Re:pdp-10 ran UNIX therefore...
on
PDP-10 Revival
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· Score: 2
Greg Titus wrote a compiler tha ran on the decsystem 10 and DECSYSTEM 20's. Sold it to Digital back in 1985 or so for lots of software for the TOPS-20 systems we had at New Mexico Tech at the time.
This compiler made it onto a DECUS tape. However, since it predated ANSI-C, it doesn't implement ANSI, but only K&R. Not a bad compiler for its time and it launched Greg's career. He's been a compiler guru ever since then.
My biggest gripe is that USWest decided in their glorious wisdom to intermingle the two area codes that we use, 720 and 303. We have a 303 area
code, but our neighbors have a 720 area code. The term "area code" no longer seems to apply.
I too live in the Denver Metro area. The term area code does still apply, but the mapping of area to one unique area code doesn't. For those of you joining us late, Denver has two area codes: 303 and 720 that are overlayed on one another. They did this rather than force 1/2 of the entire metro area to change area codes. I rather like it, but it has caused some confusion. Mostly from people not knowing what is going on and the confusion has mostly cleared up.
As for having a unique phone number that follows you forever, I kinda doubt this will happen. Phone numbers still have lots of georgraphy coded into them. The first three digits are a geographic region, so the long distance switches and such only need look at the first three digits to route the call. The next three are a sub area of that area code, so that the switches at that level only need look at 3 digits to know how to route things to a CO (or in some cases one of many COs, but those COs are hierarchical if I understand what my friends that work for ma bell tell me, but the exact details are unimport). To move away from a geographic model would require upgrading the entire US long distance system as well as all the local offices to cope with the new routing tables. I don't think there's enough gain for doing this.
So no, I don't think this is the first step towards giving people phone numbers they can keep when they move. That would require a huge huge huge investment in infrastructure. Likely it is a way to pack more phone numbers into a calling area and nothing more. sorry.
FreeBSD has two ways that you can partition your disk -- a `compatible' way and a non compatible way.
Both ways create MBR partition tables. The non-compatible way jsut lies to the BIOS about the geometry.
The real issue here is that IBM didn't look at the assigned partition ID list before creating their partition ID. FreeBSD has been using 0xa5 for about 9 or 10 years now. It is on all the lists.
This has nothing at all to do with what you are describing. Dangerously dedicated disks have the x0a5 partition on them.
So calling it compatible vs non-compatible is a bit of a miss nomer.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is only the partition ID. This has been discussed to death in the freeBSD lists. People have taken disks that have Linux on it and changed the partition ID only from linux's 0x80 to freebsd's 0xa5 and the machine becomes a brick. It is *ONLY* the partition ID.
Of course, this is all conjecture, but I suspect I'm right.
It certainly looks like an outlier in the data. Knowing what I know about stats, I'd say that the math is good.
I would caution, however, that I've not run a T test or a chi-squared test or any other measure to see if this is really an outlier. It looks like one to me. However, with so few data points, it is hard, statistically speaking, to know for sure if it is an outlier, or just an unlikely, but statitically insignficant event. Mean and standard deviation do not tell the whole store.
I know I have a bias here. My personal solution to all the problems would be to apportion the invalid votes. If there's a vote for Bush and Buchanan, each gets 1/2 a vote. Add up the numbers, round down to the nearest whole vote and you are golden.
I've also seen references to Florida law that specifically states that ballots have an "X" on the right side of the name of candidates only. Don't know how true that is, but that would make these ballots illegal. If they are illegal, then the courts would have to deside what the most appropriate legal remedy would be. I don't envy them that task.
It would also would like to see a statistical analysis of the delta in the votes as a percentage of voters done. It seems on its surface that the 700-odd votes that were missing in the original count seems high for a county the size of Palm Beach. Almost all the other country results seem to be about what I'd expect. But all the counties aren't in yet, so it is hard to know for sure.
I'd also compare this year's results with prior years that Buchanan ran to see if there are any statistical differences between the two.
There are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics:-)
I don't see a problem if there was 100% voter turnout. Isn't that what this country is about?
