired. I do remember him telling us all about patents (BOOOOOORING) and he said that the whole purpose of publishing a patent after it is granted was so that everybody else could dink around with it and decide if they wanted to license it. Ergo, you are "doing research" to decide if the method/invention patented is worth a license. Now, that is most certainly not in the text of the law, but apparently, this happens quite a bit at the commercial level. And yes, the patent holder is quite likely to find out about it if you decide to make your product without licensing the patent: witness Polaroid's successful suit against Kodak over instant cameras.
As a personal user, a patent holder will not find out about you using their patents in your own stuff. Of course, if you set up a web page to tell others how to do it, it will eventually crop up on their radar screen.
In conclusion, this particular patent appears to heavily suck bollocks.
-paul
Only if you commercialize it. You are explicitly allowed to copy something in a patent for your own personal and/or research use. It's when you sell it that you need a license.
Case in point: I will be rolling my own, without the record feature. I plan to digitize our library of tapes (lots of kids' movies and shows) and have playback from an interactive menu. The MPEG's are on a RAID system, which the media player accesses read-only over the network. Turning the player off and on can't corrupt the data, nor can the kids delete videos accidentally. When I want to add something, I'll fire up the video capture on another machine, digitize, edit, etc. and then dump it on the server.
I don't care whose patents I may or may not "infringe" because I'm doing this only for my family. There won't be a new startup company, I won't be selling them on e-bay, and I probably won't even put up a webpage on sourceforge. Ergo, the patents don't matter because I'm not marketing the system.
That's why roll-your-own is still viable, no matter how many "look and feel" or software patents a company has.
-paul
And no, the address it isn't a dictionary word, nor is is <8 characters, so I doubt they used a dictionary attack. Since my DSL is with PacBell, I bet they sold my e-mail just like they sell my phone number. Bastards.
My older address (since 1996) has a few hundred spams per day caught by Earthlink's Spaminator, and another 50 or 60 every day that get caught by POPFile. That one was put on-line, and used in Usenet (back before Usenet became useless), so it's on every bloody spammer's list. Actual desirable mail is <10 pieces per day.
I haven't had a false positive in over a month. False negatives are a little more frequent, so I still check the spam bucket. Just last night, my "thanks for subscribing" message from Consumer Reports hit the spam bucket, but I grabbed the e-mail address and whitelisted it.
I favour the death penalty for spammer. Publicly. After the first few botched executions, maybe the spam torrent will subside.
-paul
That's right, boys and girls, the GPL is a tool for TERRORISTS and COMMUNISTS!
Every day I see SCO's stock price and I mutter to myself, "it's just not fair."
-paul
Don't bring up a specific example of "Person X having to pay lots of taxes," because there will always be someone who doesn't like Person X and thinks it's quite alright that he had to pay a lot of taxes.
It needs to be first considered in the abstract: is it fair that I paid more money, both in $ and %, to several levels of government, than about 50% of the population? I certainly did not receive anything extra from the government for my extra money.
We live in a [mostly] capitalist society. For just about everything but government "services," the more you consume, the more you must pay. Do you want lobster instead of chicken? Pay up. Do you want two meals instead of one? Pay up. A mansion instead of a house? Pay up.
But with government services, all you have to do is keep screaming about your "right" to a living wage, to housing subsidies, free health care, etc. and the Senators and Misrepresentatives will hand it to you on a silver platter. But oh no, they didn't put it on the platter - I did. It was my hard work that was indirectly confiscated to put the money into the government's bank accounts to pay for these government programs.
Finally, a concrete example. I received a bonus of $20K last year. In one day, the government received an extra $9K in taxes. They did bugger all to deserve most of it. Is that fair?
-paul
Taxes.
The unproductive majority will claim that the wealthier minority must pay for all the social programs. Social programs, are, of course, not in conflict with your proposed amendment, because they aren't trying to control anyone's behaviour (other than "donations" to those programs by the wealthy minority).
Until the government restricts itself, or is restricted, to the specific powers granted it by We The People via the Constitution, we will always have a problem of tyranny - tyranny of the majority, tyranny of the lobbyists, or tyranny of one of the two major parties.
-paul
My money's on the "mass genocide" option. Handgun possession is completely illegal in D.C. (bye-bye 2nd amendment since 1977), and any rifle or shotgun must not only be unloaded, but at least partially disassembled. The crowd would last all of 2 minutes 30 seconds before the cops started machine-gunning them down.
And of course, it's all in the name of the "war on terror" because the only reason to possess a firearm (thanks, Herr Schumer, Fraulein Clinton, und Fraulein Feinstein!) is for terrorism. Al Qaeda operatives will of course come to the US to buy machine guns, where it takes 6 months and $10K, rather than pay $100 cash at a street market in Kandahar. Fucking Nazis. (Sorry, Godwin.)
-paul
We can only hope that this is true for SCO as well, especially when it's their lawyers that they're paying with stock. Talk about making a pact with the devil.
-paul
"May have patents"??? Come right out and say it, f***wads, do you or do you not have patents on this stuff. They're sounding like SCO.
SCO: our code is copied into linux. Pay us. No, we won't say which code, just pay us $699 and we'll give you a binary license.
MS: we may have patents covering the Office ML. We won't say if we do or don't, so just accept this [for now] royalty-free license.
Do I get extra points for linking MS and SCO in the same comment?
-paul
There are companies in Utah which will sell you an editted version of a movie, if that's what you want to buy. It started with Titanic, where people thought it was a great movie (it wasn't) except for Kate Winslet's nude scene. So a company sprang up to sell original VHS tapes that had a little editting applied to them to remove the naughty bits. The key was that the tapes were shrink-wrap packages straight off the shelf, for which everybody got paid (copyright respected), but then the store cut down the tape to remove the "offensive" part. This is exactly what I do with my kids' Disney tapes, except it's the 15 minutes of previews at the beginning that I cut out; open the tape, cut, respool, and presto! the movie starts as soon as I plunk it in the VCR.
I think I had a point in there somewhere.
-paul
Enjoy.
Reminds me of the Co$ documents being included in a court filing in Sweden. Suddenly, the "trade secrets" are publicly available from the Swedish courts to anyone anywhere who will pay the [small] copying fee.
-paul