I think it would be really interesting to see how the decendants of the different women are distributed. Are they evenly spread out, are they more or less partitioned off from each other (pretty unlikely), or are just identifiable centers which might suggest where these women lived?
Does anyone know anything about this? Or geographic distributions of the three clans of Africa? Also, does anyone know how much more specific this could get? What would the time limit be? Is it always going to be 100k+, or might it eventually get down to like 25k?
I'm sure no one would have any privacy issues with that sort of thing...
Seriously, I'd go for it. I know one line of my family back eight generations, but I don't even know my great-grandmother's maiden name. I suppose I should ask her sometime. I'd love to know my family history further back.
I'm not sure what patent this refers to. The earliest relevant one seems to be 4464650, but CompuServe refers to 4558302, which also fits the date a little better -- 20 years from date of filing.
Unisys would like to force licensing on a much wider range of activities than they in fact can. I don't know how anyone could claim that distributing a GIF file infringes their patent. I mean, if you are not in possession of any software which implements LZW, how can you infringe?
If anyone is unsure whether this actually hurts anyone, I used to work tech support at a clip art company. We used to get people using cheap software all the time who would say, "it says unsupported file format" when they tried to import an LZW compressed TIFF.
GIF will probably come back after the patent expires. It's the best format around for small icons and stuff. I just did a quick screenshot of a piece the Netscape toolbar. The (crappy) jpeg is 10k. The smallest PNG I could get is 2449 bytes. The GIF is 1230 bytes.
PNG has a lot more overhead than GIF. The benefits outweigh this pretty quickly, but when things get small, nothing is better than GIF. A single pixel white GIF is 35 bytes. PNG is 132. It's a small amount of data, but it adds up.
Besides, by 2003, we might be getting decent color net connected cell phones. Bandwidth will be a major issue with these.
But this isn't worth the licensing fees. The only thing worth the licensing fees is backward compatibility, and (miracle of miracles) 3 years is about the longest anyone could expect this conversion to take. Well, about 2 years before you can use PNGs everywhere, with no worries. More like 2 decades to irradicate all the GIFs from the web, but that patent's up before then.
Yes, there is a very good reason to delay before they start charging licensing fees. If they had gone after the first person to use GIF (well, LZW), then the GIF file format would have never caught on. For a software developer, the value of supporting a file format is a function of how widely supported that file format is. So the software developers weigh the benefit of supporting some file format (# of people who want it), versus the cost of implementing it (time to code, licensing fees).
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least). So if Unisys doesn't bother enforcing the patent at first, a lot of people will pick GIF as their standard format. Then, once everyone is using GIF, and no one could even think of not supporting it, they jack up the prices.
The moral of the story: patent law needs to be amended so that you must enforce it, or lose it. You shouldn't be allowed to hide the patent until you can extort a fortune from everybody and his brother who implemented what they assumed was a free algorithm.
Incidentally, it may be possible to generate GIFs without using LZW. Supposedly, you can create a run length encoded file without using LZW that will magically get decompressed correctly by an LZW decoder. It depends on the scope of the patent.
If you used a licensed program (program that paid unisys' licensing fee, I mean, not "non-pirated") to create the GIF, you are fine. I assume accuweather is creating GIFs on the fly from a CGI script.
If I ever wrote any software that I was going to release under a free license (my bigest program to date is about 20k of data summarization in Perl), I would release it under the artistic license or a BSD style license. I don't really dislike the GPL, but I dislike RMS, and his communistic attitudes, and if I released something under the GPL, people may interpret that as agreeing with his politics, rather than just choosing a licensing method.
I find it somewhat ironic that the GPL is not covered by the GPL. You can see Stallman's opposition to real freedom in the fact that he won't allow licenses based on the GPL with modifications.
Well, I was going through moderating this, but I had to mention something:
Zero Knownledge (www.freedom.net) makes use of a hard to compute but easy to check problem to avoid DOS attacks. This would be perfect for email as well. Procedure:
You contact my SFMTP (spam free mail transfer protocol) server, and say you have a message for me. The server gives you a problem to solve, like "give me a 128 bit string which has 0x1234 as the first 16 bits of it's MD5 hash". The sender has to go do a computationally expensive search for such a string. It finds it. The receiver can easily check that the answer is correct (and thus that the computer spent the time calculating it). The receiver accepts the email. The supercomputer goes on to the next recipient on it's spam list.
