We just need to hold businesses to be liable for actual damage probably caused by their data leak. If your SSN & other personally identifiable information was leaked by X Corporation, they should have to cover the expenses you incur when you're defrauded by the data thief. Pass a law like that and you'll see firms thinking really hard, not just about *how* to secure that data, but about *what* data they really need to be keeping.
Of course you'd have to put some kind of cap on damages (but it should scale with the revenue of the company), so every breach isn't fatal to every company, but when government contractors get off from a breach like this by (at most) sending a note to the affected, paying for a credit report or two, and getting a little bad publicity - you know something's messed up.
At my last job all the devs had two widescreen lcds - 1920 X 1200. One was horizontal (for normal stuff) the other was vertical for writing/reading code. Worked quite well.
This situation tells you something about free speech as well. Many people claim we can lock down the internet and preserve free speech by eliminating anonymous free speech. This is as good evidence as we're likely to find: without anonymity there can be no free speech. If this guy wasn't a well-paid (presumably) lawyer, he'd have a devil of a time fighting this absurd claim. He may still have a devil of a time. Win or lose, the consequences are clear: the blog is closed, Frenkel's free speech ended, and patent litigation information just got a lot more disparate. And now anyone blogging about patent trolls know what they might be exposed to. Watch out NY County Lawyer.
As I understand it, the traffic was mostly for files hosted on the site, not general site traffic. Both the Fitna and Scientology OT leaks were in huge demand. However, why not just use bittorrent to host files like that? This is almost literally the situation bittorrent was designed for - wikileaks could set up their own tracker for their own files without too much trouble.
Microsoft has gone for "more features" over "better quality." And who can blame them? Apple is eating their lunch, largely because OSX comes with more features. Until Vista it was undoubtedly shinier. Plus it comes with usable built in apps - iLife v. what - paint & windows movie maker? The problem is that at Microsoft the need for features in Windows wholly eclipsed the need for quality, where as at Apple the need for features was subjugated to the need for quality.
Many linux distros have tried to catch up in the features section too - XGL/Compiz for shininess, and though media creativity apps are still a long way from usable, at least things are generally stable and fairly high quality.
So what does it do? Well, slideshows. Handy, but not hugely exciting Not only that, OpenOffice can already export slideshows into.swf files. When.swf support was first added I thought it was so neat I went and created a short animation - flipbook style. As it turns out, OO.org requires you to click, to advance to the next slide - which is the only added feature of salasaga AFAICT.
From the project homepage
An Integrated Development Environment for producing eLearning. Imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we're well on the way to a first release for doing that. To me, this seems to suggest this is designed as an educational tool, not a linux flash replacement. But it fails to show (at least to me) why it is any better than a traditional powerpoint presentation, and what it does that is so special. The homepage also claims Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning but never discloses _what_ that serious limitation is, or how salasaga addresses it (other than making vague future claim about ajax).
Oh come on, do you really think it is unfair that the 30 year veteran gets paid twice what you do? Pay scales with value subject to the limitation of substitutability. People typically get paid more the longer they're in a company/field because experience, knowledge, & expertise typically increases over time in a company/field. Someone who has been with a firm for 10 years is trusted more because they've demonstrated consistent capability, new guys haven't gotten the chance to yet. People higher up the "ladder" get paid more because they're typically harder to replace.
The slacking off you're referring to is a chicken & egg problem. Are the new guys playing with gadgets, doing work halfway, and BSing their boss because they expect to be canned or are they getting canned because they're doing a crap job? As bad as it is to turnover new guys so much (and in my unrepresentative experience the turnover isn't as high as you've experienced), to pay the new guys the same as the old hats would make sure you never had any old hats - and that'd be far more crippling.
I'm not in IT anymore either, but not because of turnover - and good luck in physics.
Close - people are only paid on the money they bring in *if* they're some kind of a unique good. Like Tiger Woods, Madonna, Brad Pitt, etc. If you're not a unique good, your labor is replaceable and thus only worth what employers will pay for it. That's why some athletes, musicians, actors, etc. make so much, and other athletes, musicians, and actors get so little.
