Go to Media Matters, or one of the right-wing websites and get a load of what accuracy means today. If you're looking to bloggers for news, you're hosed. These are opinions, not journalism. My RSS/Atom reader gets 50 different sites every eight minutes. Local content in my 'major' market has been a monopoly for years. Heaven help you if you're a suburb, or a rural community. But this ruling doesn't affect them-- it's about major market competition.
You have to take EVERYTHING with a grain of salt these days; the integrity of print media and daily news are at a formulaic all-time low. You trust these guys? I don't.
In major markets, there are lots of the same bubble-headed bleached-blonds on TV (thank you, Don Henley) spouting the same foo at 6pm and 11pm. Then there are the morning shows. The rest are network fillers and commercials. This, this is quality? I can watch 900+ cable channels, and it's still a wasteland.
If you're a suburb of a major market, you're screwed for local news. Where are you going to get the news on a local level? The FCC's decision doesn't affect you, it only dries up competition in major markets-- that's where the money is.
TV 'anchors' are stars now. They don't get the news. They get make-up jobs and Lexus rides, and show up, looking pretty, when the mayor turns a shovel some place. Parts of the community? Nope. Entertainment. And it's been that way for two decades now.
There's so much propaganda and quid pro quo, that newspapers are barely believable. And with formula media content, most radio stations sound the same, and have little news content (save NPR & BBC).
So we don't care. Sir Rupert can put better money in his web properties. And Clear Channel and Emmis clearly suck in their radio markets. TV? Does it matter? The FCC hasn't reflected popular choice in years. Why should they start now??
Interchangeability is important. The.doc and other formats replaced WordPerfect and.rtf standards as de facto interchange formats. That's what happens when you use software that monopolized a market.
Triangulation errors don't matter with nuclear weapons.
And if the accuracy is that bad, it means you're in a desolate area, so reversion to a google map ought to do the job, unless you're in a cave. And if you're in the niddle of a baseball stadium, that narrows it down a lot! Mine currently is placed either in NJ, or in a western burb of Chicago, both very far away from my actual locus.
Nukes wouldn't even do it. But maybe some cool X-files laser-from-the-sky might figure out my latencies and zap me on the spot. No matter.
That the TSA didn't mandate encryption is a travesty. After all, Security is their middle name.
We agree that the keys to encryption need to be well managed, and penalities for any kind of data loss need to be incredibly severe.
Not flying or going to an airport since 9/11 (presuming *because* of 9/11's aftermath) as a result of your demands, would appear to border on paranoia in the extreme, however. Someone has your IP address for the message you posted, and has already traced you back. It's in your service provider's info sent to the NSA. You didn't have an https connection, so everyone saw what you wrote here today. Feel better? In a wonderful world, security wouldn't be a problem. That doesn't excuse bad data handling, rather it says that it's really loose and stupid not to have required encryption up until now.
Now if I can just find those keys....there might be a protocol, like packets over pigeons, for truckers. I wonder.....Peterbuilt AES??
You see two auctions, one for a kewl expensive collectable car. They look identical in the search page.
One of them has a very low buy-it-now listing, and a gmail address to contact to be a 'qualified' bidder.
Which one of them is fishing for your eBay creds? I see these all of the time; I collect and restore specific models of classic cars, and I see one of these almost every week. If you alert eBay through LiveChat, they'll usually take them down. But if you have report an auction through their mind-numbing 100 questions forms method, you'll never get a fraudulent auction done because you'll explode before you get to the end of forms-- none of which says--> HEY, THIS IS AN OBVIOUS FRAUD!
You can discredit sellers, but sellers have options to restore their dignity if they want to do this-- although it's tough. PayPal can also interecede, as can buyer credit sources. Resources, except in the complaints department, are tilted towards buyers. But that doesn't mean that there are loads of phish attempts. You find them in amusing places, like when I tried to surf for an Apple notebook, and there were a hundred auctions for the same machine-- if you bought the story about getting it shipped from Italy.
At best, it's a wicked procedural and PR gaffe. At worst, it's much worse than that.
Vetting the situation requires, unfortunately for Jones and McRobbie, startling clarity and an ugly audit. Provided brilliant-- no, crystaline-- results, subsequent dicta needs to be fully transparent. The merest hint of personal gain on McRobbie's part at either taxpayer or student cost taints this and/or subsequent research endeavors. McRobbie makes a great if controversial salary in a time of fiscal difficulties in Indiana. The office deserves and warrants the salary paid for the efforts expended; I have no truck with competitive compensation.
The gaffe here is the appearance of quid pro quo, and unwinding the missteps mandates openness and an audit to cleanse the dignities of all involved. Google with their 'do no harm' spin won a lot of friends for Brin, then Schmidt. Schmidt had his tenure from Sun and Novell and HP. Jones is otherwise a king among comparative Lilliputians. As the road to hell is paved with good intentions, clarity and obviousness are mandated in such roles as McRobbie's. Research endeavor suits many institutions, and within Indiana, others like Jischke didn't leave impressions of coopted intentions, yet Jischke benefited well from his services to Purdue, as an example in a local sense. He was successful in real terms, and his methods of developing partnerships had no seeming ethical taints. On the rare occasion when there were good questions, his openness evaporated any apparent constraint.