--Kevin
Re:Isn't a Correction, It's a Mistake
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Tech Stocks Tumble
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· Score: 2
Yes, but if I have hard evidence that she is a witch that's too complicated to explain quickly, then I might just have to tell everyone is a witch because the cows udder dried up. It's unsupported, but I'm convinced on economic grounds that I know well enough to be convinced by, but not well enough to convey to someone else, that the DOJ is bad for the economy.
And I think that it's pretty clear (but not provably so) that the ruling did in fact trigger this current downturn, even if there were other reasons contributing. I disagree that all tech stocks are vastly overvalued. I think that there is value in tech stocks that is poorly accounted for by standard stock valuation methods.
Given the simplicity of the decryption code, they should have known from the start. Besides, it's not like they are posting the passwords to any sites -- you need access to the password file (or equiv) to crack anything.
Note an important thing about the code: it doesn't do any "try this, then see if it worked" type tests like an irreversable hash would. It's not a encryption, it's just a reversible transformation.
Maybe next time they should higher a cryptographer.
Everyone is screaming about UCITA granting too many rights to software vendors, but few people are noticing the absurd restrictions that they claim GPL places on code. I can't reference GPL'd libraries from non-GPL software? Why? A derived work means that I use the code, in a possibly modified form. But use isn't derivation.
I can use EMACS to write a novel, but the novel isn't a derived work from EMACS.
Assuming there was a video format that was supported only by GPL software, I could release a movie in that file format, that was unusable without the software, and the movie would not be a derived work of the software.
If I dynamically link GPL'd system libraries in a commercial software product, it isn't a derived work.
If I release GPL'd software that needs to call non-GPL'd libraries, I don't know how anyone could theorize that the libraries are a derived work of the software.
The whole thing is part of RMS's "don't use software tainted by the sin of commercialization" campaign. RMS's dreams are not law. RMS's most recent wishes for what people would do are not legally binding. Only the text of the GPL and the realities of copyright law matter.
The text of the GPL says "'work based on the Program' means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language." The original question seems to be just a sneaky way to create a derived work, if you are including the library with the program. On the other hand, if the library were already standard, then it wouldn't be. Assuming the GPL is valid, then it comes down to what the courts would consider a derived work. So ask for permission, or ask a lawyer. But even if it's technically legal, if you're just trying to swipe code without abiding by the author's wishes, you probably won't have much luck selling to the Linux community.
The justice department has set off a panic. I mean, Sun stock collapses the same day they announce increased earnings?
My theory: investors are willing to gamble on the unpredictability of tech companies, because these average out to be good gambles. But the unpredicatability of tech companies, and the unpredicatabiltiy of the justice department is too much, because all high tech companies are in violation of dozens of anti-trust laws.
Giving away software for free to gain market share? Preditory pricing. Only licensing your patents to people who don't directly compete against you? Sounds very monopolistic. Making proprietary modifications to standards to make sure that people using your products can't switch? ditto.
While all the CEOs are testifying before congress that Microsoft is the only one doing this sort of stuff, the market knows better. No one wants to invest in a regulated industry. Anything you do that makes a lot of money will bring a plague of justice department lawyers trying to prove you're a monopoly. Every time your competitors get mad, they'll complain to the government. Are we supposed to believe that government bureaucrats understand the dynamics of a market that companies can't even predict more than 6 months down the line?
On the bright side, maybe when the economy collapses, and we go back to high inflation, high unemployment, no stock options, and a higher budget deficit, they'll remember what caused it, and the politicians will finally notice that regulation does more harm than good.
I joined up with scientology and spent a total of about 6 hours in classes, and one auditing session.
I wanted to learn brainwashing techniques.
What I came away with was that their single most effective technique is that of introducing their own terminology. Couple this with the dogma that you have to understand every single word you read, and you are forced to spend all your brainpower trying to pick the intended meaning out of the gibberish, leaving nothing left to realize that it's... gibberish.
