firewall/route all outgoing SMTP traffic to a dummy box on your LAN; the spammers think their mail went out, and it goes to straight to/dev/null. If they never pay, so what? You've spiked their efforts, and can turn'em in to the Feds for a reward.
admin/nopassword... ??? (just kidding!) Perhaps it's unkind to Cisco to think that if they were so stupid as to do it once, they're stupid enough to do it twice, but one never knows.
Yes, Wi-Fi is an area of spotty hardware support, as it is developing and changing so rapidly. FWIW, I suggest using external WiFi bridges for desktop systems where internal cards are troublesome, and sticking to known-functional WiFi cards for laptops.
Of course, I try to avoid WiFi for my networks 'cause even its encrypted modes are not very secure...
Yup. They did the same with Internet Exploder, if you recall. Of course, that was a rather more important product for most users, but the principle's the same.
Well, the following considerations have a strong impact on my view of the privacy issues:
1) Scammer was using a public Internet cafe. For that matter, he was using the Internet, and don't we all understand that anything going out over the 'Net unencrypted can be considered seen by many eyes? There's no reasonable expectation of privacy in this situation. I certainly don't expect more privacy at an Internet cafe than I can get from using SSL on a machine I control; SMTP traffic is effectively public.
2) Scammer was caught in flagrante delicto, turned in by the sysadmin on the basis of unsolicited information from a public source. This is far, far from the situation where Ashcroft tracks my every 'Net transaction in the absence of probable cause. (And the police in this case VERY likely have probable cause to get a warrant to search the perp's computer and crack his codes.)
Even if this weren't a spam case, (say, a kidnapping or extortion rap instead), I don't see a fundamental issue of concern in the specific circumstances involved. I worry much more about snooping in the absence of clear evidence of a crime (yes, Mr. Ashcroft, I mean YOU).
Janus is the Roman god of doorways, gates, passages, preventing people from copying music, etc.
So, with a clearer view of history we can now see that the grandeur of Imperial Rome was brought low by... a bunch of file-swapping Goths and some Vandals pirating MP3s! SPQR conquered by P2P. No wonder the RIAA are quaking in their togas and lace-up sandals.
SCO has admitted no trade secrets were misappropriated; they dropped that claim, and cannot resurrect it now. Standing alone, the loony-tune derivative works theory will fall flat with a bang, and the "we terminated their AIX license" claim is multiply invalid. So they have NO case against IBM.
IBM, OTOH, has an airtight GPL violation case against SCO, even if SCO hasn't put GPL'ed code into proprietary products (a likely event which IBM should now be in a position to know about from discovery). THAT puts SCO out of business if IBM so desires; no SCOSource program, no OpenLinux distro, no Linux Kernel Personalities, probably no UnixWare at all. And IBM has no motivation to be merciful.
Just because the US middle class hasn't been fully impoverished YET (and we're NOT better off than we were ten years ago!) doesn't mean that continuing outsourcing WON'T do it. Why should one expect a relatively highly-paid workforce with political rights and high expectations to be able to compete with much-lower-paid folk who can't unionize and don't get health insurance or retirement benefits, and will work for peanuts even by local standards 'cause any job is better than none?
With outsourcing trends as they are, we are rather likely to get what Neal Stephenson describes in Snow Crash as an globally-distributed layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would call prosperity. Unfortunately for us in the US, *we* will call it "abject poverty".
I once had a Crocker Bank ATM in California give me $40 and a receipt, and the withdrawal never showed up on my account. The bank staff ABSOLUTELY REFUSED TO BELIEVE the transaction had occurred, even when sent a copy of the receipt; they claimed that all the balances on the ATM machines added up properly, everything was consistent, nothing was missing or mislaid (hence implying I was mistaken. Would that I were thus mistaken more often.) I eventually closed that account, and Crocker later went under. Gee, I wonder why?
It boggles the mind how bankers could be so indifferent to their money going missing like that. As a programmer, I know that ANY (memory / money) leak of whatever size is trouble on the wing and must be tracked to its source, and it ought to be a matter of course for bankers to think likewise. Competent, honest ones, anyway...
OK, I happen to share that suspicion. Problem is, PayPal limits you to a $2K cumulative transaction total if you don't give them access to an account (which I won't do, at least not an account I use for anything else). How do you deal with that? I suppose one could close the account and open another, but I suspect their terms of use frown on that.
The only solution I can see is opening a special-purpose bank account for PayPal use only, and feeding it only what it needs for the transactions I authorize. Which is rather a lot of inconvenience for the convenience of one-click shopping...
