I think you are confusing right/wrong with legal/illegal.
In what way? The fundamentals of antitrust law are surprisingly similar in the EU, US, and most other places for that matter. Almost all of them list tying and more specifically bundling as illegal actions and mostly as part of criminal law.
People who do insist upon populating the earth and saving every embryo need to do more than just adopt, they need to do ensure society has a place for them and has the necessary services in place, otherwise they will be debating where the build the next prison to house them as adults.
Privileged system access is not the holy grail; access to specific resources are.
Amen! This is slowly making its way into the server space now via virtual machines, jails, Solaris zones, etc. It is going to take some real HCI expertise, however, to bring it to the desktop.
We really need to make programs stay on their own turf. Not just files; how about that registry? Why the hell should every program be able to read all of it, and write almost all of it, even keys that belong to a different program?
OS X actually does a much better job of compartmentalizing end user applications than most OS's. The fact that each application is its own directory could make the implementation of these application level permissions much simpler and more flexible. The implementation of plug-in style services can relieve some of the biggest headaches for an end user of such a system such as updating and software registration.
Really only SE Linux is set up to handle this sort of thing.
I don't think SE Linux's implementation is clean enough for a normal user of a home desktop. There is a lot of work to be done. I do, however, think this will be the way of the future.
so that's why there's a checkbox in the mail service prefs to scan all mail for viruses in OS X Server?
Apple includes ClamAV bundled with OS X server. Since they don't have a monopoly on server OS's or antivirus suites, this is perfectly legal. They can also bundle a block of cheese and a sports car if they want. The only thing questionable for Apple is bundling something with iPods since that is the only potential monopolized product I know of they sell. The courts are still trying to determine if it is a monopoly or not.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a monopoly on desktop OS's as ruled by numerous courts. They are, therefore, clearly breaking the law if they bundle anything with Windows where there is an existing market, like an antivirus suite. So far they have been able to bribe the courts to look the other way and simply pay off all the companies that have brought lawsuits against them for so doing.
Re:But what if Microsoft offered it all together?
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The issue is persuading other companies who sell your product not to sell a competitors product.
The issue is, quite simply, doing anything that provides your product an advantage over another product, because you have a monopoly on a different product. It does not matter if it is coercion, bundling, or tying. Here's the test. Look at two products in the market, like IE and Firefox. Does IE gain an advantage in the market because MS bundles it and thus all developers know users will have it available? Yes. Are they able to do this because of their Windows OS monopoly? Yes? Without having a monopoly, can the Firefox team make sure every Windows box has a copy of Firefox on them, without costing them any money? No. Thus it is a violation.
Do you have cites for your claims MS has settled with several companies over Wordpad?
I don't have citations, just something I think I recall from and article in passing. MS has settled a lot of these lawsuits, most of them with the inclusion of a nondisclosure clause. It would take a lot of digging to find any given specifics, if it is even possible.
And while having 70% marketshare may have potential for monopoly influence, it doesn't mean you are imposing your will on vendors - it means you probably have enough clout to do so. I mean, anyone has the potential to be a murderer, but we aren't all murderers now, are we?
Here is where you are making a false analogy. Being a murderer is illegal, by definition because it means you have committed murder, which is a crime. Being a monopolist is not illegal because gaining a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Thus a more proper analogy would be Monopolists are like people who have baseball bats. They both have the power to commit a crime. If a baseball bat owner beats someone to death or if a monopolist bundles another product with their monopoly product, then they have committed a crime.
In the case of Apple, the courts aren't ruling if Apple has beaten someone. We know Apple is bundling. The courts are ruling if Apple has a baseball bat and is thus guilty of armed assault instead of simple assault. They are measuring the size and weight of the stick Apple has to see if it is legally a weapon. (To be a more perfect analogy, beatings would have to not be a crime unless committed with a weapon as bundling is not a crime unless the involve a monopoly product.)
Um, if you are worried about holes in launchd, why not audit the source code yourself?
Because I don't have the time and because I don't trust myself to find any and all potential problems. I'd much rather Apple had a team of experts attack it on their dime and/or that the OSS community as a whole spent some time banging on it. They, collectively, can do a much more thorough job. I know some people are already looking at it, including some OpenBSD guys. In fact, I've heard rumors of potential DoS attacks that could take down the box if SSH is enabled on OS X 10.4 systems. We'll see if they pan out.
Re:But what if Microsoft offered it all together?
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By your rationale, Microsoft's Notepad and Wordpad, and Apple's Text Edit would all violate the law because they are bundled with the OS and there are definitely existing markets for word processing.
Actually, it is very arguable that Wordpad is illegal bundling, but it is really more of text editor than a word processor and whether or not it competes with an existing market is debatable. I think MS actually settled out of court with several companies over this very inclusion. As for TextEdit, it is not a violation because OS X is not a monopoly in any market.
Having a large market share of a product is not the same as having a monopoly.
This is true, although many laws specify 70% of a market as a guideline for potential monopoly influence.
If Apple starting buying up other companies and disolving them, or put pressure on retailers of the iPod to not sell competing brands, that would be illegal.
The former actually would not be illegal. The latter would be illegal if and only if Apple was found to be wielding monopoly power in the market in which iPods are sold as defined by the court. There are many indicators of monopoly influence and the iPod is definitely coming close in some ways.
Making a product that sells insanely well is not illegal...
You're missing the point. It isn't illegal to have a monopoly or gain a monopoly. It is illegal to use a monopoly to gain more money from other markets. If Apple gains a monopoly on iPods, nothing stops them from maintaining that monopoly, but the law makes it illegal for them to bundle or tie that monopoly to other markets. That means they can no longer bundle iTunes with iPods unless they are willing to include every other jukebox software someone asks for. That means they can't tie the iPod to the iTunes music store by refusing to let other music sellers include the same level of DRM that music from the iTunes store does. Note, all of this is if they have a monopoly. Microsoft does have a monopoly.
