Social engineering? Signing up for the listserv is a matter of going to this website., then filling out such hard hitting forms as "Name" and "Interest in Biometrics", and waiting for an e-mail confirmation stating you've been approved. Since the website says that its a free listserv for anyone interested in Biometrics, I don't think approval would be all that hard to get. After they signed up, they then summarized the most interesting things from each year that were posted to the listserv, and posted the results on the web. Wow! From the summary and translated article make it seem like they pulled a government approved hack of the NSA using cunning wit and unmatched skill or something.
... if you beat up a video store clerk and steal some real, actual copies of a film on DVD or VHS.
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Great analogy, except that you're comparing the ACTUAL time you would probably get for a crime to the MAXIMUM time you could get for another crime. The MAXIMUM punishment for felony aggravated assault and felony robbery would probably be about 30+ years, depending on the state. Why do people on slashdot have such trouble comprehending maximum punishment? Go look at some laws. Most crimes have suprisingly high maximum punishents. Most people don't get the maximum. That's why it's called a maximum punishment, not a standard punishemnt.
Microsoft's complaint claims that this is "an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought, by means of the dissemination of information."
Holy context Batman. I love how the submitter is so blatantly trying to get everyone riled up with that quote (oh no, thought crime!), when in fact that quote is actually just a direct translation of Article 12 of the Brazilian Press Law. (Microsoft is directly quoting the law when they use it in the complaint).
Because there is no way to patch the XBox version, an updated gamedisk is going to be re-released, according to the Through The Looking Glass Forum Admin (who I can only assume is a reliable source). It is currently unknown whether or not people who bought the unpatched version will be able to trade the game in.
Run it under Linux and win4lin, and never venture onto the Windows desktop at all.
Except, like, every time you run a windows application through win4lin. win4lin is just a virtual machine! You still need to install an authentic copy of Microsoft Windows on your machine. Although there is a big usability difference, there is not philisophical difference, as the summary seems to imply.
The Bono law is different. It grants an extra 20 years on copyrights. This can be taken away without infringing on any rights, because if the law had never been passed, the copyright holders would have had the same rights as if it was passed, and then later taken away. However, the 1976 law is different. If it had never been passed, many people would have just registered for copyrights, and then still held them legally. But because it was passed, they didn't need to register. If the 1976 law is then declared unconstitutional, and all non-registered copyrights are put in the public domain, even ones that would have been registered had the 1976 law not been passed, it would be unfair, and unconstitutional, because the law currently says you don't need to register.
The summary is a bit misleading. It seems to imply that (if the lawsuit succeeds) if a work goes out of print, it will become public domain. This is not the case. The only thing that this lawsuit is aiming to do is to declare the three major copyright acts passed since 1976 unconsitutional, and basically revert back to the copyright law that existed in the US from 1790 to 1976. Basically, you would need to register works with the copyright office, renew them every so often, and keep records of all works that you have copyrighted. The copyright term would also be shortened significantly.
For big companies, keeping up with copyrights would be no big deal (although many would have a fuss about the shortening of the term, like say, Disney). That's why this talk about implications in video games is so silly. First of all, the oldest playable videogames are only about 20 years old, which is well under the copyright term, even with the old laws. Second, most videogame companies are still around, or have been bought out by other companies, in which case the copyrights would be inhereted. The fact that these games can't be bought commercially anymore doesn't mean anything, the companies would still own the copyrights, and the games would not be public domain.
The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively. The courts aren't going to say "Well, you didn't have to file for a copyright or keep copyright records after 1976 in order to legally have a copyright, but you should have been able to see into the future and see that these laws are unconstitutional, and done it anyways." It's impossible to say how many of the works people are talking about would still be under copyright if the recent laws had never been passed. It's theoretically possible that every work someone submits a story about would be under copyright if the new copyright laws had never been passed, and that they didn't file for a copyright simply because the new laws made it so that they didn't need to. That's why the courts aren't just going to say "Every work published from 1976 to now is public domain!"
The price for these two items in Japan are currently 210,000 yen (1,900 USD) for the U70 and 178,500 yen (1,600 USD) for the U50.
I don't think price is a big concern for anyone willing to shell out an extra 700 bucks over the original retail price to get the latest toy from Japan, when there are so many comprarable products in the US that would be just as useful to 99.9% of the population. Stuff like this doesn't have to fill a particular niche, it just has to be new and unique enough to attract the attention of rich technophiles who crave the bleeding edge.
