The whole Web 2.0 Internet is a just a mass of circular references. Be thankful that it isn't telling you the holocaust never happened, or something else obviously untrue.
I wouldn't take someone who got their information solely from an American alternative sources seriously to be honest. I think they fall into a trap of assuming that the Mainstream Media and politicans are always involved in some sort of conspiracy.
And I think that is basically wrong. America is too leaky to have that sort of conspiracy. Bush was wrong to invade Iraq for example, but I don't think there was a conspiracy, just a criminally negligent lack of planning and a stupid assumption that Iraqis are the same as Americans. But Iraq is a country with a population which has long been brutalized. Saddam was an evil dictator certainly, but removing him by force was never going to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian Democracy, as James Baker put witheringly pointed out. Actually it was more likely to turn into a warground for every group in the region which can muster a few AK47s, most of whom plan to set up a highly unfree society and need to kill lots of Americans to make them leave in order to do it.
But the fact that preemptive military action against the bad guys is a bad idea doesn't make them not bad guys. Lots of the alternative American stuff I read seems to be based on a strange inverted patriotism where America is uniquely evil and Iran, China, Iraq and North Korea are basically blameless. I suppose that is true of individual citizens, but all those governments are pretty much evil incarnate, because a political system based on force guarantees that. And I think it is that inverted patriotism that makes most Americans dismiss it, even if they do so for the wrong, conventionally patriotic reasons.
"You've complete carefully avoided my point which is this -"
I am sorry, I didn't intend to. Honestly.
1) Copyright was not included into the US Constitution because of stopping sharing of the work. It was in interest of "Progress of Science and useful Arts" - sorry, I don't see how sharing of the work is againist the progress of it. Copyright does promote sharing. If I write some software and there is no copyright, the only way I can restrict who has it is by NDAs and DRM. And for those of us without trust funds who want to charge for our work, restricting who has it is the only way to do it. Copyright allows you to make something widely available and still legally have a way to only allow people who've paid you or abide by a license to use it. It's the same with patents. And both can be sold outright or licensed.
From an FSF point of view look at it this way. If copyright didn't exist then everyone would be free to proprietarize GPL code, just like they can for BSD code. Essentially the GPL would disappear and all former GPL code would be defacto BSD.
2) I am saying that the market mechanism should change from compulsory payment on the work per distributed copy, to voluntary payment directly to the autor for distributed noncommercial copy AND compulsory payment for commercial copy. You could do this with present day copyright and a well written license.
3) You are correct in this, don't worry:)
"My question is simple. Since sharing is moral and authors of GPL code don't get much of a cut, is it OK if I take GPL code and use it as I see fit?" If you keep it free (as in speech) for other people, go for it. Moreover, you don't have to redistribute your changed/derived version under the same terms as long as you are not doing so commercially (or at least, this is what I think, IANAL).
The license terms don't apply only to people who I like, they apply to everyone. I won't resort to analogies, since you are intelligent. Copyright holders on proprietary software shouldn't have the same right to object againist unauthorized copying as the FSF on unauthorized non-free copying since the first does not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", while the second one certainly does. How would that work? Copyright is copyright. Would there be a 'first class' copyright for FSF approved Free software and 'second class' copyright for TV shows and movies?
"Maybe the FSF should form an anti copyright infringement alliance with the MPAA and RIAA in fact. They all seem to be organisations that gain their power from holding the copyright on other people's work."
FSF holds copyright on the GPL licenses. It doesn't hold copyrights on the copyrighted work, all rights stay with the developer himself. Actually it does
It doesn't pay them either, so far as I can see. So it's a tad hypocritical to use the fact that record companies don't pay the artists very much as a justification for copying don't you think?
No one owns television shows. The media corporations have copyrights to them. The concept of property is simply not applicable here. Consequently, the "something" doesn't have an owner, and sharing it is thus moral. Someone owns the copyright.