Let me clarify the bundling issue for you. If I have no monopolies I can bundle anything I want with anything. If I have a monopoly on say, televisions, I'm prevented from bundling anything with those televisions. For example, if I started building DVD players into my televisions, I'd quickly own the DVD player market as well, since no one will buy another DVD player when they had to get one included with their TV anyway. Even if my DVD players are inferior quality, they would still take over the market so long as they were just "good enough." In the same way it is illegal for MS to bundle a Web browser. IE is inferior to firefox, but it is just "good enough" that most people use it anyway, since otherwise they have to go out and find a different browser and most don't even know they can do such a thing. Whether or not it can be removed after the fact is irrelevant. If I bundled a DVD player with every TV, but you could easily remove the DVD player and throw it away would most people throw it away and buy a different one? Of course not. When you buy Windows you paid for the IE developers' work regardless if you throw it away later. Hence it is the initial bundling that matters, not the ability to remove it after the fact. Also note, it only prevents me from bundling not others. If Circuit city wants to give away a free DVD player with each of my TVs they sell, nothing is stopping them, just as nothing stops Dell from bundling Windows and IE and selling them. Only the monopolist is forbidden from doing so.
I'm just wondering if anyone has ever built a firewall device from a Windows box.
Please shut up right now before you give some braindead manager an idea. We have a projector some creep built on Windows and we can't even keep it from crashing all the time. Do you know how much of an idiot you look like when you're giving a presentation and your projector crashes, you have to pull the plug and listen to the Windows start-up chime? Its like telling people your monitor crashed. They look at you like your brains just dribbled out of your ears.
Re:But what if Microsoft offered it all together?
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It's not difficult to understand; it's annoying because it's the wrong argument, and it really muddies the debate. We don't need to hold Microsoft and Apple to different standards to show that one is better than the other. There is nothing wrong with MS bundling software with their OS.
I 100% disagree with this. It is illegal for MS to bundle any software with their OS, for which their is a separate market (like antivirus). Anyone who understands the economic models of monopolies should understand why. We are holding MS and Apple to the same standard. Neither can bundle products they have for which there is an existing market, with a product they have that is a monopoly in a market. It is illegal for MS to bundle antivirus software with Windows. It is not illegal for them to bundle antivirus with their mice or MS Office. It is legal for Apple to bundle antivirus with their OS. If Apple is ever ruled to have a monopoly on iPods it will be illegal for them to bundle antivirus with iPods (They are around 70% of the market now and some courts have already begun investigating the possibility).
Re:the article may have some good points, but...
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If anything, Windows has a somewhat better design in that it is possible to set up privileged accounts with a specific power that only root has on UNIX, yet not have any of the other root powers.
I don't want to quibble about nomenclature and real differences between security layers or accounts or whatever between platforms, but I think you're a little mistaken here. One of the reasons LaunchD is being applauded in this article is because it allows you to run a given process with very specific permissions without going to hassle of trying to create a special user account and while also integrating the scheduling and resource allocation in one, nice, neat, hopefully secure package. It obviates the need for straining the "user" metaphor as is so common. I don't exactly think it is really appropriate to claim it as the security benefactor, however, when what we're really talking about is that services aren't written to require unneeded permissions as much as on Windows.
If OSX had that kind of a market share, youd bet your ass that everyone would be breaking down its walls, in exactly the same way.
Most people keep their money in their mattress. If most people had home safes, everyone would be breaking into safes and taking their money in exactly the same way.
Do you see how this analogy exposes the flaw in your logic? To show a classic example, IIS has a much smaller market share than Apache, but is compromised more often. If OS X had an equal market share as Windows, OS X would still be compromised less often for the following reasons:
It has fewer exposed services
It has more secure default settings, and most people don't change defaults.
Normal users don't have permission to break things as easily
Apple does not ignore local escalations, so there are a lot fewer of them
Most services don't run with lots of unneeded permissions and complete access to root the box.
On OS X software that needs you to be a privileged user is rare, unlike Windows.
Not having a monopoly, Apple actually responds to security concerns and fixes them and will adapt to keep users happy. MS has people locked in and doesn't care.
Would you rather it effect Apples measly market share, or Microsofts dominant machine?
It depends upon my motivation. Ideally, it would run on both. The thing is, there is plenty of motivation for crackers to write malware for OS X, simply to gain publicity and respect in the community or to shut up smug mac users. It hasn't happened yet because there are a lot of barriers besides market share.
Most mac users are just as dumb as most windows users, they just tend to have some sort of superiority complex.
I'm not sure this is true. There are plenty of dumb users on both systems, but a lot of the security industry has moved to macs, providing a greater likelihood a mac malware will end up on the machine of someone with a clue. More importantly, however, mac users can be dumb, and because they have a more secure system by default, they are still not exploited as often.
neither is really better than the other, from a sheer 'does this work' standpoint.
I strongly disagree as do most users I know that have actually run OS X and Windows as their regular machine. From both a security perspective and a general use perspective, OS X is a more usable desktop machine for most people. Just because OS X is not perfect for security, does not mean it is as bad as the abysmal mess that is a standard Windows installation.
I wonder if they[microsoft] would have been slapped with an antitrust lawsuit if they incorporated antivirus in the OS.
Microsoft probably cannot legally enter into the antivirus market at all. If they bundle it they are blatantly breaking antitrust law. If they sell it they are exposing themselves to lawsuits because of the conflict of interest. They are selling a monopoly product and then charging customers a second time to fix the flaws in the software the courts have ruled they were coerced into buying by the monopolized market. MS is implementing antivirus software, by the way and they are going to be sued. Legally, they should be fixing the OS to solve the problem.