They found that 10-15% of email addresses are bogus. This makes perfect sense, because most users who register probably figure that they need to recieve an e-mail to confirm registration, (even if you don't, as in the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer). If you look at Name/address/phone number/other personal info, then the amount of falsified data is probably at 85%+. Of course, there's no way to run a database queue to find out how much of that is fake, since they can't just count bounced e-mails. But to the companies e-mail is really all that matters anyway, so the fact that the other info is fake is moot.
I don't know about prior art, but the idea isn't half-bad. The patent describes a card that has an actual keypad on it, with the hash of the PIN number stored inside the card. You then input the PIN number on the card itself, and the hashes are compared. This enables data on the card to be read for some amount of time. It would be preferable to having to PIN/password on the reader for two reasons, the first is that you would only need one universal password for it to work everywhere, and the second is that the data on the card could be encrypted as a function of the hash of the PIN number.
Look at his selling history and active auctions. He's been selling this stuff on eBay for over FOUR YEARS. He has about 100 seperate items on sale right now. He is probably bored as hell of it. This auction was a great idea, even if no one bids the $100,000 dollars. It has generated HUGE amounts of publicity for him(it had 20,000 hits before it hit/.) If no one bids on it, he'll have no problem selling the items seperately. And maybe, just maybe, there's a video game obsessed nut rich enough to bid the 100k.
There is actually a much more interesting press release on the Novell website about NetWare and McDonald's Brazil. It is unclear whether or not Germany was running SCO Unix on the servers before the switch to Linux, but SCO is apparently not a worldwide McDonald's affiliate, as McDonald's Brazil has been running NetWare for 15 years. This article also gives much more information about the IT infrastructure of McDonald's, since the slashdot article just made me think "How many DNS, FTP, and Proxy servers can McDonald's Germany possibly have?". McDonald's Brazil, which is about the same size as McDonald's Germany, has 6 giant servers in different locations accross the country, and each one has a huge database for all of the information of each restaurant, plus the administrative information. You have to remember that a lot of the IT related stuff is for McDonald's huge corperate staff, not the people taking your order. The other interesting thing is that McDonald's is completely centralized, so if a server failure occurs, and the in-store machines can't connect with a central database, they apparently can't take orders or give receipts out at the actual restaurants.
First of all, here are a couple of interesting links. The news stories are kind of vague as to the specifics of the charges, so here are the actual indictment.
The website with the actual mailing list (which is named, along with about 10 others in the above PDF) is here.
The thing about websites, forums, and mailing lists, is that you can never get the true feel from a description designed to make it sound horrible. For all we know, the messages that they read could be considered the trolls of the mailing list. Even if they weren't, Internet forums is still a sticky subject. People say a lot of stupid things, discussions can get heated, people can troll, people can exaggerate their beliefs to get a better response, and sometimes there are just nuts who use the Internet to let our their ideas that no one will listen to in real life. The sites could have been designed to support and recruit terrorists, but you can never really know, and there certainly wasn't enough evidence to point fingers at a moderator of the mailing list.
Seems like it would be better as a Ming example...
on
Ming + PHP5 + AI = Pretty
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The project itself really doesn't impress me. All the K++ people did was use a random number generator to generate colors, gradients, curve coordinates, circles, etc. The actual cool part (Dynamically genereated fully functional Flash movies through PHP) was all the work of the Ming library coders. This is akin to someone creating a spinning rainbow colored 3D cube in OpenGL or someone applying a ton of Photoshop filters to a cool picture of the sky. It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
Well, in that case, cost of media and shipping would be zero, and it would still be as free as Open Office, and they would only be paying for support =)
Before everyone starts complaining about why they didn't use a free alternative like OOo, look at the Star Office 7 link in the summary. It IS free for educational use:
Education No license fees; cost of media and shipping
It was probably cheaper than trying to burn and distrubute thousands and thousands of OOo CDs, since most schools don't have CD burners available that would be able to produce a quantity like that. They bulk of the 'minimal' amount of money probably went to a support contract.
Actually, the wired article got it wrong, it WAS in fact the patriot act. In a subpoena, the government cites sections of the US Code, not the act that modified the US code. In this case, the 1989 act modified section 175, and the PATRIOT act later modified that same section. The 1989 act says "Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon" is commiting a crime. In this act, "`for use as a weapon' does not include the development, production, transfer, acquisition, retention, or possession of any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes." This does not say that any other use IS "use as a weapon".
However, the PATRIOT act DOES make it bioterrorism to develop biological agents for any other reason than "reasonably justified by a prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose," even if it is NOT use as a weapon. From the wired article:
The subpoenas cited Section 175 of the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which prohibits the use of certain biological materials for anything other than a "prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose."
Since "bona fide research" is not present in the 1989 act, but is present in the PATRIOT act, and the fact that the PATRIOT act overwrote what was passed in the 1989 act, it is clear that the subpoena did in fact site the PATRIOT act.