Offering Yahoo, Google, Live Search, and other offerings is but a normal and largely free service for students, faculty, and allied employees of IU. Adding labor and assets above these to ChaCha, or the appearance of it, allies ChaCha's efforts, to ChaCha's ends specifically. Indiana taxpayers, students, parents assessing student situations, and so on, might look askance when a university official, a past immediate director of a for-profit entrepreneurial venture, subsequently dedicates resources towards the aims of that venture. It not only looks suspect, but it's a nasty start for the top official of IU to have done this. Lipfarts evaporate when the air clears. An open door (painstaking audit) provides the breeze needed.
It must be done quickly, else IU scares away subsequent research candidates that had any relationship with McRobbie. A pariah effect would be deadly to IU, and would thwart McRobbie's ability to subsequently attract needed research-- and the current taint left by seemingly dubious behavior. Summary: the taint of quid pro quo and a subsequent vivid (if painful) open exposure of the aims of the relationship convinces all. And should the audit be very forthcoming and unquestionably clear McRobbie, then the best of luck and perserverent effort to all. Google survives by answers. Better answers are always desirable.
Since you don't like my vocabulary and apparently are missing my message, let me take something from Scott Jones' own web site. I'll annotate. Viz:
>> An Indianapolis technology business and Indiana University have announced a partnership.
Ok, there's a partnership. See the next sentence.
>> The partnership will use IU's library and information technology staff in a Carmel-based Internet search engine that uses experts as "guides" through techniques including instant messaging.
Uh, let's see. IU's library and information technology staff.... and who is paying for this? Indianatax payers? Those with fealty to the bursars of IU? Guides cost money.
>> When IU students and faculty use the service, IU guides will be vetting and voting upon the instant search results, constantly improving them. Guides will also available for information seekers' interaction via live chat.
Nothing like letting people do research with IU guides to vet and vote. After all, librarians do that. And the IT staff do that... right?
>> Scott A. Jones, founder of the ChaCha search engine, and Brad Wheeler, Indiana University vice president for information technology, made the announcement. Jones is the inventor of key parts of voice-mail technology.
As ValleyWag and others cite, Wheeler works for McRobbie, or perhaps Dr Garland Elmore and McRobbie. Elmore would seem above this fray.
>> The alliance is one of several partnerships Michael McRobbie, IU president, intends to make with Indiana-based businesses to promote economic and technological growth in the state.
Alliances are great, and they are key. Good for McRobbie. Good for IU. Good for their students, who are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries.
>> McRobbie resigned from the board of directors of ChaCha before taking office July 1. He resigned from that position when he was named IU president so as not to have any conflicts of interest, said Lauren Kinzler of Dittoe Public Relations.
Ah, here's the truck I have with the entire matter. All of the aforementioned came when McRobbie, who very unlikely worked for ChaCha as a director for FREE, through his obvious and tacit approval didn't dismiss, or disapprove of this relationship between IU and ChaCha, and therefore it lacks transparency. To summarize my truck: he worked for ChaCha as a director, and then after becoming president-elect, quits ChaCha, and then this policy and university resources policy comes birthed from the ether.
Not.
I don't believe McRobbie was a direct beneficiary of a bribe, direct (W-2 or 1099) pay, stock asset value amplification scheme from Jones or any theory like that. Instead, there's a situation that looks very much like quid pro quo. McRobbie is a director of Jones' startup- ChaCha, resigns handily, and suddenly IU's using an unproven engine while utilizing university assets and resources backing it. Hmmmmm. We won't even look at other ChaCha directors becoming involved in IU's leadership.
Powerless indeed. How presumptive. It leads me to believe that you believe yourself to be, or might actually be in a position of power at IU. If you are, then your defense of this abrogation of ethics as I see it demands openness and transparency that this matter does not have.
Now, let's get an audit for full exposure and transparency. Then let's recind this relationship so as to for once and all remove all possible taints, and use an arms-length method to employ this dictum on IU's campuses.
1) I don't believe IU, and this quid pro quo relationship has to end if it's to be transparent. Let Scot Jones get his own money and good will to make the endeavor work. Using IU resources to benefit Scot Jones is much like building a stadium for Jim Irsay with tax dollars. Oh, wait....
2) McRobbie's assension becomes complete on inauguration. There've been plenty of solid IU presidents, some with better records on various issues than others. Now it's McRobbie's turn to show that he can be transparent in these relationships, and while inviting research and perhaps using research to further the academic goals of the institution, be also capable of maintaining an arms-length distance-- and remove the heavy hand of this policy.
If desired transparency is drool, then I dribble. Perhaps you were thinking of 'drivel'.