Maybe with apple incorporating it they have the green light to go ahead with it.
I thihk you're operating under some misconceptions. LaunchD is not an antivirus suite. It is a deamon that launches other software. If a service starts up on a Mac, LaunchD did it. It takes care of scheduling automated events as well. It basically replaced about 5 different bits of legacy code on Linux and the BSDs. It also lets you run a Web server, easily, by default, that, if compromised, does not give an attacker complete control of your computer... just of the Web server. That is why it is being touted here as a security win.
Conceptually, I agree that LaunchD is a really slick idea and I really hope Linux and the BSDs take a good hard look at this code and the possibility of adopting it. That said, it is not a security panacea by any means, just one more clean, sensible implementation that leaves less room for a vulnerability. The thing that makes me hesitate to laud this feature, however, is the implementation. Apple has a lot of smart people working for them and a lot of old school UNIX geeks to whom secure programming is as natural as breathing. They also have a lot of coders and managers who realize that OS X is not a primarily security minded OS. Sure, it is better than Windows and on par with a desktop Linux distro, but it isn't a locked down OpenBSD install or a super secure Linux distro. They don't focus their efforts on security and it shows sometimes when they introduce new code. LaunchD replaces a number of time tested bits of code and while it is (IMHO) a much cleaner, nicer design I haven't a clue about how well written and tested it is, especially from a security perspective. I'd feel a lot better about claiming it as a security feature if I knew some white hats had pounded on it for a while and exposed anything Apple did not bother to think of. I'd feel a lot better if the OSS community in general jumped on it and adopted it, thus helping with this security testing and adding more eyes.
I like LaunchD. I like OS X as a desktop. Lets just not get carried away here with random claims about security. OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, but that really isn't saying a lot. I'm not willing to just assume LaunchD is secure in and of itself, let alone that it will play a big part in securing the OS as a whole.
At the risk of disrupting the fun, I'd like to interject a serious comment. ISS resells some real security technologies that IBM has been missing from their offerings for a long time. In the network security space, they resell some important technology that has traditionally been in the "Cisco camp" and thus mostly implemented by enterprise customers that don't do a lot of business with IBM. This could really change the landscape of enterprise security... in a few years when IBM manages to get ISS integrated into their sales channels.
If unrestricted internet access from work is so important for you that you'll refuse a job, then you're most likely one of the people who shouldn't be allowed that unrestricted access.
I have and do work with people that would probably look elsewhere for employment if they were not given unrestricted internet access. This is for several reasons. Their jobs would be a lot harder without the internet as a research tool. It is a sign of a company that does not trust its employees, and that is a death sentence for hiring high end creative developers. It makes work a lot less pleasant when you can't look at the Strongbad cartoon someone posted on IRC or the acquisition news of one of the company's partners or to add a new movie someone told you about to your Netflix queue. I'm spending a third of my life at work and I sure don't want to do so in an environment with strict requirements for what I do when. I have a job. So long as I get it done my employer should be happy. If some day I'm not super motivated and read Slashdot for an hour before I get a good idea, well that is more than made up for when I put in three extra hours on something when I am on a roll and don't want to interrupt my project for something like dinner.
If you treat employees like people and rely upon their loyalty to the company and their boss to keep them working hard, you can get very good results. If you make sure they have a vested interest in the success of the company you can do even better. Have you even seen the movie "office space?" Would you rather an employee looked at Slashdot and then did the best they could to solve the company's problems or one that pretended to work while doing as little as possible to not get fired?
Go waste somebody else's money. I don't want a bunch of slackers "working" for me, taking my money, and doing other things when they should be productive. I don't ask my people to work overtime becuase we schedule so that things get done in the alloted schedule. If you are so addicted to the internet that you can't put in 4 hours before lunch and 4 hours after lunch without access to all of it, you're not going to do what I need you to do.
There are several factors here you are probably not considering. First, web access can make a lot of jobs much easier. Looking up documentation, examples, and forums for help can make a huge difference in how easy a job is to do. Second, people are not machine parts. They are not designed to work on strict schedules within tolerances. They are people. You can either treat them as a bunch of slackers you need to force to do their jobs creating an adversarial relationship or you can treat them as people. I'm posting this from work and if my immediate superior noticed that, well he might reply to it. He cares if I get my job done and how well, not what I'm doing at any given moment.
If you have an adversarial relationship with your employees, they will have a lot less loyalty to you. They also aren't likely to enjoy their jobs very much or go the extra mile to stay all night working on a special project of theirs or solving that obscure problem for some customer. You're also not likely to attract the best and brightest because they are smart enough to know that if they're spending a third of their lives somewhere, they don't want it to be someplace they don't like. Smart people will take a 20K pay cut to have a fun, relaxed atmosphere where they can see what's on Slashdot or take a nap for 30 minutes if they are tired some day.
Google understands this very well. A lot of people understood this during the.com boom, but when combined with no business plan, no real products, and a pile of venture capital, it was a disaster. As a result a lot of people associate this with failure and just assume you can't have a fun, relaxed workplace and still be successful. Those companies have lost most of their brightest people to Google or somewhere like where I work that does understand.
Free beer in the fridge cost the company a whole lot less than paying everyone a pile more money and competing only on who can pay the highest salary. And if you come in on a sunday, there's probably a few really bright people talking about their cool new project over a few beers while looking at the latest data when they don't have to be.
Do you have some evidence of this? I'm interested to know how Microsoft is "breaking" something like the JPEG standard.