I also have a big problem with people dismissing the elderly or anybody else that got confused. They aren't so feeble minded to not know how they wanted to vote. In an ideal world they would vote in a way that made it clear that were little or no room for errors. Having helped the elderly on many occasions, I know they need special attentions that younger folks don't need. On the other hand, younger folks tend to need other things the elderly don't so the accomidations made to the elderly aren't that special all things considered.
Another mathematical fact. Right now the electoral college gives smaller states more power because they have proportionally more votes than their large bretheren. If we subtract out this bias by subtracting 2*states one from each candidates total, one see that Gore wins with 220 votes (219 needed in this hypothetical situation).
Actually, these sorts of marking bad memory things have been around for a long time. The trouble with them is that RAM isn't as determanistic as you'd like to believe. Once you get one or two bad pages in RAM, more tend to break rather quickly. This has been tried in the past and I think that these systems will still be flakey even when not touching the bad ram.
I've also seen machines that had bad ram lock up randomly, even when the bad pages are never touched.
is the seperation of the Linux and BSD communities
Let us keep some historical perspective here. The Linux crowd decided to not use BSD net2 when it was freely available, but instead went off and invented their own stuff. They left the BSD community a long time ago and haven't given us enough credit or spotlight since then.
Having said that, it is good to have a convention focused on the BSD community. There are already several for the Linux community. This isn't a war or anything like that, just a chance for like horned people to get together and exchange ideas.
While some members of the BSD community may indulge in excesses wrt Linux and/or its mascots from time to time, most people realize that both groups benefit by the competition and the cross fertilization that happens between the groups.
It is also a wonderful opportunity for us to meet the people that we develop the software with, or sometimes compete against, have some personal bonding and see the latest FreeBSD bondage t-shirts;-)
there's no need to release them to the general public
I disagree. The public at large must have some way to test to see if their systems are vulnerable to attack. The easiest way to do this is by running the exploit to see if you are safe or not. This is especially true for systems that aren't too popular today as their might not even be a vendor for the product any more (When was the last time mips hardware company issued a bug fix).
Developers of similar code also have a keen interest in the exploits. As do writers of secure code. When the exploits are analized, often they relveal areas of exploration which heretofore might have been thought completely safe, or whose danger was unknown. Executable stacks and printf format strings come to mind here (a hardware problem and software sloppiness).
Besides, it is just against the freedoms that this country was founded upon to restrict speech.
This certainly is good news for people working to interoperate with other people's software. It also goes a long way towards pulling the fangs of the DMCA, which tries to limit reverse engineering of circumvention devices. This should be a boost to people who are doing the CUE Cat stuff since they aren't even copying the software, and even if they used the decompiled binaries to get an understanding of the protocol (which isn't strictly needed, given how easy it was to figure out), they would be safe.
I wonder what affect, if any, it will have on the DeCSS case?
With all due respect, the fact that it boots on a 31 CPU machine doesn't tell us a damn thing about how well it performs as a 31 CPU machine. What does the graph of performance vs number of CPUs look like? If you get the same level of performance at 16 and 31 CPUS, for example, it shows that Linux won't scale.
Until you can show a real-world benchmark for each step along the way from 1 -> 31 processors, I won't believe it will scale well. Something simple like building kernel would likely be graphable and show how well things scale. I'd build it once to preload the cache and then build it 10 times in a row, take the average, add a cpu and repeat.
I'm not saying that Linux doesn't scale. I'm also not saying that it does. I'm saying the mere fact that it booted on a 31 CPU machine means that it booted on a 31 processor machine and nothing more until more data is provided.
Yes. When you give things away, even if you attempt to attach an unenforcible contract, you are asking for trouble.
We live, for better or worse, in a free market society. In such a society, companies are free to give away things. The recipients are also free to do whatever the hell they want with them. That's how the free market works. If I sell something cheap, people will buy it. It is up to ME to make sure that I do it in such a way that I make money. If I don't, then I am the one that's SOL.
Personally, I don't see how exploiting this is any different than, say, buying something on sale or on clearance. In both cases you are getting something for below the market rates for some reason. People aren't up in arms when other people do that. why are they so ticked off that the hacker community has expanded the uses for something they got for free.
Heck, it is an old time Yankee Thrift at work here (for those in the us doing these things). If it weren't for that, we'd still only use Duct Tape on Ducts and furnaces:-).