So, following the likely course of things, majority ownership of TrollTech might pass into the hands of... IBM, as the winner of the countersuit against SCO. Or (puts on waaay-long-odds cap) perhaps the winners of a copyright-infringement suit against SCO based on the Linux kernel code we all suspect is in their "Linux Kernel Personality" code... including Linus Torvalds!
These folks write and consult and teach about Windows drivers. I've followed their newsletter ever since I had to write an NT kernel driver for some custom I/O hardware, in case I ever needed to do another one (blechh!).
According to their newsletter at www.osronline.com, XP SP2 will include mandatory runtime memory pool overrun checking for all drivers. While this will improve the OS' security, it will ALSO cause mysterious failures on upgraded systems due to poorly-written legacy XP drivers. I make no judgements as to the wisdom of this course, but it's definitely worth knowing about beforehand. Of course, if they'd done this FROM THE START, then there would be no failures from it with the upgrade...
Well, given their behavior vs IBM, they *might* well do so, I agree. Of course, their less-than-spectacular success in that endeavor, plus the case law IBM is already citing that one cannot do exactly that thing, lead one to suppose they won't be much more successful here, either. One hopes, anyway.
BTW, their stock is tanking, their earnings report was very bad, and The Motley Fool rates them the best short-sell candidate they've seen in a while. Looks like the wheels are beginning to fall off.
Yeah, it's inevitable he'll have to be deposed or testify if the case goes to trial, but his testimony (and/or Autozone's paper trail for the process) will kill the case dead, so it may well be worth the inconvenience (that's easy for ME to say...).
Of course, unless SCO can provide evidence with their complaint that their libraries WERE used, it may well not get to trial (remember that plaintiffs have to already have evidence of wrongdoing to sue, they cannot simply go discovery-fishing for it). For example, a sworn deposition and paper trail showing no improper use of SCO libraries could well result in a summary dismissal, if SCO does not show any reasonable prospect of prevailing on the merits. I think that is likely in this case.
Fyodor (or any author of GPL'ed work, for that matter) can only do this 'cause SCO is violating the terms of the license. No one can arbitrarily block an individual or group from using GPL'ed code if they comply with the license.
BTW, Groklaw has an interesting thread where it is noted that any contract or license with discriminatory terms, (such as a hypothetical GPL clone that excluded SCO by name) is illegal under common law, as it would violate principles of general equitable conduct.
Yes, SCO has violated the GPL by attempting to force users to buy licenses from them in addition to the GPL (note recent/. story on this one, I forget the link). They can sell copies, but trying to hang additional license terms on existing users is a violation.
For that matter, SCO's refusal to accept the terms of the GPL in and of itself disallows them from redistribution under it; it would be VERY hard for SCO to convincingly argue they haven't refused to accept the terms of a license they claim is "unconstitional".
As another poster pointed out (but it's worth repeating) GPLing Java won't prevent Microsoft from "polluting" it.
Sun owns the Java spec, also the trademark. Would Open-Sourcing Java necessarily allow MS to pollute it? I would think that such a polluted version would still violate the specification, hence could not be called Java or Java-compatible, or a Java implementation; trademark law and all that. True, it might be a bit more tedious to sue MS for calling it any of the above, but what essential protection would Sun lose here?
When I was a college student, I did a co-op assignment at Xerox in Webster, NY, where I had the chance to play with an Alto at lunchtimes. It was an impressive machine, the size of a dishwasher, with a strange mouse arrangement and a crisp, big monochrome bitmap display.
I have fond memories of playing Mazewar (a VERY early real-time networked multi-player 3D VR game, one of the very first FPS games, I suspect) on the Alto in between system crashes.
The typical antistatic bag has a rather high resistivity, so while it dissipates static charge adequately, it doesn't block RF very effectively. Use a tinfoil bag and you'll find that it blocks the signal.
BTW, EZpass etc, are NOT active systems, at least not most of them. The toll transponders MIGHT be active systems, but I doubt it; that big plastic shell may just house a better antenna to ensure adequate reading range (no battery = many fewer headaches when users fail to replace said battery and return the transponder when they start getting spurious "no-transponder" tickets).
The "similar to" clause. Independently-developed code "similar to" SysV code isn't necessarily their IP to begin with, so they can't grant anyone squat with respect to it.
Also, if they are trying to (re)license copies of code they released under the GPL but do not include copies of it with THIS licensing transaction (and especially if they include NO source with this "license grant"), they're in direct, explicit GPL violation. Really nice one...
If I understand the GPL correctly, SCO *can* additionally license out code to which they hold copyright, under any license they choose, or they can sell the copyright. This would be some small fraction of the Linux kernel and other stuff, I think.
