I wonder if there are similar registers for the
pcmcia cards, such at the Wavelan/lucent/orinoco
cards, or the prism II based cards? Open source
drivers would make turning up the heat on these
things easier and might help make some links more
stable.
Check out the corrected register article.
FreeBSD had 48bit IDE addressing support
in the CVS repository on Oct 6! A full month
before these patches to linux were released. So
far no released kernel supports this.:-)
The "advertisment" [sic] clause you refer to wasn't on these files in question. That clause
has been removed in FreeBSD code. The modified
BSD license has been around for a while now and
most new FreeBSD code uses it.
Please check your facts before going off like this.
The GPL does have its problems, and this is one
of them.:-)
This is false. The license clause in question is
compatible with the GPL. Someone took it, filed off the copyright notice and failed to give proper
credit. A very clear case of IP theft.
And if the BSD and GPL can't mix in the kernel, that's no excuse to file off the copyright notice.
If the GPL is so brain damaged as to forbid it, then Linux can't use it. That's not the way
to fix the licensing problem.
I've seen patches that correct the problems floating around, so this will be resolved shortly.
Even if you do distribute the original copyright/GNU license file, if you put it on the media that the user would normally have no access to, you likely would be in technical compliance.
I've talked at length to lawyers who have studied this issue. Their conclusion has universally been that it is unclear. One could make a case either way for embedded systems since the act of distribution is poorly defined and implies only software distribution and not hardware/software bundle to which the user has no access to the internal parts.
The main issue that I have with this is that it is so unclear as to create enough uncertainty for people that have intellectual property that they do not wish to distribute.
There's a more fundamental problem here. Some folks in the Linux community say that embedded systems are fine, and not to worry about it. Other folks, like stallman, say that even in the embedded systems you must comply. Who is right?
People have been saying for years that embedded systems need not fear from open source zealots.
since the software wasn't distributed separate from the hardware, it is hard to know if this fits
the definition of a distribution within its meaning in the GPL.
This is the reason that our systems are based on FreeBSD. We have a niche market (high precision timing systems) where we still have a lot of proprietary IP. FreeBSD lets us deploy that
without fear of GPL forcing issues.
And before anybody says anything, the company has
paid me for many hours of FreeBSD bug fixes over the years and contributes back to FreeBSD all that
we can because we know that it is in our best financial interst. FreeBSD isn't our compeditive
advantage, our ability to do high precision timing
systems is.
The problem with weakening crypto is that anybody
may be able to recover the keys, not just the
folks that mandated the back door. Also, there
are long term issues with this. What if a trusted
party today becomes an untrusted party in the
future? What do we do when the current threat is
over? What if the bad guys figure out the backdoor? Would you have worse problems from them
than you have now with the folks blowing things up? What if the US government gets weird and
refused to give up the back door once the crisis
is over?
And finally: What about the huge delpoyed base of strong crypto?
One more finally: Little evidence has been given
that strong crypto is being used today as a shield
for the communications with this group. Why should we give up our rights based only on the
say so of the Government, one that has lied to
us in the past?
15:1 is way above what can be regarded as "bad luck".
First, the 15 developers haven't departed the FreeBSD project. They are just unable to devote significant time to SNMng. There's a big difference between that and what is implied by this comment.
Actually, it is abouit right for every single free software project that I've been involved in. You get a lot of interest from people that want to see something done. Then you get about a 5 to 1 "disappearing into the woodwork" once people have begun work. Lots of people want to volunteer to help, but often times they don't have the time or fully understand what they volunteered for. You get another 3-5 to 1 attrition over the next year as people need to make money in their various fields over the next year. Or as their free time patterns change, etc.
Finally, although there's only one full time developer on SMPng, there are several people that are contributing to SMPng on an irregular basis.
So it isn't all that unusual. I'm sure many examples in the Linux world could be found as well.
I really like my i8k. It was only $2200 for 900MHz + dvd/cdrom + builting ethernet + modem + etra battery. And best of all, it has 1600x1200. The Equivelent IBM was almost $4k.
Of course, if you want to have a small, light machine, you are better off with one of the new Librettos...
As far as I have been able to determine, if you have the information it is yours to do with as you like. There are several court cases where people have come into possession of otherwise private information and were free to publish it. The Supreme court has been somewhat consistant about that in recent years. It is a first amendment thing. If you come by information through an illegal act that you did not commit or encourage to commit, then you can do whatever you want with the information. Witness the poor union negotiator who had his cell conversation taped and later played on the air.