1) McRobbie was indeed compensated; you think he did ChaCha for free? 2) Of course not; he's not President until Oct 18th. Nah, just another university official (as interim) doing the wrong thing 3) Two wrongs don't make a right. Look at how much Stanford has sucked down both private and federal funds. The articles over the years stagger the mind, of just how much Stanford can be as a black hole for cash-- in the name of 'development'. 4) That's what I said and implied. 5) Mmmmm KnowledgeWorkers. There's a nice buzzword for you. The phrase "paid by IU anyway" is what's at issue here. 6) How often do you find it necessary to rationalize unethical choices? Certainly, universities are supposed to endeavor research and be clever about it. Your catch-all "isn't that why we have universities?" is a droll method to justify unethical business relationships where university officials are in the pocket (personally, financially) of a private organization run by a famous local (to Indiana) VC.
Horrid profiteering (yes, I'm a capitalist) by any university official in this manner is unethical. Rationalizing his choices makes them no better.
McRobbie should have been eliminated from his assension to IU president, which happens on Oct 18, for tepid ethics.
Whatever the quality of ChaCha, it's not right for him to be on their board, then use IU student resources as well as IU assets to forward this. Jones, inventor of voice mail, needs no free ride from anyone.
Indiana politics smells as bad as politics anywhere, but this is far too close of a relationship, and McRobbie sees nothing wrong with his forceful advocacy of ChaCha. Sure, you can use google or anything you want. But using university resources towards personal profit in this way is onerous and not transparent.
Consider: he knew that he might be up for dark income. He bets against the current wisdom. The insider information cannot be revealed-- it's warranted against exposure. He trades.
Is this two wrongs making a 'right' (e.g. personal profit with knowledge that cannot legally be revealed) or is it good old American profiteering, nice and smarmy and probably legal?
Or is this just another snake eating its tail....
In my judgment, the NSA illegally monitors and coopts the telcos. He bucks the trend, and then it's uh-oh, insider trading (think equal protection clause).
If you RTFA, the implications are there. Play ball with the NSA, and life could go better with you. Cross-connect your new fiber infrastructure with the NSA and get nice secret benefits. Don't do it, and watch yourself go down, hard, at the hands of the non-secret branches of government.
Good conspiracy stuff. Kennebunkport and B-52s, anyone?
It's still a resource utlization. Get multiple instances or a reflection, and you can hammer a machine-- with ICMP rather than a UDP or TCP relationship. Before you know it, you've also had all of the exposed services discovered, and noted.
So it's still good to turn ICMP messaging or just pings off. With a GBE interface, you can send from one bot machine, hundreds of thousands of packets per second-- not just 10000 SYNs. If a bot is on the inside perimeter of an org's net, 10000 is laughingly trivial-- you can send jillions of them with just one machine, creating lots of havoc. Some machines will dutifully stand up under a ping probe/assault and salute, further revealing each and every service on each port probed, while others are busy doing something else. Both may be in a DOS mode through the attack/probe, and one of them gave up the jewels. Which would you rather be?
A ping attack, although it uses icmp messages instead of rude things like syns, is a both a resource attack (potential denial of service) as well (and more importantly), a services probe. Find the service, then open it for a crack and subsequent use.
Bombardmemt is one problem, but finding a juicy exploit is another. Not responding to an external probe is paramount. Perimeter security is an illusion, each device needs 'atomic' or 'instance' protection, and ping responses increase an attack surface dramatically.
Disable ping. Fool. Any reasonable network admin that doesn't disable ping needs their motives examined:
Anytime you can get a ping, there's a service somewhere in there that can be probed and opened with one kind of crowbar or another. Go on, expose yourself. Keep that attack surface high and wide.
Yeah, go ahead, and when that diploma from Pumpkin U falls off the wall when your net gets owned, don't blame me.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that you need to boot Linux to get to VMWare ESX!! LOL, ROFL!!!!
> The problem is that Novell has (at best) remained a static target. Microsoft has been improving Windows. Linux has been improved. So now, there's really not much of a reason to run Novell's products IN A NEW DEPLOYMENT.
We like those old deployments, the ones that have been working since about '89. Oh yeah, they dropped IPX for IP, and got a life after eDirectory. Yawn.
> It seems to me that you can get pretty much everything NetWare gives you on a Windows network with some third-party management products, with the upshot that your platform is not obsolete.
Or, you could buy NetWare, say back in '89, with maybe some of that Zen stuff and have obviated the need for generations of patch work from Microsoft. Oh yeah, that was also before the.93 Linux kernel that started FOSS on its way.
> Pretty much. Again, Novell has chosen to remain a fairly static target. Eventually, your competition will meet your feature set.
These wars have been going on for years. Has Novell kept up? Perhaps without the intense amount of FUD that its competition has needed to use.
> But remember, Novell makes more money from Microsoft (court cases, licensing deal) than it makes from sales of its products.
