Once people start combining attacks with stock market manipulations, people might start paying more attention.
Sell short EBay, DDoS them for a couple days, collect some cash. Day trading and the speed at which attack news travels has made the markets so much more reactive to the slightest bit of bad news. Do this just before some kind of major EBay event so you can claim a legit excuse for the sell and hide your tracks carefully when starting the DDoS (AOL via a stolen cell phone?)
You heard it here first.
c.
Re:can Windows be beaten on the desktop?
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 4
"So I'm a Linux user. But I don't think Microsoft cares. The reason is simple: both of my copies of Windows (one 95 and one 98) are licensed, as they came with my computers (both Dell). Microsoft is getting paid even if I don't use their software. Most of you probably know the name this has been given: the Microsoft tax."
Oh, I think they care. Did you get a complimentary copy of Office with those machines? Are you signed up with MSN? Are you creating content in their proprietary file formats or are you using your Linux box for that? Do you surf the net with IE or Netscape? Do you use Real Audio or whatever that Microsoft format is?
The operating system license is just the tip of the iceberg for Microsoft. They wouldn't be after their competitors so viciously if all they wanted was operating system money.
Microsoft wants it all. Right now, they're spending stupid amounts of cash on engineering and QA and just giving stuff away but, as they say, free is a pretty shitty long-term business model.
Of course, Microsoft and many others still don't seem to have grasped the free part. Nobody is trying to make money selling Linux. Linux is an operating system kernel and is freely available to anyone who wants it. People are making money selling Linux products, services, hardware, appliances, etc. These people aren't using "free" as the business model, they're using "cheaper, faster, better".
Hmmm...yeah, come to think of it, the last drywall job I did I stripped a couple phillips drivers (and an ungodly number of drywall screws - they don't go through 1" hemlock plank too well).
"Square-head recessed slot, that provides far better torque than hex, plus can't be stripped-out."
More or less true. Instead of stripping screws, you switch to stripping drivers. I've stripped more cheap Robertson drivers than I care to remember. On the other hand, I can't recall ever stripping a Phillips driver.
I've also stripped my share of Robertson screws. It's hard to do, but when all you have handy is an overpowered single-speed 3000+ RPM drill...
A decent Robertson driver is a work of art though.
A smart mail client would turn on HTML mail by discovery only. If it receives an HTML e-mail from someone, it (automagically) turns on HTML e-mail for that person only.
Personally, I despise any kind of marked up e-mail format. On the other hand, I don't mind some limited forms of client-side markup. For example, the quote highlighting that kmail now does is handy, although the charset support can just go.
As long as the original text version is what I actually got so that I can still dial in and read it with elm (AKA the devil I know).
"Web enabled PDAs and cell-phones (including WebTV, which is is also smaller then 640 pixels) only account for less then 2% of web access (from StatMarket's update last month anyhow)... Is it really worth it? *shrug*"
I've been in that 2%. It's worth it to me. Also remember that 2% or the web access market is one hell of a lot of people.
"Well, for me, it doesn't say you CAN'T have it clickable... so I made it so... I think most people know to click on logos nowadays..."
They don't explicitly say in the CLF body, but there's a "corrective" FAQ which states that institutional signatures and wordmarks can't be used for navigation.
It does occur to me that I may have been a little harsh in my initial criticism, so let's talk about what the CLF does right.
It stresses accessibility, to the point that it requires compliance with W3C guidelines. This is good.
As a Unix person, I especially like the emphasis on accessible data formats (i.e. anything meeting W3C specs). In our organization, we tend to use the interpretation that Microsoft formats aren't allowed.
Canada being a bilingual country, it stresses that, to the point that even stuff like 404 messages have to be bilingual and that you can switch between languages at any time in your browsing. Technically, this is a bit harder to accomplish than straight english, but it's a really nice point to have.
The resulting pages are cleaner than 90% of things on the net in terms of usability for the normal user.
I'm really just pissed off that they got so close, but then blew it in the details.
I work for the Canadian government, and I think that the CLF is crap. It's better than a lot of stuff, but still crap.
For example, page layout is specced out down to the exact pixel. We all know that this is bad, and I'm sure PDA users with 140x140 screens will be happy to know that content is NOT ALLOWED TO EXIST IN THE LEFT 150 PIXELS.