However, (BIG however!) such licensing is IN ADDITION to their prior grant of license to that same code of theirs under the GPL, made when they released the code as part of Caldera OpenLinux et al, or when they contributed code to the kernel (under the GPL in either case). They CANNOT revoke the GPL license grant, so the net effect is meaningless to the world at large and Linux users in particular. We already have rights to use, modify, and distribute it all; the additional "license" from SCO is meaningless.
Offhand, I don't think this offer of code licenses is itself a GPL violation UNLESS they are trying to license copies of code they already distributed as part of a GPL'ed work (OpenLinux et al). If they distribute ONLY their own copyrighted code with these new licenses (copies with every license, sans GPL notices), maybe they are compliant with the GPL; in any other case, I suspect they're staking themselves to an anthill (again...).
Mantricore is a clear England stand-in, and Haven an analog of France at the time of the Terror. (Rob. S. Pierre... Robespierre)
That said, I don't really know just how far Weber takes the historical analogy, being summat rusty on that history meself.
Sorta agree with both points of view
on
Singularity Sky
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, much SF is junk (like much of Zelazny and Farmer, and I *thoroughly enjoy* their work); that shouldn't surprise anyone. (Harlequin romances, anyone? Junk is all over literature, and SF is no exception.) Of course, "junk" here has a wildly variable and subjective meaning.
As far as space opera, I just finished David Weber's "Path of the Fury", and while it doesn't stand up there with Lois McMaster Bujold or C.J. Cherryh, or Weber's other works (comes off somewhat as though put together out of spare parts to turn a buck), it was a great way to spend a 6-hour airplane ride. Best thing I could have done with the time.
I've spent many an otherwise-wasted hour reading good and bad SF, and I cannot honestly say I regret ANY of it, even *shudder* half of Battlefield Earth (as a research project in "Gods below, surely the book wasn't THAT bad, the filmmaker musta taken liberties... Gaah, he didn't, it was, it was!"). Consider the alternatives, like Harlequin romances, USA Today, and broadcast TV. Even bad written fiction is better than most TV, and it lets us exercise our imaginations instead of rotting our minds.
Slashdot Mirror
firewall/route all outgoing SMTP traffic to a dummy box on your LAN; the spammers think their mail went out, and it goes to straight to /dev/null. If they never pay, so what? You've spiked their efforts, and can turn'em in to the Feds for a reward.
admin/nopassword ... ??? (just kidding!) Perhaps it's unkind to Cisco to think that if they were so stupid as to do it once, they're stupid enough to do it twice, but one never knows.
Yes, Wi-Fi is an area of spotty hardware support, as it is developing and changing so rapidly.
FWIW, I suggest using external WiFi bridges for desktop systems where internal cards are troublesome, and sticking to known-functional WiFi cards for laptops.
Of course, I try to avoid WiFi for my networks 'cause even its encrypted modes are not very secure...
Yup. They did the same with Internet Exploder, if you recall. Of course, that was a rather more important product for most users, but the principle's the same.
Well, the following considerations have a strong impact on my view of the privacy issues:
1) Scammer was using a public Internet cafe. For that matter, he was using the Internet, and don't we all understand that anything going out over the 'Net unencrypted can be considered seen by many eyes? There's no reasonable expectation of privacy in this situation. I certainly don't expect more privacy at an Internet cafe than I can get from using SSL on a machine I control; SMTP traffic is effectively public.
2) Scammer was caught in flagrante delicto, turned in by the sysadmin on the basis of unsolicited information from a public source. This is far, far from the situation where Ashcroft tracks my every 'Net transaction in the absence of probable cause. (And the police in this case VERY likely have probable cause to get a warrant to search the perp's computer and crack his codes.)
Even if this weren't a spam case, (say, a kidnapping or extortion rap instead), I don't see a fundamental issue of concern in the specific circumstances involved. I worry much more about snooping in the absence of clear evidence of a crime (yes, Mr. Ashcroft, I mean YOU).
Janus is the Roman god of doorways, gates, passages, preventing people from copying music, etc.
So, with a clearer view of history we can now see that the grandeur of Imperial Rome was brought low by... a bunch of file-swapping Goths and some Vandals pirating MP3s! SPQR conquered by P2P. No wonder the RIAA are quaking in their togas and lace-up sandals.
SCO has admitted no trade secrets were misappropriated; they dropped that claim, and cannot resurrect it now. Standing alone, the loony-tune derivative works theory will fall flat with a bang, and the "we terminated their AIX license" claim is multiply invalid. So they have NO case against IBM.