Are you suggesting we need to pay people because they feel bad if we don't ? Or are you trying to say that people who install solar panels on their roofs need to keep paying their former power company despite not needing it anymore ? No, because they don't use it anymore. But if you stopped paying but hotwired the meter to get power for free that would be wrong. It would also be a reasonable analogy for downloading a movie for free rather than paying to watch it, unlike yours.
How about, if I move back to my hometown, do I owe the phone company money because I can now talk to my friends face-to-face rather than use the phone - you know, share a communication channel for free instead of paying a fee for one ? Umm, no because you don't use the service.
But the real scumbag is the guy who digs a well in his backyard, especially if he gives water to his neighbors for free; he should be hanged for depriving the water company of profit Sigh. Let's stop the non analogous analogies and nitpicking over copyright owner vs owner. It's seriously pointless.
TV shows have an copyright owner. The copyright owner wants you to pay them in some way to see the show. If you don't want to watch it, that's fine. But if you do watch it for free that's not fine.
It's just like Linux. It is protected by copyright. If you want to use it there is a copyright license which forces you to keep forks open source. Not using it is fine. Using it and abiding by the terms of the license is fine. Using it and ignoring the terms of the license is not fine. And that's legally not fine in most countries, quite apart from the moral issues. In the US, Copyright is actually in the constitution. So don't expect it to go away soon.
Gee, what a coincidence. I do make my money by selling ideas. It just happens that I've found ways to do it that don't require me to indefinitely claim ownership of them. After all, that's what solving engineering and software problems on contract amounts to, right? No, you're selling a service like me. I'm talking about people that write something and then build a business out of licensing it.
As should be clear from my original post, I'm not against copyright in an appropriately limited form (ditto patents). I am, however, quite strongly against the idea that copyrightable works are in any way "ownable" by an individual. The copyright is owned by the author, and grants some monopoly privileges; the work is owned by society once created. (Obviously a single copy of the work, as a physical object, is owned by its owner.) I don't really know what if anything this is supposed to mean. Copyright as its name suggests is the right to say who has the right to copy. I don't really know whether that is ownership or not. I think it has many of the characteristics of ownership in that it can be sold or transferred to someone else. It's certainly very different from something being "owned by society", which would be public domain. Actually of course something owned by "society" would effectively be owned by whoever was rich enough to make physical copies. In the case of music or books, the publisher would make as many copies as they could, sell them and give the author nothing back. And that publisher would be in some low wage country too. Then again people in rich countries could just download. But the publishers would obviously stop releasing stuff in rippable formats. Who knows, but anyway it's sort of funny that one of the justifications of pirates is that copyright needs to be abolished because the poor artists get ripped off by the evil record companies.
Not this time. Flash forgets to check that allocation failed, a ludicrously common error. It then uses that pointer with an offset controlled by the attacker. NULL isn't valid. NULL plus 1024 isnâ(TM)t valid. But NULL + 0x8f71ba90 is, as is NULL + N for any N that addresses valid memory.
To this address, controlled by attackers via wild offset, Flash writes a value that is also controlled by the attacker. This is the write32 pattern: a vulnerability that gives the attacker the means to set any one value in memory to a value of their choosing. Game over.
Except not quite.
The exploit doesn't actually get to offset an arbitrary number of bytes from 0. A complicated set of conditions constrains the address it writes to and the value it gives it.
The the actual write occurs via a structure offset. Flash is hardcoded to translate your offset into another number. Working offsets, as it turns out, will be greater than 0x80000000, and will be evenly divisible by 12 after 4 is added to them. Note: I thought I was hardcore when I wrote shellcode with no lowercase letters for the IMAP vulnerability in the â(TM)90s
.... Two fun details.
First, even though IE and Firefox use different Flash builds, the addressing inside them is compatible. The exploit works in both places.
Second, Flash isn't compiled with ASLR. So the attack works on Vista.
Quite so. In the UK the Labour Party was against the British empire back when there was one, and they granted independence to all the bits they could. They also were around when the British screwed over the Chinese. So it's highly annoying when say Gordon Brown is accused of hypocrisy. The US was anti European empires too. And what the US has is not an empire in the European sense.