For all their talk of "if you read a word you don't understand, look it up", Elron doesn't have a very good command of the english language. He uses words incorrectly very frequently. Like idiots who try to sound intelligent by using big words.
The number one reason I didn't get involved was because it's all a bunch of mystical bullshit. The number two reason, though, was that in spite of this philosophy that supposedly gives you complete control over your life, there seemed to be a lot of fat, chain smoking losers in the group. This aside from the rumors that they keep a dossier on anything you reveal in an auditing session.
I once saw a video describing Disney's training process for people who work the parks. It uses a similar brainwashing technique. You aren't an employee, you're a cast member; they aren't customers, they're guest. I plan on using this technique when I form my own cult.
BTW, I'd recommend ever getting on their mailing list. I get one or two pieces of junk mail a month from them, and I only set foot in their building about four times, about three years ago.
1. Never -- the Orange Book certifications are for people trying to sell software to the government. Given the fact that no one can close Linux to be the sole provider of there version of "Trusted Linux", and given the high cost of actually getting a system certified, it's not likely to make business sense to do this. It might make sense for a BSD, since you can make the particular version that got certified proprietary.
2. As soon as the NSA opens up their modifications to Linux. They are actually working on it now, but most likely, they won't release it. The NSA isn't in the habit of releasing anything back to the outside world. They think *everyone* is a potential enemy. Look at the history of DES, and there's strong evidence that the NSA had differential cryptanalysis 10-15 years before the private sector.
But it's pretty irrelvant. The "security" implied by these certifications isn't the type of security that is usually of interest to people outside the military. The only case where I can see it being needed would be with medical records or financial records, but in those cases, you also have a whole bunch of data validity and availability issues that the Orange Book doesn't address.
What does Apple have that makes their OS mainstream, that Linux doesn't?
A well run PR department.
Apple's UI is good. The last version of OS X Server I used was very nice. The make the coolest monitors on the planet. But all of this pales in comparison to a PR department that could convince people that getting locked into a single vendor is refusing to go along with the herd. That people who build their own systems, and have options are mindless drones. That "think different" is grammatically correct. That "think different" means something. Their PR department has even convinced people that Mac OS is stable.
I'm still waiting for one country to trade in their Get a Free Clue card
So am I. I'll be on a plane the next day. Well, as soon as I graduate. Or maybe I'll wait for the hiring managers in silicon valley to come to their senses, but eventually, I'd move there.
Honestly, any country who wants to become the next high tech hotspot only needs to pass a reasonable set of laws. They don't even need good enforcement -- the tech companies will be happy to bring their own lawyer, arbitrators, private security, clean water and infrastructure. It might not happen overnight, but look at Hong Kong -- the *only* thing Hong Kong had was capitalism.
I think Russia is the most promising candidate right now. Vladimir Putin realizes that the most important thing a stable society needs is a consistently enforced set of laws. Any stupidity can be contracted around, so long as it's known in advance.
The court ruled in the specific instance of encryption, where the code was being distributed in order to facilitate understanding by other humans. The court's reasoning was along the lines of "you can't talk about an algorithm without supplying code." It's unlikely this would apply to, for example, a program to convert Paint Shop Pro to the registered version -- you aren't trying to communicate to another person how the protection method works in PSP, you're just distributing a program to defeat it.
DeCSS is a much stronger candidate, but that's a trade secret issue, not really a free speech issue (at least according to the courts so far). Which is the screwed up thing, because the whole idea of trade secrets is that if you fail to protect it, it's no longer a trade secret -- that's what patents are for.
I live in the society determined by US law. I have an interest in whether that law is reasonable and serves me, or whether that law is unreasonable and serves some special interest at the expense of private citizens. Democracy is based on the idea that the views of some idiot on the street are relevant to running government.
So, I comment on law, I argue about it. I'm not necessarily correct as to the "who'll win the superbowl" type arguing about what the outcome of a court case will be, but I am entitled to my opinion as to what the outcome of a court case should be. And since this is a democracy, it's in my interests to spread my opinions, in the hope that someone else will see how reasonable they are, and keep them in mind next election day.