Cite your source. Novell shareholders will smile at you. And they'll also point out the number of jursidictions that they've successfully won in, much to the chagrin of Microsoft shareholders, who merely seek world domination.
It's an empty argument to say that Novell didn't win the war. You're probably to young to remember the Ring Zero wars, and how hilarious Windows NT 3.51 was, and how people tried in so many ways to make pre-Active Directory services work. Novell tried valiantly to out-brain Microsoft. They did it, but they couldn't out-MARKET Microsoft. There's a big difference. Want fries with that?
Bravery because if you respond, it ties up a tiny slice of resources. Get some bozos that would do a reflected attack, and see what happens to *your* resources.
Pings are a little like sparrow farts, inconsequential, until you get a bunch of servers responding to forged packets. Don't respond by policy, and far fewer CPU strokes are used to service the onslaught. Respond to them all, and suddenly the room smells of sparrow farts.
You won't find any of my servers/boundaries responding to a ping on any address at any port for any reason. Send a TCP packet, and all of them will look at it, stroke their chins for a few microseconds, and decide whether to forward them or simply move on.
A ping test is perhaps one of the silliest, as you cite by a more accurate observation of key SOA servers over a period of time.
That said, I like Novell.com's bravery, as they always respond to a ping. It's how I know that my DNS infrastructure is working. It's a randomly successful find (I have no affiliation with them), rather it always works, when it works.
The moment MS starts the patent war, they cannot return from it unscathed even if they win. Patents are for rattling sabres (largely) anyway. They're chess pieces.
In a hilarious sort of way, Microsoft's been acting like Teddy Roosevelt by "walking softly and carrying a big stick". Once they have to whack with that stick, much hell breaks loose.
Let's see, Microsoft's current winner/loser list is impressive. And their cash position is still enormous, even without paying those pesky biters in the EU their due.
Once the war begins, it will be savage. If the piss off IBM, it's a cage match. I don't want to be around.
'I don't know why the PTO has ben so lax lately on non-obviousness....'
This is why we need precedent to bridle the weasels that believe their brilliant software idea must be exempt as no one could ever think of it (wink wink). The law's vague and the congress is lame and incapable of thought and action, so for now, it's the US Supreme Court that must guide this by example, because no one else west of them in Washington has given any leadership/guidance. And though the court has its own divisiveness, at least they function somewhat.
If you RTFA, the litigation was over a business-process that was deemed to be more about thought than process, and therefore not covered.
Although many software patents might be obvious, and pass the Supreme Court test, there are no really good precedents - yet - that cover software patent obviousness, saving the ongoing one-click litigation.
Not as nice or as pertinent as some would like, but I'll take it.
I wish what you contend was true. So far, this saber-rattling has been the crux of much FUD on Microsoft's part. Should they choose litigation, there are theories of law, including estoppel, with might work, as Microsoft has been asked more than once, publicly, to show their hand and have not. But it's really up to them to do so at the time of their choosing. And then, with a war chest of legal funds that's larger than the GDP of many countries, they will go to war, one patent at a time. This will bankrupt lots of people at the moment they start.
Will it cost them good will? What good will? It's inarguable that Microsoft believes itself to be holy, and immune in their quest to dominate markets they choose. This dogmatic belief in themselves isn't rationale, and it isn't legal, but look at the proof that says this hasn't stopped them before, anywhere. They will go for the throat and not stop and have inexhaustable funds to do this. And they don't really care what you or I think, or especially what sentiment there is on slashdot. We are, like it or not, the enemy that prevents them from domination and dares to criticize them.
The OIS won't be sued, and therefore has no nexus for a non-presumptive laches defense. The OIS can jump up and down, babble like a brook, and it matters not one whit to Microsoft, who is immune from OIS (and anyone else's) sentiments. Instead, Microsoft will become injured, and must at some point litigate, if only to save face. The excrement will hit the airconditioning, but Microsoft can afford both umbrellas and endless litigation without a significant dent in their income.
I wish things were different, but 20+ years of watching Microsoft gives me the sense (and I'm not a lawyer) that they really don't care about the OIS, or what anyone else but their revenue stream and shareholders think. The OIS, and you and I, are neither of these things.
Let's see, hundreds of visible industry columnists, analysts, and others call out Microsoft on their patent slander.
One more voice, this of an open (and therefore enemy) patent organization calls out the FUD.
Didn't matter then, doesn't matter now. Microsoft won't budge from their desire to continue to illegally dominate the marketplace, just as they have done for a dozen years.
I'd like to say it might make a difference, and it will to some-- but not Microsoft. People don't get that they believe that they're autonomous and above the law, fighting each thing until the very most bitter end. And what's going to change now?
Sadly, nothing. And they'll get worse after Craig Mundie becomes entrenched.
Slashdot Mirror
Call BS if you like. Your option.