Of course it's pointless saying this here. I doubt any Chinese people will read it and even if they do they're probably not convinced by the self serving bullshit the Chinese Communist Party spouts in the first place. The Chinese people that are probably only get their news from approved sources.
Actually it's more insidious than that. I dated a Chinese girl who said something like "the government had to stop the riot, they killed some soldiers by burning them alive".
And it's true, some of the soldiers who cleared out Tiananmen were lynched and set on fire in the anarchy after tanks went in. But that was after tanks went in, before that the demonstration was peaceful and about democracy. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang talked to the students and told Gorbachev (according to Gorbachev's autobiography) that over the short term there would be democracy inside the party but in the long run multi party democracy was inevitable and the Communist party should have to adapt to the point where it could win elections. His more brutish colleagues sent the tanks in and then used resulting deaths to justify it. Zhao was put under house arrest until he died. In an odd sort of way, that was a sign of progress, previous purged leaders were killed or sent to a concentration camp.
In Taiwan, one year after Tiananmen, there was a similar movement, the Wild Lily movement. Lee Teng Hui, who had just been elected President by a parliament last elected 50 years before met the students and told them that he would call Presidential and Parliamentary elections where every Taiwanese citizen could vote and allow the recently formed opposition party to stand. The students left, LTH ended the State of Emergency which had lasted since the civil war, called elections and won them. Even more remarkably he enacted term limits and stepped down when his ended. No tanks, no lynched soldiers. And it's funny how the Chinese don't care about the 20,000 soldiers that died in the Sino Vietnam war. Oddly enough it was mostly soldiers who fought in that war who were sent into Tiananmen, since they came from the part of China bordering Vietnam and had been told that a violent counter revolution was happening in Beijing. And relations with Vietnam improved which Vietnam's equally loathsome Communist government enthusiastically supported
You can see the same thing with Tibet - some Tibetans did kill Han Chinese and that is clearly wrong. And the Western Media did not cover that for a while. But that's because the Chinese government banned them from Tibet to avoid coverage of the crackdown. Any violence in Tibet is unnecessary too. The Dalai Lama has said he is not seeking independence, opposes violence and is willing to talk. If they talked to him and made a few concessions like legalising the Tibetan language, he could probably sell that to the Tibetans. Instead they demonize him, oppress them and then publicise any riot as proof that more oppression is needed. If China was a democracy, Tibetans would be allowed to change policy without rioting. And violent groups could be marginalised by media criticism.
I actually hope that the CCP is dooming itself. Protests in Tibetan and rising inflation were supposed to be the causes of Tiananmen. Most Chinese I suspect hate them and want a free society. Actually if China was a democracy which allowed its regions a high level of autonomy, they could probably do a deal with Taiwan too, another nationalist cause the CCP exploits to stay in power.
Even this attempt to substitute absolute censorship for a creepy groupthink set up by more selective censorship is dangerous. The people ranting about the Western media now have much more serious things to complain about nearer to home, and they can find out just how much they have been lied too if they take advantage of the recent unblocking of the BBC and CNN. Then again, maybe it's like Iran where the people demonstrating against the West are all either government zealots or dragged along against their beliefs.
You've complete carefully avoided my point which is this -
* Copyright holders for music and movies are trying to stop piracy. * You claim that people should be allowed to share against their wishes and in anycase that it doesn't hurt them because they don't get a very good cut. * You are a member of an organisation which depends on copyright to make software communally owned (don't bother to nitpick this, I'm not interested). This is enforced by copyright.
My question is simple. Since sharing is moral and authors of GPL code don't get much of a cut, is it OK if I take GPL code and use it as I see fit?
If yes, then you have to admit your arguments are bogus since they only apply to people you don't like, not to people you do. If no, then don't the copyright holders have the same right to object (and sue) as the FSF does when people us their stuff in a way they don't support?
Maybe the FSF should form an anti copyright infringement alliance with the MPAA and RIAA in fact. They all seem to be organisations that gain their power from holding the copyright on other people's work.