Slashdot Mirror
Social engineering? Signing up for the listserv is a matter of going to this website., then filling out such hard hitting forms as "Name" and "Interest in Biometrics", and waiting for an e-mail confirmation stating you've been approved. Since the website says that its a free listserv for anyone interested in Biometrics, I don't think approval would be all that hard to get. After they signed up, they then summarized the most interesting things from each year that were posted to the listserv, and posted the results on the web. Wow! From the summary and translated article make it seem like they pulled a government approved hack of the NSA using cunning wit and unmatched skill or something.
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Great analogy, except that you're comparing the ACTUAL time you would probably get for a crime to the MAXIMUM time you could get for another crime. The MAXIMUM punishment for felony aggravated assault and felony robbery would probably be about 30+ years, depending on the state. Why do people on slashdot have such trouble comprehending maximum punishment? Go look at some laws. Most crimes have suprisingly high maximum punishents. Most people don't get the maximum. That's why it's called a maximum punishment, not a standard punishemnt.
Microsoft's complaint claims that this is "an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought, by means of the dissemination of information."
Holy context Batman. I love how the submitter is so blatantly trying to get everyone riled up with that quote (oh no, thought crime!), when in fact that quote is actually just a direct translation of Article 12 of the Brazilian Press Law. (Microsoft is directly quoting the law when they use it in the complaint).
Because there is no way to patch the XBox version, an updated gamedisk is going to be re-released, according to the Through The Looking Glass Forum Admin (who I can only assume is a reliable source). It is currently unknown whether or not people who bought the unpatched version will be able to trade the game in.
Run it under Linux and win4lin, and never venture onto the Windows desktop at all.
Except, like, every time you run a windows application through win4lin. win4lin is just a virtual machine! You still need to install an authentic copy of Microsoft Windows on your machine. Although there is a big usability difference, there is not philisophical difference, as the summary seems to imply.
The Bono law is different. It grants an extra 20 years on copyrights. This can be taken away without infringing on any rights, because if the law had never been passed, the copyright holders would have had the same rights as if it was passed, and then later taken away. However, the 1976 law is different. If it had never been passed, many people would have just registered for copyrights, and then still held them legally. But because it was passed, they didn't need to register. If the 1976 law is then declared unconstitutional, and all non-registered copyrights are put in the public domain, even ones that would have been registered had the 1976 law not been passed, it would be unfair, and unconstitutional, because the law currently says you don't need to register.
The summary is a bit misleading. It seems to imply that (if the lawsuit succeeds) if a work goes out of print, it will become public domain. This is not the case. The only thing that this lawsuit is aiming to do is to declare the three major copyright acts passed since 1976 unconsitutional, and basically revert back to the copyright law that existed in the US from 1790 to 1976. Basically, you would need to register works with the copyright office, renew them every so often, and keep records of all works that you have copyrighted. The copyright term would also be shortened significantly.
For big companies, keeping up with copyrights would be no big deal (although many would have a fuss about the shortening of the term, like say, Disney). That's why this talk about implications in video games is so silly. First of all, the oldest playable videogames are only about 20 years old, which is well under the copyright term, even with the old laws. Second, most videogame companies are still around, or have been bought out by other companies, in which case the copyrights would be inhereted. The fact that these games can't be bought commercially anymore doesn't mean anything, the companies would still own the copyrights, and the games would not be public domain.
The other thing to note is that any changes to copyright law are NOT going to be applied retroactively. The courts aren't going to say "Well, you didn't have to file for a copyright or keep copyright records after 1976 in order to legally have a copyright, but you should have been able to see into the future and see that these laws are unconstitutional, and done it anyways." It's impossible to say how many of the works people are talking about would still be under copyright if the recent laws had never been passed. It's theoretically possible that every work someone submits a story about would be under copyright if the new copyright laws had never been passed, and that they didn't file for a copyright simply because the new laws made it so that they didn't need to. That's why the courts aren't just going to say "Every work published from 1976 to now is public domain!"
The price for these two items in Japan are currently 210,000 yen (1,900 USD) for the U70 and 178,500 yen (1,600 USD) for the U50.
I don't think price is a big concern for anyone willing to shell out an extra 700 bucks over the original retail price to get the latest toy from Japan, when there are so many comprarable products in the US that would be just as useful to 99.9% of the population. Stuff like this doesn't have to fill a particular niche, it just has to be new and unique enough to attract the attention of rich technophiles who crave the bleeding edge.
