I am a content creator. I can put my stuff on the web or not - my choice.
If I put it on the web, I can let Google index it (just send them the link, or have anybody else link to it), or I can prevent them from indexing it (robots.txt and/or (not send them the link + not let anybody link to it)). Thing is, if I choose the second route, nobody sees my page. Ever.
And if nobody's going to ever see it, why did I put it on the web? I want people to see my stuff - that's why I put it out there!
What Microsoft really wants to do is erect a toll booth and charge for what Google is doing for free. But if they succeed, they're going to put the brakes on the use of the Web.
The previous reply was in the right direction, but didn't go far enough.
The issue is APIs, not implementation, and APIs should not be trade secrets! The very idea of an OS having trade secret APIs is... well, I can't come up with words adequate to express how twisted that idea is.
In particular, the exact issue is that of Microsoft keeping secret APIs that it can use for its own applications, but others trying to write software for Windows don't get to use. This makes MS's software easier to write, and also (probably) makes it work better. But since Microsoft is a monopoly in operating systems, that's illegal use of a monopoly to leverage your market in another area.
So Microsoft's trade secrets are exactly the issue, but from the reverse side that the parent is coming from. Trade secret APIs are an abuse of monopoly.
Is it because it isolates the services from each other, because people can't write services that don't trash their environment and thereby corrupt other services and/or the OS? If so, that seems to be both the service's fault for being so badly written, and the OS's fault for doing such a poor job of protecting services from each other.
Is it because Windows can't multitask well and/or doesn't protect processes from each other well? If so, why does anyone think that another layer of Windows is the answer? If Windows can't protect processes from each other, why does anyone think it can protect VMs from each other? If it can't multitask well among processes, why does anyone think it can multitask well among VMs?
In short, why does anyone think this is the answer? Isn't the answer to get a real OS, one that actually works?
A quick look shows Intel's profit as being $5 billion a year, and Dell's as being $3 billion. A payment of $1 billion a year from Intel to Dell is a pretty significant financial event for both companies...
As un-/. as it seems, I actually read the article, and I don't get it.
OK, this is probably illegal. But defrauding the shareholders by artificially increasing profits? Huh? If a company finds a way to make an extra billion and change each year, don't shareholders usually consider that a good thing?
Mark says that it's possible. He also says enough that someone else as "skilled in the art" as he is can probably figure out what he did.
And what he did, if I understand correctly, is have some of his own code run as kernel without it being in a "test signed" driver. That seems to be the essense of his approach. Once you figure out how to do that, you can basically do anything, and Microsoft can't stop you.
If I have a swimming pool in my back yard, and I leave the gate open, and a neighborhood kid comes in uninvited for a swim, and drowns, I am liable. It's called an "attractive nuisance". IANAL, and I don't know if I am criminally liable (that is, whether I can go to prison for it). But the kid's family can definitely sue me, big time.
On the other hand, if I leave the gate closed and locked, and he climbs the fence, then I'm not in trouble, even if he drowns, because I took reasonable steps to protect it, and he bypassed them.
So: If I put a PC on the net, and it gets 0wn3d, should whether I am liable or not depend on whether I had it patched, firewalled, and armed with virus protection?
I can actually see this happening. It's election day 2008, and Slashdot posts yet another story about how hackable Diebold voting machines are. Some election official goes ballistic, and asks Slashdot's ISP and/or registrar to knock them off the net for the rest of election day. One or the other complies.
Hmm... if you're going to KUTV, you must be local.
I'm not sure how it would be best to proceed, but you might consider going to the state Attorney General's office. If you want to know how to approach them, I know a lawyer who has worked with and/or for them for a lot of years. You probably don't want to get a lawyer deeply involved (yet), but he might be able to advise you on how to get maximum traction with the AG...
Grinstein also noted that if their test does not substantiate what the theory predicts, one of the key mathematical assumptions about the current string theory would be incorrect.
As opposed to the whole idea being bogus? The difference is whether you go for the New, Improved String Theory, Now With Fewer Bogus Assumptions(TM), or whether you throw the whole thing out. Sounds like the physicists want to try to tweak it rather than junk it, even if it fails the experiment.
Note that "starting over with a major assumption changed" and "throwing it all out" aren't that different, so maybe I'm just ranting. Perhaps the major difference will be whether the new thing is still called string theory.
Telling what I think is the truth is just something that I do. I may try to say it gently and with tact (and if my wife is to be believed, I regularly fail), but I don't say what I consider to be false.
If Microsoft was fine with that, then sure, I'd take it. Doing what I want to do is cool. Getting paid is cool. Getting paid for what I want to do anyway is wonderful.
