The fact that Windows crashed yet again isn't what makes this so embarrassing. The embarrassing part is that the failure revealed their dirty little secret that they have Microsoft products deployed. What sort of weird legacy-compatibility requirement does the Olympics have, that imposed the we're-forced-into-using-Microsoft-stuff constraint? Because if you don't have that constraint, it simply doesn't make sense to use Windows. That's their niche, and it's hard to believe the Olympics got caught in it.
Combine that with the fact that Gates just happened to be there, and there's an implication that something dirty happened. Maybe they were paid to use Windows to publicize the platform, or used it because the Chinese are courting Gates over something.
The crash isn't the story. Everybody knows Windows crashes, so yet another example isn't really bad PR in itself. That they got caught using Windows, is. They were even arrogant enough to use it for some kind of public display, like they're untouchable or above accountability or something. The situation reeks.
So, police training should involve mugging practice and fire-fighter training should involve learning how to set fires.
For the police, YES! It's funny that you intended an absurd comparisons, when you actually compared it to something even more sensible, instead of less.
Mugging: putting your power into someone else's face, to take control of a situation and get the other person to comply. Except for the criminal aspect of it, this is part of what police are required to do anyway. A policeman who doesn't know how to mug someone, is probably a very lame policeman.
The fire fighter comparison is weaker, but can be used to explain what is going on. If fire fighters' job were to prevent fires, then absolutely, yes they should start fires as part of their training. (And if you widen the definition of fire fighter to include fire investigators then I'd also say they need to start some fires as part of their training.) The way you learn to prevent something, is to learn how it can happen. And so it is with computer security: if you don't see the ways in, then you don't know what to do about them.
California has tried to modernize its payroll system throughout the past decade, dating back to former Controller Kathleen Connell. It has faced numerous delays as state legislators have avoided investing the $177 million it now will cost.
So get a working procurement system. Payroll software does not cost $177 million. Tell you what: I'll do it for $17.7 million. Of course, someone else will underbid me by yet another factor of ten...
Does the licence say they will replace the media? Find the license (it will obviously be included inside the CD or DVD case) and you'll be able to read its terms.
What, you couldn't find a license? Then they must not have offered you a license.
Maybe that works for RIAA, but for the MPAA, the ads say "own it now." We have very strong evidence from the source that movies are sold and an after-the-sale switcharoo would expose them to so much class-action fraud liability that anyone who tried it risks going out of business.
Not so much evidence there when it comes to music, but common sense can help with that.
Software is realm in which the radical claims of lack-of-sale are happening.
This is what starts to happen when people don't bother to protect their privacy: the notion of privacy itself starts to vanish. If this argument flies, privacy will become a thing of the past, and people who to protect their own privacy will just be labeled as "paranoid weirdos."
I think there is a risk that it could happen just the way you say.
Take email, for example. It is trivial to have absolutely private email, by using pgp. Whether to have privacy or not, is utterly at the discretion of the sender. We currently have both the right to privacy, and the power (real and effective power (e.g. RSA) as opposed to an artificial power such as the right to litigate in court if you find out that someone did read your unencrypted email) to do this.
But people don't do it. And yet they get angry when they realize that their email passes through any number of unprotected systems (owned by people who have no particular duty to the email sender or recipient) where someone might read it, or might even need to read it.
So we create an artificial "right": you have the right to pretend that your unencrypted email is protected, and the government will back up your pretense. Your email has a "reasonable" (*cough* *cough*) expectation of privacy.
Since unencrypted email is considered private by this legal fiction, there is no need for encrypted email. If we were to ban the use of email encryption, then in the eyes of the law, nobody loses anything. Encryption becomes unnecessary. Arguments against banning it, carry no weight. So why not do it? The only people who need encryption, are paranoid weirdos.
The problem with those paranoid weirdos, is that when you talk about unencrypted email having a "reasonable expectation of privacy," they start laughing at your idea of what is reasonable. They call you naive, technologically ignorant, and bereft of common sense. What assholes they are, to go around calling people stupid. All the more reason we need not protect their delusional right to encrypt.