TIA 1.0 was released in late 1993 or early 1994. It did NAT-like address translation. I worked on the code from September 1995. The patent was filed November 5, 1995. When I started at Cyberspace Developement (the folks that did TIA), the address translation code was in place. When I was brought on, one of the first things I did was to create a CVS tree with all the sources in it. I went back to the original 1.0 release and put those sources in, then the interrum 1.1 sources (I was working on 2.0) and then the current 2.0 pre-alpha sources. The address translation for FTP, and a few other protocols was in place from at least 1.0 forward.
SLiRP also did TIA-like things. IIRC, it was release the summer of 1995. So there's an OPEN SOURCE release prior to CISCO's patent being filed. I don't know if it predates their internal first use, which may be a wash here.
I'd be happy to testify to these facts in a court of law, should it come to that, assuming that I can convince the folks that bought Cyberspace Developement to allow me to do so.
There was no shirnk wrap to break. No license agreement to agree to. I *NEVER* installed their software, so their new EULA is just as unenforcible as their old one and will get the same response from my atterney: Get Bent.
This isn't that new. Most of the *BSD issues
have already been committed and are thus not vulnerable. Tehy make it sound a lot worse than
it really is.
Also, *ALL* Oses are impacted, since all oses have the sprintf-like functions.
No, you are incorrect. The only part of the protocol that was reverse engineered was the cuecat keyboard stuff. The rest was a reimplementation of similar functionality. There's nothing in that protocol that is phone home. That happens at the next layer up. The serial number of the unit doing the scanning is part of the protocol, but higher levels are responsible for implementing that, or not as they see fit.
There's nothing about interoperability that requires you to implement everything. Interoperability is defined by the folks that are writing the app, not the folks that designed the original.
You are likely right that the "phone home" feature is why they are squawking. That's likely the revenue stream that feels threatened to them. They want to have the consumer data and sell that. That's, more than sales of a development kit like I originally suggested, is what is motivating this attack.
So I think your attempt to paint this as black and white is a bad thing. There are many parts of this device that are interesting. The suspect implementations are taking what they need to interoperate with this device, and leaving the rest.
Unfortunately the
Linux Community could of inadvertently created the WINDOW for the BIG companies to come
in and control and profit from this process we have created.
Excuse me? The Protocol between the cat and the keyboard port was *TRIVIAL* to reverse engineer. I figured most of it out in 10 minutes. And it took another 20-30 to get the last bit right (the xor was the kicker). 45 minutes after I started looking at bar codes, I knew the protocol.
Even if Microsoft programmers are as incompotent as people at slashdot paint them from time to time (and I know they aren't), I doubt that it would take more than a day for them to reverse engineer the protocol.
Current US laws allow for reverse engineering to effect interoperability. Nothing more than that was engaged in here.
Finally, I think they are just a bunch of crybabies out to give opensource a bad name. Look how much whining they did. Look how unspecific they were about what IP was allegedly stolen. My guess is that they lost sales of some development kit or another, or fear such loss, and are using the IP argument to scare people into not blabbing.
OpenBSD may have the same apps, but
they've been thouroughly audited for security.
This is generally only true for those ports in the ports/security tree. Most of the others haven't been havily audited. Certainly no more so than for FreeSBD's system. There are exceptions on both sides.
If you read the fine print you are merely borrowing it
Well, no. There's no fine print in a cash transaction. I went to Radio Shack. I gave them money for a purchase, and this was included for free. No contract was signed, so the Uniform Commecrial Code applies. A contract was fixed at the time of sale. I gave them my name, address, etc. They gave me the scanner. A simple quid pro quo transaction. The fact that there's a piece of paper in the packet that purports to be an enforcible contract is really laughable. It is invalid and cannot be enforced. This is doublely true if you never installed the software. If you did, The Cat people can say that you agreed to the contract since the packaging for the cdrom contained the right warning lables. Since I never installed the software, or even opened the cd package, I never agreed to a modification of the contract that was fixed at the time of sale.
In other words, They are going to have a hard time enforcing the supposed contract.