But I'd have to make sure that they understood up front what my plan was - that I was going to say what I believed to be the truth. Not pro-Microsoft, not anti-Microsoft, just the truth as best I understood it. And then I expect I'd have to resist pressure to do "a little bit more" - to soften the phrasing here or there, or to remove a "less relevant" but negative fact, or whatever, and it could get all morally ambiguous, which I hate, and they'd be trying to make me feel bad for taking their money and not doing what they wanted. And then I'd have to worry about the apearance of selling out as well as the reality, and I'd have people saying that I sold out even if I didn't...
OK, so maybe I wouldn't do it. Maybe there are too many negatives. But I don't necessarily have a problem with someone who takes this gig.
It will begin to wrap up in March, with the hearings on the partial summary judgment motions. Those will be ruled on eventually (maybe somewhere between May and August, but I could be optimistic).
Final wrap up is when the Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal. Realistically (if SCO appeals it that far, which, according to current pattern they will), that will be in three to five years. It may not go that far, because of the near certainty that SCO goes bankrupt before then, and the probability that the trustee decides to stop throwing money down the legal rathole.
It's not a totally stupid point. The courts do not like "what if" lawsuits. If your issue is "maybe" or "what if", the courts will in general tell you to get lost - and, in my opinion, rightly so. The courts are clogged enough as it is.
But I think the application of that principle to this particular situation is in error. If I'm having to pay royalties to use a patent that I believe is bogus, and my options are to expose myself to severe liability (by stopping payment but still using the patent), or stop making the product, or continue to pay the extortion, that's a pretty unjust situation that has been created. And the law, as another principle, doesn't like to create unjust situations by stupid application of rules. (Though I must say, for something that it tries to avoid, it seems to do it way too often anyway...)
To go along with IP spoofing, there's the ARP poisoning attack. You send a packet that appears to be from IP address x.x.x.x, but with your actual MAC address. Then the router, when it sees packets destined for x.x.x.x, it sends them to you rather than to the real x.x.x.x
To do this, you'd probably have to be another user of the same ISP. But it would be a way for someone to cover their tracks...
And note that the computer in the legal case was connected directly to the internet. (Don't know if there was a firewall or not.) Perfect setup for being compromised and having a P2P server put on it...
Isn't your client's stupid business model costing him far more money than the file sharing is?
Stuff that might actually be useful to ask:
- As someone else said, how do you prove that the screen shots have not been altered? - If the screen shots are backed up with packet captures, how do you prove that those were not altered? - Given that both IP and MAC addresses can be spoofed, how do you prove that the defendant's computer was actually the source of the packets? - Given that the titles of stuff on a file sharing network may have no relationship to the contents of the file, how do you prove that the file actually contained material copyrighted by the plaintiff? - Each song that the plaintiff says that the defendant illegally shared/distributed was not actually written or recorded by the plaintiff, but by an artist. The copyrights were assigned to the plaintiff as part of a contract with the artist. For each song, prove that the plaintiff has valid control of the copyright by having met all the terms of the contract with the artist.
I really like this last one. If the RIAA has been stiffing the artists on their royalties or with funny accounting, they're going to have to run the funny accounting past a judge, and justify why they get to sue for copyrights where they are ripping off the artists. Even if they can give an accounting that passes the laugh test, it enormously increases their workload in the case.
Well, let's see. x=(a t^2) / 2. Let's say a = 3.2 ft/sec^2 (1/10 g), so we're not talking real heavy acceleration here. t = 1 hour = 3600 seconds. (We'll use the other hour to decelerate.) Then...
x = 20,736,000 feet = 3927 miles. The whole, two hour flight would be 7854 miles. Not quite halfway around the world (12000 miles).
To do halfway around the world in 2 hours, we need to get 6000 miles = 31,680,000 feet, accelerating from zero, in 1 hour = 3600 seconds. For that, we need a = 2x / t^2 = 4.89 ft / sec^2 = 0.15 g.
Whether that's too much to be comfortable or healthy, I don't know.
Wow. Way to crawl into the OT gutter, even though I specifically asked you not to. All right, I'll crawl in with you for a bit...
There are only a few alternatives here. One is that nothing is morally bad (evil), or not bad enough to be worthy of punishment. A lot of modern ethics seems to live here, though I don't think most people are willing to state it quite that bluntly. In fact, your statement that God punishing most people would be regarded as unethical states that you have an idea that some things are unethical or wrong. So, do you think that those who do unethical things should never have consequences for doing so? If so, then you must think that the rule of law is either worse than anarchy, or merely a necessary evil, because the rule of law involves punishing people for their actions.