I've skimmed the conclusions of law, and it's interesting to me that Judge Jackson's reasons for concluding that Microsoft violated the Sherman anti-trust act read like a list of what everyone thinks is wrong with the UCITA and the DeCSS case. For example:
"...Microsoft bound Internet Explorer to Windows with contractual and, later, technological shackles in order to ensure..."
Replace Microsoft's tying with the DVDCCA's attempts to control players, and you get the same situation. And for the same reason -- attempting to abuse monopoly power.
Or,
"...extent that Microsoft still asserts a copyright defense, relying upon federal copyright law as a justification for its various restrictions on OEMs..."
Of course, attempting to justify anything and everything by being protected under copyright is exactly what the UCITA is about.
Personally, I think Jackson's finding of fact shows a poor understanding of the situation -- yes, microsoft had a monopoly, but they faced a highly elastic long term demand, and couldn't reap outrageous profits. But, I think his conclusions of law will supply a lot of material for anyone who wants something to quote against UCITA or the DMCA.
I believe Mozilla is a pun on the name Mosaic. Mosaic was the first widely used graphical browser. It was written largely by Mark Andresson, who went on to work on Netscape. So, take Mosaic, and combine it with Godzilla (for big, and powerful, and general ass-kicking) and you get Mozilla, which was the name sent in the user agent string for Netscape, and, I would assume, the internal name for the browser.
Mosaic got modified by Spyglass, and Spyglass Mosaic was the starting point for IE, so the two major browsers started with Mark Andreesson. IE was never "Mozilla", but it sent Mozilla as it's user-agent string because it was pretty much compatible.
From reading the referenced post, it appears that there will be a system wereby "security" bugs only appear on bugzilla if you are logged in as a member of the security team.
Currently, it is limited to "netscape only", which doesn't make that much sense, because not all of the main contributers are in that category.
The article goes on and on about "security through obscurity" vs. "many eyes", but fails to mention a single actual security related bug.
The majority of the software mentioned is actually security software -- firewalls and detect stuff.
The only "exploit" mentioned is the DOS against Yahoo et al a couple weeks back. Which, they again fail to mention, did not exploit bugs in software. Or, it didn't exploit any bugs in the software run by the sites attacked.
It seemed more along the lines of, oh, look at the security companies who gave us money to mention them. See their neat products.
Everyone is whining about "security through obscurity". Well, sorry, the other forms of security are already gone -- that's what it means that there's a security bug. Security through obscurity is better than nothing.
Unlike closed source projects, even a general description of the problem might be enough to find the exact bug, and to develop an exploit for an open source project. This means that it's even more critical that the nature of the bug isn't leaked until a solution or work-around is known.
What if someone found a hole in Apache? Should they post it far and wide, or should they quitely pass it along to the main developers so that the hole can be closed before half the world's websites are replaced by "ThiZ Site HAXed by KeWl d00d"?
Of course, there is the possibility of Netscape taking the microsoft approach -- just ignore it until actual damage is caused -- but I think this is unlikely. They are already agreeing that the bugs need to have a distribution other than netscape only. I think it's pretty unlikely they would let security bugs be swept under the rug.
The price is $24/semester, not $24/month. The difference in price suggests that the fee is not actually the charge for the service.
The students are given access to the internet, the students are allowed to plug their own computers into the net, if they bring them downstairs.
$24/semester sounds like what someone would charge to make sure that the rooms with connections went to the students that want them and will use them. It probably doesn't even pay for wiring the rooms (think -- hubs, cable, patch panels, sockets in the rooms...). Does anyone think that these students failed to request dorm rooms with the internet connection?
So, a few lucky students are allowed to rent cabling at $24/semester. The rest are told to go fuck themselves. But some students say, "fine, you won't sell to us, we'll buy from someone else", and they end up in jail.
But your assumption is wrong. How about: 1) Assume 1 == 1 2) Either 1 == 1 or N = 4 for all N 3) 4 is the sum of two primes 4) by 2 and 3, for all N, N is the sum of two primes 5) Since all numbers are the sum of two primes, all odd numbers are the sum of two primes (QED)
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I think it would be really interesting to see how the decendants of the different women are distributed. Are they evenly spread out, are they more or less partitioned off from each other (pretty unlikely), or are just identifiable centers which might suggest where these women lived?