In the case of JPEG, they are trying to replace both JPEG and PNG with a bundled graphics formats (Windows Media Photo) included in Windows Vista. They have contacted numerous camera and printer companies in an attempt to promote this new format, which is completely proprietary. Their hope is that they can quietly lock more people in the Windows format when they realize there is no easy, legal way to move their stored family photos to a neutral format that they can use on Linux or OS X. Further, there is talk of Web services built around this format for automated publishing as well as Frontpage integration so that people can publish their family photo galleries in a way only viewable by IE to provide incentive for people who just view images from other family members to stay on Windows. Finally, I've heard rumors of a new media format, like Kodak photo CDs, that they plan to integrate for backup and transfer to professional printers (Walmart), to make sure even old JPEGs are hard to view and harder to export without a Windows system. initially, of course, they are promising to license the format for other devices (excluding open source), but if they can ever manage to gain even moderate market share, we all know what the end result will be.
I never suggested it was, however statistics is a logical procedure and does not violate any of the rules of logic.
Go read your MacKay again and pay special attention to the logical indeterminism of choice and the problem of propositional logic.
You've strongly implied in your posts that you think that I have presented a logical fallacy, but all of your attempts to name a specific one have been either misinterpretations of the rules of logic, or misinterpretations of my statements. You've hinted that prediction is inherently illogical. Statistics is a counter example that I was hoping you'd be able to grok. Sadly, you've instead decided to once again avoid my statements and argue against an interpretation of what I wrote that is so strained it verges on being a strawman.
As an aside, your arguments in this thread where you write, "coupled with that annoying 'let me tell you how it is' tone" shortly followed by, "Oh, and thanks for the shark example. It was stupid and proves you have no idea what you're talking about..." Is both funny and sad. Healer, heal thyself.
That's all well and good. What I said was that you need to stop pretending you're making a "logical" argument when you are obviously not.
You've failed to show how using past behavior as a possible indicator of future behavior is illogical.
The main fallacy here is your argumentative presumption based on "feeling".
Feeling? What emotive arguments have I made? This is objective analysis, not feeling.
As far as I'm concerned you can play tarot card reader all day and tell us what Microsoft will be doing next Tuesday - just don't try to pass it as logic.
Perhaps you missed the memo, but structured logic in the form of the scientific method has used predictors for hundreds of years. It is not logical to say that because the sun came up yesterday it will today. It is logical to say that because the sun has come up every day for years, it is reasonable to deduce it is likely it will come up tomorrow, barring strong evidence to the contrary. There is nothing emotive or illogical about that. Statistics and probability can determine the probability of certain future events in exacting detail. That does not make them illogical.
It appears that you fell asleep when your logic teacher was trying to explain the concept of fallacies of involved assumptions, better known in logic circles as Petitio Principii. Eg: Microsoft did X yesterday and Y the day before - therefore they will do Z tomorrow.
I did not say that Microsoft will do something bad tomorrow. I said it is reasonable for people to suspect that they will and illogical to ignore past experience as a possible indicator of future behavior. You seem to have misinterpreted the meaning of said fallacy. It certainly does not preclude the above.
Dahmer was also not a murderer the day before he first murdered someone, mmm?
No, but knowing that he has consistently been murdering people, raping the corpses, and eating them for years makes it reasonable to suspect him when people disappear.
And of course your analogy is a classic example of the poisoning the well fallacy, in which you draw a comparison to an emotionally charged subject that cannot be dismissed as false because it's based on well-known previous, observable events.
Poisoning the well is when you appeal to emotion. I was simply providing a simplified analogy using Dahmer as an easily recognizable criminal to represent MS's criminal actions. I made no appeals to emotion in so doing. I suppose someone could view this historical person in a very emotional way, but I don't expect most people will.
Maybe you should go hit the books again. MS's consistent criminal behavior over the past decade does not in any way prove that they will commit similar criminal acts in the future, but it does imply that this is a reasonable, possible danger. To expect everyone to ignore all their past experience with the company and suddenly give them the benefit of the doubt is both foolish and illogical.
Chief Hacking Officer? I wasn't aware companies had those these days.
This is what happens when employees pick their own titles. I used to work with the "grand poobah of software development" at a former company. It was on his business cards. An IBM guy snorted soda through his nose when he read it.
You're giving off that new hippy "down with the man" college student smell. Are you a freshmen or a sophomore?
I graduated from undergraduate school quite a long time ago. I don't think reprimanding someone for not spending five minutes with wikipedia to gain a basic understanding of the subject they decided to make inflammatory, flippant remarks about qualifies anyone as having a "down with the man" mentality. I don't think my co-workers and colleagues would characterize me as a "hippy" by any means.
P.S. you're giving off that "I make wild assumptions based upon very little information" smell. Are you, perhaps, a troll as well as a coward?
when did slashdot become an unofficial apple forum? i had to block the apple section!
Why has Slashdot always been a Linux forum? Nerd use Linux. Slashdot started carrying a lot of Apple content when Apple released an OS that nerds started using in large numbers. The fact that a lot of the most innovative features to be added to computing in the last handful of years kind of seals the deal. Even nerds who don't use OS X are usually interested in an improved replacement for "chron" or a soon to be widely deployed video chat client that can filter out your background and replace it with another in realtime. It is most certainly, news for nerds.
Using that reasoning, I can fairly state that OSS will never gain wide acceptance because its community consists of a bunch of pompus elitist assholes.
This is the logical fallacy, "Non sequitur." You've failed to demonstrate any flaw in the reasoning or analogy, but instead have simply presented an unsupported belief and an ad hominem attack to boot. Please read a book on reasoning, logic, or critical thinking and come back when you can support some of your illogical opinions.
No, Microsoft isn't illegally bundling IE. They're bundling IE, but not illegally. That hsi issue already went through the courts and Microsoft is still bundling IE should give you a clue that it's not illegal.
If you bothered to follow the court decisions, it was ruled illegal, but after certain, huge, campaign contributions the courts decided not to do anything about stopping the illegal action as part of their remedy. You also might notice that since then, MS has settled out of court paying undisclosed sums to dozens of companies as a result of this behavior.