Our irresponsible behavior (failing to protect our privacy and then crying to the government to Do Something when we are "violated") could cost us.
There is no reason we cannot do the same for privacy.
I think there is a reason. There's a clear point where a potential mugger turns into a mugger: when he makes the threat that he will harm if you don't hand over your wallet.
At what point are totally innocuous activities privacy violations?
You're walking outside and I'm walking outside. I see you, but don't know you. Has the crime happened yet?
I pay attention to what you're wearing. Now have I crossed that line?
I go home and write down that I was out walking and saw somebody wearing a blue shirt. Have I gone too far yet?
Someone else who knows you, writes down that he happened to see you on the street that day. Bad?
I upload what I wrote to a website. Crime? The other person uploads what he wrote to a website. Crime?
Someone reads both of these, and puts it together: you were wearing a blue shirt that day. Privacy violation? Or does the violation just happen when he writes his conclusion and shares it with the world?
I don't know how you can protect (create?!) privacy in public, unless you mandate that people aren't allowed to pay attention in public, or aren't allowed to record what they see in public, or aren't allowed to share their thoughts about what they saw in public. None of these things would be tolerable from a civil liberties standpoint, but would be required to create public privacy.
When someone.. says.. "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy", they just mean..
.. that the expectation of privacy is not reasonable.
If you don't want the world to know to wore a blue shirt, then don't go out in public while wearing your blue shirt. It's not reasonable to expect that you can do that, and still have the world be ignorant of what everyone saw.
If I were to be running Linux, with equivalent protection, I'd be right pissed if it could be trivially rootkitted/bypassed by swapping in a malicious bootloader.
But "swapping in a malicious bootloader" requires that the OS be rootkitted/bypassed. Ergo, you essentially said that you would be pissed if compromising the system can be trivially accomplished by merely compromising the system. Well, then I guess you're pissed.
If you are running BitLocker, or if Microsoft resumes implementing Trusted Computing, then you are S.O.L.
I think you left something out of that sentence. Microsoft can resume implementing Trusted Computing and you can still not be S.O.L. It's really easy. Just don't run Windows.
It's easy to say that in hindsight. But we know that having an "X" in one's name makes a thing faster (e.g. Xatom, Nanox) so the experiment had to be tried with changes less radical than doing that.
Isaiah sounds all biblical and stuff, and computer in biblical times were very, very slow (even slower than World War 2 computers), so it was thought that upgrading to a techie-sounding word might improve things, and "nano" is a very techie word (for a word without an "X" at least).
On the other hand, Silverthorne sounds like an internal code name, not nearly dumbed down enough for the mass market. Renaming it to "atom" not only sounds lamer, but implies it's from the "atomic age" (i.e. the 1950s).
By changing each name in an opposite direction, it was hypothesized that it might cause a performance delta on the order of adding an "X". So the experiment was run. Sure, now we know. But did you?
Which is exactly why Leopard will be the last version of Mac OS X that Apple sells at retail. How much is someone willing to bet that you'll have to purchase entire OS updates in the future via some type of Software Update mechanism?
Good. At least it's not a dishonest business practice. Everyone who wants to license software instead of selling it under the terms of copyright, should have to sacrifice all their retail sales. That's just common sense. Retail sales are sales, and customer's expect something they bought to be something they now own. If you pay money and don't sign an agreement that says you're not buying it, then you bought it. If Apple wants to prevent sales of their product, then they need to stop selling it.
If you compare the price of OS X with the price of Vista and then compare the volume of each one and what you get for the money you'll quite easily find out that those $129 or whatever isn't enough for the OS.
That is ridiculous. I can't think of any criteria (whether we're talking about prices or how it works, or whatever), where Vista is a serious benchmark, or even considered "normal." Whether Mac OS X is underpriced or not, I can't say, but this reason for saying it's underpriced, is totally bogus.