Does anyone know anything about this? Or geographic distributions of the three clans of Africa? Also, does anyone know how much more specific this could get? What would the time limit be? Is it always going to be 100k+, or might it eventually get down to like 25k?
I'm sure no one would have any privacy issues with that sort of thing...
Seriously, I'd go for it. I know one line of my family back eight generations, but I don't even know my great-grandmother's maiden name. I suppose I should ask her sometime. I'd love to know my family history further back.
--Kevin
I'm not sure what patent this refers to. The earliest relevant one seems to be 4464650, but CompuServe refers to 4558302, which also fits the date a little better -- 20 years from date of filing.
Unisys would like to force licensing on a much wider range of activities than they in fact can. I don't know how anyone could claim that distributing a GIF file infringes their patent. I mean, if you are not in possession of any software which implements LZW, how can you infringe?
If anyone is unsure whether this actually hurts anyone, I used to work tech support at a clip art company. We used to get people using cheap software all the time who would say, "it says unsupported file format" when they tried to import an LZW compressed TIFF.
--Kevin
GIF will probably come back after the patent expires. It's the best format around for small icons and stuff. I just did a quick screenshot of a piece the Netscape toolbar. The (crappy) jpeg is 10k. The smallest PNG I could get is 2449 bytes. The GIF is 1230 bytes.
PNG has a lot more overhead than GIF. The benefits outweigh this pretty quickly, but when things get small, nothing is better than GIF. A single pixel white GIF is 35 bytes. PNG is 132. It's a small amount of data, but it adds up.
Besides, by 2003, we might be getting decent color net connected cell phones. Bandwidth will be a major issue with these.
But this isn't worth the licensing fees. The only thing worth the licensing fees is backward compatibility, and (miracle of miracles) 3 years is about the longest anyone could expect this conversion to take. Well, about 2 years before you can use PNGs everywhere, with no worries. More like 2 decades to irradicate all the GIFs from the web, but that patent's up before then.
--Kevin
Yes, there is a very good reason to delay before they start charging licensing fees. If they had gone after the first person to use GIF (well, LZW), then the GIF file format would have never caught on. For a software developer, the value of supporting a file format is a function of how widely supported that file format is. So the software developers weigh the benefit of supporting some file format (# of people who want it), versus the cost of implementing it (time to code, licensing fees).
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least). So if Unisys doesn't bother enforcing the patent at first, a lot of people will pick GIF as their standard format. Then, once everyone is using GIF, and no one could even think of not supporting it, they jack up the prices.
The moral of the story: patent law needs to be amended so that you must enforce it, or lose it. You shouldn't be allowed to hide the patent until you can extort a fortune from everybody and his brother who implemented what they assumed was a free algorithm.
Incidentally, it may be possible to generate GIFs without using LZW. Supposedly, you can create a run length encoded file without using LZW that will magically get decompressed correctly by an LZW decoder. It depends on the scope of the patent.
If you used a licensed program (program that paid unisys' licensing fee, I mean, not "non-pirated") to create the GIF, you are fine. I assume accuweather is creating GIFs on the fly from a CGI script.
--Kevin
If I ever wrote any software that I was going to release under a free license (my bigest program to date is about 20k of data summarization in Perl), I would release it under the artistic license or a BSD style license. I don't really dislike the GPL, but I dislike RMS, and his communistic attitudes, and if I released something under the GPL, people may interpret that as agreeing with his politics, rather than just choosing a licensing method.
I find it somewhat ironic that the GPL is not covered by the GPL. You can see Stallman's opposition to real freedom in the fact that he won't allow licenses based on the GPL with modifications.
--Kevin
Well, I was going through moderating this, but I had to mention something:
Zero Knownledge (www.freedom.net) makes use of a hard to compute but easy to check problem to avoid DOS attacks. This would be perfect for email as well. Procedure:
You contact my SFMTP (spam free mail transfer protocol) server, and say you have a message for me.
The server gives you a problem to solve, like "give me a 128 bit string which has 0x1234 as the first 16 bits of it's MD5 hash".
The sender has to go do a computationally expensive search for such a string. It finds it.
The receiver can easily check that the answer is correct (and thus that the computer spent the time calculating it).
