You know, I still don't get the huge deal with the telecom immunity.
It was never about telecoms.
Retroactive Immunity should be reserved for those cases where an actor violated a law which was so egregiously and blatantly wrong that they can be forgiven, after the fact, for having violated the law in the first place.
It should come with a formal apology by the lawmakers for having created the law in the first place.
It should also come with a compensation package for those who were financially impacted by by their act of following the law (at the time) and doing the right thing.
And finally, it should come with a change to the law, correcting the original flaw, and preventing a similar situation from occurring again in the future.
In this case, Obama's vote in favor of retroactive immunity can be read to mean he feels FISA was egregiously and blatantly wrong for demanding that telecoms not disclose information without a warrant. He clearly also feels that Qwest deserved to suffer financially against their (Bush-spyfunded) competitors for not seeing that their privacy-preserving actions would eventually by condemned by Congress.
These are, or course, my words, not Obama's. But the Senator should know why a backlash has formed against his as a result of his vote.
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
There's another point many are missing: Among the innocent Americans which the current Republican administration has felt justified in spying on are the staffers and volunteers of the Obama for America movement, and the Senator himself. Was there ever a more clear-cut case of a group agitating for Regime Change in the US than this group of "terrorists"?
Other posters have said this, but it bears repeating.
You need to start thinking now about how you are going to convince the loser (and his supporters) that he actually lost...especially if you can't convince yourself. You will have only testimony from the machine; a machine you will be forced to admit is under your control.
Modern science has yet to produce an instance of non-trivial code which is also bug free, and you are asking the loser to believe your electronic voting machines are 100% bug free, 100% tamper proof, and 100% tamper evident? They know they are not, you know they are not. Nobody is being fooled.
Resign. You have already lost the game.
Or plan to keep enough paper ballots on-hand for the entire registered population, and just declare the machines broken before the start.
It's the only way to be sure.
Because you know after the final vote is cast, your post here will become part of the lawsuit by whomever loses.
I'll bet the next run of this story is about how some company pre-publishes a fake negative report at a non-disclosed (but guessable) URL on their web site and waits for Reuters (or someone else) to pick-up the story. Then, when the actual certified results are published, Reuters has a lot of explaining to do (as well as a few legal charges to answer.)
The next extension, of course, would be for some low-paid webadmin to game some auto news site (news.google.com comes to mind) as part of a pump-and-dump strategy (or would that be a cry-and-buy strategy?) to make a quick buck.
When you want advice on what America should do, go to an American
When you want advice on Chicken Soup, do you ask a chicken?
If you want advice on what America should do, you should ask both those who are responsible for making it happen, and those who would be affected by the decisions.
I see two problems. First, for people who wish to clone a MS program that uses a feature revealed under this program, it makes it easier for Microsoft to prevail in a copyright suit because you'll never be able to establish that you didn't have access to MS code.
You can't prove a negative. It does answer the question a defendent might pose, something like "how did the defendent get access to M$ well guarded secrets?" but it doesn't prove anything by itself.
The second problem is that it weakens your case if you reverse engineer MS code. Courts allow reverse engineering to make competing products when proper documentation is not available. It's possible that even a restrictive and unfair NDA requiring some ridiculous fee arrangement still counts as being available such that you cannot refuse to reverse engineer. I plan to submit a comment to the DOJ about this and I hope others will too.
Perhaps unlikely, but well worth considering anyway.
And for those who read at +1 or better only, now you have the entire comment.
Check-out the RFC's and find out what your computer is obligated to do to be a member of a computer network.
Of course, you could ignore those obligations, but then there's not much of a point in being connected to the network; kinda like going to a party just to sit in the corner.
Here's a hint; there are services you are obligated to offer when you send packet one; long before you've even figured out who your local gateway is.
Pick one, and get everyone comfortable with that one.
...and while you're at it, get rid of all those people who don't use the one you've picked.
And the products they're developing, or services they're offering, too.
And we all know about those "problem apps" that you can never seem to get running well on that platform, well just bar them from the corporate LAN. Fire anyone who insists on using them.
Heck, we all know about that one major app which works well and runs great but doubles the size of the backups; we'll let's get rid of that one, too. I hate having to remember to swap the tapes every Friday afternoon.