Sure, it said this in the software license that came with this item, but they are SOL. It isn't legally enforcible. I *NEVER* installed the software, so the terms of the sale is fixed when they gave it to me WITH MY OTHER PURCHASE. I bought a video amplifier and they gave me my cat. The contract for the entire transaction was fixed at the time I gave them my money (since it is impossible w/o software to fix the contract at a later point in time).
In addition, the item was not free, but given to me (and everybody else) for good and fair compensation, namely the personal information. It can be shown that this information has a monitary value (just look at how much email lists and snailmail lists sell for), and therefore the
exchange could likely be viewed as a "sale" for the purposes of the uniform commercial code.
Software is a special case because it has labels on it stating that you are agreeig to a license, plus presents you with the license and a chance to repudiate the license and get a refund (in theory at least, when was the last time someone was able to return software they didn't like the license terms to, say, CompUSA).
So I think they are SOL unless you installed their driver software. Which I've never done. I've not even taken it out of the packaging.
P.S. If I were the author that got such a C&D letter, then I'd demand they get a whole lot more specific about what, exactly, was in violation. Such vague letters are easy and cheap to write and are meaningless in many cases because they aren't specific. Ask them for specifics. What, specifically, are they objecting to. What gives them the legal right to object to it (copyright claim, granted patent claim, trade secret, etc) so you have a chance to audit their claims. If they refuse, then you are in a much better position later if they file legal action against you.
The keyboard connector is a Y connector, so you don't lose anything.
Also, it looks like it spits out a stream of keys which look something like
.C3nZC3nZC3nXD3T6ENv1C3nX.ahb6.eaq.
Where the string startnig with C3 is identical on all barcodes I scanned. My guess it is a serial
number. The.ahb6. field is likely the type of bar code that was read (since it changes for
different barcodes). And the.eaq. is the barcode that I scanned (in this case a country code from a seagate cheetah disk: SG for those collecting these things).
I've been able to read Most barcodes that I've thrown at the thing: Normal product UPC, a book ISBN, the strange codes in the ratshack catalog, a barcode on the seagate disk I was given to install, and the bar codes on a box that some electrical parts came in.
My guess is that there's a code for these the bar code. It looks like it is 5 or 6 bits per character, encoded in some strange way. If it is 6 bits, then SG is 12 bits, which would imply that each character of bar code delivers 4 bits. If SG is really 24 bits (start S G stop), then we're delivering 8 bits, which seems wrong because I didn't see anything in the control character or
upper half of the range. So we may be looking at a radix 62 encoding (A-Za-z0-9).
Anyway, enough musings, I'll bet I've overlooked a pointer to the specs posted elsewhere on this page:-)
How many remote root holes ahve there been in Linux as compared to OpenBSD in the last 3 years? According to the OpenBSD folks I hang out with, there have been NO remote root holes in OpenBSD in the past 3 years. Linux has had literally hundreds.
where the Playstation 2 is now under restrictive export controls
This is not true. I travelled to Japan in Early June. I asked the customs officer if the Sony Playstation 2 had any export controls on it, since I was thinking of buying a few to bring back to the US. He told me that no, there were no export controls on it. That the whole thing was some confusion at central government and was cleared up within two days. He also told me that I'd only have to worry about import issues on the country I was bringing them into.
He didn't come out and say it, but some of my Japanese friends did. It was just a ploy by Sony to make the playstation sound really cool.
Oh, there is one last issue with taking a PS2 out of Japan. Sony will not honor the warantees on these units outside of Japan. At least that's
what I was told by my Japenese friends. That was a deal killer for me.
ObOnTopic: I think that the port to dreamcast is way cool. Look at how useful the NetBSD/hpcmips port is for the WindowsCE machines that are now being dumped on the market cheaply.
Slashdot Mirror
This compiler made it onto a DECUS tape. However, since it predated ANSI-C, it doesn't implement ANSI, but only K&R. Not a bad compiler for its time and it launched Greg's career. He's been a compiler guru ever since then.
Warner Losh
As a FreeBSD core team member, I can tell you that apple definitely has contributed code back to both NetBSD and FreeBSD.
It also means shipwreck.