Go to Media Matters, or one of the right-wing websites and get a load of what accuracy means today. If you're looking to bloggers for news, you're hosed. These are opinions, not journalism. My RSS/Atom reader gets 50 different sites every eight minutes. Local content in my 'major' market has been a monopoly for years. Heaven help you if you're a suburb, or a rural community. But this ruling doesn't affect them-- it's about major market competition.
You have to take EVERYTHING with a grain of salt these days; the integrity of print media and daily news are at a formulaic all-time low. You trust these guys? I don't.
In major markets, there are lots of the same bubble-headed bleached-blonds on TV (thank you, Don Henley) spouting the same foo at 6pm and 11pm. Then there are the morning shows. The rest are network fillers and commercials. This, this is quality? I can watch 900+ cable channels, and it's still a wasteland.
If you're a suburb of a major market, you're screwed for local news. Where are you going to get the news on a local level? The FCC's decision doesn't affect you, it only dries up competition in major markets-- that's where the money is.
TV 'anchors' are stars now. They don't get the news. They get make-up jobs and Lexus rides, and show up, looking pretty, when the mayor turns a shovel some place. Parts of the community? Nope. Entertainment. And it's been that way for two decades now.
There's so much propaganda and quid pro quo, that newspapers are barely believable. And with formula media content, most radio stations sound the same, and have little news content (save NPR & BBC).
So we don't care. Sir Rupert can put better money in his web properties. And Clear Channel and Emmis clearly suck in their radio markets. TV? Does it matter? The FCC hasn't reflected popular choice in years. Why should they start now??
Interchangeability is important. The .doc and other formats replaced WordPerfect and .rtf standards as de facto interchange formats. That's what happens when you use software that monopolized a market.
Triangulation errors don't matter with nuclear weapons.
And if the accuracy is that bad, it means you're in a desolate area, so reversion to a google map ought to do the job, unless you're in a cave. And if you're in the niddle of a baseball stadium, that narrows it down a lot! Mine currently is placed either in NJ, or in a western burb of Chicago, both very far away from my actual locus.
Nukes wouldn't even do it. But maybe some cool X-files laser-from-the-sky might figure out my latencies and zap me on the spot. No matter.
That the TSA didn't mandate encryption is a travesty. After all, Security is their middle name.
We agree that the keys to encryption need to be well managed, and penalities for any kind of data loss need to be incredibly severe.
Not flying or going to an airport since 9/11 (presuming *because* of 9/11's aftermath) as a result of your demands, would appear to border on paranoia in the extreme, however. Someone has your IP address for the message you posted, and has already traced you back. It's in your service provider's info sent to the NSA. You didn't have an https connection, so everyone saw what you wrote here today. Feel better? In a wonderful world, security wouldn't be a problem. That doesn't excuse bad data handling, rather it says that it's really loose and stupid not to have required encryption up until now.
Now if I can just find those keys....there might be a protocol, like packets over pigeons, for truckers. I wonder.....Peterbuilt AES??
"No, not the keys to the truck and trailer, I need the damn keys to the laptop!"
You see two auctions, one for a kewl expensive collectable car. They look identical in the search page.
One of them has a very low buy-it-now listing, and a gmail address to contact to be a 'qualified' bidder.
Which one of them is fishing for your eBay creds? I see these all of the time; I collect and restore specific models of classic cars, and I see one of these almost every week. If you alert eBay through LiveChat, they'll usually take them down. But if you have report an auction through their mind-numbing 100 questions forms method, you'll never get a fraudulent auction done because you'll explode before you get to the end of forms-- none of which says--> HEY, THIS IS AN OBVIOUS FRAUD!
You can discredit sellers, but sellers have options to restore their dignity if they want to do this-- although it's tough. PayPal can also interecede, as can buyer credit sources. Resources, except in the complaints department, are tilted towards buyers. But that doesn't mean that there are loads of phish attempts. You find them in amusing places, like when I tried to surf for an Apple notebook, and there were a hundred auctions for the same machine-- if you bought the story about getting it shipped from Italy.
At best, it's a wicked procedural and PR gaffe. At worst, it's much worse than that.
Vetting the situation requires, unfortunately for Jones and McRobbie, startling clarity and an ugly audit. Provided brilliant-- no, crystaline-- results, subsequent dicta needs to be fully transparent. The merest hint of personal gain on McRobbie's part at either taxpayer or student cost taints this and/or subsequent research endeavors. McRobbie makes a great if controversial salary in a time of fiscal difficulties in Indiana. The office deserves and warrants the salary paid for the efforts expended; I have no truck with competitive compensation.
The gaffe here is the appearance of quid pro quo, and unwinding the missteps mandates openness and an audit to cleanse the dignities of all involved. Google with their 'do no harm' spin won a lot of friends for Brin, then Schmidt. Schmidt had his tenure from Sun and Novell and HP. Jones is otherwise a king among comparative Lilliputians. As the road to hell is paved with good intentions, clarity and obviousness are mandated in such roles as McRobbie's. Research endeavor suits many institutions, and within Indiana, others like Jischke didn't leave impressions of coopted intentions, yet Jischke benefited well from his services to Purdue, as an example in a local sense. He was successful in real terms, and his methods of developing partnerships had no seeming ethical taints. On the rare occasion when there were good questions, his openness evaporated any apparent constraint.