It is illegal to bundle two products when one of them wields monopoly power in one market and the other is in a second market. This is basic antitrust law going back to the Sherman act and is, in fact, the first example of illegal antitrust behavior provided. Don't mistake not being stopped/punished for not being guilty.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confusing right/wrong with legal/illegal.
In what way? The fundamentals of antitrust law are surprisingly similar in the EU, US, and most other places for that matter. Almost all of them list tying and more specifically bundling as illegal actions and mostly as part of criminal law.
People who do insist upon populating the earth and saving every embryo need to do more than just adopt, they need to do ensure society has a place for them and has the necessary services in place, otherwise they will be debating where the build the next prison to house them as adults.
I take it you read "Freakonomics?"
Privileged system access is not the holy grail; access to specific resources are.
Amen! This is slowly making its way into the server space now via virtual machines, jails, Solaris zones, etc. It is going to take some real HCI expertise, however, to bring it to the desktop.
We really need to make programs stay on their own turf. Not just files; how about that registry? Why the hell should every program be able to read all of it, and write almost all of it, even keys that belong to a different program?
OS X actually does a much better job of compartmentalizing end user applications than most OS's. The fact that each application is its own directory could make the implementation of these application level permissions much simpler and more flexible. The implementation of plug-in style services can relieve some of the biggest headaches for an end user of such a system such as updating and software registration.
Really only SE Linux is set up to handle this sort of thing.
I don't think SE Linux's implementation is clean enough for a normal user of a home desktop. There is a lot of work to be done. I do, however, think this will be the way of the future.
so that's why there's a checkbox in the mail service prefs to scan all mail for viruses in OS X Server?
Apple includes ClamAV bundled with OS X server. Since they don't have a monopoly on server OS's or antivirus suites, this is perfectly legal. They can also bundle a block of cheese and a sports car if they want. The only thing questionable for Apple is bundling something with iPods since that is the only potential monopolized product I know of they sell. The courts are still trying to determine if it is a monopoly or not.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has a monopoly on desktop OS's as ruled by numerous courts. They are, therefore, clearly breaking the law if they bundle anything with Windows where there is an existing market, like an antivirus suite. So far they have been able to bribe the courts to look the other way and simply pay off all the companies that have brought lawsuits against them for so doing.
The issue is persuading other companies who sell your product not to sell a competitors product.
The issue is, quite simply, doing anything that provides your product an advantage over another product, because you have a monopoly on a different product. It does not matter if it is coercion, bundling, or tying. Here's the test. Look at two products in the market, like IE and Firefox. Does IE gain an advantage in the market because MS bundles it and thus all developers know users will have it available? Yes. Are they able to do this because of their Windows OS monopoly? Yes? Without having a monopoly, can the Firefox team make sure every Windows box has a copy of Firefox on them, without costing them any money? No. Thus it is a violation.
Do you have cites for your claims MS has settled with several companies over Wordpad?
I don't have citations, just something I think I recall from and article in passing. MS has settled a lot of these lawsuits, most of them with the inclusion of a nondisclosure clause. It would take a lot of digging to find any given specifics, if it is even possible.
And while having 70% marketshare may have potential for monopoly influence, it doesn't mean you are imposing your will on vendors - it means you probably have enough clout to do so. I mean, anyone has the potential to be a murderer, but we aren't all murderers now, are we?
Here is where you are making a false analogy. Being a murderer is illegal, by definition because it means you have committed murder, which is a crime. Being a monopolist is not illegal because gaining a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Thus a more proper analogy would be Monopolists are like people who have baseball bats. They both have the power to commit a crime. If a baseball bat owner beats someone to death or if a monopolist bundles another product with their monopoly product, then they have committed a crime.
In the case of Apple, the courts aren't ruling if Apple has beaten someone. We know Apple is bundling. The courts are ruling if Apple has a baseball bat and is thus guilty of armed assault instead of simple assault. They are measuring the size and weight of the stick Apple has to see if it is legally a weapon. (To be a more perfect analogy, beatings would have to not be a crime unless committed with a weapon as bundling is not a crime unless the involve a monopoly product.)
Um, if you are worried about holes in launchd, why not audit the source code yourself?
Because I don't have the time and because I don't trust myself to find any and all potential problems. I'd much rather Apple had a team of experts attack it on their dime and/or that the OSS community as a whole spent some time banging on it. They, collectively, can do a much more thorough job. I know some people are already looking at it, including some OpenBSD guys. In fact, I've heard rumors of potential DoS attacks that could take down the box if SSH is enabled on OS X 10.4 systems. We'll see if they pan out.
By your rationale, Microsoft's Notepad and Wordpad, and Apple's Text Edit would all violate the law because they are bundled with the OS and there are definitely existing markets for word processing.
Actually, it is very arguable that Wordpad is illegal bundling, but it is really more of text editor than a word processor and whether or not it competes with an existing market is debatable. I think MS actually settled out of court with several companies over this very inclusion. As for TextEdit, it is not a violation because OS X is not a monopoly in any market.
Having a large market share of a product is not the same as having a monopoly.
This is true, although many laws specify 70% of a market as a guideline for potential monopoly influence.
If Apple starting buying up other companies and disolving them, or put pressure on retailers of the iPod to not sell competing brands, that would be illegal.
The former actually would not be illegal. The latter would be illegal if and only if Apple was found to be wielding monopoly power in the market in which iPods are sold as defined by the court. There are many indicators of monopoly influence and the iPod is definitely coming close in some ways.
Making a product that sells insanely well is not illegal...