Both you and me know that macs sell at a premium and part of the reason to pay for that premium is to be able to use their software.
If so, then maybe they really are charging too little for the software. That's their problem or error, and it's something under their control: they have all the power here. Failure to exercise their power does not create an obligation for others to not buy their product. If Apple wants to discourage sales of their product, they should raise the price or lower the quality.
I suppose you meant that there are still many cross-browser incompatibilities with DOM, CSS and HTML
Don't forget the event handler. It's not even about IE vs FF. It's like IE does things one way, and every single browser on the fucking planet does it another way, and they're all compatible with each other. IE is the one black sheep of the web world. VIC20s will have good browsers before Microsoft makes one.
In other words, a DRM customer's attitude is, "fuck the future." That would explain a lot of today's politics. I can only hope that you are an insignificant minority, but I know that you're actually very typical and in the overwhelming majority.
Maybe if I wanted/needed a different music player, or I cared about saving a few pennies and buying music from Wal-Mart, then I'd start caring about this.
Can that really only happen after you get fucked over, or is there some way that seeing the inevitability of eventually getting fucked over, would make you start caring? Is there anything that can be done about this? (I ask you because presumably something that would make you care, would make a lot of other people care too, and then the situation could start to change. Yes, I'm an optimist.) Seriously: what would it take, to change your position before you get fucked? Is there any way to persuade people to consider their future?
DRM for Video makes sense, especially in a "rental" situation.
I think different people have different definitions of "makes sense." The point of "If you can listen to it, you can record it," is that DRM does not work. Having a rental expire makes sense, but only if expiration really works. Does it makes sense to do things that have no chance of working? Does it make sense to use DRM for rentals when the renter is always going to have the option of keeping the content indefinitely anyway?
It may be that the very idea of a "rental situation," when it comes to renting information, doesn't "make sense."
the whole case stopped being less "funny" and more tragic when..
The two are orthogonal. There's no limit to how sad something can be, while still being joke-worthy. Put a million babies and puppies into a slow shredder that takes 10 minutes to kill each one as they scream in agony and horror while their parents watch, and someone might find something funny to say about it. The thing is, making the joke doesn't mean they're the insensitive monster you say they are. It just means they saw a funny angle. Don't make me quote Mel Brooks.
Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware," according to Sophos's senior technology consultant.. .. Sophos says it doesn't blame Google for the situation...
PC Pro's crack writers say:
Google's Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world's malware hosted on the web
Selling food is not considered speech. Selling software is, apparently, and that might not be much of a stretch. Software is protected by copyright, which implies that it is creative expression. Creative expressions are clearly protected by the first amendment.
Placing legal requirements on the exercise of speech, is a violation of freedom of speech.
If one accepts the premise that publishing a game is a form of speech, then this law would be equivalent to the government passing a requirement that all books be labeled as to whether they are "subversive" or not.
I want to know how providing the consumer more information is a bad thing?
"Bad Thing" is a separate issue from violation of the first amendment. One can make many arguments in favor of violating the first amendment. But, for whatever reason, we have not repealed that amendment yet.
What we need is the opposite of this scheme... We need to store our passwords on our own local trusted machine. Like on our personal mobile phone with tested HW encryption, which requires multifactor ID: thumbprint, voice recog, keyed PIN, retina scan.
OpenID lets you do that, though I haven't heard of a provider implementation that actually does that, yet. Shifting to OpenID is what is going to let you get what you want, because it centralizes the authentication and you can control that central point and lock it down as hard as you want.
The obvious concern here is that if your openid user+pass gets stolen, you just lost everything.
But at least OpenID puts the matter into your hands (if you so desire). If you recycle usernames and passwords (as many people do) then a compromise of any site (and these sites are beyond your control; a third party merely needs to make a mistake, and that happens all the time) and your credentials are compromised and can be used to take your identity on other sites.
