Yep, I'm still installing it... started last october... it's still only on 78%:-/ What the bet it'll crash at 99%? You know it's like a fundamental law of the universe; the longer any computer process takes, the more likely it will crash when it gets to 99%.
"that users would want to use software outside of their control"
hahaha, it's funny because it's apple! Hardwired batteries, single sheet aluminium cases, Apple don't like letting you into -anything-, control will be theirs... somewhere in rural America (probably) is a giant warehouse, filled with giant crates, which in turn are filled with all the second buttons from the mice, being looked at by "top men". And you thought they were designed with only one button, HA shows what you know. They just only give you one, and keep the other. Rumour has it that from time to time, people in the warehouse will select a few of the second mouse buttons at random, lay them out on the floor, and play Dance Dance Revolution on 'em.
Haha i kinda arrived at the same conclusion, but completely different countries... I'm not big business, my clients are all bigger businesses than mine, but they don't have customers from the regions we've had attacks from, blocking the ip ranges for those countries wouldn't really have negative effects on our businesses... but there's no way I could actually do that. Partly, I have a somewhat "you asked for it" attitude when I've warned of a security problem and it's been ignored as "nah that won't happen". An attack could come more locally, and I can protect better against them when I'm armed with a "told you so" or two:-) But even that aside, that standards I have for myself and what I consider a personal failure just don't allow it (not on moral grounds, this isn't judgement, purely based on what I set out to achieve)... I want to know that I can defend against incoming attacks, wherever they might come from, and so preemptively blocking a whole country would be like giving up. If that's not a goal of yours, blocking a country you do no business with is simply pragmatic, I don't argue there.
The leaving bit - Google have said they're not... so end of on that one really! I didn't think they would; I thought at most, they might be using the situation to their advantage to try leverage something, but there's too little information made public to even make guesses as to the likelihood of that, or what it could be.
Google have said though is that their servers -were not- hacked into. The accounts that were accessed were accessed only partially (subject lines, dates etc, but none of the email body texts) and were accessed using the correct login and password. From information that seems to be out in the following days, and perhaps stuff that was eluded to in the original statement, I don't remember specifically, but it seemed what was being said was the attacks were against the individuals machines, which gained the attackers access to the usernames and passwords used to login to gmail et al in the normal fashion.
Occam's razor just isn't sufficient here. The choices aren't "it was chinese government or google themselves who did this"... if it was, then yeah, chinese government seems more likely of the two. It's not hard to believe a situation where this is done by someone anti-PRC, knowing that people will just believe it's PRC that's responsible, increasing internation sympathy for their cause. That's no more implausable than it being the chinese government. Because there is more than one perfectly plausable answer, the belief in a preferred scenario over another where someone else is responsible is about as meaningful as believing it was a flying spaghetti monster that did it.
We all know what we can guess, repeating it constantly convincing ourselves it's true lies somewhere between stupid and ignorant... people shouldn't be talking about their guesses as if they've already been shown to be true, or alternatives have been ruled out. As a species we really need to hurry 'n grow out of this pretending to be certain when it's just impossible for us to be. Wars get started that way.
Erm, sort of knew, some can't upgrade to 'know' status without something more concrete, a source etc, but still welcome your reply nonetheless.
"is hard because there is no other information"
But when there's no information, then people don't know... I guess I respond in such situations with curiosity or disinterest, others seem to respond by making shot in the dark guesses that least challenges existing beliefs, and then acting like that's fact as found out from something/someone authoritive. No information makes it hard(/impossible) to know anything with any level of certainty... one guess is as good as another. I don't understand the leap from "there's no information" to "therefore I know this must be true":-/ see my point at all?
Here in the UK too... Google has become a verb, that always demonstrates an exceptional level of success, that your product has entered into common language usage. Google isn't on a par with other search engines, they will usually give you much better results than competitor search engines. Some comedy stand up guy the other week here said on TV that if Google suddenly went offline, people would be catapulted back to the 1600s or something, not have a clue what to do etc etc etc... obviously exagerated for comedic effect etc, but still, shows the level of penetration 'n public acceptance. They have become, to many, the gateway to the internet, to the point where it could be a worrying thing - too much power 'n control in one place.