The receiver accepts the email.
The supercomputer goes on to the next recipient on it's spam list.
--Kevin
Yes, but if I have hard evidence that she is a witch that's too complicated to explain quickly, then I might just have to tell everyone is a witch because the cows udder dried up. It's unsupported, but I'm convinced on economic grounds that I know well enough to be convinced by, but not well enough to convey to someone else, that the DOJ is bad for the economy.
And I think that it's pretty clear (but not provably so) that the ruling did in fact trigger this current downturn, even if there were other reasons contributing. I disagree that all tech stocks are vastly overvalued. I think that there is value in tech stocks that is poorly accounted for by standard stock valuation methods.
--Kevin
Given the simplicity of the decryption code, they should have known from the start. Besides, it's not like they are posting the passwords to any sites -- you need access to the password file (or equiv) to crack anything.
Note an important thing about the code: it doesn't do any "try this, then see if it worked" type tests like an irreversable hash would. It's not a encryption, it's just a reversible transformation.
Maybe next time they should higher a cryptographer.
--Kevin
Everyone is screaming about UCITA granting too many rights to software vendors, but few people are noticing the absurd restrictions that they claim GPL places on code. I can't reference GPL'd libraries from non-GPL software? Why? A derived work means that I use the code, in a possibly modified form. But use isn't derivation.
I can use EMACS to write a novel, but the novel isn't a derived work from EMACS.
Assuming there was a video format that was supported only by GPL software, I could release a movie in that file format, that was unusable without the software, and the movie would not be a derived work of the software.
If I dynamically link GPL'd system libraries in a commercial software product, it isn't a derived work.
If I release GPL'd software that needs to call non-GPL'd libraries, I don't know how anyone could theorize that the libraries are a derived work of the software.
The whole thing is part of RMS's "don't use software tainted by the sin of commercialization" campaign. RMS's dreams are not law. RMS's most recent wishes for what people would do are not legally binding. Only the text of the GPL and the realities of copyright law matter.
The text of the GPL says "'work based on the Program' means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language." The original question seems to be just a sneaky way to create a derived work, if you are including the library with the program. On the other hand, if the library were already standard, then it wouldn't be. Assuming the GPL is valid, then it comes down to what the courts would consider a derived work. So ask for permission, or ask a lawyer. But even if it's technically legal, if you're just trying to swipe code without abiding by the author's wishes, you probably won't have much luck selling to the Linux community.
--Kevin
The justice department has set off a panic. I mean, Sun stock collapses the same day they announce increased earnings?
My theory: investors are willing to gamble on the unpredictability of tech companies, because these average out to be good gambles. But the unpredicatability of tech companies, and the unpredicatabiltiy of the justice department is too much, because all high tech companies are in violation of dozens of anti-trust laws.
Giving away software for free to gain market share? Preditory pricing. Only licensing your patents to people who don't directly compete against you? Sounds very monopolistic. Making proprietary modifications to standards to make sure that people using your products can't switch? ditto.
While all the CEOs are testifying before congress that Microsoft is the only one doing this sort of stuff, the market knows better. No one wants to invest in a regulated industry. Anything you do that makes a lot of money will bring a plague of justice department lawyers trying to prove you're a monopoly. Every time your competitors get mad, they'll complain to the government. Are we supposed to believe that government bureaucrats understand the dynamics of a market that companies can't even predict more than 6 months down the line?
On the bright side, maybe when the economy collapses, and we go back to high inflation, high unemployment, no stock options, and a higher budget deficit, they'll remember what caused it, and the politicians will finally notice that regulation does more harm than good.
--Kevin
I joined up with scientology and spent a total of about 6 hours in classes, and one auditing session.
... gibberish.
I wanted to learn brainwashing techniques.
What I came away with was that their single most effective technique is that of introducing their own terminology. Couple this with the dogma that you have to understand every single word you read, and you are forced to spend all your brainpower trying to pick the intended meaning out of the gibberish, leaving nothing left to realize that it's
For all their talk of "if you read a word you don't understand, look it up", Elron doesn't have a very good command of the english language. He uses words incorrectly very frequently. Like idiots who try to sound intelligent by using big words.