IBM, OTOH, has an airtight GPL violation case against SCO, even if SCO hasn't put GPL'ed code into proprietary products (a likely event which IBM should now be in a position to know about from discovery). THAT puts SCO out of business if IBM so desires; no SCOSource program, no OpenLinux distro, no Linux Kernel Personalities, probably no UnixWare at all. And IBM has no motivation to be merciful.
Just because the US middle class hasn't been fully impoverished YET (and we're NOT better off than we were ten years ago!) doesn't mean that continuing outsourcing WON'T do it. Why should one expect a relatively highly-paid workforce with political rights and high expectations to be able to compete with much-lower-paid folk who can't unionize and don't get health insurance or retirement benefits, and will work for peanuts even by local standards 'cause any job is better than none?
With outsourcing trends as they are, we are rather likely to get what Neal Stephenson describes in Snow Crash as an globally-distributed layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would call prosperity. Unfortunately for us in the US, *we* will call it "abject poverty".
I once had a Crocker Bank ATM in California give me $40 and a receipt, and the withdrawal never showed up on my account. The bank staff ABSOLUTELY REFUSED TO BELIEVE the transaction had occurred, even when sent a copy of the receipt; they claimed that all the balances on the ATM machines added up properly, everything was consistent, nothing was missing or mislaid (hence implying I was mistaken. Would that I were thus mistaken more often.) I eventually closed that account, and Crocker later went under. Gee, I wonder why?
It boggles the mind how bankers could be so indifferent to their money going missing like that. As a programmer, I know that ANY (memory / money) leak of whatever size is trouble on the wing and must be tracked to its source, and it ought to be a matter of course for bankers to think likewise. Competent, honest ones, anyway...
OK, I happen to share that suspicion. Problem is, PayPal limits you to a $2K cumulative transaction total if you don't give them access to an account (which I won't do, at least not an account I use for anything else). How do you deal with that? I suppose one could close the account and open another, but I suspect their terms of use frown on that.
The only solution I can see is opening a special-purpose bank account for PayPal use only, and feeding it only what it needs for the transactions I authorize. Which is rather a lot of inconvenience for the convenience of one-click shopping...
That won't happen during Bush administration, for sure.
Gee, then we just have to wait 9 months, and hope our fears about voting-machine fraud are overrated...
So, following the likely course of things, majority ownership of TrollTech might pass into the hands of... IBM, as the winner of the countersuit against SCO. Or (puts on waaay-long-odds cap) perhaps the winners of a copyright-infringement suit against SCO based on the Linux kernel code we all suspect is in their "Linux Kernel Personality" code... including Linus Torvalds!
See The Register, today's BOFH installment, for more on this topic...
These folks write and consult and teach about Windows drivers. I've followed their newsletter ever since I had to write an NT kernel driver for some custom I/O hardware, in case I ever needed to do another one (blechh!).
According to their newsletter at www.osronline.com, XP SP2 will include mandatory runtime memory pool overrun checking for all drivers. While this will improve the OS' security, it will ALSO cause mysterious failures on upgraded systems due to poorly-written legacy XP drivers. I make no judgements as to the wisdom of this course, but it's definitely worth knowing about beforehand. Of course, if they'd done this FROM THE START, then there would be no failures from it with the upgrade...
Well, given their behavior vs IBM, they *might* well do so, I agree. Of course, their less-than-spectacular success in that endeavor, plus the case law IBM is already citing that one cannot do exactly that thing, lead one to suppose they won't be much more successful here, either. One hopes, anyway.
BTW, their stock is tanking, their earnings report was very bad, and The Motley Fool rates them the best short-sell candidate they've seen in a while. Looks like the wheels are beginning to fall off.
Yeah, it's inevitable he'll have to be deposed or testify if the case goes to trial, but his testimony (and/or Autozone's paper trail for the process) will kill the case dead, so it may well be worth the inconvenience (that's easy for ME to say...).
Of course, unless SCO can provide evidence with their complaint that their libraries WERE used, it may well not get to trial (remember that plaintiffs have to already have evidence of wrongdoing to sue, they cannot simply go discovery-fishing for it). For example, a sworn deposition and paper trail showing no improper use of SCO libraries could well result in a summary dismissal, if SCO does not show any reasonable prospect of prevailing on the merits. I think that is likely in this case.
Fyodor (or any author of GPL'ed work, for that matter) can only do this 'cause SCO is violating the terms of the license. No one can arbitrarily block an individual or group from using GPL'ed code if they comply with the license.