80% (or more) of sales of CD's goes to the publisher, only that minority part goes to the author himself. The percentage cut the artist gets is something they have to work out with the publisher. Usually at the start they get a low percentage and later on they can negotiate a large one.
But the publisher should get something. In fact for most mainstream stuff, I think the concept of an artist is pretty questionable. Most of this stuff is actually created more by the publisher's marketing department than anyone else. They could find loads of people to be the singer. Essentially the artist is commoditized and that reduces their bargaining power. Once they become famous of course, they can decommoditize themselves and charge more.
But early on what about the people that work for the publisher? If they're really the creative force behind it, I think they should be allowed to control who gets a copy of their work. A copyright it you will. As it happens the people that wrote the US Constitution agreed with me
Since you're an FSF member, you should also note that copyright, the thing that allows the MPAA to stop people using their IP without paying for it is also the thing which stops evil proprietary software companies taking GPL code and using it in a closed source system.
But if we're morally allowed to ignore copyright if the artists are not being paid much, I suppose I'm free to take GPL code and proprietarize it, right? After all the authors don't get paid much, most of the money from selling Linux stays with Red Hat, IBM and the like.
True, but if ASLR was enabled system() would be at a different address each boot.
But I don't think any of these things are foolproof on their own. Even the combination of them can be exploited if you have the right sort of bad code. But ASLR+Running processes with low privilege levels+stack canaries+NX does stop a lot of exploits.
In this case if ASLR had been enabled in the flash binary it would not have been possible to execute arbitrary code.
This interesting because he's exploiting a malloc fail. The gory details of exploiting ActionScript is also cool because it has a bytecode verifier and he manages to get around it. It really is a lot more high tech than a typical stack buffer smash against a badly written C application, and that is important because everyone should hopefully have updated that sort of code to be exploit free by now. And stack checked binaries and data execute prevention, AMD's "Not Execute" bit, make those more likely to end in process death than arbitrary code execution.
Finally because it works on both IE and Firefox and Flash has such a huge installation base it should be able to target a very high percentage of current machines. Larry Osterman called it "The way the world (wide web]) ends"
Mind you, if Address Space Layout Randomisation was turned on in the Flash executable on Vista, exploiting this hole would most likely (255 times out of 256) lead to a browser crash rather than arbitrary code execution, so it's not like the last few years work on security has been totally wasted. At the moment it's not and you will get owned reliably. Adobe have published an update, so it's a good idea to download it.
Back when I was reading about security someone said that buffer overflows that execute code on the stack were first generation exploits. Second generation would be more subtle stuff like this.
That's very poetic. But what if you were someone who lived by selling your ideas?
I'm not - I sell services to people. But I'd like to be someone who sells software. And people that make songs or software or movies do it partly because they want to make money out of it. So if you start taking their stuff and not paying them and you break the law whilst doing so, you shouldn't be too surprised if they sic their lawyers on you.
Which is irrelevant if most of the costs you pay for either is essentially a license fee. I remember reading that the cost of pressing a CD in volume was only a few cents, back when CDs were launched. So the reproduction cost has never been a significant percentage of the purchase cost of either music or software.
Sharing is moral if you own something. Sharing some you don't own and who's owner doesn't want it shared because they want to charge people for using it is not moral.
How would you feel if technology made it possible for people to share for free something you used to sell to them individually?
Add up the numbers for the top 500 illegal torrents on Pirate Bay and all the other torrent sites and I bet you'll get a much bigger total bandwidth than this. Popular TV shows and movies can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of downloaders. And that is happening 24/7, not just on a release.
Please, it's ridiculous to claim that the majority of torrent bandwidth is used for legal content. And it's pointless too. No one from the MPAA/RIAA is going to come one here and stop harassing pirates just because some people use the same protocol to download Linux. They don't care about that, what they do is to leach on the illegal torrents they do care about and then try to get the ISPs to tell them who was using the IP addresses they saw downloading.
By the same token, the tech being used in the iPod Touch is quite a bit different, which is how it can offer 32GB of flash storage for ~CDN$500 while a 64GB SSD upgrade for a MacBook Air is CDN$1,400. Naah, that's market segmentation.