A customer's site got compromised somehow, some javascript thing got put on some of the pages, it was spotted so I was brought in to clean it up 'n see how it happened etc. It took -weeks- afterwards for Google to be updated to remove the warning about the site being potentially dangerous when people clicked on it in search results. That properly damaged business for them. We filled out the forms 'n did various stuff google provides functions for, but we were basically screwed, and just had to wait and hope. That's a lot of power.
But, it's a *lot* easier to achieve that in Spanish than in English... I know very little Spanish, started trying to learn some not too long ago, haven't got amazingly far yet, not had much chance to... but, put a spanish word in front of me, and I can read it and pronounce it no prob. My native language is English, which I'm pretty good with (compared to the majority of other native speakers I know who are sloppy as hell!) yet you can put a new English word in front of me, and I can still get it wrong, because we have *so* many exceptions and competing rules depending on which language the word originated from, that you either know a word, or you've just gotta take a stab at it and hope someone'll correct you if you need it. Spanish's phonetic spelling pretty much removes that problem. Still, it does have other complexities in other areas that English is simpler on too.
"that it is somehow unethical to respond in kind to hacking is ridiculous and counterproductive"
No it's not, it's well founded and for good reasons, but in this instance it's unclear (to me, perhaps clearer to people more in the know) that those reasons necessarily apply.
We have laws. We have laws that say what is and isn't allowed, and what the consequences will be if they are broken. They allow for specific things within specific boundaries for self defense under specific situations, because people who are the victim of a crime are often not the best people to be deciding what should happen... they can want to strike back with a full vengance, and that's not a good path to start down. They can make mistakes about who's responsible, and take their anger out on an innocent. They could just be mislead; used to carry out a crime by someone else by proxy. All kinds of reasons, I'm sure you get it.
So that's the way we are... it's pretty engrained, and most of the time it's right... you have a problem like that, you let the law handle it, you don't take the law into your own hands, it's too dangerous to let people go down that route.
However I will concede that that only really works when you are protected by the law. Hacking attacks are too new a thing, with police not set up to deal with it, and perhaps no one that can... and in china? I'm guessing that best case scenario there is they're having similar types of problems, with worse case being that they just won't do anything by choice... well, no I guess the worse case is it's the government doing it to begin with, so they're not going to protect you.
This probably applies to a lot of what goes on, I deal with a fair few attacks that seem to be coming out of the middle east; there's no legal recourse for that. Fortuantely it's not a huge problem for me; I can lock them out, and can use it to prove to my clients they need to listen to me when I say something's insecure and will get them hacked. Not considering themselves a worthy target doesn't mean anything when it's automated scripts doing the search 'n exploit stage. You have an IP address, they will look at you!
It's definitely not a ridiculous attitude that people have though towards it though, it is based on doing what's right and what's best in situations that we're used to in the rest of life. People are starting to realise they need to break away from this a bit her though, and people have started taking down botnets themselves using "hacking" techniques etc.
People here hate patents and microsoft more than they care for facts... tho they're saying what rambus patented wasn't their own tech, but they raced to the patent office first... which would certainly counter your points. Me... I've no idea on this one!
Cheers, I was interested in the figures but not quite enough to have searched yet:-)
If you notice though, the total world population % with access to the internet is 1.3% lower than China's reported figure, so the figures pretty much balance out, whether looking at online figures or total population figures, it's about a sixth either way. Haha I was kinda banking on the the figures for the rest of the world balancing it out, as I did see that counter argument coming, I couldn't've hoped for them being only 1.3% apart! Almost as if I put those figures there myself...;-)
I'm not saying I agree with your conclusion, as I don't believe there's evidence either to suggest that... there's enough motive to go round an awful long way, it's just as wrong to suggest it was any one of them without presenting reason to believe one motivated party were responsible over another motivated party... BUT... did ya notice how Google's (well, I read the original blog, not sure how much that's a corporate vs personal statement, but I'm guessing it was pretty google) statement, they had to kind of play both sides? Hackerz!!! Vs "Everything's fine, stay with us".