Contract law, btw, requires that all parties sign, or otherwise agree to the contract. With this virus, there's no such agreement between the recipient and those who wish to keep the information private. It would be very hard to prosecute someone for disclosing this information, except maybe a copyright claim which would only protect the instance of the information, not the information itself.
The infected sender might be extremely liable, or not at all. It all would hinge on wheather or not it was possible to take reasonable steps to ensure that such unauthorized disclosure would be prevented.
Bottom line: You can tell people whatever you want to about this. Posting actual documents may expose you to a copyright action (since all documents are copyright at birth), but that would not preclude you from posting summaries.
If we can get the BIOS makers to support these, we'd have a really cool, small console window for machines that don't normally need displays, but
do from time to time need access to a desplay + keyboard.
Can we please change that infernal BSD mascot? I like Unix and Unix variants as much as everyone else, but I am
very uncomfortable with *BSD's connection to Satanism and demonic figures.
There is no connection to Satanism. The daemon is not anti-christian or neo-pagan. He's just a mascot. I don't see you complaining about the New Jersey Blue Devils hockey team, or any of the other countless examples in todays society. Some so-called Christians will have you believe that all things that aren't god are evil, or that anything that matches their silly little filters for a devil is wrong. They are not to be trusted as they distort the truth and burn people at the stakes.
See, old stereo types are easy to pin on people, but utterly without basis in fact. There hasn't been a witch burning in over a hundred years.
What is the best way to respond to a legal threat? In the past, I've been told to tell anyone that makes legal threats or demands of me or my software to talk to direct all such communications through my lawyer as a matter of policy. Is this a good policy? When does taking a matter public do more harm than good?
If I write a piece of software under license A. Someone else takes that software, makes modifications to it and then releases it under license B, what leagal recourse would I have? Let us say that A is the BSD license and B is the GPL. Can someone who created a derivitive work change the licensing for the whole work, or are just the changes that person made covered by the new license.
: BSD has too many of its own schisms to accuse Linux of being the schism.
Linux has too many schisms to be throwing stones at anybody about schisms. Oh, wait, they use newspeak "distributions" to mask that fact. And arguments that there is only one kernel, like the kernel is the only part of the system that matters.
BSD predates Linux. Why do Linux in the first place? Why didn't people get behind BSD back in its early days? Why dilute the effort? Why let big companies scare people off?
Come on Russ. That's a rather narrow and myopic view of things. Competition between *BSD and Linux has been one of the driving forces that has made both of them better over the years. Linux would be better at Y for a while, then BSD would leap from them and then Linux would leap frog BSD. Back and forth because of competition. I don't think that it would have made as much progress as it has (either of them) if it wasn't for the other's presence.
Not to mention the fact that *BSD predates the well heeled enemies of free software. There's a lot of momentum in the *BSD community and just because MS or other folks want to shut Linux down is not a good reason for *BSD to abandon their systems to rally behind Linux.
As the former FreeBSD security officer, I can tell you that we sat on information about exploits until fixes were in the tree, except for those folks that needed to know. Once we released an advisory, which didn't contain exploits, usually the exploits that we used to test our fixes appeared in Bugtraq. Sometimes with a very long lag.
In the security biz, sometimes short term non-disclosure can be beneficial. So long as it is short term and you don't rely on it for the long term security of your system.
Also, the time lag that we like to see is closer to a week than 2 days since it lets us get a good advisory written, as well as doing better testing to see if other exploits are possible that the first one wouldn't find in testing, etc. We actually like to work with the folks that bring these to our attention so that we can make sure that our developers have had a chance to fix the problem before the release goes out (as well as informing other parties that we think might be using the same code base). Sometimes this means asking them to sit on things a little longer if the bug turns out to be hard to fix. Other times it means sending them a "go for it any time" and waiting a while for them to release their advisory so they get credit before we release ours.
I don't think this will be used to sweep security issues under the rug. Rather it will help those folks that intergrate BIND into their base OSes, like FreeBSD does, to provide more timely updates to their source bases so they don't open a window of opportunity for the bad guys to hit the user community.
It comes down to balance and common sense. in the end.
No. This isn't the only Limestone warehouse. There are about 50 of them last time I checked in the KC area. I grew up there and the Cub Scout troop I was in took a tour once. Then later in High school, some organization I was involved with managed to wrangle a tour in another one.
A truly scarey place. But they have excellent climent control, which is why they use them for this.
I thought the idea nuts when I was in 2nd grade and got my first tour. Now that I see what people store in them these days, I know I was right.