That's true now. But there are some Intel Atom based chipsets with integrated graphics that should be very low power.
Imagine one of them with an SSD and a LED backlight screen. Or, better, an OLED screen. I reckon it should be possible to get a laptop with decent performance for everything except games with much lower power consumption than a C610 in a few years time. There are loads of optimisations you can do given time, like running the core logic at a lower voltage, powering down bus transceivers when they are inactive and so on.
Even when operating at full speed these devices should have no fan and no moving parts. When they are idle with the screen in power save, the only power should be the screen.
That Transend is a real bargain. $175 is only £89. If you have an old ultraportable it's probably the best upgrade you can make to it.
I had an Fujitsu lifebook ultraportable that this would have been ideal for - it had a old 20GB 2.5" drive that was probably slower. Sadly the keyboard got fried and I got rid of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole Web 2.0 Internet is a just a mass of circular references. Be thankful that it isn't telling you the holocaust never happened, or something else obviously untrue.
I wouldn't take someone who got their information solely from an American alternative sources seriously to be honest. I think they fall into a trap of assuming that the Mainstream Media and politicans are always involved in some sort of conspiracy.
And I think that is basically wrong. America is too leaky to have that sort of conspiracy. Bush was wrong to invade Iraq for example, but I don't think there was a conspiracy, just a criminally negligent lack of planning and a stupid assumption that Iraqis are the same as Americans. But Iraq is a country with a population which has long been brutalized. Saddam was an evil dictator certainly, but removing him by force was never going to turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian Democracy, as James Baker put witheringly pointed out. Actually it was more likely to turn into a warground for every group in the region which can muster a few AK47s, most of whom plan to set up a highly unfree society and need to kill lots of Americans to make them leave in order to do it.
But the fact that preemptive military action against the bad guys is a bad idea doesn't make them not bad guys. Lots of the alternative American stuff I read seems to be based on a strange inverted patriotism where America is uniquely evil and Iran, China, Iraq and North Korea are basically blameless. I suppose that is true of individual citizens, but all those governments are pretty much evil incarnate, because a political system based on force guarantees that. And I think it is that inverted patriotism that makes most Americans dismiss it, even if they do so for the wrong, conventionally patriotic reasons.
I am sorry, I didn't intend to. Honestly.
1) Copyright was not included into the US Constitution because of stopping sharing of the work. It was in interest of "Progress of Science and useful Arts" - sorry, I don't see how sharing of the work is againist the progress of it. Copyright does promote sharing. If I write some software and there is no copyright, the only way I can restrict who has it is by NDAs and DRM. And for those of us without trust funds who want to charge for our work, restricting who has it is the only way to do it. Copyright allows you to make something widely available and still legally have a way to only allow people who've paid you or abide by a license to use it. It's the same with patents. And both can be sold outright or licensed.
From an FSF point of view look at it this way. If copyright didn't exist then everyone would be free to proprietarize GPL code, just like they can for BSD code. Essentially the GPL would disappear and all former GPL code would be defacto BSD. 2) I am saying that the market mechanism should change from compulsory payment on the work per distributed copy, to voluntary payment directly to the autor for distributed noncommercial copy AND compulsory payment for commercial copy. You could do this with present day copyright and a well written license. 3) You are correct in this, don't worry
"My question is simple. Since sharing is moral and authors of GPL code don't get much of a cut, is it OK if I take GPL code and use it as I see fit?"
If you keep it free (as in speech) for other people, go for it. Moreover, you don't have to redistribute your changed/derived version under the same terms as long as you are not doing so commercially (or at least, this is what I think, IANAL).
The license terms don't apply only to people who I like, they apply to everyone. I won't resort to analogies, since you are intelligent.
Copyright holders on proprietary software shouldn't have the same right to object againist unauthorized copying as the FSF on unauthorized non-free copying since the first does not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", while the second one certainly does. How would that work? Copyright is copyright. Would there be a 'first class' copyright for FSF approved Free software and 'second class' copyright for TV shows and movies? "Maybe the FSF should form an anti copyright infringement alliance with the MPAA and RIAA in fact. They all seem to be organisations that gain their power from holding the copyright on other people's work."