With OpenID, if you run your own provider, then a third party cannot compromise you. MySpace could open their whole database up to the public, and the risk to you is nothing.
This is empowering. OpenID doesn't add or remove a risk, so much as it shifts risk. And one of the directions you can shift it (which isn't an option under the non-OpenID system) is to you. Slashdotters (i.e. people supposedly more competent than average at keeping their systems secure) should be ecstatic about this.
A single username/password combination is an idiotic idea which means one site getting compromised compromises ALL websites you've a openID profile... I thought they would learn from that experience when you could have a set of car keys from a Ford in the UK (in the 1970's IIRC), and it would open all the other Ford cars.
You might not understand how OpenID works. You appear to think a compromise of any of the sites compromises them all. Nope. Your OpenID provider is the one and only site whose compromise cascades into the others. You get to pick which is the one site that carries that risk, and that site can even be one under your control running OpenBSD if you like, and you can make it require a 256-bit passphrase and a physical key and and a retina scan, if you desire.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Windows crashed yet again isn't what makes this so embarrassing. The embarrassing part is that the failure revealed their dirty little secret that they have Microsoft products deployed. What sort of weird legacy-compatibility requirement does the Olympics have, that imposed the we're-forced-into-using-Microsoft-stuff constraint? Because if you don't have that constraint, it simply doesn't make sense to use Windows. That's their niche, and it's hard to believe the Olympics got caught in it.
Combine that with the fact that Gates just happened to be there, and there's an implication that something dirty happened. Maybe they were paid to use Windows to publicize the platform, or used it because the Chinese are courting Gates over something.
The crash isn't the story. Everybody knows Windows crashes, so yet another example isn't really bad PR in itself. That they got caught using Windows, is. They were even arrogant enough to use it for some kind of public display, like they're untouchable or above accountability or something. The situation reeks.
For the police, YES! It's funny that you intended an absurd comparisons, when you actually compared it to something even more sensible, instead of less.
Mugging: putting your power into someone else's face, to take control of a situation and get the other person to comply. Except for the criminal aspect of it, this is part of what police are required to do anyway. A policeman who doesn't know how to mug someone, is probably a very lame policeman.
The fire fighter comparison is weaker, but can be used to explain what is going on. If fire fighters' job were to prevent fires, then absolutely, yes they should start fires as part of their training. (And if you widen the definition of fire fighter to include fire investigators then I'd also say they need to start some fires as part of their training.) The way you learn to prevent something, is to learn how it can happen. And so it is with computer security: if you don't see the ways in, then you don't know what to do about them.
So get a working procurement system. Payroll software does not cost $177 million. Tell you what: I'll do it for $17.7 million. Of course, someone else will underbid me by yet another factor of ten...
Does the licence say they will replace the media? Find the license (it will obviously be included inside the CD or DVD case) and you'll be able to read its terms.
What, you couldn't find a license? Then they must not have offered you a license.
Maybe that works for RIAA, but for the MPAA, the ads say "own it now." We have very strong evidence from the source that movies are sold and an after-the-sale switcharoo would expose them to so much class-action fraud liability that anyone who tried it risks going out of business.
Not so much evidence there when it comes to music, but common sense can help with that.
Software is realm in which the radical claims of lack-of-sale are happening.
I think there is a risk that it could happen just the way you say.
Take email, for example. It is trivial to have absolutely private email, by using pgp. Whether to have privacy or not, is utterly at the discretion of the sender. We currently have both the right to privacy, and the power (real and effective power (e.g. RSA) as opposed to an artificial power such as the right to litigate in court if you find out that someone did read your unencrypted email) to do this.
But people don't do it. And yet they get angry when they realize that their email passes through any number of unprotected systems (owned by people who have no particular duty to the email sender or recipient) where someone might read it, or might even need to read it.
So we create an artificial "right": you have the right to pretend that your unencrypted email is protected, and the government will back up your pretense. Your email has a "reasonable" (*cough* *cough*) expectation of privacy.