If you can bring more in employers may be willing to pay you more, unless your work is easily commoditized and a dozen others would do it for less - thus the salary falls until no one qualified can do the work for less (subject to transaction costs). This is why pay isn't proportional to the labor put in, or the value produced.
It is interesting to me that theft itself is a criminal offense. Theft generally directly involves only two private parties, not the government or the public at large. So the government decided (long ago in England) to step in an enforce private property rights. Back then of course it was larceny, and required some sort of trespass and asportation, but basically that is what happened AFAIK. Whether that was because those with the most property controlled the government back then (different from now?) or because public enforcement of private property rights was thought of as sufficiently good for the public to justify using their funds for enforcement - I don't know.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the government decided to do the same with copyright infringement. It would certainly be more capable than the RIAA, and likely more effective when the fear isn't of getting a John Doe letter from a lawyer, but the fear is that the feds might bust down your door and confiscate your computers.
Note that I'm am not for this position, but there are two sides to the issue. Of course this would be like giving a massive subsidy directly to the big copyright holders, but isn't enforcing shoplifting like giving a subsidy to retailers so they don't have to sue every thief?
At the moment the punishment for file-sharing is much greater than the theft of physical CDs. How is this possible? I absolutely agree, this is nuts. But the reasoning isn't hard to see. Stores can directly take measures to reduce the amount of theft - hire security guards, use those magnetic barcodes that set off alarms when you leave, etc. It is also pretty easy to catch someone if you suspect them - "empty your pockets" is probably enough. Stores can also take measures to make sure those caught with stolen merchandise are punished, they can detain you, call the police, and give you a bad time about it.
With file sharing, there is no "store" you have to visit that even has an interest, let alone an ability, to stop replicating copyrighted material without permission. It is very hard to catch an infringer, and figure out who they are. It is even harder to prove someone has infringed copyrights, even if you believe you've caught in the act and identified them properly (lower standard of proof for civil cases notwithstanding). The best the record companies can do is give you a bad time IF they do catch you and IF they identify you and IF they prove you are guilty.
It is all about risk reward. Shoplifting is riskier, thus less common, than file sharing. The record companies got caught with their pants down, and they're trying to make file sharing risky enough to reduce it - given they have a hard time catching suspects & proving they violated copyright rules - punishment is about the only stick they've got left. Trying to catch & prosecute everyone they found on limewire, eMule, bt, or wherever they get their list of defendants from would be insanely expensive - lobbying to get these absurd penalties is much cheaper.
They don't need any fancy technology to do this -- just a list of port numbers.
Considering how trivial it is to route P2P traffic over any port you so desire, including port 80 which they certainly aren't going to shut off, I think they know it'll take a little more than a list of ports. Most P2P apps I've seen have this functionality built right in - uTorrent, azureus, eMule, etc. Want to hide your traffic? Encrypt it and run it over port 22.
But even traffic run in this way is trivial to filter for AT&T. Without getting into how packet inspection & packet shaping works, most P2P protocols are so distinct, they're easy to spot. e.g. torrent apps, aside from the telltale amount of upload they take, make hundreds of small connections in a very short period of time, and maintain many connections for a longer amount of time. This makes them easy to spot and throttle or block.
That's how CEOs and Board or Directors work - they're the same people. The BoDs for one firm are CEOs of others. They all reward each other with bonuses and fat paychecks. Until one of them screws up really bad that is, then they reward that guy with a golden parachute, expecting no less in return.
What were they thinking?They were thinking that he owns stock in the companies they work at/run, and he can respond in kind.
I wouldn't say he was being a pedant, just clarifying my point. It is good to get some accuracy around here with regard to legal stuff. I was trying to make the point you did about how the RIAA goes after uploaders and why they don't go after downloaders, but I guess my statements were not accurate.
