Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants.
Really? Well, in that case I'm declaring my house to be "The People's Republic Of Jimicus' Place", setting up a supreme court with me as the highest judge in the land (and my cat as prime minister), and the cat shall be declaring jurisdiction over everyone else in the world.
Now, let's see how effective that is when I start demanding taxes...
Actually, the only way things get stopped by anti-virus is if the AV has been modified to detect them. Essentially, most AV packages act as a glorified binary grep, searching for suspicious strings and flagging up any files that contain them. If the AV vedonr doesn't add this to their database, it won't be found.
As regards firewalls - it's a bit curious to announce that it isn't stopped by any type of firewall unless it does something really obscure like take advantage of bugs in IE or Outlook to install itself then report back via encoded HTTP requests or sending email - both of which would raise flags very quickly.
Myself, I'm wondering if something has been lost in translation and this "spyware" isn't spyware in the traditional sense, it's simply a black box which sits on the telco's network monitoring SIP calls. Strikes me as about a hundred times more likely.
No kidding. If it did, they wouldn't be criminals.
(As an aside, I wrote to my MP pointing this one out a couple of years ago when they proposed making forging an ID card illegal (it already is anyway). The letter I received back said, in a nutshell, "We know criminals don't obey the law. We're trying to find a solution to that one and anyone who has any ideas is welcome to write to us".)
Sometimes a country with heavily regulated banking has advantages.
We have a system for "pull" payments here in the UK called "Direct Debit". It's the most accepted form of payment for things like electricity and gas bills (though some Internet-based services prefer authority to withdraw direct from a card every month; I won't touch them).
The advantage it has is that it is backed by a regulated guarantee - in the event of a mistake, the bank is obliged to refund you immediately.
VMS uses a security model that is much closer to Windows than unix; yet, it is rarely hacked.
Get real. In this day and age, VMS is rarely FOUND on the public internet. Yeah, sure, there are organisations still using it, but most of those organisations are using it for things which are so critical that there is no way they're going anywhere near the Internet.
but from what I can tell from this article, the security on the upcoming version of IE might not be one of them (for once).
Vista may have had a lot of attention from various quarters, but I bet you anything you like it's not even had 10% of the attention XP has.
I'm reserving judgement on the security standpoint for at least a year after release. (My boss, bless him, has saved me the trouble of having to propose that at work by already stating that he doesn't like the idea of upgrading straight away and would much rather give it at least a year-18 months).
If you're going to try libelling someone to cover your backside, perhaps it would be a good idea if:
A: That someone isn't Microsoft, with all their lawyers. B: You don't do it in documents which are very likely to end up being used as evidence in a court of law.
No, but if electricity is cheap enough compared with oil, then the demand for eletrically powered things (rather than oil powered) will shoot up - I'm thinking heating systems, vehicles, that sort of stuff.
Problem is, to appeal to the mass market it's got to be cheape enough once you've factored in the extra cost of buying an electric vehicle - but as demand increases the existing problems with making electric and hybrid electric vehicles which can perform to a similar standard as petrol powered ones will slowly melt away.
Furthermore, Coverity simply cannot accomplish what they claim to accomplish: there is no way of detecting "bugs" automatically--if there were, compilers would already be doing it.
You can't detect bugs with 100% certainty by definition on any Turing machine, but you can certainly detect code which may result in unintended behaviour. Run lint against a bunch of source code and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Really, the software has no commercial value in itself
The software may have no commercial value, but the ability to support it certainly does. By open-sourcing it, anyone could set up a business selling and supporting the software, which would undermine the business plan of the company which wrote it in the first place - and you'd probably never get any significant community contributions because not many people in the community need to built a mission critical air traffic control system. Think Nessus and the reasons they gave for closing the source..
Both forms of testing can be applied to both open and closed source projects (after all, all projects have source code, the only difference in this context is if the source code is available to the general public). However, it's probably reasonable to say that the majority of open source software doesn't get much white box testing,
Well, if it's an OEM copy of Windows, as far as Microsoft are concerned the license lives and dies with the motherboard.
The only exception is for warranty repairs which result in the exact same model of motherboard being used. Not too much of a problem with large OEMs as they keep motherboards around for years to cover their warranties, but smaller shops probably don't, and good luck getting the exact same model of motherboard 9 months later.