So, this attack meant the accounts were breached, BUT not through a security flaw of their own, the accounts were accessed using the correct username and password... and the privacy wasn't fully breached; they saw the email subject lines and dates etc, but didn't access any of the actual message bodies. Oh, and also, while the sophisticated attacks (ie, logging in???) weren't through a flaw in their system, they have increased security measures to protect accounts in the future... hmm, okay, I guess that last one isn't totally contradictary, you can mitigate against problems outside of your system, but still... this just doesn't quite add up.
They haven't said they believe it to be the government, but they have definitely eluded to it, by discussing talks to change their search engine with the government within the same statement in a rather linked way. If they don't have any reason to believe it's the government, but word their statements in a way designed to make people believe they do, perhaps to gain leverage for the talks, that would be a bad thing. But, if they did have reason to believe it was them, I can understand keeping it quiet to protect their staff in the country, as they could be arrested for what Google did, or worse. Personally I would want to pull them out of the country, and then go public, but it might be impossible pulling that many people out discreetly enough.
This is the problem, none of this is believable, because it's all hypothetical, nobody's actually come out and said anything, there's not been the slightest actual assertion, just a lot of eluding. I can understand reasons why that might be necessary... but what I don't understand is, how come everyone's acting like they know something I don't? Do they know something I don't, do they think they know it because they misunderstood Google's statement, are they just so easily convinced of everything based upon absolutely nothing at all, or do they not care as long as they get to be angry and hate someone in another country? Or of course, something else?*
(*What I have done here, is recognised and demonstrated that I have recognised that I might not have thought of everything, am open to the idea that I haven't, and invite additional information... how come people don't do that?!! It's not hard!!!)
Well that shifts it away from the one sixth figure... but as much of the rest of the world can't either, that shifts it back.
Attacks I deal with tend to come out of the middle east, but to be fair, there's a high chance it's coming from someone with a compromised machine just proxying the attack, so I try not to hold it against the country of origin. I've been at the other end of that once, net cut off 'n stuff, tho my machine wasn't compromised, they just hadn't thought about the fact that having an IP address on something doesn't necessarily mean it actually came from there (this was 10 years ago, when it didn't mean that a lot more than it doesn't mean it today).
Still, doesn't mean you can cut off a country home to a sixth of the worlds population, even if some of them are responsible for the attacks you get. If you're going to start down that road, just unplug your system from the internet... that's where 100% of them come from!!!
Google said the attacks "originated from within China". They said there were "sophisticated attacks" against human rights activists, which involved accessing their accounts by use of the "correct username and password". I have yet to find where they have said there is any evidence to believe it was the Chinese government "as a nation" who carried this out, despite what news outlets have said (like they'd ever blow something out of proportion or report something uncertain as being certain). Originating in China narrows it down to a tiny ONE SIXTH of the worlds population! There're so many other possible explanations, such as it being carried out by someone wanting to make it look like it was Chinese government to get sympathy for their cause, or it could be that so many activists out there are dumb as hell and clicked stuff that other people didn't... how many NON human rights activists were hit by this attack? Was every single person whose account was hit one of the activists?
Now, with the Chinese governments history, I would hardly call it surprising if it was them... but making the leap from it originating within the largest country in the world, and therefore it must be the government, is far too much of a leap for me to take without there being at least some other small piece of suppporting evidence.
Does anyone have anything to offer? Pictures of people being killed or whatever don't count, they only support claims that people are killed. Of course, if you're okay with killing, you're probably okay with hacking, but there are more people that kill than the chinese government, and they can't all be responsible for the hacking thing, so that doesn't prove, or even suggest, that it was them.
Have I missed a statement from Google or something that someone can point me so where they actually say they believe the government was responsible? Even if they're not disclosing evidence, have they even said they've seen any?
Am I the only person who refuses to believe something purely on the grounds that it makes me angry? These aren't unreasonable questions.