As for having a unique phone number that follows you forever, I kinda doubt this will happen. Phone numbers still have lots of georgraphy coded into them. The first three digits are a geographic region, so the long distance switches and such only need look at the first three digits to route the call. The next three are a sub area of that area code, so that the switches at that level only need look at 3 digits to know how to route things to a CO (or in some cases one of many COs, but those COs are hierarchical if I understand what my friends that work for ma bell tell me, but the exact details are unimport). To move away from a geographic model would require upgrading the entire US long distance system as well as all the local offices to cope with the new routing tables. I don't think there's enough gain for doing this.
So no, I don't think this is the first step towards giving people phone numbers they can keep when they move. That would require a huge huge huge investment in infrastructure. Likely it is a way to pack more phone numbers into a calling area and nothing more. sorry.
The real issue here is that IBM didn't look at the assigned partition ID list before creating their partition ID. FreeBSD has been using 0xa5 for about 9 or 10 years now. It is on all the lists. This has nothing at all to do with what you are describing. Dangerously dedicated disks have the x0a5 partition on them.
So calling it compatible vs non-compatible is a bit of a miss nomer.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is only the partition ID. This has been discussed to death in the freeBSD lists. People have taken disks that have Linux on it and changed the partition ID only from linux's 0x80 to freebsd's 0xa5 and the machine becomes a brick. It is *ONLY* the partition ID.
actually you are wrong.I would caution, however, that I've not run a T test or a chi-squared test or any other measure to see if this is really an outlier. It looks like one to me. However, with so few data points, it is hard, statistically speaking, to know for sure if it is an outlier, or just an unlikely, but statitically insignficant event. Mean and standard deviation do not tell the whole store.
I know I have a bias here. My personal solution to all the problems would be to apportion the invalid votes. If there's a vote for Bush and Buchanan, each gets 1/2 a vote. Add up the numbers, round down to the nearest whole vote and you are golden.
I've also seen references to Florida law that specifically states that ballots have an "X" on the right side of the name of candidates only. Don't know how true that is, but that would make these ballots illegal. If they are illegal, then the courts would have to deside what the most appropriate legal remedy would be. I don't envy them that task.
It would also would like to see a statistical analysis of the delta in the votes as a percentage of voters done. It seems on its surface that the 700-odd votes that were missing in the original count seems high for a county the size of Palm Beach. Almost all the other country results seem to be about what I'd expect. But all the counties aren't in yet, so it is hard to know for sure.
I'd also compare this year's results with prior years that Buchanan ran to see if there are any statistical differences between the two.
There are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics :-)
I don't see a problem if there was 100% voter turnout. Isn't that what this country is about?
I also have a big problem with people dismissing the elderly or anybody else that got confused. They aren't so feeble minded to not know how they wanted to vote. In an ideal world they would vote in a way that made it clear that were little or no room for errors. Having helped the elderly on many occasions, I know they need special attentions that younger folks don't need. On the other hand, younger folks tend to need other things the elderly don't so the accomidations made to the elderly aren't that special all things considered.
Another mathematical fact. Right now the electoral college gives smaller states more power because they have proportionally more votes than their large bretheren. If we subtract out this bias by subtracting 2*states one from each candidates total, one see that Gore wins with 220 votes (219 needed in this hypothetical situation).
Finally, damn this is a barn burner.
Actually, these sorts of marking bad memory things have been around for a long time. The trouble with them is that RAM isn't as determanistic as you'd like to believe. Once you get one or two bad pages in RAM, more tend to break rather quickly. This has been tried in the past and I think that these systems will still be flakey even when not touching the bad ram.
I've also seen machines that had bad ram lock up randomly, even when the bad pages are never touched.
Let me just say that I have my doubts.
Let us keep some historical perspective here. The Linux crowd decided to not use BSD net2 when it was freely available, but instead went off and invented their own stuff. They left the BSD community a long time ago and haven't given us enough credit or spotlight since then.
Having said that, it is good to have a convention focused on the BSD community. There are already several for the Linux community. This isn't a war or anything like that, just a chance for like horned people to get together and exchange ideas. While some members of the BSD community may indulge in excesses wrt Linux and/or its mascots from time to time, most people realize that both groups benefit by the competition and the cross fertilization that happens between the groups.