After all, we can't let little things like efficiency, profitibility, or innovation stand in the way of a clean functioning computer room, now can we?
I would not be surprised if the studio did the math and discovered that they make more money off the licensing for Harry Potter Action Figures sold to the families who've only seen it on pirated video than they would from selling a legit video to those same families.
Everyone start sharing your internet connection, even if it's just dialup. Use IPv6 as much as possible. Run cat5 to your neigbors house, wireless, whatever.
<sarcasm>
This sounds great, I already have a couple hundred nodes under my control, can I offer them up for service?
Of course, I can't offer them for free, but I promise they will be cheap. We'll start at $9.95 a month and 100 free hours.
And I don't want anyone sharing kiddie porn on my network, so that stuff is out. But that's reasonable, isn't it?
</sarcasm>
And now you understand how we got to where we are.
If AOLTW were to block its competitors from sending content to its users that would be a gross violation of anti-trust laws.
Anti-trust? Nice try.
If I'm AOL/TW, why the hell should I have to allow you (as the competition) to use my networks to try to take away my customers. Isn't that like you being able to demand the right to erect a billboard on my property?
That is the crux of these policy decisions; the FCC is relaxing the common carrier restrictions on broadband communication.
In the early days of the telephone system (we're talking back when each call was connected by the operator by hand) there was a lawsuit filed by the owner of a small town funeral home who feared that the phone company was directing business to a competitor. The competitor's wife was the town telephone operator. Since that time, the concept of common carriage has been used.
The common carrier laws are regulation (so they must be bad, right?) that require the operator of a telephony services network to carry all communications equally without respect for content.
If I take your GPL'd dice roller and modify it, I've created a derivitive work. But if I take your die roller and add it to my "gaming suite" program, is the entire program derivitive? The law doesn't cleary say "yes," but the GPL's advocates have the repuation (possibly justified--I don't know) of saying "YES" and threatening ("we'll sue you") people who disagree in action.
You are correct that such a decision would need to be made by a Court, but the odds would not be in your favor.
Consider; If a producer makes an original motion picture about a topic of his choice, but includes in the filming a scene which takes place with a particular sculpture in the background, can the artist who created the sculpture claim the whole motion picture is a derivative work?
So, if I create something that resembles a CD, but really just uses the CD format to carry a harmful digital payload to damage your system, I'm just an artist protecting my rights.
but...
If I create something that resembles an email message, but really just uses the email message format to carry a harmful digital payload to damage your system, I'm just an evil hacker who's likely to be spending time in prison.
No they couldn't, because they don't own the files, the user that created them does.
You own the copywritable content of the Word file (the poem, the layout, the tags, etc) but Microsoft owns the file format.
But if you (as the copyriht holder) declare that the work can be freely distributed, copied, and modified, that does not empower me to read, copy or modify your poem unless I'm also licensed to use Word.
If they declare that their Word file format is a content protection device, then my being licensed to run Star Office isn't good enough. Microsoft can claim that Star Office (or any other program capable of reading their proprietary format) is a circumvention device and have it pulled from the market for DMCA reasons.
Does this imply that, under the DMCA, any (nominally) legal content-creation program can be ruled unlawful if it has the ability to read a file instead of merely write a file?
It could come to that.
Microsoft could declare their file formats to be a "content protection device", and make it illegal for Sun to even offer OpenOffice on DMCA reasons.
Selling software is the same as selling access to it.
We need to be technical here, because it's important. Normally, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use it. Software which is offered as open source could be considered much different. When you procure software in source form, (at least under most Open Source licenses) you could almost say you own it, but with an encumberance. The person/group from which you procured it can, for the most part, no longer dictate what you do with the software, prevent you from using it in the future, force you to upgrade, or prevent you from taking it apart and using the bits as you see fit.
If you give it away for free, it comes with no warranty.
So, if the local petrol station offers a free car wash with a fill-up, and the machine scratches the paint job all to hell, I'm S.O.L? It was free, right? So I can't really complain that it caused damage?
So no matter how obfuscated and buggy your code is, I become responsible for it now because choose to use it?
Exactly. Or were you having problem with the concept of due diligence?