Sure, the CLF is supposed to result in sites that will fit in 640x480. What he doesn't mention is that the CLF won't produce sites that really work at any other resolution. Yup, if you're browser is less than 640x480, you're horizontally scrolling. If it's bigger, well, everything after the 640'th pixel is whitespace.
People will slower computers and connections will be happy to know that the oh-so-accessible Canadian web sites are loaded with tables (for layout purposes only, of course), blank filler GIFs (http://canada.gc.ca/main_e.html has not less than 10 blank GIFs of various sizes...like someone never heard of the width and height tags), text as images, and things like institutional logos that can't be clicked on (no, you can't click on the Canada "wordmark", you have to click on the bit of text below it that says "Canada Site".
The CLF also dictates e-mail requirements. Neat stuff like all e-mail should have an image representing the institution and the Canada wordmark. Like I really want to get an e-mail with 500 bytes of header, 133 bytes of text, and 4k of useless images.
Don't get me started about the wonderfully EASY TO REMEMBER bilingual URLs that the CLF requires, nice stuff like www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/clf-upe, www.tbs-sct.gc.ca, etc. So now I'm supposed to know acronyms in two languages? Like www.cio.gc.ca/clf/ and www.dpi.gc.ca/upe/ are so hard to implement?
The people who came up with this pile of shit should be required to write out the entire contents of useit.com 100 times for their sins.
"MicroSoft is forgetting that they now have made sure that even _less_ security administrators will get to know about their products weaknesses"
Actually, it's more subtle than that. SecurityFocus will still publish stuff about MS bugs (heck, I've gotten three or four in the last hour), but Microsoft won't be able to spin the bugs in exactly the way they want through their own advisories. 90% of the MS advisories read something like:
"A problem has been found in MS Blah. There is nothing to worry about. In certain extreme cases, undocumented of course, it's possible that some evil person might, if the phase of the moon is right, steal a filler image off a users hard drive. There is nothing to worry about."
Not to mention the infamout credits, which read something like:
"Credit goes to LeetHackerGroup for working with Microsoft to protect users."
Someone's working to protect users and we all know who it _isn't_.
It would be a lot nicer if the comparison was actually good. I found it to be fairly bogus. The only point it made that I could buy was the control panel complexity (I find that the KDE2 control panel sucks in comparison to KDE1).
The comments about the taskbar are pretty much irrelevant. KDE2 has multiple taskbars - a windowlist, which seems to address all the nice things he attributes to Whistler, and a Taskbar applet which is pretty much like the old KDE1 taskbar (but configurable). I don't know if the Pager qualifies as a taskbar.
I find it difficult to take seriously a review which points out the differences in how different the "start" menus looks and how this will confuse users without mentioning that "Start" is a stupid name for a system menu and they're all in the bottom left corner (by default) anyways.
KDE has had thumbnails in the file manager since (IIRC) the KDE1 betas (okay, the feature wasn't stable then, but neither is Whisler).
There certainly are some major differences between Whistler, KDE2, Gnome, etc. I just hope that the author of the review uses the three long enough to discover them. He certainly didn't take the time for this one.
And is it just me, or does the NewsForge discussion system suck rocks?
"How would it benefit anyone to scan the barcode of the can of Coke that they are drinking to see a Coke advertisement. If I'm drinking a Coke I don't need to be advertised to."
How about:
- Scan this bar, win a million bucks! (AKA Scan the bar, get free stuff).
- Scan here to find out more about our great prizes...
- Scan here to be added to our free mailing list.
Admittedly, some of those require giving DC permission to share your personal information with advertisers, but as the various Coke Card, Pepsi stuff campaigns show, advertisers think there's enough suckers out there to make it work.
The key thing for DC is to make the reader and the barcode ubiquitous. When they can tell advertisers that over n% of the population has and uses a:cat, well, they're printing money.
I work for Environment Canada, and I do on-call, and I get paid for it.
The pay works out to 1 hour of time for every 8 hours of standby (i.e. 2 hours a day during the week and three hours a day on the weekend/holiday), plus a _minimum_ of 3 hours at the appropriate overtime rate if we actually get called. That's time and a half or, rarely double time. The typical problem takes about 15-20 minutes to fix, from home. In rare occasions we actually need to get to the office to fix something (in which case we get paid travel costs).
We don't always bill for the trivial stuff, unless it inconveniences us.