I had a non-compete clause in a contract that I signed. I left the company to become a consultant. One of my gigs was going to be on the software that I'd just written 6 months earlier for one of their customers. I wound up taking the gig after talking to a lawyer. He said that judges take a very dim view of restraint of trade. My non-compete contract didn't have limitations on geography or a reasonable duration (it was two years). This was just about the time that a judge ruled that that such a long time duration was not acceptible or reasonable in the internet age.
I didn't have any problems with the other company, but I didn't tell them and asked my client to not
specifically mention my name.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if there are similar registers for the
pcmcia cards, such at the Wavelan/lucent/orinoco
cards, or the prism II based cards? Open source
drivers would make turning up the heat on these
things easier and might help make some links more
stable.
Check out the corrected register article. :-)
FreeBSD had 48bit IDE addressing support
in the CVS repository on Oct 6! A full month
before these patches to linux were released. So
far no released kernel supports this.
Especially when other systems (like NetBSD, FreeBSD,Solaris) were omitted.
Please check your facts before going off like this.
The GPL does have its problems, and this is one of them. :-)
And if the BSD and GPL can't mix in the kernel, that's no excuse to file off the copyright notice. If the GPL is so brain damaged as to forbid it, then Linux can't use it. That's not the way to fix the licensing problem.
I've seen patches that correct the problems floating around, so this will be resolved shortly.
Even if you do distribute the original copyright/GNU license file, if you put it on the media that the user would normally have no access to, you likely would be in technical compliance.
I've talked at length to lawyers who have studied this issue. Their conclusion has universally been that it is unclear. One could make a case either way for embedded systems since the act of distribution is poorly defined and implies only software distribution and not hardware/software bundle to which the user has no access to the internal parts.
The main issue that I have with this is that it is so unclear as to create enough uncertainty for people that have intellectual property that they do not wish to distribute.
There's a more fundamental problem here. Some folks in the Linux community say that embedded systems are fine, and not to worry about it. Other folks, like stallman, say that even in the embedded systems you must comply. Who is right?
People have been saying for years that embedded systems need not fear from open source zealots.
since the software wasn't distributed separate from the hardware, it is hard to know if this fits
the definition of a distribution within its meaning in the GPL.
This is the reason that our systems are based on FreeBSD. We have a niche market (high precision timing systems) where we still have a lot of proprietary IP. FreeBSD lets us deploy that
without fear of GPL forcing issues.
And before anybody says anything, the company has
paid me for many hours of FreeBSD bug fixes over the years and contributes back to FreeBSD all that
we can because we know that it is in our best financial interst. FreeBSD isn't our compeditive
advantage, our ability to do high precision timing
systems is.
The problem with weakening crypto is that anybody
may be able to recover the keys, not just the
folks that mandated the back door. Also, there
are long term issues with this. What if a trusted
party today becomes an untrusted party in the
future? What do we do when the current threat is
over? What if the bad guys figure out the backdoor? Would you have worse problems from them
than you have now with the folks blowing things up? What if the US government gets weird and
refused to give up the back door once the crisis
is over?
And finally: What about the huge delpoyed base of strong crypto?
One more finally: Little evidence has been given
that strong crypto is being used today as a shield
for the communications with this group. Why should we give up our rights based only on the
say so of the Government, one that has lied to
us in the past?
Yes. ssh/pgp are too widely deployed to be made
illegal now.
Actually, it is abouit right for every single free software project that I've been involved in. You get a lot of interest from people that want to see something done. Then you get about a 5 to 1 "disappearing into the woodwork" once people have begun work. Lots of people want to volunteer to help, but often times they don't have the time or fully understand what they volunteered for. You get another 3-5 to 1 attrition over the next year as people need to make money in their various fields over the next year. Or as their free time patterns change, etc.
Finally, although there's only one full time developer on SMPng, there are several people that are contributing to SMPng on an irregular basis.
So it isn't all that unusual. I'm sure many examples in the Linux world could be found as well.
Warner
FreeBSD's boot process will still tell how fast :-).
it is clocked
I really like my i8k. It was only $2200 for 900MHz + dvd/cdrom + builting ethernet + modem + etra battery. And best of all, it has 1600x1200. The Equivelent IBM was almost $4k.
Of course, if you want to have a small, light machine, you are better off with one of the new Librettos...
As far as I have been able to determine, if you have the information it is yours to do with as you like. There are several court cases where people have come into possession of otherwise private information and were free to publish it. The Supreme court has been somewhat consistant about that in recent years. It is a first amendment thing. If you come by information through an illegal act that you did not commit or encourage to commit, then you can do whatever you want with the information. Witness the poor union negotiator who had his cell conversation taped and later played on the air.