You're missing the point. It isn't illegal to have a monopoly or gain a monopoly. It is illegal to use a monopoly to gain more money from other markets. If Apple gains a monopoly on iPods, nothing stops them from maintaining that monopoly, but the law makes it illegal for them to bundle or tie that monopoly to other markets. That means they can no longer bundle iTunes with iPods unless they are willing to include every other jukebox software someone asks for. That means they can't tie the iPod to the iTunes music store by refusing to let other music sellers include the same level of DRM that music from the iTunes store does. Note, all of this is if they have a monopoly. Microsoft does have a monopoly.
Let me clarify the bundling issue for you. If I have no monopolies I can bundle anything I want with anything. If I have a monopoly on say, televisions, I'm prevented from bundling anything with those televisions. For example, if I started building DVD players into my televisions, I'd quickly own the DVD player market as well, since no one will buy another DVD player when they had to get one included with their TV anyway. Even if my DVD players are inferior quality, they would still take over the market so long as they were just "good enough." In the same way it is illegal for MS to bundle a Web browser. IE is inferior to firefox, but it is just "good enough" that most people use it anyway, since otherwise they have to go out and find a different browser and most don't even know they can do such a thing. Whether or not it can be removed after the fact is irrelevant. If I bundled a DVD player with every TV, but you could easily remove the DVD player and throw it away would most people throw it away and buy a different one? Of course not. When you buy Windows you paid for the IE developers' work regardless if you throw it away later. Hence it is the initial bundling that matters, not the ability to remove it after the fact. Also note, it only prevents me from bundling not others. If Circuit city wants to give away a free DVD player with each of my TVs they sell, nothing is stopping them, just as nothing stops Dell from bundling Windows and IE and selling them. Only the monopolist is forbidden from doing so.
I hope that clarifies things.
I'm just wondering if anyone has ever built a firewall device from a Windows box.
Please shut up right now before you give some braindead manager an idea. We have a projector some creep built on Windows and we can't even keep it from crashing all the time. Do you know how much of an idiot you look like when you're giving a presentation and your projector crashes, you have to pull the plug and listen to the Windows start-up chime? Its like telling people your monitor crashed. They look at you like your brains just dribbled out of your ears.
It's not difficult to understand; it's annoying because it's the wrong argument, and it really muddies the debate. We don't need to hold Microsoft and Apple to different standards to show that one is better than the other. There is nothing wrong with MS bundling software with their OS.
I 100% disagree with this. It is illegal for MS to bundle any software with their OS, for which their is a separate market (like antivirus). Anyone who understands the economic models of monopolies should understand why. We are holding MS and Apple to the same standard. Neither can bundle products they have for which there is an existing market, with a product they have that is a monopoly in a market. It is illegal for MS to bundle antivirus software with Windows. It is not illegal for them to bundle antivirus with their mice or MS Office. It is legal for Apple to bundle antivirus with their OS. If Apple is ever ruled to have a monopoly on iPods it will be illegal for them to bundle antivirus with iPods (They are around 70% of the market now and some courts have already begun investigating the possibility).
If anything, Windows has a somewhat better design in that it is possible to set up privileged accounts with a specific power that only root has on UNIX, yet not have any of the other root powers.
I don't want to quibble about nomenclature and real differences between security layers or accounts or whatever between platforms, but I think you're a little mistaken here. One of the reasons LaunchD is being applauded in this article is because it allows you to run a given process with very specific permissions without going to hassle of trying to create a special user account and while also integrating the scheduling and resource allocation in one, nice, neat, hopefully secure package. It obviates the need for straining the "user" metaphor as is so common. I don't exactly think it is really appropriate to claim it as the security benefactor, however, when what we're really talking about is that services aren't written to require unneeded permissions as much as on Windows.
If OSX had that kind of a market share, youd bet your ass that everyone would be breaking down its walls, in exactly the same way.
Most people keep their money in their mattress. If most people had home safes, everyone would be breaking into safes and taking their money in exactly the same way.
Do you see how this analogy exposes the flaw in your logic? To show a classic example, IIS has a much smaller market share than Apache, but is compromised more often. If OS X had an equal market share as Windows, OS X would still be compromised less often for the following reasons:
Would you rather it effect Apples measly market share, or Microsofts dominant machine?
It depends upon my motivation. Ideally, it would run on both. The thing is, there is plenty of motivation for crackers to write malware for OS X, simply to gain publicity and respect in the community or to shut up smug mac users. It hasn't happened yet because there are a lot of barriers besides market share.
Most mac users are just as dumb as most windows users, they just tend to have some sort of superiority complex.
I'm not sure this is true. There are plenty of dumb users on both systems, but a lot of the security industry has moved to macs, providing a greater likelihood a mac malware will end up on the machine of someone with a clue. More importantly, however, mac users can be dumb, and because they have a more secure system by default, they are still not exploited as often.
neither is really better than the other, from a sheer 'does this work' standpoint.
I strongly disagree as do most users I know that have actually run OS X and Windows as their regular machine. From both a security perspective and a general use perspective, OS X is a more usable desktop machine for most people. Just because OS X is not perfect for security, does not mean it is as bad as the abysmal mess that is a standard Windows installation.
I wonder if they[microsoft] would have been slapped with an antitrust lawsuit if they incorporated antivirus in the OS.
Microsoft probably cannot legally enter into the antivirus market at all. If they bundle it they are blatantly breaking antitrust law. If they sell it they are exposing themselves to lawsuits because of the conflict of interest. They are selling a monopoly product and then charging customers a second time to fix the flaws in the software the courts have ruled they were coerced into buying by the monopolized market. MS is implementing antivirus software, by the way and they are going to be sued. Legally, they should be fixing the OS to solve the problem.
Maybe with apple incorporating it they have the green light to go ahead with it.
I thihk you're operating under some misconceptions. LaunchD is not an antivirus suite. It is a deamon that launches other software. If a service starts up on a Mac, LaunchD did it. It takes care of scheduling automated events as well. It basically replaced about 5 different bits of legacy code on Linux and the BSDs. It also lets you run a Web server, easily, by default, that, if compromised, does not give an attacker complete control of your computer... just of the Web server. That is why it is being touted here as a security win.