The problem is that Sun's been tooting their horn quite a bit recently about being part of this free software/open source _community_. People who don't play nice with their neighbours tend to get ostracized from communities surprisingly quickly. I expect that the GNOME Foundation will crucify them over this, for example. I also wouldn't be surprised if Don throws an anti-Sun clause in the next release of any of his drivers.
It might be legal, fair, or whatever, but unless it's nice they chances of success in the long run are pretty low.
"Besides, you are legally obligated to anyways... unless it is so broad that you believe it not to be you "invention"."
Given that he's no longer an employee, can they force him to do squat?
I'm tempted to say that if they wanted him to sign anything, they missed their chance the minute he walked out the door.
Of course, once lawyers get involved all bets are off.
As for whether or not it's a real invention...If one of the people who alledgedly invented it can't come up with prior art or claim with a straight face that they came up with it over a beer, it just might be a real bonna-fide invention...
Think about it. Well done cookies are opaque, which means you have no control over the contents. With a P3P enabled proxy server, we've got total control over what identifying information gets kept by a web server.
Unless a P3P server is requiring certificates for everything and actually verifying them as the user connects to each page (read: expensive), there's an opportunity to feed pretty much any information you want to the server.
I predict that Mr. Gates is going to be visiting some pretty racy web sites when P3P gets off the ground.
Also, with a well-done proxy, you can basically use the P3P protocol to implement your own form of nyms (you can't hide your IP address, but that's it). A junkbuster patch for this should be trivial.
I think that P3P can dramatically _increase_ the amount of privacy we have (compared to cookies), while at the same time making all that demographic information sites are collecting completely useless. If enough users routinely feed new random information to a site every time they connect, it could also get pretty expensive to store all that. I imagine they might catch on to that when the number of unique records exceeds the global population, but that'll be a while down the road.
Our relay is partially open - it allows relay only if the sender's e-mail address or at least one recipient's e-mail address is from a locally-hosted domain. Not the most secure method, perhaps, but it seems to be enough extra work that spammers simply find a wide-open relay and use it instead of us. There's a much better way to do this. I modified our POP server at a previous employer such that it placed an IP on an approved relay list for up to two hours after a valid authentication. This worked great for people on the road because all they had to know was that they had to check their mail before trying to send anything (something people usually do anyway). c.
From what I can tell, the defense doesn't stand a chance if it keeps on the fair use, free speech line of reasoning because both of those are overuled by the DMCA. The "code is speech" argument is still too vague to win.
From what I can tell, the DMCA doesn't strictly prevent fair use. You can take excepts from a VHS is you have the player. You can copy parts of a CD if you have the player. You can view certain parts of a DVD if you have the player. It's just that now, the players are tightly controlled. Rights to fair use aren't being infringed upon.
Now the right to making archival copies, there's an approach. To argue that circumvention of DVD protections is necessary in order to make perfect archival copies might fly a lot better than free speech.
It's also worth pointing out that the argument about a player requiring a CSS key to read a DVD is bogus. A player doesn't need to know the key, it can just take a few seconds to brute force a key when it starts playing the DVD. In effect, CSS is really just a file format where a little bit of pre-computing is needed before the file can be read. In my mind, it's no different from endian conversions in TIFF. Since the player key requirement seems to imply that CSS is an encryption algorithm, perhaps someone can whip up a version of css-cat that doesn't take any keys in the input?
Another approach that one might take is to rename DeCSS to EnCSS. CSS works both ways, right? In order to burn a DVD, you need CSS. If someone was to build a piece of hardware that did DVD burning, one could use EnCSS to write their own copyrighted products to a DVD. I imagine you could take a shot at saying that preventing the distribution of EnCSS is prior restraint on free speech. Or will the MPAA claim that Linux users have to right to "protect" copyrighted works on DVD?
Why don't a whole bunch of enterprising slashdotters (anonymously) create a large number web pages at places like Geocities, slap up the DeCSS/css-auth source, and call them in (individually of course). And don't forget e-mail chain letters started from all kinds of free e-mail accounts. Make sure you CC various members of the CCA, MPAA, and movie companies.
Keep their lawyers busy pumping out cease and desist letters (at what, $100 or $200 an hour?) and give them the impression of a really large grassroots effect happening.
For copyright violations? I doubt it. Extradition is usually reserved for fairly serious things like murder, torture, and massive fraud. I expect the perpetrator would also have to be an adult. The MPAA would have to be doing some really major dick sucking in order to pull off extradition for something as lame as reverse engineering. c.