Copy protection only went away then because for a time, the software was large enough that the only feasible way to distribute it was on CD-ROM yet CD burners were prohibitively expensive for most people.
Neither did your CS course teach you that in real life........there are a lot of problems where the best solution isn't technical.....that if you go into systems administration rather than programming, it's the tiny "little" problems which wind up taking up most of your time.
And reading between the lines, it didn't teach you to look up stuff you didn't understand. I do hope that last bit's not true though;)
But I've made a general policy in my department that we've stopped purchasing or installing software that requires "activation" or any other kind of phoning-home.
Then you should consider yourself very lucky to be able to do that.
If I was to tell the creative types they couldn't have Adobe Creative Suite (that phones home at install) ot the Finance director he couldn't have his Version 2003 of Office (yep - phones home. We have a Volume License for it, but you need a much larger volume license before they give you a version which doesn't phone home), I'd probably be burnt at the stake.
I did. AFAICT most of what you say is speculation based on it, because it certainly doesn't explain specifically why they think this is OK yet pulling the data isn't.
EU data protection law, amongst other things, outlaws sending data to countries without similarly strong data protection law. So technically, it matters not how the data gets to the US, it's still illegal. This is just an agreement to effectively exempt the US from the law.
Thing is, if you're going to start cooking up agreements to exempt certain groups from a law which was designed specifically to affect them, what's the point in having the law in the first place?
I know what the difference between push and pull is.
I just don't see how it makes the remotest difference in this context as the net result is the same - the same amount of information about the same number of people leaves the same countries under much the same terms - the only difference is how it does so.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the black box solution has already been implemented in the UK for the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
So it might be rather bad for my health to make a perfectly casual remark like "Say! Let's nuke Lon...£$%*"£_$( NO CARRIER
Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants.
Really? Well, in that case I'm declaring my house to be "The People's Republic Of Jimicus' Place", setting up a supreme court with me as the highest judge in the land (and my cat as prime minister), and the cat shall be declaring jurisdiction over everyone else in the world.
Now, let's see how effective that is when I start demanding taxes...
Actually, the only way things get stopped by anti-virus is if the AV has been modified to detect them. Essentially, most AV packages act as a glorified binary grep, searching for suspicious strings and flagging up any files that contain them. If the AV vedonr doesn't add this to their database, it won't be found.
As regards firewalls - it's a bit curious to announce that it isn't stopped by any type of firewall unless it does something really obscure like take advantage of bugs in IE or Outlook to install itself then report back via encoded HTTP requests or sending email - both of which would raise flags very quickly.
Myself, I'm wondering if something has been lost in translation and this "spyware" isn't spyware in the traditional sense, it's simply a black box which sits on the telco's network monitoring SIP calls. Strikes me as about a hundred times more likely.
Legality does not stop criminals.
No kidding. If it did, they wouldn't be criminals.
(As an aside, I wrote to my MP pointing this one out a couple of years ago when they proposed making forging an ID card illegal (it already is anyway). The letter I received back said, in a nutshell, "We know criminals don't obey the law. We're trying to find a solution to that one and anyone who has any ideas is welcome to write to us".)
Modern malware isn't particularly compatible with MS-DOS 5/Windows 3.1 either but I wouldn't suggest you try running much on it these days.
My previous employer paid IBM a lot of money for AIX 4, but support was still dropped for it.
Sometimes a country with heavily regulated banking has advantages.
We have a system for "pull" payments here in the UK called "Direct Debit". It's the most accepted form of payment for things like electricity and gas bills (though some Internet-based services prefer authority to withdraw direct from a card every month; I won't touch them).
The advantage it has is that it is backed by a regulated guarantee - in the event of a mistake, the bank is obliged to refund you immediately.
Is that so?
Nevertheless, if you lie in court you can certainly be done for perjury.
VMS uses a security model that is much closer to Windows than unix; yet, it is rarely hacked.
Get real. In this day and age, VMS is rarely FOUND on the public internet. Yeah, sure, there are organisations still using it, but most of those organisations are using it for things which are so critical that there is no way they're going anywhere near the Internet.
but from what I can tell from this article, the security on the upcoming version of IE might not be one of them (for once).
Vista may have had a lot of attention from various quarters, but I bet you anything you like it's not even had 10% of the attention XP has.