Downloading is more clearly illegal than uploading. Downloading is illegal because it is making a copy without authorization. Prosecuting uploaders has been in the name of "broadcasting" a copyrighted work without authorization.
You're right though in saying that only uploaders have been caught and prosecuted. That is simply because in a traditional P2P app, it is impossible for a 3rd party to see what you are downloading, but very easy for them to see what you've made available. If the RIAA/MPAA could catch downloaders, they would.
So this is a way to do some political protest - and I've refused to buy or listen to new music represented by the RIAA too - but this cuts both ways. To us, we see someone making a point. The RIAA sees further falling sales - which to them means there *must* be more piracy. That in turn provides them with some more "facts" to show congress - "piracy is killing us, look at our sales."
Of course it may be that crappy new music is killing them, or people who finished repurchasing tapes/vinyl years ago are killing them, or fans are simply disillusioned with big media in general, or fans are disillusioned with the RIAA in particular (thats you and me), or any of a dozen other things. But who is congress going to believe anyway?
And when congress mandates all public universities pay a "support the music industry" rhapsody/napster tax, and the RIAA finally gets state sponsorship, you'll be supporting the RIAA anyway.
Yeah I was thinking organic shield too, but not casserole - the driver. How are the cops going to aim this thing so precisely in a high speed chase it only hits the engine block, not the suspect? Putting aside the other stuff they might hit while following a reckless driver in a high speed chase, they'll have to shoot the car from ahead, a situation (having cops ahead and behind) that makes most high speed drivers even more erratic.
This really seems like a bad idea. If the pain is anything like the new microwave gun developed for the military and riot police, being shot with this would be far more likely to cause me to lose control of my car than just having my car turn off. And if the penetration is anything like a real microwave, it'll miss all the electronics housed in the steel engine block (farraday cage) and penetrate the guy - possibly killing him (heart attack, brain damage, etc.) or causing more real permanent damage than is necessary.
Interesting that in grokster, http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/03/2012239.shtml?tid=95&tid=141&tid=126&tid=17">MGM admitted ripping CDs is fair use, even while they were denying ripping DVDs was fair use. Now Sony/BMG is obviously not MGM (Sony owns Universal iirc) but it speaks to the scruples of these companies that are willing to bend the law any way they can to get what they want.
If all you're looking for is desktop search, like beagle or spotlight, it seems to me there are dozens of alternatives. On Windows you have google, msn, yahoo, and my favorite - copernic. On Linux you've got beagle, catfish, and my favorite - kat. Heck, you can just grep most stuff, or shoehorn google desktop. On Macs you've got spotlight, and google desktop, plus frontends like quicksilver and blinkx.
I'm sure you could find a way to shoehorn some of these apps to work centralized on a server (maybe move the index to the server, point the apps at that index, then point "my documents" to a shared drive so access may be had by all). BUT - if you want a real server app, I think the best suggestions - lucene, google appliances - have already been made.
Even lighter and faster than foxit: Sumatra PDF Reader . It is Windows only but runs fine in Wine. Since TFA has no details, I can't say if Sumatra is also vulnerable, but for me it beats foxit.
Well, as you know FRCP rule 11 (esp subsection b) isn't used successfully that much. The impact it has that I see is 1 - it allows old lawyers to scare the crap out of younger ones by threatening them, and 2 - it guides the way we plead. So rather than using it to slap down others (except in the most egregious cases), it is kind of a behavior modifier. I've never really seen someone explicitly violate 11b (thus I've never threatened with it), so I can't be sure what judges think of using it, but the infrequency should say something. Anyway, sorry about the rap on the knuckles, keep up the great work (and thanks for keeping us updated).
MS Office 2007 has some pretty sweet features, and the ribbon is pretty helpful once you give it a chance. BUT - the lack of configurability is awful - you can't pick the elements on the ribbon, you can't customize them, you can't even move the ribbon to the side, which would make more sense given word processing is essentially a vertical activity. I also went back to OO.o when I got frustrated with the ribbon.