FSF holds copyright on the GPL licenses. It doesn't hold copyrights on the copyrighted work, all rights stay with the developer himself. Actually it does
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
It doesn't pay them either, so far as I can see. So it's a tad hypocritical to use the fact that record companies don't pay the artists very much as a justification for copying don't you think?
TV shows have an copyright owner. The copyright owner wants you to pay them in some way to see the show. If you don't want to watch it, that's fine. But if you do watch it for free that's not fine.
It's just like Linux. It is protected by copyright. If you want to use it there is a copyright license which forces you to keep forks open source. Not using it is fine. Using it and abiding by the terms of the license is fine. Using it and ignoring the terms of the license is not fine. And that's legally not fine in most countries, quite apart from the moral issues. In the US, Copyright is actually in the constitution. So don't expect it to go away soon.
The NULL pointer dereferencing uses an absolute address, well a relative one from 0 which is the same thing. E.g. it does this
....
http://www.matasano.com/log/1032/this-new-vulnerability-dowds-inhuman-flash-exploit/
Not this time. Flash forgets to check that allocation failed, a ludicrously common error. It then uses that pointer with an offset controlled by the attacker. NULL isn't valid. NULL plus 1024 isnâ(TM)t valid. But NULL + 0x8f71ba90 is, as is NULL + N for any N that addresses valid memory.
To this address, controlled by attackers via wild offset, Flash writes a value that is also controlled by the attacker. This is the write32 pattern: a vulnerability that gives the attacker the means to set any one value in memory to a value of their choosing. Game over.
Except not quite.
The exploit doesn't actually get to offset an arbitrary number of bytes from 0. A complicated set of conditions constrains the address it writes to and the value it gives it.
The the actual write occurs via a structure offset. Flash is hardcoded to translate your offset into another number. Working offsets, as it turns out, will be greater than 0x80000000, and will be evenly divisible by 12 after 4 is added to them. Note: I thought I was hardcore when I wrote shellcode with no lowercase letters for the IMAP vulnerability in the â(TM)90s
Two fun details.
First, even though IE and Firefox use different Flash builds, the addressing inside them is compatible. The exploit works in both places.
Second, Flash isn't compiled with ASLR. So the attack works on Vista.
Mass casualty. Go Flash!
Quite so. In the UK the Labour Party was against the British empire back when there was one, and they granted independence to all the bits they could. They also were around when the British screwed over the Chinese. So it's highly annoying when say Gordon Brown is accused of hypocrisy. The US was anti European empires too. And what the US has is not an empire in the European sense.
Of course it's pointless saying this here. I doubt any Chinese people will read it and even if they do they're probably not convinced by the self serving bullshit the Chinese Communist Party spouts in the first place. The Chinese people that are probably only get their news from approved sources.
You can get computers that are made in Taiwan. At least my Asus says that on the bottom.
Actually it's more insidious than that. I dated a Chinese girl who said something like "the government had to stop the riot, they killed some soldiers by burning them alive".
And it's true, some of the soldiers who cleared out Tiananmen were lynched and set on fire in the anarchy after tanks went in. But that was after tanks went in, before that the demonstration was peaceful and about democracy. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang talked to the students and told Gorbachev (according to Gorbachev's autobiography) that over the short term there would be democracy inside the party but in the long run multi party democracy was inevitable and the Communist party should have to adapt to the point where it could win elections. His more brutish colleagues sent the tanks in and then used resulting deaths to justify it. Zhao was put under house arrest until he died. In an odd sort of way, that was a sign of progress, previous purged leaders were killed or sent to a concentration camp.