The number one reason I didn't get involved was because it's all a bunch of mystical bullshit. The number two reason, though, was that in spite of this philosophy that supposedly gives you complete control over your life, there seemed to be a lot of fat, chain smoking losers in the group. This aside from the rumors that they keep a dossier on anything you reveal in an auditing session.
I once saw a video describing Disney's training process for people who work the parks. It uses a similar brainwashing technique. You aren't an employee, you're a cast member; they aren't customers, they're guest. I plan on using this technique when I form my own cult.
BTW, I'd recommend ever getting on their mailing list. I get one or two pieces of junk mail a month from them, and I only set foot in their building about four times, about three years ago.
--Kevin
1. Never -- the Orange Book certifications are for people trying to sell software to the government. Given the fact that no one can close Linux to be the sole provider of there version of "Trusted Linux", and given the high cost of actually getting a system certified, it's not likely to make business sense to do this. It might make sense for a BSD, since you can make the particular version that got certified proprietary.
2. As soon as the NSA opens up their modifications to Linux. They are actually working on it now, but most likely, they won't release it. The NSA isn't in the habit of releasing anything back to the outside world. They think *everyone* is a potential enemy. Look at the history of DES, and there's strong evidence that the NSA had differential cryptanalysis 10-15 years before the private sector.
But it's pretty irrelvant. The "security" implied by these certifications isn't the type of security that is usually of interest to people outside the military. The only case where I can see it being needed would be with medical records or financial records, but in those cases, you also have a whole bunch of data validity and availability issues that the Orange Book doesn't address.
--Kevin
What does Apple have that makes their OS mainstream, that Linux doesn't?
A well run PR department.
Apple's UI is good. The last version of OS X Server I used was very nice. The make the coolest monitors on the planet. But all of this pales in comparison to a PR department that could convince people that getting locked into a single vendor is refusing to go along with the herd. That people who build their own systems, and have options are mindless drones. That "think different" is grammatically correct. That "think different" means something. Their PR department has even convinced people that Mac OS is stable.
--Kevin
I'm still waiting for one country to trade in their Get a Free Clue card
So am I. I'll be on a plane the next day. Well, as soon as I graduate. Or maybe I'll wait for the hiring managers in silicon valley to come to their senses, but eventually, I'd move there.
Honestly, any country who wants to become the next high tech hotspot only needs to pass a reasonable set of laws. They don't even need good enforcement -- the tech companies will be happy to bring their own lawyer, arbitrators, private security, clean water and infrastructure. It might not happen overnight, but look at Hong Kong -- the *only* thing Hong Kong had was capitalism.
I think Russia is the most promising candidate right now. Vladimir Putin realizes that the most important thing a stable society needs is a consistently enforced set of laws. Any stupidity can be contracted around, so long as it's known in advance.
--Kevin
The court ruled in the specific instance of encryption, where the code was being distributed in order to facilitate understanding by other humans. The court's reasoning was along the lines of "you can't talk about an algorithm without supplying code." It's unlikely this would apply to, for example, a program to convert Paint Shop Pro to the registered version -- you aren't trying to communicate to another person how the protection method works in PSP, you're just distributing a program to defeat it.
DeCSS is a much stronger candidate, but that's a trade secret issue, not really a free speech issue (at least according to the courts so far). Which is the screwed up thing, because the whole idea of trade secrets is that if you fail to protect it, it's no longer a trade secret -- that's what patents are for.
--Kevin
I live in the society determined by US law. I have an interest in whether that law is reasonable and serves me, or whether that law is unreasonable and serves some special interest at the expense of private citizens. Democracy is based on the idea that the views of some idiot on the street are relevant to running government.
So, I comment on law, I argue about it. I'm not necessarily correct as to the "who'll win the superbowl" type arguing about what the outcome of a court case will be, but I am entitled to my opinion as to what the outcome of a court case should be. And since this is a democracy, it's in my interests to spread my opinions, in the hope that someone else will see how reasonable they are, and keep them in mind next election day.
--Kevin
I've skimmed the conclusions of law, and it's interesting to me that Judge Jackson's reasons for concluding that Microsoft violated the Sherman anti-trust act read like a list of what everyone thinks is wrong with the UCITA and the DeCSS case. For example:
"...Microsoft bound Internet Explorer to Windows with contractual and, later, technological shackles in order to ensure..."