A second alternative is that, while some things are really wrong enough to deserve punishment, most of us don't do those things, so most people are "good" or "good enough". To bring this at least somewhat back on-topic, the experiments in question might make us question this viewpoint.
If you don't take either of the previous two viewpoints, the only view left is that God, if He exists and is truly moral, must regard most (or all) of us as worthy of punishment. That's not such an immoral or unethical view as you make it sound.
OK, I see your point about who is being harmed. I think it's a valid point. At this time I don't know whether I agree with it or not, but it is, at a minimum, a real issue.
And if the issue is people are harmed when they are pressured into doing things that are against their conscience, you've got a dilemma with the virtual victims. Since there's no real victim, the subjects are less going against their conscience. But that makes the experiment less able to test what it's trying to test, which is exactly whether an authority figure can pressure people into doing what is, under normal conditions, against their conscience.
BTW, I disagree about the manipulativeness of the experiment being a problem. Yes, it's manipulative. The idea is to test how people respond when subjected to a particular set of conditions. To run the experiment, you have to make the conditions occur. That's not being manipulative, that's experimental design.
I consider myself as having more ethics than the average. I am a Christian (yeah, hold your slams, that's not the point). I try to live consistent with what Christianity teaches. More than once I have said what I felt needed to be said, even though there was some chance that it might cost me my job. Once I have done what I felt needed done, even though there was some chance that it might cost me my life.
I don't see what's morally or ethically wrong with the experiment, even with a real human subject. I mean, the "victim" isn't actually being shocked, whether the "victim" is human or virtual.
Is the fear that the experiment desensitizes the subject to situations where they are asked to obey a command that they should refuse? But the results indicate that the subject is likely to already be in that state. If properly debriefed at the end of the experiment, the subject is more likely to refuse such a command in the future, rather than less.
So can someone explain to me what's unethical about this?
Some sleazebag spammer sends me spam. I complain to the authorities. Said authorities decide that the spammer is breaking the law (fraud, spam laws, whatever). And the spammer says that the e-mails can't be used as evidence against him, because it's his private communication? That's the craziest legal theory I've heard since SCO.
You send your trash to me, I'll let the feds take it as evidence, gladly. You send several million of your trash to Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail, and they probably feel the same.
Free clue to spammers: The feds aren't the ones invading our privacy here. You are.
Slashdot Mirror
If I put it on the web, I can let Google index it (just send them the link, or have anybody else link to it), or I can prevent them from indexing it (robots.txt and/or (not send them the link + not let anybody link to it)). Thing is, if I choose the second route, nobody sees my page. Ever.
And if nobody's going to ever see it, why did I put it on the web? I want people to see my stuff - that's why I put it out there!
What Microsoft really wants to do is erect a toll booth and charge for what Google is doing for free. But if they succeed, they're going to put the brakes on the use of the Web.
The previous reply was in the right direction, but didn't go far enough.
The issue is APIs, not implementation, and APIs should not be trade secrets! The very idea of an OS having trade secret APIs is... well, I can't come up with words adequate to express how twisted that idea is.
In particular, the exact issue is that of Microsoft keeping secret APIs that it can use for its own applications, but others trying to write software for Windows don't get to use. This makes MS's software easier to write, and also (probably) makes it work better. But since Microsoft is a monopoly in operating systems, that's illegal use of a monopoly to leverage your market in another area.
So Microsoft's trade secrets are exactly the issue, but from the reverse side that the parent is coming from. Trade secret APIs are an abuse of monopoly.
Why is there all this interest in virtualization?
Is it because it isolates the services from each other, because people can't write services that don't trash their environment and thereby corrupt other services and/or the OS? If so, that seems to be both the service's fault for being so badly written, and the OS's fault for doing such a poor job of protecting services from each other.
Is it because Windows can't multitask well and/or doesn't protect processes from each other well? If so, why does anyone think that another layer of Windows is the answer? If Windows can't protect processes from each other, why does anyone think it can protect VMs from each other? If it can't multitask well among processes, why does anyone think it can multitask well among VMs?
In short, why does anyone think this is the answer? Isn't the answer to get a real OS, one that actually works?
A quick look shows Intel's profit as being $5 billion a year, and Dell's as being $3 billion. A payment of $1 billion a year from Intel to Dell is a pretty significant financial event for both companies...
As un-/. as it seems, I actually read the article, and I don't get it.
OK, this is probably illegal. But defrauding the shareholders by artificially increasing profits? Huh? If a company finds a way to make an extra billion and change each year, don't shareholders usually consider that a good thing?
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Mark says that it's possible. He also says enough that someone else as "skilled in the art" as he is can probably figure out what he did.