Since unencrypted email is considered private by this legal fiction, there is no need for encrypted email. If we were to ban the use of email encryption, then in the eyes of the law, nobody loses anything. Encryption becomes unnecessary. Arguments against banning it, carry no weight. So why not do it? The only people who need encryption, are paranoid weirdos.
The problem with those paranoid weirdos, is that when you talk about unencrypted email having a "reasonable expectation of privacy," they start laughing at your idea of what is reasonable. They call you naive, technologically ignorant, and bereft of common sense. What assholes they are, to go around calling people stupid. All the more reason we need not protect their delusional right to encrypt.
Our irresponsible behavior (failing to protect our privacy and then crying to the government to Do Something when we are "violated") could cost us.
I think there is a reason. There's a clear point where a potential mugger turns into a mugger: when he makes the threat that he will harm if you don't hand over your wallet.
At what point are totally innocuous activities privacy violations?
You're walking outside and I'm walking outside. I see you, but don't know you. Has the crime happened yet?
I pay attention to what you're wearing. Now have I crossed that line?
I go home and write down that I was out walking and saw somebody wearing a blue shirt. Have I gone too far yet?
Someone else who knows you, writes down that he happened to see you on the street that day. Bad?
I upload what I wrote to a website. Crime? The other person uploads what he wrote to a website. Crime?
Someone reads both of these, and puts it together: you were wearing a blue shirt that day. Privacy violation? Or does the violation just happen when he writes his conclusion and shares it with the world?
I don't know how you can protect (create?!) privacy in public, unless you mandate that people aren't allowed to pay attention in public, or aren't allowed to record what they see in public, or aren't allowed to share their thoughts about what they saw in public. None of these things would be tolerable from a civil liberties standpoint, but would be required to create public privacy.
If you don't want the world to know to wore a blue shirt, then don't go out in public while wearing your blue shirt. It's not reasonable to expect that you can do that, and still have the world be ignorant of what everyone saw.
But "swapping in a malicious bootloader" requires that the OS be rootkitted/bypassed. Ergo, you essentially said that you would be pissed if compromising the system can be trivially accomplished by merely compromising the system. Well, then I guess you're pissed.
I think you left something out of that sentence. Microsoft can resume implementing Trusted Computing and you can still not be S.O.L. It's really easy. Just don't run Windows.
It's easy to say that in hindsight. But we know that having an "X" in one's name makes a thing faster (e.g. Xatom, Nanox) so the experiment had to be tried with changes less radical than doing that.
Isaiah sounds all biblical and stuff, and computer in biblical times were very, very slow (even slower than World War 2 computers), so it was thought that upgrading to a techie-sounding word might improve things, and "nano" is a very techie word (for a word without an "X" at least).
On the other hand, Silverthorne sounds like an internal code name, not nearly dumbed down enough for the mass market. Renaming it to "atom" not only sounds lamer, but implies it's from the "atomic age" (i.e. the 1950s).
By changing each name in an opposite direction, it was hypothesized that it might cause a performance delta on the order of adding an "X". So the experiment was run. Sure, now we know. But did you?
Good. At least it's not a dishonest business practice. Everyone who wants to license software instead of selling it under the terms of copyright, should have to sacrifice all their retail sales. That's just common sense. Retail sales are sales, and customer's expect something they bought to be something they now own. If you pay money and don't sign an agreement that says you're not buying it, then you bought it. If Apple wants to prevent sales of their product, then they need to stop selling it.
That is ridiculous. I can't think of any criteria (whether we're talking about prices or how it works, or whatever), where Vista is a serious benchmark, or even considered "normal." Whether Mac OS X is underpriced or not, I can't say, but this reason for saying it's underpriced, is totally bogus.
If so, then maybe they really are charging too little for the software. That's their problem or error, and it's something under their control: they have all the power here. Failure to exercise their power does not create an obligation for others to not buy their product. If Apple wants to discourage sales of their product, they should raise the price or lower the quality.