Offering Yahoo, Google, Live Search, and other offerings is but a normal and largely free service for students, faculty, and allied employees of IU. Adding labor and assets above these to ChaCha, or the appearance of it, allies ChaCha's efforts, to ChaCha's ends specifically. Indiana taxpayers, students, parents assessing student situations, and so on, might look askance when a university official, a past immediate director of a for-profit entrepreneurial venture, subsequently dedicates resources towards the aims of that venture. It not only looks suspect, but it's a nasty start for the top official of IU to have done this. Lipfarts evaporate when the air clears. An open door (painstaking audit) provides the breeze needed.
It must be done quickly, else IU scares away subsequent research candidates that had any relationship with McRobbie. A pariah effect would be deadly to IU, and would thwart McRobbie's ability to subsequently attract needed research-- and the current taint left by seemingly dubious behavior. Summary: the taint of quid pro quo and a subsequent vivid (if painful) open exposure of the aims of the relationship convinces all. And should the audit be very forthcoming and unquestionably clear McRobbie, then the best of luck and perserverent effort to all. Google survives by answers. Better answers are always desirable.
Since you don't like my vocabulary and apparently are missing my message, let me take something from Scott Jones' own web site. I'll annotate. Viz:
>> An Indianapolis technology business and Indiana University have announced a partnership.
Ok, there's a partnership. See the next sentence.
>> The partnership will use IU's library and information technology staff in a Carmel-based Internet search engine that uses experts as "guides" through techniques including instant messaging.
Uh, let's see. IU's library and information technology staff.... and who is paying for this? Indianatax payers? Those with fealty to the bursars of IU? Guides cost money.
>> When IU students and faculty use the service, IU guides will be vetting and voting upon the instant search results, constantly improving them. Guides will also available for information seekers' interaction via live chat.
Nothing like letting people do research with IU guides to vet and vote. After all, librarians do that. And the IT staff do that... right?
>> Scott A. Jones, founder of the ChaCha search engine, and Brad Wheeler, Indiana University vice president for information technology, made the announcement. Jones is the inventor of key parts of voice-mail technology.
As ValleyWag and others cite, Wheeler works for McRobbie, or perhaps Dr Garland Elmore and McRobbie. Elmore would seem above this fray.
>> The alliance is one of several partnerships Michael McRobbie, IU president, intends to make with Indiana-based businesses to promote economic and technological growth in the state.
Alliances are great, and they are key. Good for McRobbie. Good for IU. Good for their students, who are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries.
>> McRobbie resigned from the board of directors of ChaCha before taking office July 1. He resigned from that position when he was named IU president so as not to have any conflicts of interest, said Lauren Kinzler of Dittoe Public Relations.
Ah, here's the truck I have with the entire matter. All of the aforementioned came when McRobbie, who very unlikely worked for ChaCha as a director for FREE, through his obvious and tacit approval didn't dismiss, or disapprove of this relationship between IU and ChaCha, and therefore it lacks transparency. To summarize my truck: he worked for ChaCha as a director, and then after becoming president-elect, quits ChaCha, and then this policy and university resources policy comes birthed from the ether.
Not.
I don't believe McRobbie was a direct beneficiary of a bribe, direct (W-2 or 1099) pay, stock asset value amplification scheme from Jones or any theory like that. Instead, there's a situation that looks very much like quid pro quo. McRobbie is a director of Jones' startup- ChaCha, resigns handily, and suddenly IU's using an unproven engine while utilizing university assets and resources backing it. Hmmmmm. We won't even look at other ChaCha directors becoming involved in IU's leadership.
Powerless indeed. How presumptive. It leads me to believe that you believe yourself to be, or might actually be in a position of power at IU. If you are, then your defense of this abrogation of ethics as I see it demands openness and transparency that this matter does not have.
Good.
Now, let's get an audit for full exposure and transparency. Then let's recind this relationship so as to for once and all remove all possible taints, and use an arms-length method to employ this dictum on IU's campuses.
1) I don't believe IU, and this quid pro quo relationship has to end if it's to be transparent. Let Scot Jones get his own money and good will to make the endeavor work. Using IU resources to benefit Scot Jones is much like building a stadium for Jim Irsay with tax dollars. Oh, wait....
2) McRobbie's assension becomes complete on inauguration. There've been plenty of solid IU presidents, some with better records on various issues than others. Now it's McRobbie's turn to show that he can be transparent in these relationships, and while inviting research and perhaps using research to further the academic goals of the institution, be also capable of maintaining an arms-length distance-- and remove the heavy hand of this policy.
If desired transparency is drool, then I dribble. Perhaps you were thinking of 'drivel'.