It is also a wonderful opportunity for us to meet the people that we develop the software with, or sometimes compete against, have some personal bonding and see the latest FreeBSD bondage t-shirts ;-)
Developers of similar code also have a keen interest in the exploits. As do writers of secure code. When the exploits are analized, often they relveal areas of exploration which heretofore might have been thought completely safe, or whose danger was unknown. Executable stacks and printf format strings come to mind here (a hardware problem and software sloppiness).
Besides, it is just against the freedoms that this country was founded upon to restrict speech.
Warner Losh
FreeBSD Security Officer
The big problem is that There's a Linux bias on slashdot. They don't report these sorts of things too often.
*BSD is actually easier to port to new architectures because it has been ported to many architectures.
I wonder what affect, if any, it will have on the DeCSS case?
The same way that script kiddies do :-)
Until you can show a real-world benchmark for each step along the way from 1 -> 31 processors, I won't believe it will scale well. Something simple like building kernel would likely be graphable and show how well things scale. I'd build it once to preload the cache and then build it 10 times in a row, take the average, add a cpu and repeat.
I'm not saying that Linux doesn't scale. I'm also not saying that it does. I'm saying the mere fact that it booted on a 31 CPU machine means that it booted on a 31 processor machine and nothing more until more data is provided.
We live, for better or worse, in a free market society. In such a society, companies are free to give away things. The recipients are also free to do whatever the hell they want with them. That's how the free market works. If I sell something cheap, people will buy it. It is up to ME to make sure that I do it in such a way that I make money. If I don't, then I am the one that's SOL.
Personally, I don't see how exploiting this is any different than, say, buying something on sale or on clearance. In both cases you are getting something for below the market rates for some reason. People aren't up in arms when other people do that. why are they so ticked off that the hacker community has expanded the uses for something they got for free.
Heck, it is an old time Yankee Thrift at work here (for those in the us doing these things). If it weren't for that, we'd still only use Duct Tape on Ducts and furnaces :-).
SLiRP also did TIA-like things. IIRC, it was release the summer of 1995. So there's an OPEN SOURCE release prior to CISCO's patent being filed. I don't know if it predates their internal first use, which may be a wash here.
I'd be happy to testify to these facts in a court of law, should it come to that, assuming that I can convince the folks that bought Cyberspace Developement to allow me to do so.
Warner Losh
There was no shirnk wrap to break. No license agreement to agree to. I *NEVER* installed their software, so their new EULA is just as unenforcible as their old one and will get the same response from my atterney: Get Bent.
This isn't that new. Most of the *BSD issues
have already been committed and are thus not vulnerable. Tehy make it sound a lot worse than
it really is.
Also, *ALL* Oses are impacted, since all oses have the sprintf-like functions.
Warner Losh
FreeBSD Security Officer.
No, you are incorrect. The only part of the protocol that was reverse engineered was the cuecat keyboard stuff. The rest was a reimplementation of similar functionality. There's nothing in that protocol that is phone home. That happens at the next layer up. The serial number of the unit doing the scanning is part of the protocol, but higher levels are responsible for implementing that, or not as they see fit.
There's nothing about interoperability that requires you to implement everything. Interoperability is defined by the folks that are writing the app, not the folks that designed the original.
You are likely right that the "phone home" feature is why they are squawking. That's likely the revenue stream that feels threatened to them. They want to have the consumer data and sell that. That's, more than sales of a development kit like I originally suggested, is what is motivating this attack.
So I think your attempt to paint this as black and white is a bad thing. There are many parts of this device that are interesting. The suspect implementations are taking what they need to interoperate with this device, and leaving the rest.
Even if Microsoft programmers are as incompotent as people at slashdot paint them from time to time (and I know they aren't), I doubt that it would take more than a day for them to reverse engineer the protocol.
Current US laws allow for reverse engineering to effect interoperability. Nothing more than that was engaged in here.
Finally, I think they are just a bunch of crybabies out to give opensource a bad name. Look how much whining they did. Look how unspecific they were about what IP was allegedly stolen. My guess is that they lost sales of some development kit or another, or fear such loss, and are using the IP argument to scare people into not blabbing.
OpenBSD may have the same apps, but
they've been thouroughly audited for security.