And what he did, if I understand correctly, is have some of his own code run as kernel without it being in a "test signed" driver. That seems to be the essense of his approach. Once you figure out how to do that, you can basically do anything, and Microsoft can't stop you.
If I have a swimming pool in my back yard, and I leave the gate open, and a neighborhood kid comes in uninvited for a swim, and drowns, I am liable. It's called an "attractive nuisance". IANAL, and I don't know if I am criminally liable (that is, whether I can go to prison for it). But the kid's family can definitely sue me, big time.
On the other hand, if I leave the gate closed and locked, and he climbs the fence, then I'm not in trouble, even if he drowns, because I took reasonable steps to protect it, and he bypassed them.
So: If I put a PC on the net, and it gets 0wn3d, should whether I am liable or not depend on whether I had it patched, firewalled, and armed with virus protection?
I can actually see this happening. It's election day 2008, and Slashdot posts yet another story about how hackable Diebold voting machines are. Some election official goes ballistic, and asks Slashdot's ISP and/or registrar to knock them off the net for the rest of election day. One or the other complies.
Creepy.
Yeah, but good propaganda doesn't leave you going, "Huh?" So this particular propaganda is likely not to fly very well.
Hmm... if you're going to KUTV, you must be local.
I'm not sure how it would be best to proceed, but you might consider going to the state Attorney General's office. If you want to know how to approach them, I know a lawyer who has worked with and/or for them for a lot of years. You probably don't want to get a lawyer deeply involved (yet), but he might be able to advise you on how to get maximum traction with the AG...
As opposed to the whole idea being bogus? The difference is whether you go for the New, Improved String Theory, Now With Fewer Bogus Assumptions(TM), or whether you throw the whole thing out. Sounds like the physicists want to try to tweak it rather than junk it, even if it fails the experiment.
Note that "starting over with a major assumption changed" and "throwing it all out" aren't that different, so maybe I'm just ranting. Perhaps the major difference will be whether the new thing is still called string theory.
Maybe.
Telling what I think is the truth is just something that I do. I may try to say it gently and with tact (and if my wife is to be believed, I regularly fail), but I don't say what I consider to be false.
If Microsoft was fine with that, then sure, I'd take it. Doing what I want to do is cool. Getting paid is cool. Getting paid for what I want to do anyway is wonderful.
But I'd have to make sure that they understood up front what my plan was - that I was going to say what I believed to be the truth. Not pro-Microsoft, not anti-Microsoft, just the truth as best I understood it. And then I expect I'd have to resist pressure to do "a little bit more" - to soften the phrasing here or there, or to remove a "less relevant" but negative fact, or whatever, and it could get all morally ambiguous, which I hate, and they'd be trying to make me feel bad for taking their money and not doing what they wanted. And then I'd have to worry about the apearance of selling out as well as the reality, and I'd have people saying that I sold out even if I didn't...
OK, so maybe I wouldn't do it. Maybe there are too many negatives. But I don't necessarily have a problem with someone who takes this gig.
SCO didn't fabricate evidence. If they did, they'd have some...
Define "wrap up".
It will begin to wrap up in March, with the hearings on the partial summary judgment motions. Those will be ruled on eventually (maybe somewhere between May and August, but I could be optimistic).
Final wrap up is when the Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal. Realistically (if SCO appeals it that far, which, according to current pattern they will), that will be in three to five years. It may not go that far, because of the near certainty that SCO goes bankrupt before then, and the probability that the trustee decides to stop throwing money down the legal rathole.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
... Which way did they come in?
It's not a totally stupid point. The courts do not like "what if" lawsuits. If your issue is "maybe" or "what if", the courts will in general tell you to get lost - and, in my opinion, rightly so. The courts are clogged enough as it is.
But I think the application of that principle to this particular situation is in error. If I'm having to pay royalties to use a patent that I believe is bogus, and my options are to expose myself to severe liability (by stopping payment but still using the patent), or stop making the product, or continue to pay the extortion, that's a pretty unjust situation that has been created. And the law, as another principle, doesn't like to create unjust situations by stupid application of rules. (Though I must say, for something that it tries to avoid, it seems to do it way too often anyway...)
To go along with IP spoofing, there's the ARP poisoning attack. You send a packet that appears to be from IP address x.x.x.x, but with your actual MAC address. Then the router, when it sees packets destined for x.x.x.x, it sends them to you rather than to the real x.x.x.x To do this, you'd probably have to be another user of the same ISP. But it would be a way for someone to cover their tracks...
And note that the computer in the legal case was connected directly to the internet. (Don't know if there was a firewall or not.) Perfect setup for being compromised and having a P2P server put on it...