You're entitled to your opinions. Not your facts.
1) McRobbie was indeed compensated; you think he did ChaCha for free?
2) Of course not; he's not President until Oct 18th. Nah, just another university official (as interim) doing the wrong thing
3) Two wrongs don't make a right. Look at how much Stanford has sucked down both private and federal funds. The articles over the years stagger the mind, of just how much Stanford can be as a black hole for cash-- in the name of 'development'.
4) That's what I said and implied.
5) Mmmmm KnowledgeWorkers. There's a nice buzzword for you. The phrase "paid by IU anyway" is what's at issue here.
6) How often do you find it necessary to rationalize unethical choices? Certainly, universities are supposed to endeavor research and be clever about it. Your catch-all "isn't that why we have universities?" is a droll method to justify unethical business relationships where university officials are in the pocket (personally, financially) of a private organization run by a famous local (to Indiana) VC.
Horrid profiteering (yes, I'm a capitalist) by any university official in this manner is unethical. Rationalizing his choices makes them no better.
McRobbie should have been eliminated from his assension to IU president, which happens on Oct 18, for tepid ethics.
Whatever the quality of ChaCha, it's not right for him to be on their board, then use IU student resources as well as IU assets to forward this. Jones, inventor of voice mail, needs no free ride from anyone.
Indiana politics smells as bad as politics anywhere, but this is far too close of a relationship, and McRobbie sees nothing wrong with his forceful advocacy of ChaCha. Sure, you can use google or anything you want. But using university resources towards personal profit in this way is onerous and not transparent.
Consider: he knew that he might be up for dark income. He bets against the current wisdom. The insider information cannot be revealed-- it's warranted against exposure. He trades.
Is this two wrongs making a 'right' (e.g. personal profit with knowledge that cannot legally be revealed) or is it good old American profiteering, nice and smarmy and probably legal?
Or is this just another snake eating its tail....
In my judgment, the NSA illegally monitors and coopts the telcos. He bucks the trend, and then it's uh-oh, insider trading (think equal protection clause).
If you RTFA, the implications are there. Play ball with the NSA, and life could go better with you. Cross-connect your new fiber infrastructure with the NSA and get nice secret benefits. Don't do it, and watch yourself go down, hard, at the hands of the non-secret branches of government.
Good conspiracy stuff. Kennebunkport and B-52s, anyone?
Right.
It's still a resource utlization. Get multiple instances or a reflection, and you can hammer a machine-- with ICMP rather than a UDP or TCP relationship. Before you know it, you've also had all of the exposed services discovered, and noted.
So it's still good to turn ICMP messaging or just pings off. With a GBE interface, you can send from one bot machine, hundreds of thousands of packets per second-- not just 10000 SYNs. If a bot is on the inside perimeter of an org's net, 10000 is laughingly trivial-- you can send jillions of them with just one machine, creating lots of havoc. Some machines will dutifully stand up under a ping probe/assault and salute, further revealing each and every service on each port probed, while others are busy doing something else. Both may be in a DOS mode through the attack/probe, and one of them gave up the jewels. Which would you rather be?
A ping attack, although it uses icmp messages instead of rude things like syns, is a both a resource attack (potential denial of service) as well (and more importantly), a services probe. Find the service, then open it for a crack and subsequent use.
Bombardmemt is one problem, but finding a juicy exploit is another. Not responding to an external probe is paramount. Perimeter security is an illusion, each device needs 'atomic' or 'instance' protection, and ping responses increase an attack surface dramatically.
Uh, sure.
Try uh, http://www.sco.com./
Yeah, that's the one.
Disable ping. Fool. Any reasonable network admin that doesn't disable ping needs their motives examined:
Anytime you can get a ping, there's a service somewhere in there that can be probed and opened with one kind of crowbar or another. Go on, expose yourself. Keep that attack surface high and wide.
Yeah, go ahead, and when that diploma from Pumpkin U falls off the wall when your net gets owned, don't blame me.
> Yes, DOS is still needed to boot NetWare.
.93 Linux kernel that started FOSS on its way.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that you need to boot Linux to get to VMWare ESX!! LOL, ROFL!!!!
> The problem is that Novell has (at best) remained a static target. Microsoft has been improving Windows. Linux has been improved. So now, there's really not much of a reason to run Novell's products IN A NEW DEPLOYMENT.
We like those old deployments, the ones that have been working since about '89. Oh yeah, they dropped IPX for IP, and got a life after eDirectory. Yawn.
> It seems to me that you can get pretty much everything NetWare gives you on a Windows network with some third-party management products, with the upshot that your platform is not obsolete.
Or, you could buy NetWare, say back in '89, with maybe some of that Zen stuff and have obviated the need for generations of patch work from Microsoft. Oh yeah, that was also before the
> Pretty much. Again, Novell has chosen to remain a fairly static target. Eventually, your competition will meet your feature set.
These wars have been going on for years. Has Novell kept up? Perhaps without the intense amount of FUD that its competition has needed to use.