I'm reserving judgement on the security standpoint for at least a year after release. (My boss, bless him, has saved me the trouble of having to propose that at work by already stating that he doesn't like the idea of upgrading straight away and would much rather give it at least a year-18 months).
If you're going to try libelling someone to cover your backside, perhaps it would be a good idea if:
A: That someone isn't Microsoft, with all their lawyers.
B: You don't do it in documents which are very likely to end up being used as evidence in a court of law.
No, but if electricity is cheap enough compared with oil, then the demand for eletrically powered things (rather than oil powered) will shoot up - I'm thinking heating systems, vehicles, that sort of stuff.
Problem is, to appeal to the mass market it's got to be cheape enough once you've factored in the extra cost of buying an electric vehicle - but as demand increases the existing problems with making electric and hybrid electric vehicles which can perform to a similar standard as petrol powered ones will slowly melt away.
Furthermore, Coverity simply cannot accomplish what they claim to accomplish: there is no way of detecting "bugs" automatically--if there were, compilers would already be doing it.
You can't detect bugs with 100% certainty by definition on any Turing machine, but you can certainly detect code which may result in unintended behaviour. Run lint against a bunch of source code and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I was right with you until this point:
Really, the software has no commercial value in itself
The software may have no commercial value, but the ability to support it certainly does. By open-sourcing it, anyone could set up a business selling and supporting the software, which would undermine the business plan of the company which wrote it in the first place - and you'd probably never get any significant community contributions because not many people in the community need to built a mission critical air traffic control system. Think Nessus and the reasons they gave for closing the source..
You've got that the wrong way round, closed source is the blackbox.
In testing terms, "black box" and "white box" have specific meanings which aren't in related to how open the source code is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_box_testing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box_testing
Both forms of testing can be applied to both open and closed source projects (after all, all projects have source code, the only difference in this context is if the source code is available to the general public). However, it's probably reasonable to say that the majority of open source software doesn't get much white box testing,
know how to use Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal, soon to be illegal where I live)
Really? Where's that - I need to knock it off the list of "places I might like to live"?
That's quite all right, they'll simply kick out a drug-addled mugger in order to make room for a foolish Internet troll.
And what if your MoBo died?
Well, if it's an OEM copy of Windows, as far as Microsoft are concerned the license lives and dies with the motherboard.
The only exception is for warranty repairs which result in the exact same model of motherboard being used. Not too much of a problem with large OEMs as they keep motherboards around for years to cover their warranties, but smaller shops probably don't, and good luck getting the exact same model of motherboard 9 months later.
Copy protection only went away then because for a time, the software was large enough that the only feasible way to distribute it was on CD-ROM yet CD burners were prohibitively expensive for most people.
Neither did your CS course teach you that in real life.... ....there are a lot of problems where the best solution isn't technical. ....that if you go into systems administration rather than programming, it's the tiny "little" problems which wind up taking up most of your time.
;)
And reading between the lines, it didn't teach you to look up stuff you didn't understand. I do hope that last bit's not true though
But I've made a general policy in my department that we've stopped purchasing or installing software that requires "activation" or any other kind of phoning-home.
Then you should consider yourself very lucky to be able to do that.
If I was to tell the creative types they couldn't have Adobe Creative Suite (that phones home at install) ot the Finance director he couldn't have his Version 2003 of Office (yep - phones home. We have a Volume License for it, but you need a much larger volume license before they give you a version which doesn't phone home), I'd probably be burnt at the stake.
I did. AFAICT most of what you say is speculation based on it, because it certainly doesn't explain specifically why they think this is OK yet pulling the data isn't.
EU data protection law, amongst other things, outlaws sending data to countries without similarly strong data protection law. So technically, it matters not how the data gets to the US, it's still illegal. This is just an agreement to effectively exempt the US from the law.
Thing is, if you're going to start cooking up agreements to exempt certain groups from a law which was designed specifically to affect them, what's the point in having the law in the first place?
I know what the difference between push and pull is.
I just don't see how it makes the remotest difference in this context as the net result is the same - the same amount of information about the same number of people leaves the same countries under much the same terms - the only difference is how it does so.
Old system: US pulls 34 items of data about each passenger.
New system: EU pushes 34 items of data about each passenger.
Unless the data itself has dramatically changed, I really can't see any functional difference. So how is this any better?
Probably not a good idea to ask for a new card because "I accidentally ticked "Yes" to "Are you a terrorist?"" then.