Replace Microsoft's tying with the DVDCCA's attempts to control players, and you get the same situation. And for the same reason -- attempting to abuse monopoly power.
Or,
"...extent that Microsoft still asserts a copyright defense, relying upon federal copyright law as a justification for its various restrictions on OEMs..."
Of course, attempting to justify anything and everything by being protected under copyright is exactly what the UCITA is about.
Personally, I think Jackson's finding of fact shows a poor understanding of the situation -- yes, microsoft had a monopoly, but they faced a highly elastic long term demand, and couldn't reap outrageous profits. But, I think his conclusions of law will supply a lot of material for anyone who wants something to quote against UCITA or the DMCA.
--Kevin
Somebody reply to this and tell me -- where can I get Windows port of the GIMP?
I believe Mozilla is a pun on the name Mosaic. Mosaic was the first widely used graphical browser. It was written largely by Mark Andresson, who went on to work on Netscape. So, take Mosaic, and combine it with Godzilla (for big, and powerful, and general ass-kicking) and you get Mozilla, which was the name sent in the user agent string for Netscape, and, I would assume, the internal name for the browser.
Mosaic got modified by Spyglass, and Spyglass Mosaic was the starting point for IE, so the two major browsers started with Mark Andreesson. IE was never "Mozilla", but it sent Mozilla as it's user-agent string because it was pretty much compatible.
--Kevin
From reading the referenced post, it appears that there will be a system wereby "security" bugs only appear on bugzilla if you are logged in as a member of the security team.
Currently, it is limited to "netscape only", which doesn't make that much sense, because not all of the main contributers are in that category.
--Kevin
The article goes on and on about "security through obscurity" vs. "many eyes", but fails to mention a single actual security related bug.
The majority of the software mentioned is actually security software -- firewalls and detect stuff.
The only "exploit" mentioned is the DOS against Yahoo et al a couple weeks back. Which, they again fail to mention, did not exploit bugs in software. Or, it didn't exploit any bugs in the software run by the sites attacked.
It seemed more along the lines of, oh, look at the security companies who gave us money to mention them. See their neat products.
--Kevin
Everyone is whining about "security through obscurity". Well, sorry, the other forms of security are already gone -- that's what it means that there's a security bug. Security through obscurity is better than nothing.
Unlike closed source projects, even a general description of the problem might be enough to find the exact bug, and to develop an exploit for an open source project. This means that it's even more critical that the nature of the bug isn't leaked until a solution or work-around is known.
What if someone found a hole in Apache? Should they post it far and wide, or should they quitely pass it along to the main developers so that the hole can be closed before half the world's websites are replaced by "ThiZ Site HAXed by KeWl d00d"?
Bruce Schneier addressed this in a recent cryptogram. See: http://www.counterpane.com/crypto- gram-0001.html
Of course, there is the possibility of Netscape taking the microsoft approach -- just ignore it until actual damage is caused -- but I think this is unlikely. They are already agreeing that the bugs need to have a distribution other than netscape only. I think it's pretty unlikely they would let security bugs be swept under the rug.
--Kevin
The price is $24/semester, not $24/month. The difference in price suggests that the fee is not actually the charge for the service.
The students are given access to the internet, the students are allowed to plug their own computers into the net, if they bring them downstairs.
$24/semester sounds like what someone would charge to make sure that the rooms with connections went to the students that want them and will use them. It probably doesn't even pay for wiring the rooms (think -- hubs, cable, patch panels, sockets in the rooms...). Does anyone think that these students failed to request dorm rooms with the internet connection?
So, a few lucky students are allowed to rent cabling at $24/semester. The rest are told to go fuck themselves. But some students say, "fine, you won't sell to us, we'll buy from someone else", and they end up in jail.
But your assumption is wrong. How about:
1) Assume 1 == 1
2) Either 1 == 1 or N = 4 for all N
3) 4 is the sum of two primes
4) by 2 and 3, for all N, N is the sum of two primes
5) Since all numbers are the sum of two primes, all odd numbers are the sum of two primes (QED)