Conceptually, I agree that LaunchD is a really slick idea and I really hope Linux and the BSDs take a good hard look at this code and the possibility of adopting it. That said, it is not a security panacea by any means, just one more clean, sensible implementation that leaves less room for a vulnerability. The thing that makes me hesitate to laud this feature, however, is the implementation. Apple has a lot of smart people working for them and a lot of old school UNIX geeks to whom secure programming is as natural as breathing. They also have a lot of coders and managers who realize that OS X is not a primarily security minded OS. Sure, it is better than Windows and on par with a desktop Linux distro, but it isn't a locked down OpenBSD install or a super secure Linux distro. They don't focus their efforts on security and it shows sometimes when they introduce new code. LaunchD replaces a number of time tested bits of code and while it is (IMHO) a much cleaner, nicer design I haven't a clue about how well written and tested it is, especially from a security perspective. I'd feel a lot better about claiming it as a security feature if I knew some white hats had pounded on it for a while and exposed anything Apple did not bother to think of. I'd feel a lot better if the OSS community in general jumped on it and adopted it, thus helping with this security testing and adding more eyes.
I like LaunchD. I like OS X as a desktop. Lets just not get carried away here with random claims about security. OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, but that really isn't saying a lot. I'm not willing to just assume LaunchD is secure in and of itself, let alone that it will play a big part in securing the OS as a whole.
At the risk of disrupting the fun, I'd like to interject a serious comment. ISS resells some real security technologies that IBM has been missing from their offerings for a long time. In the network security space, they resell some important technology that has traditionally been in the "Cisco camp" and thus mostly implemented by enterprise customers that don't do a lot of business with IBM. This could really change the landscape of enterprise security... in a few years when IBM manages to get ISS integrated into their sales channels.
If unrestricted internet access from work is so important for you that you'll refuse a job, then you're most likely one of the people who shouldn't be allowed that unrestricted access.
I have and do work with people that would probably look elsewhere for employment if they were not given unrestricted internet access. This is for several reasons. Their jobs would be a lot harder without the internet as a research tool. It is a sign of a company that does not trust its employees, and that is a death sentence for hiring high end creative developers. It makes work a lot less pleasant when you can't look at the Strongbad cartoon someone posted on IRC or the acquisition news of one of the company's partners or to add a new movie someone told you about to your Netflix queue. I'm spending a third of my life at work and I sure don't want to do so in an environment with strict requirements for what I do when. I have a job. So long as I get it done my employer should be happy. If some day I'm not super motivated and read Slashdot for an hour before I get a good idea, well that is more than made up for when I put in three extra hours on something when I am on a roll and don't want to interrupt my project for something like dinner.
If you treat employees like people and rely upon their loyalty to the company and their boss to keep them working hard, you can get very good results. If you make sure they have a vested interest in the success of the company you can do even better. Have you even seen the movie "office space?" Would you rather an employee looked at Slashdot and then did the best they could to solve the company's problems or one that pretended to work while doing as little as possible to not get fired?
Go waste somebody else's money. I don't want a bunch of slackers "working" for me, taking my money, and doing other things when they should be productive. I don't ask my people to work overtime becuase we schedule so that things get done in the alloted schedule. If you are so addicted to the internet that you can't put in 4 hours before lunch and 4 hours after lunch without access to all of it, you're not going to do what I need you to do.
There are several factors here you are probably not considering. First, web access can make a lot of jobs much easier. Looking up documentation, examples, and forums for help can make a huge difference in how easy a job is to do. Second, people are not machine parts. They are not designed to work on strict schedules within tolerances. They are people. You can either treat them as a bunch of slackers you need to force to do their jobs creating an adversarial relationship or you can treat them as people. I'm posting this from work and if my immediate superior noticed that, well he might reply to it. He cares if I get my job done and how well, not what I'm doing at any given moment.
If you have an adversarial relationship with your employees, they will have a lot less loyalty to you. They also aren't likely to enjoy their jobs very much or go the extra mile to stay all night working on a special project of theirs or solving that obscure problem for some customer. You're also not likely to attract the best and brightest because they are smart enough to know that if they're spending a third of their lives somewhere, they don't want it to be someplace they don't like. Smart people will take a 20K pay cut to have a fun, relaxed atmosphere where they can see what's on Slashdot or take a nap for 30 minutes if they are tired some day.
Google understands this very well. A lot of people understood this during the .com boom, but when combined with no business plan, no real products, and a pile of venture capital, it was a disaster. As a result a lot of people associate this with failure and just assume you can't have a fun, relaxed workplace and still be successful. Those companies have lost most of their brightest people to Google or somewhere like where I work that does understand.
Free beer in the fridge cost the company a whole lot less than paying everyone a pile more money and competing only on who can pay the highest salary. And if you come in on a sunday, there's probably a few really bright people talking about their cool new project over a few beers while looking at the latest data when they don't have to be.
Do you have some evidence of this? I'm interested to know how Microsoft is "breaking" something like the JPEG standard.
In the case of JPEG, they are trying to replace both JPEG and PNG with a bundled graphics formats (Windows Media Photo) included in Windows Vista. They have contacted numerous camera and printer companies in an attempt to promote this new format, which is completely proprietary. Their hope is that they can quietly lock more people in the Windows format when they realize there is no easy, legal way to move their stored family photos to a neutral format that they can use on Linux or OS X. Further, there is talk of Web services built around this format for automated publishing as well as Frontpage integration so that people can publish their family photo galleries in a way only viewable by IE to provide incentive for people who just view images from other family members to stay on Windows. Finally, I've heard rumors of a new media format, like Kodak photo CDs, that they plan to integrate for backup and transfer to professional printers (Walmart), to make sure even old JPEGs are hard to view and harder to export without a Windows system. initially, of course, they are promising to license the format for other devices (excluding open source), but if they can ever manage to gain even moderate market share, we all know what the end result will be.