What do first amendment rights have to do with anything?
This is a cultural issue, not a legal issue. Yeah, you have the right to say anything you please and be a complete asshole about it. So after you finish reading this, please go and express your right to free speech by walking up to the head of your company and calling him a loser, moron, and anything else you can come up with. Go ahead, it's your right.
While you're looking for another job, you can think about the difference between legal and cultural (or, in this case, economic) limits on free speech.
The point Jon is trying to make is that on the net those cultural/economic limits disappear and people have no qualms about doing things that in the real world would be insane. Most people don't walk up to a 300 pound weight lifter and call him a pussy. Most people don't stop to yell and scream at police officers. Most people show a certain amount of respect when they tell complete strangers that they're wrong. But put a keyboard in someones hand and they'll do all those things.
While I agree with his basic argument, there's one factor I haven't seen mentioned. Is there any guarrantee that a seriously disabled child won't be "fixable" sometime in its lifetime, assuming it lives long enough? Someone already alluded to CF as an example of how medical tech can extend the lifetime, but it's also possible that tech could, for example, give limbs to someone born without any. Major limb reattachment has been proven and todays/. has another article on human tissue cloning, which means it should be viable technology before a child born today would become an adult.
That's one reason I'd say this topic _is_ appropriate for/. The effects of technology on seemingly unrelated ethical issues can't be ignored.
>You can't eliminate guns. They're too easy to >make. You never heard of a "zip gun"?
First, a zip gun needs ammo. If you strictly control guns, why not ammo as well?
That aside, you're comparing apples and oranges. A hand-built, one-shot, slow-loading zip gun isn't in the same category as even a shitty clone-of-a-clone-of-a-clone import automatic pistol with a couple spare clips.
If they'd used zip guns in Columbine, there probably wouldn't have been more than a handful of injured.
Things are obtaining patents now, it's worse than I thought. It's a fairly old concept. Things also tend to band together in order to obtain patents and then use said patents to harrass the rest of the world in an attempt to garner money and power. Up here in Canada, we call them lawyers. c.
Slashdot Mirror
Once people start combining attacks with stock market manipulations, people might start paying more attention.
Sell short EBay, DDoS them for a couple days, collect some cash. Day trading and the speed at which attack news travels has made the markets so much more reactive to the slightest bit of bad news. Do this just before some kind of major EBay event so you can claim a legit excuse for the sell and hide your tracks carefully when starting the DDoS (AOL via a stolen cell phone?)
You heard it here first.
c.
"So I'm a Linux user. But I don't think Microsoft cares. The reason is simple: both of my copies of Windows (one 95 and one 98) are licensed, as they came with my computers (both Dell). Microsoft is getting paid even if I don't use their software. Most of you probably know the name this has been given: the Microsoft tax."
Oh, I think they care. Did you get a complimentary copy of Office with those machines? Are you signed up with MSN? Are you creating content in their proprietary file formats or are you using your Linux box for that? Do you surf the net with IE or Netscape? Do you use Real Audio or whatever that Microsoft format is?
The operating system license is just the tip of the iceberg for Microsoft. They wouldn't be after their competitors so viciously if all they wanted was operating system money.
Microsoft wants it all. Right now, they're spending stupid amounts of cash on engineering and QA and just giving stuff away but, as they say, free is a pretty shitty long-term business model.
Of course, Microsoft and many others still don't seem to have grasped the free part. Nobody is trying to make money selling Linux. Linux is an operating system kernel and is freely available to anyone who wants it. People are making money selling Linux products, services, hardware, appliances, etc. These people aren't using "free" as the business model, they're using "cheaper, faster, better".
c.
Hmmm...yeah, come to think of it, the last drywall job I did I stripped a couple phillips drivers (and an ungodly number of drywall screws - they don't go through 1" hemlock plank too well).
c.
"Square-head recessed slot, that provides far better torque than hex, plus can't be stripped-out."
More or less true. Instead of stripping screws, you switch to stripping drivers. I've stripped more cheap Robertson drivers than I care to remember. On the other hand, I can't recall ever stripping a Phillips driver.
I've also stripped my share of Robertson screws. It's hard to do, but when all you have handy is an overpowered single-speed 3000+ RPM drill...
A decent Robertson driver is a work of art though.
c.