BTW, Groklaw has an interesting thread where it is noted that any contract or license with discriminatory terms, (such as a hypothetical GPL clone that excluded SCO by name) is illegal under common law, as it would violate principles of general equitable conduct.
Move along, folks, nothing to see here...
Yes, SCO has violated the GPL by attempting to force users to buy licenses from them in addition to the GPL (note recent /. story on this one, I forget the link). They can sell copies, but trying to hang additional license terms on existing users is a violation.
For that matter, SCO's refusal to accept the terms of the GPL in and of itself disallows them from redistribution under it; it would be VERY hard for SCO to convincingly argue they haven't refused to accept the terms of a license they claim is "unconstitional".
Thus, they're hosed twofold.
As another poster pointed out (but it's worth repeating) GPLing Java won't prevent Microsoft from "polluting" it.
Sun owns the Java spec, also the trademark. Would Open-Sourcing Java necessarily allow MS to pollute it? I would think that such a polluted version would still violate the specification, hence could not be called Java or Java-compatible, or a Java implementation; trademark law and all that. True, it might be a bit more tedious to sue MS for calling it any of the above, but what essential protection would Sun lose here?
When I was a college student, I did a co-op assignment at Xerox in Webster, NY, where I had the chance to play with an Alto at lunchtimes. It was an impressive machine, the size of a dishwasher, with a strange mouse arrangement and a crisp, big monochrome bitmap display.
I have fond memories of playing Mazewar (a VERY early real-time networked multi-player 3D VR game, one of the very first FPS games, I suspect) on the Alto in between system crashes.
The typical antistatic bag has a rather high resistivity, so while it dissipates static charge adequately, it doesn't block RF very effectively. Use a tinfoil bag and you'll find that it blocks the signal.
BTW, EZpass etc, are NOT active systems, at least not most of them. The toll transponders MIGHT be active systems, but I doubt it; that big plastic shell may just house a better antenna to ensure adequate reading range (no battery = many fewer headaches when users fail to replace said battery and return the transponder when they start getting spurious "no-transponder" tickets).
The "similar to" clause. Independently-developed code "similar to" SysV code isn't necessarily their IP to begin with, so they can't grant anyone squat with respect to it.
Also, if they are trying to (re)license copies of code they released under the GPL but do not include copies of it with THIS licensing transaction (and especially if they include NO source with this "license grant"), they're in direct, explicit GPL violation. Really nice one...
If I understand the GPL correctly, SCO *can* additionally license out code to which they hold copyright, under any license they choose, or they can sell the copyright. This would be some small fraction of the Linux kernel and other stuff, I think.
However, (BIG however!) such licensing is IN ADDITION to their prior grant of license to that same code of theirs under the GPL, made when they released the code as part of Caldera OpenLinux et al, or when they contributed code to the kernel (under the GPL in either case). They CANNOT revoke the GPL license grant, so the net effect is meaningless to the world at large and Linux users in particular. We already have rights to use, modify, and distribute it all; the additional "license" from SCO is meaningless.
Offhand, I don't think this offer of code licenses is itself a GPL violation UNLESS they are trying to license copies of code they already distributed as part of a GPL'ed work (OpenLinux et al). If they distribute ONLY their own copyrighted code with these new licenses (copies with every license, sans GPL notices), maybe they are compliant with the GPL; in any other case, I suspect they're staking themselves to an anthill (again...).
Mantricore is a clear England stand-in, and Haven an analog of France at the time of the Terror. (Rob. S. Pierre ... Robespierre)
That said, I don't really know just how far Weber takes the historical analogy, being summat rusty on that history meself.
Yes, much SF is junk (like much of Zelazny and Farmer, and I *thoroughly enjoy* their work); that shouldn't surprise anyone. (Harlequin romances, anyone? Junk is all over literature, and SF is no exception.) Of course, "junk" here has a wildly variable and subjective meaning.
As far as space opera, I just finished David Weber's "Path of the Fury", and while it doesn't stand up there with Lois McMaster Bujold or C.J. Cherryh, or Weber's other works (comes off somewhat as though put together out of spare parts to turn a buck), it was a great way to spend a 6-hour airplane ride. Best thing I could have done with the time.
I've spent many an otherwise-wasted hour reading good and bad SF, and I cannot honestly say I regret ANY of it, even *shudder* half of Battlefield Earth (as a research project in "Gods below, surely the book wasn't THAT bad, the filmmaker musta taken liberties... Gaah, he didn't, it was, it was!"). Consider the alternatives, like Harlequin romances, USA Today, and broadcast TV. Even bad written fiction is better than most TV, and it lets us exercise our imaginations instead of rotting our minds.