They found that 10-15% of email addresses are bogus. This makes perfect sense, because most users who register probably figure that they need to recieve an e-mail to confirm registration, (even if you don't, as in the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer). If you look at Name/address/phone number/other personal info, then the amount of falsified data is probably at 85%+. Of course, there's no way to run a database queue to find out how much of that is fake, since they can't just count bounced e-mails. But to the companies e-mail is really all that matters anyway, so the fact that the other info is fake is moot.
I don't know about prior art, but the idea isn't half-bad. The patent describes a card that has an actual keypad on it, with the hash of the PIN number stored inside the card. You then input the PIN number on the card itself, and the hashes are compared. This enables data on the card to be read for some amount of time. It would be preferable to having to PIN/password on the reader for two reasons, the first is that you would only need one universal password for it to work everywhere, and the second is that the data on the card could be encrypted as a function of the hash of the PIN number.
Look at his selling history and active auctions. He's been selling this stuff on eBay for over FOUR YEARS. He has about 100 seperate items on sale right now. He is probably bored as hell of it. This auction was a great idea, even if no one bids the $100,000 dollars. It has generated HUGE amounts of publicity for him(it had 20,000 hits before it hit /.) If no one bids on it, he'll have no problem selling the items seperately. And maybe, just maybe, there's a video game obsessed nut rich enough to bid the 100k.
There is actually a much more interesting press release on the Novell website about NetWare and McDonald's Brazil. It is unclear whether or not Germany was running SCO Unix on the servers before the switch to Linux, but SCO is apparently not a worldwide McDonald's affiliate, as McDonald's Brazil has been running NetWare for 15 years. This article also gives much more information about the IT infrastructure of McDonald's, since the slashdot article just made me think "How many DNS, FTP, and Proxy servers can McDonald's Germany possibly have?". McDonald's Brazil, which is about the same size as McDonald's Germany, has 6 giant servers in different locations accross the country, and each one has a huge database for all of the information of each restaurant, plus the administrative information. You have to remember that a lot of the IT related stuff is for McDonald's huge corperate staff, not the people taking your order. The other interesting thing is that McDonald's is completely centralized, so if a server failure occurs, and the in-store machines can't connect with a central database, they apparently can't take orders or give receipts out at the actual restaurants.
The website with the actual mailing list (which is named, along with about 10 others in the above PDF) is here.
The thing about websites, forums, and mailing lists, is that you can never get the true feel from a description designed to make it sound horrible. For all we know, the messages that they read could be considered the trolls of the mailing list. Even if they weren't, Internet forums is still a sticky subject. People say a lot of stupid things, discussions can get heated, people can troll, people can exaggerate their beliefs to get a better response, and sometimes there are just nuts who use the Internet to let our their ideas that no one will listen to in real life. The sites could have been designed to support and recruit terrorists, but you can never really know, and there certainly wasn't enough evidence to point fingers at a moderator of the mailing list.
The project itself really doesn't impress me. All the K++ people did was use a random number generator to generate colors, gradients, curve coordinates, circles, etc. The actual cool part (Dynamically genereated fully functional Flash movies through PHP) was all the work of the Ming library coders. This is akin to someone creating a spinning rainbow colored 3D cube in OpenGL or someone applying a ton of Photoshop filters to a cool picture of the sky. It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
Well, in that case, cost of media and shipping would be zero, and it would still be as free as Open Office, and they would only be paying for support =)
Before everyone starts complaining about why they didn't use a free alternative like OOo, look at the Star Office 7 link in the summary. It IS free for educational use:
Education No license fees; cost of media and shipping
It was probably cheaper than trying to burn and distrubute thousands and thousands of OOo CDs, since most schools don't have CD burners available that would be able to produce a quantity like that. They bulk of the 'minimal' amount of money probably went to a support contract.
Actually, the wired article got it wrong, it WAS in fact the patriot act. In a subpoena, the government cites sections of the US Code, not the act that modified the US code. In this case, the 1989 act modified section 175, and the PATRIOT act later modified that same section. The 1989 act says "Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon" is commiting a crime. In this act, "`for use as a weapon' does not include the development, production, transfer, acquisition, retention, or possession of any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes." This does not say that any other use IS "use as a weapon".
However, the PATRIOT act DOES make it bioterrorism to develop biological agents for any other reason than "reasonably justified by a prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose," even if it is NOT use as a weapon. From the wired article:The subpoenas cited Section 175 of the U.S. Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which prohibits the use of certain biological materials for anything other than a "prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose."
Since "bona fide research" is not present in the 1989 act, but is present in the PATRIOT act, and the fact that the PATRIOT act overwrote what was passed in the 1989 act, it is clear that the subpoena did in fact site the PATRIOT act.