A smart mail client would turn on HTML mail by discovery only. If it receives an HTML e-mail from someone, it (automagically) turns on HTML e-mail for that person only.
Personally, I despise any kind of marked up e-mail format. On the other hand, I don't mind some limited forms of client-side markup. For example, the quote highlighting that kmail now does is handy, although the charset support can just go.
As long as the original text version is what I actually got so that I can still dial in and read it with elm (AKA the devil I know).
c.
"Web enabled PDAs and cell-phones (including WebTV, which is is also smaller then 640 pixels) only account for less then 2% of web access (from StatMarket's update last month anyhow)... Is it really worth it? *shrug*"
I've been in that 2%. It's worth it to me. Also remember that 2% or the web access market is one hell of a lot of people.
"Well, for me, it doesn't say you CAN'T have it clickable... so I made it so... I think most people know to click on logos nowadays..."
They don't explicitly say in the CLF body, but there's a "corrective" FAQ which states that institutional signatures and wordmarks can't be used for navigation.
c.
It does occur to me that I may have been a little harsh in my initial criticism, so let's talk about what the CLF does right.
It stresses accessibility, to the point that it requires compliance with W3C guidelines. This is good.
As a Unix person, I especially like the emphasis on accessible data formats (i.e. anything meeting W3C specs). In our organization, we tend to use the interpretation that Microsoft formats aren't allowed.
Canada being a bilingual country, it stresses that, to the point that even stuff like 404 messages have to be bilingual and that you can switch between languages at any time in your browsing. Technically, this is a bit harder to accomplish than straight english, but it's a really nice point to have.
The resulting pages are cleaner than 90% of things on the net in terms of usability for the normal user.
I'm really just pissed off that they got so close, but then blew it in the details.
c.
I work for the Canadian government, and I think that the CLF is crap. It's better than a lot of stuff, but still crap.
For example, page layout is specced out down to the exact pixel. We all know that this is bad, and I'm sure PDA users with 140x140 screens will be happy to know that content is NOT ALLOWED TO EXIST IN THE LEFT 150 PIXELS.
Sure, the CLF is supposed to result in sites that will fit in 640x480. What he doesn't mention is that the CLF won't produce sites that really work at any other resolution. Yup, if you're browser is less than 640x480, you're horizontally scrolling. If it's bigger, well, everything after the 640'th pixel is whitespace.
People will slower computers and connections will be happy to know that the oh-so-accessible Canadian web sites are loaded with tables (for layout purposes only, of course), blank filler GIFs (http://canada.gc.ca/main_e.html has not less than 10 blank GIFs of various sizes...like someone never heard of the width and height tags), text as images, and things like institutional logos that can't be clicked on (no, you can't click on the Canada "wordmark", you have to click on the bit of text below it that says "Canada Site".
The CLF also dictates e-mail requirements. Neat stuff like all e-mail should have an image representing the institution and the Canada wordmark. Like I really want to get an e-mail with 500 bytes of header, 133 bytes of text, and 4k of useless images.
Don't get me started about the wonderfully EASY TO REMEMBER bilingual URLs that the CLF requires, nice stuff like www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/clf-upe, www.tbs-sct.gc.ca, etc. So now I'm supposed to know acronyms in two languages? Like www.cio.gc.ca/clf/ and www.dpi.gc.ca/upe/ are so hard to implement?
The people who came up with this pile of shit should be required to write out the entire contents of useit.com 100 times for their sins.
c.
"MicroSoft is forgetting that they now have made sure that even _less_ security administrators will get to know about their products weaknesses"
Actually, it's more subtle than that. SecurityFocus will still publish stuff about MS bugs (heck, I've gotten three or four in the last hour), but Microsoft won't be able to spin the bugs in exactly the way they want through their own advisories. 90% of the MS advisories read something like:
"A problem has been found in MS Blah. There is nothing to worry about. In certain extreme cases, undocumented of course, it's possible that some evil person might, if the phase of the moon is right, steal a filler image off a users hard drive. There is nothing to worry about."
Not to mention the infamout credits, which read something like:
"Credit goes to LeetHackerGroup for working with Microsoft to protect users."
Someone's working to protect users and we all know who it _isn't_.
No, I don't think I'll miss the MS advisories...
c.
It would be a lot nicer if the comparison was actually good. I found it to be fairly bogus. The only point it made that I could buy was the control panel complexity (I find that the KDE2 control panel sucks in comparison to KDE1).