Overly broad patents often wouldn't actually stand up in court, as the courts end up doing the job that the patent office has failed to and invalidate them. Problem is, when somebody's bigger than you, they can still far too easily use their wrongly issued patent to extort money out of you, even if you know the patent would be invalidated in court, they could bankrupt you before you've even gotten that far. To me, that stinks even more than the patents do, as that problem affects even more than patents.
Erm... what? That is what happens... if you build something using patented tech, you have to pay the patent holder. If a patent never gets used, nobody ever has to pay 'em anything. All this legal stuff comes from companies saying "What? Patented? This? Nooo no no no, this is erm... erm... this is something else... it's a chicken" and then the nvidia guy holds up a chip and starts making chicken noises pretending all like it's a chicken, which made me even more hungry than talking about chips alone. If what you have to pay for is the use of patented tech, and companies are trying to compete in a price driven market, then it doesn't matter what route the money takes to get to the inventors. Companies are going to try and cut corners.
As for limiting the funds... what if your patented tech took $200bln to develop? Remember that high end silicon stuff is not cheap, we've all seen the pictures from IBM of them moving individual atoms to spell out their name or whatever, that's not just for fun, that's a required step of developing an the scale which next generations of chips 'n stuff are going to require. Think they should be limited to get return on those investments to the level of whoever "invented" the 200+ patents covering a dyson vacuum cleaner?
Totally... but comparable to photos from Hubble? Sure, I guess "not as good as" is a comparison. Living here in Britain I can confirm getting pictures of the sky like that is no easy feat, and are definitely impressive... but there's no way you could achieve anything like Hubble's output, what a silly thing for them to say! I expected better from news outlets than that... haha jk.
"Get ANY of the Rambus patents and build something with it? OK? Failed already?"
Err, yep! I left my design miniaturising laser and silicon fabrication plant in my other trousers.
Erm, you can't play games on an nvidia chip without a whole host of other chips 'n circuitry... does that mean you have patents on nvidia chips, or intel chips, because they are only components in a complete system, not a complete system in themselves? Either components of a complex system are patentable or they're not. If they're not, the only people who can hold the patents will be people like Dell, who put them together to form a working full system. If they are, and rambus technology is a component of the system (or a component of a component of a system, etc), then it gets one too. If you can't build something with it, then nvidia would've had nothing to worry about, as they couldn't possibly have built something that infringed on the patents. They have, so they have, ergo you can.
Not true unless you destroy the time machines before the police get you for the torture. Just because you change the future so you never invent the time machine doesn't mean the ones already in the past will suddenly disappear. Dispite the grandfather paradox, time just doesn't work like that.
You'd end up with a situation where there are just two time machines, found in a time before man kind was ready and able to produce them itself, yet perfectly able to decypher the buttons. Well *rubs hands* I can't see how that could possibly go wrong... so thanks for that, you human hater.
A patent can't cover binary encoding of numbers. It can cover an implentation of the binary encoding of numbers, eg, a particular way of wiring transistors up with capacitors to store the number, which probably has been subjected to many patents in the past that are now expired, and so the information is public domain, widely known, thus "obvious".
I think the problem with rambus wasn't so much the patenting and licensing of their tech, but the amount they wanted for the licensing of the tech, in manys' eyes, was holding technological progress to ransom, which is why those RDRAM based PCs never properly took off like other memory technologies. Memory's hazy tho (mine) and I never looked into it deeply, so I couldn't comment on how warrented such an impression was.
No it's not. It's "because I'm first to publish". Patents are about getting information into the public as quickly as possible, by giving a financial/market incentive to whomever does it first. Imagine if companies wanting to keep their techs to themselves and those who pay towards their r&d had to find other ways to keep others out, such as covering all their chips in a substance that would destroy it if you tried to remove it. How much of their r&d budget would have to go into developing that? As much as they spend on lawyers? Perhaps, but this way, at least we get to keep the gunk off the chips we want to put into our laptops, and instead in courtrooms where it belongs.