In Taiwan, one year after Tiananmen, there was a similar movement, the Wild Lily movement. Lee Teng Hui, who had just been elected President by a parliament last elected 50 years before met the students and told them that he would call Presidential and Parliamentary elections where every Taiwanese citizen could vote and allow the recently formed opposition party to stand. The students left, LTH ended the State of Emergency which had lasted since the civil war, called elections and won them. Even more remarkably he enacted term limits and stepped down when his ended. No tanks, no lynched soldiers. And it's funny how the Chinese don't care about the 20,000 soldiers that died in the Sino Vietnam war. Oddly enough it was mostly soldiers who fought in that war who were sent into Tiananmen, since they came from the part of China bordering Vietnam and had been told that a violent counter revolution was happening in Beijing. And relations with Vietnam improved which Vietnam's equally loathsome Communist government enthusiastically supported
You can see the same thing with Tibet - some Tibetans did kill Han Chinese and that is clearly wrong. And the Western Media did not cover that for a while. But that's because the Chinese government banned them from Tibet to avoid coverage of the crackdown. Any violence in Tibet is unnecessary too. The Dalai Lama has said he is not seeking independence, opposes violence and is willing to talk. If they talked to him and made a few concessions like legalising the Tibetan language, he could probably sell that to the Tibetans. Instead they demonize him, oppress them and then publicise any riot as proof that more oppression is needed. If China was a democracy, Tibetans would be allowed to change policy without rioting. And violent groups could be marginalised by media criticism.
I actually hope that the CCP is dooming itself. Protests in Tibetan and rising inflation were supposed to be the causes of Tiananmen. Most Chinese I suspect hate them and want a free society. Actually if China was a democracy which allowed its regions a high level of autonomy, they could probably do a deal with Taiwan too, another nationalist cause the CCP exploits to stay in power.
Even this attempt to substitute absolute censorship for a creepy groupthink set up by more selective censorship is dangerous. The people ranting about the Western media now have much more serious things to complain about nearer to home, and they can find out just how much they have been lied too if they take advantage of the recent unblocking of the BBC and CNN. Then again, maybe it's like Iran where the people demonstrating against the West are all either government zealots or dragged along against their beliefs.
You've complete carefully avoided my point which is this -
* Copyright holders for music and movies are trying to stop piracy.
* You claim that people should be allowed to share against their wishes and in anycase that it doesn't hurt them because they don't get a very good cut.
* You are a member of an organisation which depends on copyright to make software communally owned (don't bother to nitpick this, I'm not interested). This is enforced by copyright.
My question is simple. Since sharing is moral and authors of GPL code don't get much of a cut, is it OK if I take GPL code and use it as I see fit?
If yes, then you have to admit your arguments are bogus since they only apply to people you don't like, not to people you do. If no, then don't the copyright holders have the same right to object (and sue) as the FSF does when people us their stuff in a way they don't support?
Maybe the FSF should form an anti copyright infringement alliance with the MPAA and RIAA in fact. They all seem to be organisations that gain their power from holding the copyright on other people's work.
80% (or more) of sales of CD's goes to the publisher, only that minority part goes to the author himself. The percentage cut the artist gets is something they have to work out with the publisher. Usually at the start they get a low percentage and later on they can negotiate a large one.
But the publisher should get something. In fact for most mainstream stuff, I think the concept of an artist is pretty questionable. Most of this stuff is actually created more by the publisher's marketing department than anyone else. They could find loads of people to be the singer. Essentially the artist is commoditized and that reduces their bargaining power. Once they become famous of course, they can decommoditize themselves and charge more.
But early on what about the people that work for the publisher? If they're really the creative force behind it, I think they should be allowed to control who gets a copy of their work. A copyright it you will. As it happens the people that wrote the US Constitution agreed with me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Since you're an FSF member, you should also note that copyright, the thing that allows the MPAA to stop people using their IP without paying for it is also the thing which stops evil proprietary software companies taking GPL code and using it in a closed source system.
But if we're morally allowed to ignore copyright if the artists are not being paid much, I suppose I'm free to take GPL code and proprietarize it, right? After all the authors don't get paid much, most of the money from selling Linux stays with Red Hat, IBM and the like.
You're aware this site is News for Nerds, right? If this sort of thing is boring to you, maybe you're on the wrong site.