The comments about the taskbar are pretty much irrelevant. KDE2 has multiple taskbars - a windowlist, which seems to address all the nice things he attributes to Whistler, and a Taskbar applet which is pretty much like the old KDE1 taskbar (but configurable). I don't know if the Pager qualifies as a taskbar.
I find it difficult to take seriously a review which points out the differences in how different the "start" menus looks and how this will confuse users without mentioning that "Start" is a stupid name for a system menu and they're all in the bottom left corner (by default) anyways.
KDE has had thumbnails in the file manager since (IIRC) the KDE1 betas (okay, the feature wasn't stable then, but neither is Whisler).
There certainly are some major differences between Whistler, KDE2, Gnome, etc. I just hope that the author of the review uses the three long enough to discover them. He certainly didn't take the time for this one.
And is it just me, or does the NewsForge discussion system suck rocks?
c.
"How would it benefit anyone to scan the barcode of the can of Coke that they are drinking to see a Coke advertisement. If I'm drinking a Coke I don't need to be advertised to."
:cat, well, they're printing money.
How about:
- Scan this bar, win a million bucks! (AKA Scan the bar, get free stuff).
- Scan here to find out more about our great prizes...
- Scan here to be added to our free mailing list.
Admittedly, some of those require giving DC permission to share your personal information with advertisers, but as the various Coke Card, Pepsi stuff campaigns show, advertisers think there's enough suckers out there to make it work.
The key thing for DC is to make the reader and the barcode ubiquitous. When they can tell advertisers that over n% of the population has and uses a
c.
I work for Environment Canada, and I do on-call, and I get paid for it.
The pay works out to 1 hour of time for every 8 hours of standby (i.e. 2 hours a day during the week and three hours a day on the weekend/holiday), plus a _minimum_ of 3 hours at the appropriate overtime rate if we actually get called. That's time and a half or, rarely double time. The typical problem takes about 15-20 minutes to fix, from home. In rare occasions we actually need to get to the office to fix something (in which case we get paid travel costs).
We don't always bill for the trivial stuff, unless it inconveniences us.
c.
The problem is that Sun's been tooting their horn quite a bit recently about being part of this free software/open source _community_. People who don't play nice with their neighbours tend to get ostracized from communities surprisingly quickly. I expect that the GNOME Foundation will crucify them over this, for example. I also wouldn't be surprised if Don throws an anti-Sun clause in the next release of any of his drivers.
It might be legal, fair, or whatever, but unless it's nice they chances of success in the long run are pretty low.
c.
"Besides, you are legally obligated to anyways... unless it is so broad that you believe it not to be you "invention"."
Given that he's no longer an employee, can they force him to do squat?
I'm tempted to say that if they wanted him to sign anything, they missed their chance the minute he walked out the door.
Of course, once lawyers get involved all bets are off.
As for whether or not it's a real invention...If one of the people who alledgedly invented it can't come up with prior art or claim with a straight face that they came up with it over a beer, it just might be a real bonna-fide invention...
c.
Think about it. Well done cookies are opaque, which means you have no control over the contents. With a P3P enabled proxy server, we've got total control over what identifying information gets kept by a web server.
Unless a P3P server is requiring certificates for everything and actually verifying them as the user connects to each page (read: expensive), there's an opportunity to feed pretty much any information you want to the server.
I predict that Mr. Gates is going to be visiting some pretty racy web sites when P3P gets off the ground.
Also, with a well-done proxy, you can basically use the P3P protocol to implement your own form of nyms (you can't hide your IP address, but that's it). A junkbuster patch for this should be trivial.
I think that P3P can dramatically _increase_ the amount of privacy we have (compared to cookies), while at the same time making all that demographic information sites are collecting completely useless. If enough users routinely feed new random information to a site every time they connect, it could also get pretty expensive to store all that. I imagine they might catch on to that when the number of unique records exceeds the global population, but that'll be a while down the road.
c.
Our relay is partially open - it allows relay only if the sender's e-mail address or at least one recipient's e-mail address is from a locally-hosted domain. Not the most secure method, perhaps, but it seems to be enough extra work that spammers simply find a wide-open relay and use it instead of us. There's a much better way to do this. I modified our POP server at a previous employer such that it placed an IP on an approved relay list for up to two hours after a valid authentication. This worked great for people on the road because all they had to know was that they had to check their mail before trying to send anything (something people usually do anyway). c.