Further, despite the fact that I am not a programmer, I am expected to know enough about programming to be able to decipher your code, and impliment fixes.
Either that, or hire someone else to decipher the code, verify correct operation, compile, test it, and implement fixes for you. That's what binary distributions are for. It may not be cost-free, but what were you expecting?
If anything, (as you've correctly pointed out) it makes the market even more lucrative for companies like Microsoft, but only if they get their act together. And that's a win-win for everybody.
What about if the code is quazi-compiled - something like.NET bytecode or Java VM bytecode?
We make the assumption that binaries will not be edited in binary form. That is to say that when a change is made to the executable, that change will be made to the readable source version, pre compilation. If you mod the binary, clearly you own the liability. If you patch the binary, liability belongs to the patch creator.
If I can't see (and edit) the.NET or Java source, it makes no sense to place liability onto me. The same would apply to encrypted source.
On the other hand, it's possible for perfectly good Java source to become faulty once run through a bad Java VM. In such a case, it makes no sense to hold the author of the Java source liable. The liability would lie with whomever created the Java VM.
There's an ambiguous area here in the selection and integration of components. If I take faultless C++ source and run it through a faultless FORTRAN compiler, I get to keep the liability (along with the resulting mess.)
Most products in most industries are covered by a blanket warranty with a reasonable "void if modified" clause. In software, it's "warranty void if you use it as intended."
It will take but one major product liability lawsuit to change that. And Microsoft is now big enough that there's bound to be a few lawyers willing to take the case on a contingency.
Simple Solution: Liability lies with whomever compiled it.
If you give out source (which cannot be executed) there's no way you could be liable for what happens once it gets compiled and executed. After all, it could be the faulty compiler which introduced the bug.
If you want to be able to pin the liability on the author/creator, find a firm willing to offer pre-compiled binaries. You'll probably have to pay them. Wow, suddenly there's a reason to buy the boxed set from Red Hat.
If a certain firm chooses to keep it's source closed, and sell only pre-compiled binaries, they get to keep full liability for themselves. Think about software embedded in automobiles. If there's a product defect there, the whole car gets recalled.
And Microsoft can still negotiate the liability away in a contract, it just becomes the OEM's liable for M$ buggy code.
Until someone can create a system that accurately models the way "real life" ownership works...
Explain to me again which part of the Internet isn't "real life"?
Things change, technology advances. Sharing digital copies is not as encumbering as sharing physical objects. That fact is neither good nor bad in itself.
This program was actually popping up windows on my personal desktop, on my computer (yes, I do own it)...
No, you don't.
Get that fact through your head and you'll understand everything much more clearly.
Computers are not like oil or steel or cotton. Computers have loyalty. A comupter is owned by whoever wrote the software making it run. You can only trust a computer as far as you can trust the person (or people) who wrote the software that runs on it.
This is one of the reasons why allowing a single, for profit corporation to own a monopoly on proprietary software is orders of magnitude worse than allowing a single, for profit corporation to own a monopoly on something like oil or steel.
You purchased the hardware, you pay for the electricity to run it, you provide the real estate where it sits, you pay for the air conditioning to keep it cool, and you pay the parts and labor when it breaks. But as soon as it starts running someone elses software, it will start doing what that other person want it to do. There's no reason for them to respect your wishes once they own your computer.
So ask yourself: Who wrote this software? What was their motivation for writing it? Was it about money? And where is that money coming from? What is their cause? And do you want to contribute to their cause?
Beyond that, there was the decision years ago that said AT&T could not prohibit you from connecting a non-AT&T phone to their phone network, as long as it doesn't damage the phone network, of course.
That was very specific legislation which only applied to common carriers as defined by the law. It has no applicability to cable. They own their own network and can do whatever they will with it.
Remember: once a company becomes dominant in it's industry and can no longer grow at the expense of it's competitors, it has no choice but to grow at the expense of it's customers.
Why should you be worried about Magic Lantern? Are you a terrorist?
No. I am not a terrorist.
<HYPOTHETICAL MODE=ON>
I'm a candidate for public office. I'm God fearing and I love my country. I'm honest (yes, really) and my political views are exactly in line with yours. You would surely vote for me.