I can see where you're coming from on the blaming lawyers front, it is very fulfilling, but truth is they are as supply on demand as everything else. Sure, their existance does ensure their continued demand, in that you must hire good lawyers (in the terms of success, not as in good vs evil) to defend against good lawyers, but it's the companies doing this to each other. The lawyers are like expensive weapons, they amplify the damage those using the weapons wish to inflict, and just as in any arms race, where spending more on bigger better weapons helps you defend against others' bigger better weapons, surviving without them when you have a lot to protect and defend lies somewhere between difficult and laughably impossible.
Lawyers don't sue people. People do. Seems silly to blame the weapon for the intent of those holding it. The mistake that you have made here (dumbass;) was in thinking that unlike missiles and bullets, lawyers are people with minds of their own and can choose not to do the things they do, but don't because they lack morals. This is simply not the case. Lawyers aren't people. They're weapons. Just like a child pulled out of an African village to be turned into a weapon and used in a local war, the soul hides away in some darkened corner somewhere and what's left appears only human to the eye, or of course, the dissector's scalpal. The difference being of course, lawyers aren't lawyers through being forced into it, and thus one must conclude the lack of any soul to begin with. Therefore, the moral onus must fall upon those who purchase them for use against other human beings.
Plugs are different in different countries, and the mains voltage varies too... batteries, now they're consistant wherever you go, so by your argument, a battery powered toaster would be the best. Sounds like a pain in the ass if you're a cafe or something and you're going to be making a lot of toast. If you've got a load of four pronged wall sockets around though to use, maybe one of those four pronged *powered* toasters mightn't actually be such a bad idea.
If by "don't like standards" you're implying adverse to them, no I'm not. I'm adverse to the idea of failing to give the best solution just because it's nonstandard. For example, a client of mine was interested in switching to exchange email server. I told him it'd have to be without me, and gave him details of someone else who would support it. He's sticking with me and an open solution. In that instance, what I can implement on top of oss software 'n open standards is by far a better solution for his business, and for me to be providing.
However there is a vaste amount of stuff I've been providing my clients and by proxy, their customers, for many years now, that used features available only in IE. Was this a problem? No, it allowed them to connect with >95% of people who'd come to their site. The loss of the remaining few % was considered to be offset by the increase conversion rate they were getting by making these features available. Other browsers are now starting to implement those features, which is great because they have more of the market now. It's good that there are more choices of software that provide the solutions people wish to use. But the thing you're obviously struggling with the notion of, is that before then, while there was only one piece of software providing the solution, DIDN'T make the PROBLEM go away.
You try telling someone that an implementation for a solution they want to implement for their business or for their customers is waiting standards ratification and so they're going to have to wait three years, because the solution available at the moment doesn't have an ISO number, and you'll be laughed out the place, and someone else will be brought in, quite rightly so.
Technology is not going to stand still for bureaucracy, however much you want it to.
Technology should stand still to give people time to catch up??? Erm, no. Best tool for the job in hand. If Microsoft are the only ones who offer it, I'll use MS. If lots of people offer it, I can use someone else. I'm not going to ignore any options, especially over some illusion of there being an industry standard that's anything more than some academic papers that don't describe reality.
The day all of our problems start following "standards", our solutions will be able to too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, I'm still installing it... started last october... it's still only on 78% :-/ What the bet it'll crash at 99%? You know it's like a fundamental law of the universe; the longer any computer process takes, the more likely it will crash when it gets to 99%.
"that users would want to use software outside of their control"
hahaha, it's funny because it's apple! Hardwired batteries, single sheet aluminium cases, Apple don't like letting you into -anything-, control will be theirs... somewhere in rural America (probably) is a giant warehouse, filled with giant crates, which in turn are filled with all the second buttons from the mice, being looked at by "top men". And you thought they were designed with only one button, HA shows what you know. They just only give you one, and keep the other. Rumour has it that from time to time, people in the warehouse will select a few of the second mouse buttons at random, lay them out on the floor, and play Dance Dance Revolution on 'em.