... but you probably shouldn't:
Isn't your client's stupid business model costing him far more money than the file sharing is?
Stuff that might actually be useful to ask:
- As someone else said, how do you prove that the screen shots have not been altered?
- If the screen shots are backed up with packet captures, how do you prove that those were not altered?
- Given that both IP and MAC addresses can be spoofed, how do you prove that the defendant's computer was actually the source of the packets?
- Given that the titles of stuff on a file sharing network may have no relationship to the contents of the file, how do you prove that the file actually contained material copyrighted by the plaintiff?
- Each song that the plaintiff says that the defendant illegally shared/distributed was not actually written or recorded by the plaintiff, but by an artist. The copyrights were assigned to the plaintiff as part of a contract with the artist. For each song, prove that the plaintiff has valid control of the copyright by having met all the terms of the contract with the artist.
I really like this last one. If the RIAA has been stiffing the artists on their royalties or with funny accounting, they're going to have to run the funny accounting past a judge, and justify why they get to sue for copyrights where they are ripping off the artists. Even if they can give an accounting that passes the laugh test, it enormously increases their workload in the case.
Well, let's see. x=(a t^2) / 2. Let's say a = 3.2 ft/sec^2 (1/10 g), so we're not talking real heavy acceleration here. t = 1 hour = 3600 seconds. (We'll use the other hour to decelerate.) Then...
x = 20,736,000 feet = 3927 miles. The whole, two hour flight would be 7854 miles. Not quite halfway around the world (12000 miles).
To do halfway around the world in 2 hours, we need to get 6000 miles = 31,680,000 feet, accelerating from zero, in 1 hour = 3600 seconds. For that, we need a = 2x / t^2 = 4.89 ft / sec^2 = 0.15 g.
Whether that's too much to be comfortable or healthy, I don't know.
There are only a few alternatives here. One is that nothing is morally bad (evil), or not bad enough to be worthy of punishment. A lot of modern ethics seems to live here, though I don't think most people are willing to state it quite that bluntly. In fact, your statement that God punishing most people would be regarded as unethical states that you have an idea that some things are unethical or wrong. So, do you think that those who do unethical things should never have consequences for doing so? If so, then you must think that the rule of law is either worse than anarchy, or merely a necessary evil, because the rule of law involves punishing people for their actions.
A second alternative is that, while some things are really wrong enough to deserve punishment, most of us don't do those things, so most people are "good" or "good enough". To bring this at least somewhat back on-topic, the experiments in question might make us question this viewpoint.
If you don't take either of the previous two viewpoints, the only view left is that God, if He exists and is truly moral, must regard most (or all) of us as worthy of punishment. That's not such an immoral or unethical view as you make it sound.
OK, I see your point about who is being harmed. I think it's a valid point. At this time I don't know whether I agree with it or not, but it is, at a minimum, a real issue. And if the issue is people are harmed when they are pressured into doing things that are against their conscience, you've got a dilemma with the virtual victims. Since there's no real victim, the subjects are less going against their conscience. But that makes the experiment less able to test what it's trying to test, which is exactly whether an authority figure can pressure people into doing what is, under normal conditions, against their conscience. BTW, I disagree about the manipulativeness of the experiment being a problem. Yes, it's manipulative. The idea is to test how people respond when subjected to a particular set of conditions. To run the experiment, you have to make the conditions occur. That's not being manipulative, that's experimental design.
I consider myself as having more ethics than the average. I am a Christian (yeah, hold your slams, that's not the point). I try to live consistent with what Christianity teaches. More than once I have said what I felt needed to be said, even though there was some chance that it might cost me my job. Once I have done what I felt needed done, even though there was some chance that it might cost me my life.
I don't see what's morally or ethically wrong with the experiment, even with a real human subject. I mean, the "victim" isn't actually being shocked, whether the "victim" is human or virtual.
Is the fear that the experiment desensitizes the subject to situations where they are asked to obey a command that they should refuse? But the results indicate that the subject is likely to already be in that state. If properly debriefed at the end of the experiment, the subject is more likely to refuse such a command in the future, rather than less.
So can someone explain to me what's unethical about this?
Some sleazebag spammer sends me spam. I complain to the authorities. Said authorities decide that the spammer is breaking the law (fraud, spam laws, whatever). And the spammer says that the e-mails can't be used as evidence against him, because it's his private communication? That's the craziest legal theory I've heard since SCO.
You send your trash to me, I'll let the feds take it as evidence, gladly. You send several million of your trash to Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail, and they probably feel the same.
Free clue to spammers: The feds aren't the ones invading our privacy here. You are.