To be fair, there is also gnumeric and abiword (both of which do more than *most* people need, and abiword really is the fastest wysiwyg word processor around), and the entire KOffice suite - kword, kspread, kexi, krita and co.
I can't imagine why this is a story. I *assume* illegal wiretapping si working to catch terrorists. Why else would they take so much heat over this issue. But whether or not it catches terrorists, the question remains - is it legal for parts of the US Government to wiretap anyone they please without a warrant and without oversight?
Slashdot Mirror
We just need to hold businesses to be liable for actual damage probably caused by their data leak. If your SSN & other personally identifiable information was leaked by X Corporation, they should have to cover the expenses you incur when you're defrauded by the data thief. Pass a law like that and you'll see firms thinking really hard, not just about *how* to secure that data, but about *what* data they really need to be keeping.
Of course you'd have to put some kind of cap on damages (but it should scale with the revenue of the company), so every breach isn't fatal to every company, but when government contractors get off from a breach like this by (at most) sending a note to the affected, paying for a credit report or two, and getting a little bad publicity - you know something's messed up.
At my last job all the devs had two widescreen lcds - 1920 X 1200. One was horizontal (for normal stuff) the other was vertical for writing/reading code. Worked quite well.
This situation tells you something about free speech as well. Many people claim we can lock down the internet and preserve free speech by eliminating anonymous free speech. This is as good evidence as we're likely to find: without anonymity there can be no free speech. If this guy wasn't a well-paid (presumably) lawyer, he'd have a devil of a time fighting this absurd claim. He may still have a devil of a time. Win or lose, the consequences are clear: the blog is closed, Frenkel's free speech ended, and patent litigation information just got a lot more disparate. And now anyone blogging about patent trolls know what they might be exposed to. Watch out NY County Lawyer.
As I understand it, the traffic was mostly for files hosted on the site, not general site traffic. Both the Fitna and Scientology OT leaks were in huge demand. However, why not just use bittorrent to host files like that? This is almost literally the situation bittorrent was designed for - wikileaks could set up their own tracker for their own files without too much trouble.
Many linux distros have tried to catch up in the features section too - XGL/Compiz for shininess, and though media creativity apps are still a long way from usable, at least things are generally stable and fairly high quality.
Rename: F2
Properties: Alt-Enter
There is almost always a keyboard shortcut in Windows.
Not only that, OpenOffice can already export slideshows into
From the project homepage An Integrated Development Environment for producing eLearning. Imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we're well on the way to a first release for doing that. To me, this seems to suggest this is designed as an educational tool, not a linux flash replacement. But it fails to show (at least to me) why it is any better than a traditional powerpoint presentation, and what it does that is so special. The homepage also claims Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning but never discloses _what_ that serious limitation is, or how salasaga addresses it (other than making vague future claim about ajax).
This probably should've made the post.
Oh come on, do you really think it is unfair that the 30 year veteran gets paid twice what you do? Pay scales with value subject to the limitation of substitutability. People typically get paid more the longer they're in a company/field because experience, knowledge, & expertise typically increases over time in a company/field. Someone who has been with a firm for 10 years is trusted more because they've demonstrated consistent capability, new guys haven't gotten the chance to yet. People higher up the "ladder" get paid more because they're typically harder to replace.
The slacking off you're referring to is a chicken & egg problem. Are the new guys playing with gadgets, doing work halfway, and BSing their boss because they expect to be canned or are they getting canned because they're doing a crap job? As bad as it is to turnover new guys so much (and in my unrepresentative experience the turnover isn't as high as you've experienced), to pay the new guys the same as the old hats would make sure you never had any old hats - and that'd be far more crippling.
I'm not in IT anymore either, but not because of turnover - and good luck in physics.
Close - people are only paid on the money they bring in *if* they're some kind of a unique good. Like Tiger Woods, Madonna, Brad Pitt, etc. If you're not a unique good, your labor is replaceable and thus only worth what employers will pay for it. That's why some athletes, musicians, actors, etc. make so much, and other athletes, musicians, and actors get so little.