However, the party currently in office is corrupt (the result an electorial mistake in the last election); it's no secret, everyone knows it and acknowledges it. A majority would surely vote the corrupt incumbents out. But the incumbents have no intention of allowing themselves to be voted out of power.
The problem here is that every time I contact my supporters to discuss election strategy or try to point out a weakness in the incumbent party platform, the opposition seems to know about it instantly, and takes immediate steps to counter the strategy or have the weaknesses covered up.
Consequently, the "honest" party has been unable to mount an organized attempt to retake political power in this arena.
%lt;/HYPOTHETICAL MODE=ON%gt;
It's a deadlock situation, like screwing up your LILO install, and not being able to fix it because you can't boot.
I realize your comment was meant to be flip and funny, but there's real danger here. There are some political philosophies which define any activity which doesn't promote their power as "terrorist". A democracy must be able to defend itself against such an incursion. We've done a good job of selecting those checks and balances, but it's not a foregone conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I still don't get the huge deal with the telecom immunity.
It was never about telecoms. Retroactive Immunity should be reserved for those cases where an actor violated a law which was so egregiously and blatantly wrong that they can be forgiven, after the fact, for having violated the law in the first place.
It should come with a formal apology by the lawmakers for having created the law in the first place.
It should also come with a compensation package for those who were financially impacted by by their act of following the law (at the time) and doing the right thing.
And finally, it should come with a change to the law, correcting the original flaw, and preventing a similar situation from occurring again in the future.
In this case, Obama's vote in favor of retroactive immunity can be read to mean he feels FISA was egregiously and blatantly wrong for demanding that telecoms not disclose information without a warrant. He clearly also feels that Qwest deserved to suffer financially against their (Bush-spyfunded) competitors for not seeing that their privacy-preserving actions would eventually by condemned by Congress.
These are, or course, my words, not Obama's. But the Senator should know why a backlash has formed against his as a result of his vote.
Just try thinking of it from the company's point of view. The government orders them to hand over records. The government obviously shows a disdain for the constitution and considers anyone who stands in their way to be terrorist accomplices. What's going to happen to you when you say 'No'?
There's another point many are missing: Among the innocent Americans which the current Republican administration has felt justified in spying on are the staffers and volunteers of the Obama for America movement, and the Senator himself. Was there ever a more clear-cut case of a group agitating for Regime Change in the US than this group of "terrorists"?
Which brings us back to Today's Slashdot article...
You need to start thinking now about how you are going to convince the loser (and his supporters) that he actually lost...especially if you can't convince yourself. You will have only testimony from the machine; a machine you will be forced to admit is under your control.
Modern science has yet to produce an instance of non-trivial code which is also bug free, and you are asking the loser to believe your electronic voting machines are 100% bug free, 100% tamper proof, and 100% tamper evident? They know they are not, you know they are not. Nobody is being fooled.
Resign. You have already lost the game.
Or plan to keep enough paper ballots on-hand for the entire registered population, and just declare the machines broken before the start.
It's the only way to be sure.
Because you know after the final vote is cast, your post here will become part of the lawsuit by whomever loses.
I'll bet the next run of this story is about how some company pre-publishes a fake negative report at a non-disclosed (but guessable) URL on their web site and waits for Reuters (or someone else) to pick-up the story. Then, when the actual certified results are published, Reuters has a lot of explaining to do (as well as a few legal charges to answer.)
The next extension, of course, would be for some low-paid webadmin to game some auto news site (news.google.com comes to mind) as part of a pump-and-dump strategy (or would that be a cry-and-buy strategy?) to make a quick buck.
Do you trust your news source?
Do you still trust Reuters?
When you want advice on Chicken Soup, do you ask a chicken?
If you want advice on what America should do, you should ask both those who are responsible for making it happen, and those who would be affected by the decisions.
You can't prove a negative. It does answer the question a defendent might pose, something like "how did the defendent get access to M$ well guarded secrets?" but it doesn't prove anything by itself.
Perhaps unlikely, but well worth considering anyway.
And for those who read at +1 or better only, now you have the entire comment.