This is generally only true for those ports in the ports/security tree. Most of the others haven't been havily audited. Certainly no more so than for FreeSBD's system. There are exceptions on both sides.
Well, no. There's no fine print in a cash transaction. I went to Radio Shack. I gave them money for a purchase, and this was included for free. No contract was signed, so the Uniform Commecrial Code applies. A contract was fixed at the time of sale. I gave them my name, address, etc. They gave me the scanner. A simple quid pro quo transaction. The fact that there's a piece of paper in the packet that purports to be an enforcible contract is really laughable. It is invalid and cannot be enforced. This is doublely true if you never installed the software. If you did, The Cat people can say that you agreed to the contract since the packaging for the cdrom contained the right warning lables. Since I never installed the software, or even opened the cd package, I never agreed to a modification of the contract that was fixed at the time of sale.
In other words, They are going to have a hard time enforcing the supposed contract.
In addition, the item was not free, but given to me (and everybody else) for good and fair compensation, namely the personal information. It can be shown that this information has a monitary value (just look at how much email lists and snailmail lists sell for), and therefore the exchange could likely be viewed as a "sale" for the purposes of the uniform commercial code.
Software is a special case because it has labels on it stating that you are agreeig to a license, plus presents you with the license and a chance to repudiate the license and get a refund (in theory at least, when was the last time someone was able to return software they didn't like the license terms to, say, CompUSA).
So I think they are SOL unless you installed their driver software. Which I've never done. I've not even taken it out of the packaging.
P.S. If I were the author that got such a C&D letter, then I'd demand they get a whole lot more specific about what, exactly, was in violation. Such vague letters are easy and cheap to write and are meaningless in many cases because they aren't specific. Ask them for specifics. What, specifically, are they objecting to. What gives them the legal right to object to it (copyright claim, granted patent claim, trade secret, etc) so you have a chance to audit their claims. If they refuse, then you are in a much better position later if they file legal action against you.
The keyboard connector is a Y connector, so you don't lose anything.
.ahb6. field is likely the type of bar code that was read (since it changes for
.eaq. is the barcode that I scanned (in this case a country code from a seagate cheetah disk: SG for those collecting these things).
:-)
Also, it looks like it spits out a stream of keys which look something like
.C3nZC3nZC3nXD3T6ENv1C3nX.ahb6.eaq.
Where the string startnig with C3 is identical on all barcodes I scanned. My guess it is a serial
number. The
different barcodes). And the
I've been able to read Most barcodes that I've thrown at the thing: Normal product UPC, a book ISBN, the strange codes in the ratshack catalog, a barcode on the seagate disk I was given to install, and the bar codes on a box that some electrical parts came in.
My guess is that there's a code for these the bar code. It looks like it is 5 or 6 bits per character, encoded in some strange way. If it is 6 bits, then SG is 12 bits, which would imply that each character of bar code delivers 4 bits. If SG is really 24 bits (start S G stop), then we're delivering 8 bits, which seems wrong because I didn't see anything in the control character or
upper half of the range. So we may be looking at a radix 62 encoding (A-Za-z0-9).
Anyway, enough musings, I'll bet I've overlooked a pointer to the specs posted elsewhere on this page
How many remote root holes ahve there been in Linux as compared to OpenBSD in the last 3 years? According to the OpenBSD folks I hang out with, there have been NO remote root holes in OpenBSD in the past 3 years. Linux has had literally hundreds.
This is not true. I travelled to Japan in Early June. I asked the customs officer if the Sony Playstation 2 had any export controls on it, since I was thinking of buying a few to bring back to the US. He told me that no, there were no export controls on it. That the whole thing was some confusion at central government and was cleared up within two days. He also told me that I'd only have to worry about import issues on the country I was bringing them into.
He didn't come out and say it, but some of my Japanese friends did. It was just a ploy by Sony to make the playstation sound really cool.
Oh, there is one last issue with taking a PS2 out of Japan. Sony will not honor the warantees on these units outside of Japan. At least that's what I was told by my Japenese friends. That was a deal killer for me.
ObOnTopic: I think that the port to dreamcast is way cool. Look at how useful the NetBSD/hpcmips port is for the WindowsCE machines that are now being dumped on the market cheaply.