If you can bring more in employers may be willing to pay you more, unless your work is easily commoditized and a dozen others would do it for less - thus the salary falls until no one qualified can do the work for less (subject to transaction costs). This is why pay isn't proportional to the labor put in, or the value produced.
It is interesting to me that theft itself is a criminal offense. Theft generally directly involves only two private parties, not the government or the public at large. So the government decided (long ago in England) to step in an enforce private property rights. Back then of course it was larceny, and required some sort of trespass and asportation, but basically that is what happened AFAIK. Whether that was because those with the most property controlled the government back then (different from now?) or because public enforcement of private property rights was thought of as sufficiently good for the public to justify using their funds for enforcement - I don't know.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the government decided to do the same with copyright infringement. It would certainly be more capable than the RIAA, and likely more effective when the fear isn't of getting a John Doe letter from a lawyer, but the fear is that the feds might bust down your door and confiscate your computers.
Note that I'm am not for this position, but there are two sides to the issue. Of course this would be like giving a massive subsidy directly to the big copyright holders, but isn't enforcing shoplifting like giving a subsidy to retailers so they don't have to sue every thief?
With file sharing, there is no "store" you have to visit that even has an interest, let alone an ability, to stop replicating copyrighted material without permission. It is very hard to catch an infringer, and figure out who they are. It is even harder to prove someone has infringed copyrights, even if you believe you've caught in the act and identified them properly (lower standard of proof for civil cases notwithstanding). The best the record companies can do is give you a bad time IF they do catch you and IF they identify you and IF they prove you are guilty.
It is all about risk reward. Shoplifting is riskier, thus less common, than file sharing. The record companies got caught with their pants down, and they're trying to make file sharing risky enough to reduce it - given they have a hard time catching suspects & proving they violated copyright rules - punishment is about the only stick they've got left. Trying to catch & prosecute everyone they found on limewire, eMule, bt, or wherever they get their list of defendants from would be insanely expensive - lobbying to get these absurd penalties is much cheaper.
They don't need any fancy technology to do this -- just a list of port numbers.
Considering how trivial it is to route P2P traffic over any port you so desire, including port 80 which they certainly aren't going to shut off, I think they know it'll take a little more than a list of ports. Most P2P apps I've seen have this functionality built right in - uTorrent, azureus, eMule, etc. Want to hide your traffic? Encrypt it and run it over port 22.
But even traffic run in this way is trivial to filter for AT&T. Without getting into how packet inspection & packet shaping works, most P2P protocols are so distinct, they're easy to spot. e.g. torrent apps, aside from the telltale amount of upload they take, make hundreds of small connections in a very short period of time, and maintain many connections for a longer amount of time. This makes them easy to spot and throttle or block.
That's how CEOs and Board or Directors work - they're the same people. The BoDs for one firm are CEOs of others. They all reward each other with bonuses and fat paychecks. Until one of them screws up really bad that is, then they reward that guy with a golden parachute, expecting no less in return.
What were they thinking?They were thinking that he owns stock in the companies they work at/run, and he can respond in kind.
I wouldn't say he was being a pedant, just clarifying my point. It is good to get some accuracy around here with regard to legal stuff. I was trying to make the point you did about how the RIAA goes after uploaders and why they don't go after downloaders, but I guess my statements were not accurate.
:)
Besides, isn't law a profession of pedants?
Downloading is more clearly illegal than uploading. Downloading is illegal because it is making a copy without authorization. Prosecuting uploaders has been in the name of "broadcasting" a copyrighted work without authorization.
You're right though in saying that only uploaders have been caught and prosecuted. That is simply because in a traditional P2P app, it is impossible for a 3rd party to see what you are downloading, but very easy for them to see what you've made available. If the RIAA/MPAA could catch downloaders, they would.