> But remember, Novell makes more money from Microsoft (court cases, licensing deal) than it makes from sales of its products.
Cite your source. Novell shareholders will smile at you. And they'll also point out the number of jursidictions that they've successfully won in, much to the chagrin of Microsoft shareholders, who merely seek world domination.
It's an empty argument to say that Novell didn't win the war. You're probably to young to remember the Ring Zero wars, and how hilarious Windows NT 3.51 was, and how people tried in so many ways to make pre-Active Directory services work. Novell tried valiantly to out-brain Microsoft. They did it, but they couldn't out-MARKET Microsoft. There's a big difference. Want fries with that?
Bravery because if you respond, it ties up a tiny slice of resources. Get some bozos that would do a reflected attack, and see what happens to *your* resources.
Pings are a little like sparrow farts, inconsequential, until you get a bunch of servers responding to forged packets. Don't respond by policy, and far fewer CPU strokes are used to service the onslaught. Respond to them all, and suddenly the room smells of sparrow farts.
You won't find any of my servers/boundaries responding to a ping on any address at any port for any reason. Send a TCP packet, and all of them will look at it, stroke their chins for a few microseconds, and decide whether to forward them or simply move on.
A ping test is perhaps one of the silliest, as you cite by a more accurate observation of key SOA servers over a period of time.
That said, I like Novell.com's bravery, as they always respond to a ping. It's how I know that my DNS infrastructure is working. It's a randomly successful find (I have no affiliation with them), rather it always works, when it works.
The moment MS starts the patent war, they cannot return from it unscathed even if they win. Patents are for rattling sabres (largely) anyway. They're chess pieces.
In a hilarious sort of way, Microsoft's been acting like Teddy Roosevelt by "walking softly and carrying a big stick". Once they have to whack with that stick, much hell breaks loose.
Let's see, Microsoft's current winner/loser list is impressive. And their cash position is still enormous, even without paying those pesky biters in the EU their due.
Once the war begins, it will be savage. If the piss off IBM, it's a cage match. I don't want to be around.
You answer your own thoughts....
'I don't know why the PTO has ben so lax lately on non-obviousness....'
This is why we need precedent to bridle the weasels that believe their brilliant software idea must be exempt as no one could ever think of it (wink wink). The law's vague and the congress is lame and incapable of thought and action, so for now, it's the US Supreme Court that must guide this by example, because no one else west of them in Washington has given any leadership/guidance. And though the court has its own divisiveness, at least they function somewhat.
If you RTFA, the litigation was over a business-process that was deemed to be more about thought than process, and therefore not covered.
Although many software patents might be obvious, and pass the Supreme Court test, there are no really good precedents - yet - that cover software patent obviousness, saving the ongoing one-click litigation.
Not as nice or as pertinent as some would like, but I'll take it.
I wish what you contend was true. So far, this saber-rattling has been the crux of much FUD on Microsoft's part. Should they choose litigation, there are theories of law, including estoppel, with might work, as Microsoft has been asked more than once, publicly, to show their hand and have not. But it's really up to them to do so at the time of their choosing. And then, with a war chest of legal funds that's larger than the GDP of many countries, they will go to war, one patent at a time. This will bankrupt lots of people at the moment they start.
Will it cost them good will? What good will? It's inarguable that Microsoft believes itself to be holy, and immune in their quest to dominate markets they choose. This dogmatic belief in themselves isn't rationale, and it isn't legal, but look at the proof that says this hasn't stopped them before, anywhere. They will go for the throat and not stop and have inexhaustable funds to do this. And they don't really care what you or I think, or especially what sentiment there is on slashdot. We are, like it or not, the enemy that prevents them from domination and dares to criticize them.
The OIS won't be sued, and therefore has no nexus for a non-presumptive laches defense. The OIS can jump up and down, babble like a brook, and it matters not one whit to Microsoft, who is immune from OIS (and anyone else's) sentiments. Instead, Microsoft will become injured, and must at some point litigate, if only to save face. The excrement will hit the airconditioning, but Microsoft can afford both umbrellas and endless litigation without a significant dent in their income.
I wish things were different, but 20+ years of watching Microsoft gives me the sense (and I'm not a lawyer) that they really don't care about the OIS, or what anyone else but their revenue stream and shareholders think. The OIS, and you and I, are neither of these things.
Let's see, hundreds of visible industry columnists, analysts, and others call out Microsoft on their patent slander.
One more voice, this of an open (and therefore enemy) patent organization calls out the FUD.
Didn't matter then, doesn't matter now. Microsoft won't budge from their desire to continue to illegally dominate the marketplace, just as they have done for a dozen years.
I'd like to say it might make a difference, and it will to some-- but not Microsoft. People don't get that they believe that they're autonomous and above the law, fighting each thing until the very most bitter end. And what's going to change now?
Sadly, nothing. And they'll get worse after Craig Mundie becomes entrenched.