True, but if ASLR was enabled system() would be at a different address each boot.
But I don't think any of these things are foolproof on their own. Even the combination of them can be exploited if you have the right sort of bad code. But ASLR+Running processes with low privilege levels+stack canaries+NX does stop a lot of exploits.
In this case if ASLR had been enabled in the flash binary it would not have been possible to execute arbitrary code.
This interesting because he's exploiting a malloc fail. The gory details of exploiting ActionScript is also cool because it has a bytecode verifier and he manages to get around it. It really is a lot more high tech than a typical stack buffer smash against a badly written C application, and that is important because everyone should hopefully have updated that sort of code to be exploit free by now. And stack checked binaries and data execute prevention, AMD's "Not Execute" bit, make those more likely to end in process death than arbitrary code execution.
Finally because it works on both IE and Firefox and Flash has such a huge installation base it should be able to target a very high percentage of current machines. Larry Osterman called it "The way the world (wide web]) ends"
Mind you, if Address Space Layout Randomisation was turned on in the Flash executable on Vista, exploiting this hole would most likely (255 times out of 256) lead to a browser crash rather than arbitrary code execution, so it's not like the last few years work on security has been totally wasted. At the moment it's not and you will get owned reliably. Adobe have published an update, so it's a good idea to download it.
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb08-11.html
Back when I was reading about security someone said that buffer overflows that execute code on the stack were first generation exploits. Second generation would be more subtle stuff like this.
That's very poetic. But what if you were someone who lived by selling your ideas?
I'm not - I sell services to people. But I'd like to be someone who sells software. And people that make songs or software or movies do it partly because they want to make money out of it. So if you start taking their stuff and not paying them and you break the law whilst doing so, you shouldn't be too surprised if they sic their lawyers on you.
Maybe you'd like to try Codester
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6823&cid=886346
Which is irrelevant if most of the costs you pay for either is essentially a license fee. I remember reading that the cost of pressing a CD in volume was only a few cents, back when CDs were launched. So the reproduction cost has never been a significant percentage of the purchase cost of either music or software.
Sharing is moral if you own something. Sharing some you don't own and who's owner doesn't want it shared because they want to charge people for using it is not moral.
How would you feel if technology made it possible for people to share for free something you used to sell to them individually?
Add up the numbers for the top 500 illegal torrents on Pirate Bay and all the other torrent sites and I bet you'll get a much bigger total bandwidth than this. Popular TV shows and movies can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of downloaders. And that is happening 24/7, not just on a release.
Please, it's ridiculous to claim that the majority of torrent bandwidth is used for legal content. And it's pointless too. No one from the MPAA/RIAA is going to come one here and stop harassing pirates just because some people use the same protocol to download Linux. They don't care about that, what they do is to leach on the illegal torrents they do care about and then try to get the ISPs to tell them who was using the IP addresses they saw downloading.
Yeah, I can just the FBI sending Agent Scully to check out some eBay scammer in Zimbabwe.
That's true now. But there are some Intel Atom based chipsets with integrated graphics that should be very low power.
Imagine one of them with an SSD and a LED backlight screen. Or, better, an OLED screen. I reckon it should be possible to get a laptop with decent performance for everything except games with much lower power consumption than a C610 in a few years time. There are loads of optimisations you can do given time, like running the core logic at a lower voltage, powering down bus transceivers when they are inactive and so on.
Even when operating at full speed these devices should have no fan and no moving parts. When they are idle with the screen in power save, the only power should be the screen.
I read some copypasta on a site that made me feel ill for ages. I wrote a textblock patch, but it hasn't been accepted yet.
PayPal has its uses. If you have a site with freeware for people to download stick a PayPal donate button on it.
You won't make big money, but it will cover site hosting costs. Plus if you see some site you like you can donate to them.
That Transend is a real bargain. $175 is only £89. If you have an old ultraportable it's probably the best upgrade you can make to it.
I had an Fujitsu lifebook ultraportable that this would have been ideal for - it had a old 20GB 2.5" drive that was probably slower. Sadly the keyboard got fried and I got rid of it.