So this is a way to do some political protest - and I've refused to buy or listen to new music represented by the RIAA too - but this cuts both ways. To us, we see someone making a point. The RIAA sees further falling sales - which to them means there *must* be more piracy. That in turn provides them with some more "facts" to show congress - "piracy is killing us, look at our sales."
Of course it may be that crappy new music is killing them, or people who finished repurchasing tapes/vinyl years ago are killing them, or fans are simply disillusioned with big media in general, or fans are disillusioned with the RIAA in particular (thats you and me), or any of a dozen other things. But who is congress going to believe anyway?
And when congress mandates all public universities pay a "support the music industry" rhapsody/napster tax, and the RIAA finally gets state sponsorship, you'll be supporting the RIAA anyway.
Yeah I was thinking organic shield too, but not casserole - the driver. How are the cops going to aim this thing so precisely in a high speed chase it only hits the engine block, not the suspect? Putting aside the other stuff they might hit while following a reckless driver in a high speed chase, they'll have to shoot the car from ahead, a situation (having cops ahead and behind) that makes most high speed drivers even more erratic.
This really seems like a bad idea. If the pain is anything like the new microwave gun developed for the military and riot police, being shot with this would be far more likely to cause me to lose control of my car than just having my car turn off. And if the penetration is anything like a real microwave, it'll miss all the electronics housed in the steel engine block (farraday cage) and penetrate the guy - possibly killing him (heart attack, brain damage, etc.) or causing more real permanent damage than is necessary.
Interesting that in grokster, http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/03/2012239.shtml?tid=95&tid=141&tid=126&tid=17">MGM admitted ripping CDs is fair use, even while they were denying ripping DVDs was fair use. Now Sony/BMG is obviously not MGM (Sony owns Universal iirc) but it speaks to the scruples of these companies that are willing to bend the law any way they can to get what they want.
If all you're looking for is desktop search, like beagle or spotlight, it seems to me there are dozens of alternatives. On Windows you have google, msn, yahoo, and my favorite - copernic. On Linux you've got beagle, catfish, and my favorite - kat. Heck, you can just grep most stuff, or shoehorn google desktop. On Macs you've got spotlight, and google desktop, plus frontends like quicksilver and blinkx.
I'm sure you could find a way to shoehorn some of these apps to work centralized on a server (maybe move the index to the server, point the apps at that index, then point "my documents" to a shared drive so access may be had by all). BUT - if you want a real server app, I think the best suggestions - lucene, google appliances - have already been made.
Even lighter and faster than foxit: Sumatra PDF Reader . It is Windows only but runs fine in Wine. Since TFA has no details, I can't say if Sumatra is also vulnerable, but for me it beats foxit.
Well, as you know FRCP rule 11 (esp subsection b) isn't used successfully that much. The impact it has that I see is 1 - it allows old lawyers to scare the crap out of younger ones by threatening them, and 2 - it guides the way we plead. So rather than using it to slap down others (except in the most egregious cases), it is kind of a behavior modifier. I've never really seen someone explicitly violate 11b (thus I've never threatened with it), so I can't be sure what judges think of using it, but the infrequency should say something. Anyway, sorry about the rap on the knuckles, keep up the great work (and thanks for keeping us updated).
MS Office 2007 has some pretty sweet features, and the ribbon is pretty helpful once you give it a chance. BUT - the lack of configurability is awful - you can't pick the elements on the ribbon, you can't customize them, you can't even move the ribbon to the side, which would make more sense given word processing is essentially a vertical activity. I also went back to OO.o when I got frustrated with the ribbon.
To be fair, there is also gnumeric and abiword (both of which do more than *most* people need, and abiword really is the fastest wysiwyg word processor around), and the entire KOffice suite - kword, kspread, kexi, krita and co.
I can't imagine why this is a story. I *assume* illegal wiretapping si working to catch terrorists. Why else would they take so much heat over this issue. But whether or not it catches terrorists, the question remains - is it legal for parts of the US Government to wiretap anyone they please without a warrant and without oversight?