Don't forget the event handler. It's not even about IE vs FF. It's like IE does things one way, and every single browser on the fucking planet does it another way, and they're all compatible with each other. IE is the one black sheep of the web world. VIC20s will have good browsers before Microsoft makes one.
In other words, a DRM customer's attitude is, "fuck the future." That would explain a lot of today's politics. I can only hope that you are an insignificant minority, but I know that you're actually very typical and in the overwhelming majority.
Can that really only happen after you get fucked over, or is there some way that seeing the inevitability of eventually getting fucked over, would make you start caring? Is there anything that can be done about this? (I ask you because presumably something that would make you care, would make a lot of other people care too, and then the situation could start to change. Yes, I'm an optimist.) Seriously: what would it take, to change your position before you get fucked? Is there any way to persuade people to consider their future?
Are you sure you really know that, rather than merely assume it, since it would make perfect sense? Can you cite a law or court ruling?
Anyway, back to music: The mp3.com case's ruling was that sending someone a song they have proven that they already have, is copyright infringement.
There's no reason the situation would be different with software.
Write your legislator.
I think different people have different definitions of "makes sense." The point of "If you can listen to it, you can record it," is that DRM does not work. Having a rental expire makes sense, but only if expiration really works. Does it makes sense to do things that have no chance of working? Does it make sense to use DRM for rentals when the renter is always going to have the option of keeping the content indefinitely anyway?
It may be that the very idea of a "rental situation," when it comes to renting information, doesn't "make sense."
The two are orthogonal. There's no limit to how sad something can be, while still being joke-worthy. Put a million babies and puppies into a slow shredder that takes 10 minutes to kill each one as they scream in agony and horror while their parents watch, and someone might find something funny to say about it. The thing is, making the joke doesn't mean they're the insensitive monster you say they are. It just means they saw a funny angle. Don't make me quote Mel Brooks.
A word in a URL can infringe a trademark? Wow. I guess they should change that part of the URL to "buttheadgamecompany".
PC Pro's crack writers say:
(Emphasis mine.) Journalism at its finest!
Selling food is not considered speech. Selling software is, apparently, and that might not be much of a stretch. Software is protected by copyright, which implies that it is creative expression. Creative expressions are clearly protected by the first amendment.
Placing legal requirements on the exercise of speech, is a violation of freedom of speech.
If one accepts the premise that publishing a game is a form of speech, then this law would be equivalent to the government passing a requirement that all books be labeled as to whether they are "subversive" or not.
"Bad Thing" is a separate issue from violation of the first amendment. One can make many arguments in favor of violating the first amendment. But, for whatever reason, we have not repealed that amendment yet.
OpenID lets you do that, though I haven't heard of a provider implementation that actually does that, yet. Shifting to OpenID is what is going to let you get what you want, because it centralizes the authentication and you can control that central point and lock it down as hard as you want.
But at least OpenID puts the matter into your hands (if you so desire). If you recycle usernames and passwords (as many people do) then a compromise of any site (and these sites are beyond your control; a third party merely needs to make a mistake, and that happens all the time) and your credentials are compromised and can be used to take your identity on other sites.
With OpenID, if you run your own provider, then a third party cannot compromise you. MySpace could open their whole database up to the public, and the risk to you is nothing.
This is empowering. OpenID doesn't add or remove a risk, so much as it shifts risk. And one of the directions you can shift it (which isn't an option under the non-OpenID system) is to you. Slashdotters (i.e. people supposedly more competent than average at keeping their systems secure) should be ecstatic about this.
You might not understand how OpenID works. You appear to think a compromise of any of the sites compromises them all. Nope. Your OpenID provider is the one and only site whose compromise cascades into the others. You get to pick which is the one site that carries that risk, and that site can even be one under your control running OpenBSD if you like, and you can make it require a 256-bit passphrase and a physical key and and a retina scan, if you desire.
So don't use a third party.