Contract law, btw, requires that all parties sign, or otherwise agree to the contract. With this virus, there's no such agreement between the recipient and those who wish to keep the information private. It would be very hard to prosecute someone for disclosing this information, except maybe a copyright claim which would only protect the instance of the information, not the information itself.
The infected sender might be extremely liable, or not at all. It all would hinge on wheather or not it was possible to take reasonable steps to ensure that such unauthorized disclosure would be prevented.
Bottom line: You can tell people whatever you want to about this. Posting actual documents may expose you to a copyright action (since all documents are copyright at birth), but that would not preclude you from posting summaries.
If we can get the BIOS makers to support these, we'd have a really cool, small console window for machines that don't normally need displays, but
:-)
do from time to time need access to a desplay + keyboard.
I don't care about gaming with it
And there are (or were) many people that could read ROT13 jokes without the aid of said unix
one-liner (tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m).
It wasn't an effective deterent.
There was a slash dot article around usenix time saying that openbsd got some money too.
There is no connection to Satanism. The daemon is not anti-christian or neo-pagan. He's just a mascot. I don't see you complaining about the New Jersey Blue Devils hockey team, or any of the other countless examples in todays society. Some so-called Christians will have you believe that all things that aren't god are evil, or that anything that matches their silly little filters for a devil is wrong. They are not to be trusted as they distort the truth and burn people at the stakes.
See, old stereo types are easy to pin on people, but utterly without basis in fact. There hasn't been a witch burning in over a hundred years.
What is the best way to respond to a legal threat? In the past, I've been told to tell anyone that makes legal threats or demands of me or my software to talk to direct all such communications through my lawyer as a matter of policy. Is this a good policy? When does taking a matter public do more harm than good?
If I write a piece of software under license A. Someone else takes that software, makes modifications to it and then releases it under license B, what leagal recourse would I have? Let us say that A is the BSD license and B is the GPL. Can someone who created a derivitive work change the licensing for the whole work, or are just the changes that person made covered by the new license.
No. They couldn't even if they wanted to.
Warner Losh
FreeBSD Core
: BSD has too many of its own schisms to accuse Linux of being the schism.
Linux has too many schisms to be throwing stones at anybody about schisms. Oh, wait, they use newspeak "distributions" to mask that fact. And arguments that there is only one kernel, like the kernel is the only part of the system that matters.
: I just don't understand *BSD*. No part of it.
BSD predates Linux. Why do Linux in the first place? Why didn't people get behind BSD back in its early days? Why dilute the effort? Why let big companies scare people off?
Come on Russ. That's a rather narrow and myopic view of things. Competition between *BSD and Linux has been one of the driving forces that has made both of them better over the years. Linux would be better at Y for a while, then BSD would leap from them and then Linux would leap frog BSD. Back and forth because of competition. I don't think that it would have made as much progress as it has (either of them) if it wasn't for the other's presence.
Not to mention the fact that *BSD predates the well heeled enemies of free software. There's a lot of momentum in the *BSD community and just because MS or other folks want to shut Linux down is not a good reason for *BSD to abandon their systems to rally behind Linux.
In the security biz, sometimes short term non-disclosure can be beneficial. So long as it is short term and you don't rely on it for the long term security of your system.
Also, the time lag that we like to see is closer to a week than 2 days since it lets us get a good advisory written, as well as doing better testing to see if other exploits are possible that the first one wouldn't find in testing, etc. We actually like to work with the folks that bring these to our attention so that we can make sure that our developers have had a chance to fix the problem before the release goes out (as well as informing other parties that we think might be using the same code base). Sometimes this means asking them to sit on things a little longer if the bug turns out to be hard to fix. Other times it means sending them a "go for it any time" and waiting a while for them to release their advisory so they get credit before we release ours.
I don't think this will be used to sweep security issues under the rug. Rather it will help those folks that intergrate BIND into their base OSes, like FreeBSD does, to provide more timely updates to their source bases so they don't open a window of opportunity for the bad guys to hit the user community.
It comes down to balance and common sense. in the end.
Warner Losh
A truly scarey place. But they have excellent climent control, which is why they use them for this.
I thought the idea nuts when I was in 2nd grade and got my first tour. Now that I see what people store in them these days, I know I was right.
I didn't have any problems with the other company, but I didn't tell them and asked my client to not specifically mention my name.