Of course, you could ignore those obligations, but then there's not much of a point in being connected to the network; kinda like going to a party just to sit in the corner.
Here's a hint; there are services you are obligated to offer when you send packet one; long before you've even figured out who your local gateway is.
And the products they're developing, or services they're offering, too.
And we all know about those "problem apps" that you can never seem to get running well on that platform, well just bar them from the corporate LAN. Fire anyone who insists on using them.
Heck, we all know about that one major app which works well and runs great but doubles the size of the backups; we'll let's get rid of that one, too. I hate having to remember to swap the tapes every Friday afternoon.
After all, we can't let little things like efficiency, profitibility, or innovation stand in the way of a clean functioning computer room, now can we?
I would not be surprised if the studio did the math and discovered that they make more money off the licensing for Harry Potter Action Figures sold to the families who've only seen it on pirated video than they would from selling a legit video to those same families.
<sarcasm>
This sounds great, I already have a couple hundred nodes under my control, can I offer them up for service?
Of course, I can't offer them for free, but I promise they will be cheap. We'll start at $9.95 a month and 100 free hours.
And I don't want anyone sharing kiddie porn on my network, so that stuff is out. But that's reasonable, isn't it?
</sarcasm>
And now you understand how we got to where we are.
Anti-trust? Nice try.
If I'm AOL/TW, why the hell should I have to allow you (as the competition) to use my networks to try to take away my customers. Isn't that like you being able to demand the right to erect a billboard on my property?
That is the crux of these policy decisions; the FCC is relaxing the common carrier restrictions on broadband communication.
In the early days of the telephone system (we're talking back when each call was connected by the operator by hand) there was a lawsuit filed by the owner of a small town funeral home who feared that the phone company was directing business to a competitor. The competitor's wife was the town telephone operator. Since that time, the concept of common carriage has been used.
The common carrier laws are regulation (so they must be bad, right?) that require the operator of a telephony services network to carry all communications equally without respect for content.
You are correct that such a decision would need to be made by a Court, but the odds would not be in your favor.
Consider; If a producer makes an original motion picture about a topic of his choice, but includes in the filming a scene which takes place with a particular sculpture in the background, can the artist who created the sculpture claim the whole motion picture is a derivative work?
Click here to find out.
but...
If I create something that resembles an email message, but really just uses the email message format to carry a harmful digital payload to damage your system, I'm just an evil hacker who's likely to be spending time in prison.
Yup. Makes sense to me.
You own the copywritable content of the Word file (the poem, the layout, the tags, etc) but Microsoft owns the file format.
But if you (as the copyriht holder) declare that the work can be freely distributed, copied, and modified, that does not empower me to read, copy or modify your poem unless I'm also licensed to use Word.
If they declare that their Word file format is a content protection device, then my being licensed to run Star Office isn't good enough. Microsoft can claim that Star Office (or any other program capable of reading their proprietary format) is a circumvention device and have it pulled from the market for DMCA reasons.
It could come to that.
Microsoft could declare their file formats to be a "content protection device", and make it illegal for Sun to even offer OpenOffice on DMCA reasons.
You're spinning. Shouldn't they have reviewed the code before it shipped?
We need to be technical here, because it's important. Normally, you don't buy software, you buy a license to use it. Software which is offered as open source could be considered much different. When you procure software in source form, (at least under most Open Source licenses) you could almost say you own it, but with an encumberance. The person/group from which you procured it can, for the most part, no longer dictate what you do with the software, prevent you from using it in the future, force you to upgrade, or prevent you from taking it apart and using the bits as you see fit.
So, if the local petrol station offers a free car wash with a fill-up, and the machine scratches the paint job all to hell, I'm S.O.L? It was free, right? So I can't really complain that it caused damage?
Exactly. Or were you having problem with the concept of due diligence?
Either that, or hire someone else to decipher the code, verify correct operation, compile, test it, and implement fixes for you. That's what binary distributions are for. It may not be cost-free, but what were you expecting?
If anything, (as you've correctly pointed out) it makes the market even more lucrative for companies like Microsoft, but only if they get their act together. And that's a win-win for everybody.
"Let us now stand and sing the Corporate anthem..."