From what I can tell, the defense doesn't stand a chance if it keeps on the fair use, free speech line of reasoning because both of those are overuled by the DMCA. The "code is speech" argument is still too vague to win.
From what I can tell, the DMCA doesn't strictly prevent fair use. You can take excepts from a VHS is you have the player. You can copy parts of a CD if you have the player. You can view certain parts of a DVD if you have the player. It's just that now, the players are tightly controlled. Rights to fair use aren't being infringed upon.
Now the right to making archival copies, there's an approach. To argue that circumvention of DVD protections is necessary in order to make perfect archival copies might fly a lot better than free speech.
It's also worth pointing out that the argument about a player requiring a CSS key to read a DVD is bogus. A player doesn't need to know the key, it can just take a few seconds to brute force a key when it starts playing the DVD. In effect, CSS is really just a file format where a little bit of pre-computing is needed before the file can be read. In my mind, it's no different from endian conversions in TIFF. Since the player key requirement seems to imply that CSS is an encryption algorithm, perhaps someone can whip up a version of css-cat that doesn't take any keys in the input?
Another approach that one might take is to rename DeCSS to EnCSS. CSS works both ways, right? In order to burn a DVD, you need CSS. If someone was to build a piece of hardware that did DVD burning, one could use EnCSS to write their own copyrighted products to a DVD. I imagine you could take a shot at saying that preventing the distribution of EnCSS is prior restraint on free speech. Or will the MPAA claim that Linux users have to right to "protect" copyrighted works on DVD?
c.
Why don't a whole bunch of enterprising slashdotters (anonymously) create a large number web pages at places like Geocities, slap up the DeCSS/css-auth source, and call them in (individually of course). And don't forget e-mail chain letters started from all kinds of free e-mail accounts. Make sure you CC various members of the CCA, MPAA, and movie companies.
Keep their lawyers busy pumping out cease and desist letters (at what, $100 or $200 an hour?) and give them the impression of a really large grassroots effect happening.
c.
For copyright violations? I doubt it. Extradition is usually reserved for fairly serious things like murder, torture, and massive fraud. I expect the perpetrator would also have to be an adult. The MPAA would have to be doing some really major dick sucking in order to pull off extradition for something as lame as reverse engineering. c.
What do first amendment rights have to do with anything?
This is a cultural issue, not a legal issue. Yeah, you have the right to say anything you please and be a complete asshole about it. So after you finish reading this, please go and express your right to free speech by walking up to the head of your company and calling him a loser, moron, and anything else you can come up with. Go ahead, it's your right.
While you're looking for another job, you can think about the difference between legal and cultural (or, in this case, economic) limits on free speech.
The point Jon is trying to make is that on the net those cultural/economic limits disappear and people have no qualms about doing things that in the real world would be insane. Most people don't walk up to a 300 pound weight lifter and call him a pussy. Most people don't stop to yell and scream at police officers. Most people show a certain amount of respect when they tell complete strangers that they're wrong. But put a keyboard in someones hand and they'll do all those things.
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While I agree with his basic argument, there's one factor I haven't seen mentioned. Is there any guarrantee that a seriously disabled child won't be "fixable" sometime in its lifetime, assuming it lives long enough? Someone already alluded to CF as an example of how medical tech can extend the lifetime, but it's also possible that tech could, for example, give limbs to someone born without any. Major limb reattachment has been proven and todays /. has another article on human tissue cloning, which means it should be viable technology before a child born today would become an adult.
/. The effects of technology on seemingly unrelated ethical issues can't be ignored.
That's one reason I'd say this topic _is_ appropriate for
c.
>You can't eliminate guns. They're too easy to
>make. You never heard of a "zip gun"?
First, a zip gun needs ammo. If you strictly control guns, why not ammo as well?
That aside, you're comparing apples and oranges. A hand-built, one-shot, slow-loading zip gun isn't in the same category as even a shitty clone-of-a-clone-of-a-clone import automatic pistol with a couple spare clips.
If they'd used zip guns in Columbine, there probably wouldn't have been more than a handful of injured.
c.
Things are obtaining patents now, it's worse than I thought. It's a fairly old concept. Things also tend to band together in order to obtain patents and then use said patents to harrass the rest of the world in an attempt to garner money and power. Up here in Canada, we call them lawyers. c.