Look, statistics != logic.
I never suggested it was, however statistics is a logical procedure and does not violate any of the rules of logic.
Go read your MacKay again and pay special attention to the logical indeterminism of choice and the problem of propositional logic.
You've strongly implied in your posts that you think that I have presented a logical fallacy, but all of your attempts to name a specific one have been either misinterpretations of the rules of logic, or misinterpretations of my statements. You've hinted that prediction is inherently illogical. Statistics is a counter example that I was hoping you'd be able to grok. Sadly, you've instead decided to once again avoid my statements and argue against an interpretation of what I wrote that is so strained it verges on being a strawman.
As an aside, your arguments in this thread where you write, "coupled with that annoying 'let me tell you how it is' tone" shortly followed by, "Oh, and thanks for the shark example. It was stupid and proves you have no idea what you're talking about..." Is both funny and sad. Healer, heal thyself.
That's all well and good. What I said was that you need to stop pretending you're making a "logical" argument when you are obviously not.
You've failed to show how using past behavior as a possible indicator of future behavior is illogical.
The main fallacy here is your argumentative presumption based on "feeling".
Feeling? What emotive arguments have I made? This is objective analysis, not feeling.
As far as I'm concerned you can play tarot card reader all day and tell us what Microsoft will be doing next Tuesday - just don't try to pass it as logic.
Perhaps you missed the memo, but structured logic in the form of the scientific method has used predictors for hundreds of years. It is not logical to say that because the sun came up yesterday it will today. It is logical to say that because the sun has come up every day for years, it is reasonable to deduce it is likely it will come up tomorrow, barring strong evidence to the contrary. There is nothing emotive or illogical about that. Statistics and probability can determine the probability of certain future events in exacting detail. That does not make them illogical.
It appears that you fell asleep when your logic teacher was trying to explain the concept of fallacies of involved assumptions, better known in logic circles as Petitio Principii. Eg: Microsoft did X yesterday and Y the day before - therefore they will do Z tomorrow.
I did not say that Microsoft will do something bad tomorrow. I said it is reasonable for people to suspect that they will and illogical to ignore past experience as a possible indicator of future behavior. You seem to have misinterpreted the meaning of said fallacy. It certainly does not preclude the above.
Dahmer was also not a murderer the day before he first murdered someone, mmm?
No, but knowing that he has consistently been murdering people, raping the corpses, and eating them for years makes it reasonable to suspect him when people disappear.
And of course your analogy is a classic example of the poisoning the well fallacy, in which you draw a comparison to an emotionally charged subject that cannot be dismissed as false because it's based on well-known previous, observable events.
Poisoning the well is when you appeal to emotion. I was simply providing a simplified analogy using Dahmer as an easily recognizable criminal to represent MS's criminal actions. I made no appeals to emotion in so doing. I suppose someone could view this historical person in a very emotional way, but I don't expect most people will.
Maybe you should go hit the books again. MS's consistent criminal behavior over the past decade does not in any way prove that they will commit similar criminal acts in the future, but it does imply that this is a reasonable, possible danger. To expect everyone to ignore all their past experience with the company and suddenly give them the benefit of the doubt is both foolish and illogical.
Chief Hacking Officer? I wasn't aware companies had those these days.
This is what happens when employees pick their own titles. I used to work with the "grand poobah of software development" at a former company. It was on his business cards. An IBM guy snorted soda through his nose when he read it.
You're giving off that new hippy "down with the man" college student smell. Are you a freshmen or a sophomore?
I graduated from undergraduate school quite a long time ago. I don't think reprimanding someone for not spending five minutes with wikipedia to gain a basic understanding of the subject they decided to make inflammatory, flippant remarks about qualifies anyone as having a "down with the man" mentality. I don't think my co-workers and colleagues would characterize me as a "hippy" by any means.
P.S. you're giving off that "I make wild assumptions based upon very little information" smell. Are you, perhaps, a troll as well as a coward?
when did slashdot become an unofficial apple forum? i had to block the apple section!
Why has Slashdot always been a Linux forum? Nerd use Linux. Slashdot started carrying a lot of Apple content when Apple released an OS that nerds started using in large numbers. The fact that a lot of the most innovative features to be added to computing in the last handful of years kind of seals the deal. Even nerds who don't use OS X are usually interested in an improved replacement for "chron" or a soon to be widely deployed video chat client that can filter out your background and replace it with another in realtime. It is most certainly, news for nerds.
Using that reasoning, I can fairly state that OSS will never gain wide acceptance because its community consists of a bunch of pompus elitist assholes.
This is the logical fallacy, "Non sequitur." You've failed to demonstrate any flaw in the reasoning or analogy, but instead have simply presented an unsupported belief and an ad hominem attack to boot. Please read a book on reasoning, logic, or critical thinking and come back when you can support some of your illogical opinions.
No, Microsoft isn't illegally bundling IE. They're bundling IE, but not illegally. That hsi issue already went through the courts and Microsoft is still bundling IE should give you a clue that it's not illegal.
If you bothered to follow the court decisions, it was ruled illegal, but after certain, huge, campaign contributions the courts decided not to do anything about stopping the illegal action as part of their remedy. You also might notice that since then, MS has settled out of court paying undisclosed sums to dozens of companies as a result of this behavior.
It is illegal to bundle two products when one of them wields monopoly power in one market and the other is in a second market. This is basic antitrust law going back to the Sherman act and is, in fact, the first example of illegal antitrust behavior provided. Don't mistake not being stopped/punished for not being guilty.