We make the assumption that binaries will not be edited in binary form. That is to say that when a change is made to the executable, that change will be made to the readable source version, pre compilation. If you mod the binary, clearly you own the liability. If you patch the binary, liability belongs to the patch creator.
If I can't see (and edit) the .NET or Java source, it makes no sense to place liability onto me. The same would apply to encrypted source.
On the other hand, it's possible for perfectly good Java source to become faulty once run through a bad Java VM. In such a case, it makes no sense to hold the author of the Java source liable. The liability would lie with whomever created the Java VM.
There's an ambiguous area here in the selection and integration of components. If I take faultless C++ source and run it through a faultless FORTRAN compiler, I get to keep the liability (along with the resulting mess.)
Most products in most industries are covered by a blanket warranty with a reasonable "void if modified" clause. In software, it's "warranty void if you use it as intended."
It will take but one major product liability lawsuit to change that. And Microsoft is now big enough that there's bound to be a few lawyers willing to take the case on a contingency.
If you give out source (which cannot be executed) there's no way you could be liable for what happens once it gets compiled and executed. After all, it could be the faulty compiler which introduced the bug.
If you want to be able to pin the liability on the author/creator, find a firm willing to offer pre-compiled binaries. You'll probably have to pay them. Wow, suddenly there's a reason to buy the boxed set from Red Hat.
If a certain firm chooses to keep it's source closed, and sell only pre-compiled binaries, they get to keep full liability for themselves. Think about software embedded in automobiles. If there's a product defect there, the whole car gets recalled.
And Microsoft can still negotiate the liability away in a contract, it just becomes the OEM's liable for M$ buggy code.
Explain to me again which part of the Internet isn't "real life"?
Things change, technology advances. Sharing digital copies is not as encumbering as sharing physical objects. That fact is neither good nor bad in itself.
No, you don't.
Get that fact through your head and you'll understand everything much more clearly.
Computers are not like oil or steel or cotton. Computers have loyalty. A comupter is owned by whoever wrote the software making it run. You can only trust a computer as far as you can trust the person (or people) who wrote the software that runs on it.
This is one of the reasons why allowing a single, for profit corporation to own a monopoly on proprietary software is orders of magnitude worse than allowing a single, for profit corporation to own a monopoly on something like oil or steel.
You purchased the hardware, you pay for the electricity to run it, you provide the real estate where it sits, you pay for the air conditioning to keep it cool, and you pay the parts and labor when it breaks. But as soon as it starts running someone elses software, it will start doing what that other person want it to do. There's no reason for them to respect your wishes once they own your computer.
So ask yourself: Who wrote this software? What was their motivation for writing it? Was it about money? And where is that money coming from? What is their cause? And do you want to contribute to their cause?
Then choose your friends carefully.
In what way is that not a network?
That was very specific legislation which only applied to common carriers as defined by the law. It has no applicability to cable. They own their own network and can do whatever they will with it.
Remember: once a company becomes dominant in it's industry and can no longer grow at the expense of it's competitors, it has no choice but to grow at the expense of it's customers.
No. I am not a terrorist.
<HYPOTHETICAL MODE=ON>
I'm a candidate for public office. I'm God fearing and I love my country. I'm honest (yes, really) and my political views are exactly in line with yours. You would surely vote for me.
However, the party currently in office is corrupt (the result an electorial mistake in the last election); it's no secret, everyone knows it and acknowledges it. A majority would surely vote the corrupt incumbents out. But the incumbents have no intention of allowing themselves to be voted out of power.
The problem here is that every time I contact my supporters to discuss election strategy or try to point out a weakness in the incumbent party platform, the opposition seems to know about it instantly, and takes immediate steps to counter the strategy or have the weaknesses covered up.
Consequently, the "honest" party has been unable to mount an organized attempt to retake political power in this arena.
%lt;/HYPOTHETICAL MODE=ON%gt;
It's a deadlock situation, like screwing up your LILO install, and not being able to fix it because you can't boot.
I realize your comment was meant to be flip and funny, but there's real danger here. There are some political philosophies which define any activity which doesn't promote their power as "terrorist". A democracy must be able to defend itself against such an incursion. We've done a good job of selecting those checks and balances, but it's not a foregone conclusion.