Haha i kinda arrived at the same conclusion, but completely different countries... I'm not big business, my clients are all bigger businesses than mine, but they don't have customers from the regions we've had attacks from, blocking the ip ranges for those countries wouldn't really have negative effects on our businesses... but there's no way I could actually do that. Partly, I have a somewhat "you asked for it" attitude when I've warned of a security problem and it's been ignored as "nah that won't happen". An attack could come more locally, and I can protect better against them when I'm armed with a "told you so" or two :-) ... I want to know that I can defend against incoming attacks, wherever they might come from, and so preemptively blocking a whole country would be like giving up. If that's not a goal of yours, blocking a country you do no business with is simply pragmatic, I don't argue there.
But even that aside, that standards I have for myself and what I consider a personal failure just don't allow it (not on moral grounds, this isn't judgement, purely based on what I set out to achieve)
The leaving bit - Google have said they're not... so end of on that one really! I didn't think they would; I thought at most, they might be using the situation to their advantage to try leverage something, but there's too little information made public to even make guesses as to the likelihood of that, or what it could be.
Google have said though is that their servers -were not- hacked into. The accounts that were accessed were accessed only partially (subject lines, dates etc, but none of the email body texts) and were accessed using the correct login and password. From information that seems to be out in the following days, and perhaps stuff that was eluded to in the original statement, I don't remember specifically, but it seemed what was being said was the attacks were against the individuals machines, which gained the attackers access to the usernames and passwords used to login to gmail et al in the normal fashion.
Occam's razor just isn't sufficient here. The choices aren't "it was chinese government or google themselves who did this"... if it was, then yeah, chinese government seems more likely of the two. It's not hard to believe a situation where this is done by someone anti-PRC, knowing that people will just believe it's PRC that's responsible, increasing internation sympathy for their cause. That's no more implausable than it being the chinese government. Because there is more than one perfectly plausable answer, the belief in a preferred scenario over another where someone else is responsible is about as meaningful as believing it was a flying spaghetti monster that did it.
We all know what we can guess, repeating it constantly convincing ourselves it's true lies somewhere between stupid and ignorant... people shouldn't be talking about their guesses as if they've already been shown to be true, or alternatives have been ruled out. As a species we really need to hurry 'n grow out of this pretending to be certain when it's just impossible for us to be. Wars get started that way.
Erm, sort of knew, some can't upgrade to 'know' status without something more concrete, a source etc, but still welcome your reply nonetheless.
"is hard because there is no other information"
But when there's no information, then people don't know... I guess I respond in such situations with curiosity or disinterest, others seem to respond by making shot in the dark guesses that least challenges existing beliefs, and then acting like that's fact as found out from something/someone authoritive. No information makes it hard(/impossible) to know anything with any level of certainty... one guess is as good as another. I don't understand the leap from "there's no information" to "therefore I know this must be true" :-/ see my point at all?
Here in the UK too... Google has become a verb, that always demonstrates an exceptional level of success, that your product has entered into common language usage. Google isn't on a par with other search engines, they will usually give you much better results than competitor search engines. Some comedy stand up guy the other week here said on TV that if Google suddenly went offline, people would be catapulted back to the 1600s or something, not have a clue what to do etc etc etc... obviously exagerated for comedic effect etc, but still, shows the level of penetration 'n public acceptance. They have become, to many, the gateway to the internet, to the point where it could be a worrying thing - too much power 'n control in one place.
A customer's site got compromised somehow, some javascript thing got put on some of the pages, it was spotted so I was brought in to clean it up 'n see how it happened etc. It took -weeks- afterwards for Google to be updated to remove the warning about the site being potentially dangerous when people clicked on it in search results. That properly damaged business for them. We filled out the forms 'n did various stuff google provides functions for, but we were basically screwed, and just had to wait and hope. That's a lot of power.
But, it's a *lot* easier to achieve that in Spanish than in English... I know very little Spanish, started trying to learn some not too long ago, haven't got amazingly far yet, not had much chance to... but, put a spanish word in front of me, and I can read it and pronounce it no prob. My native language is English, which I'm pretty good with (compared to the majority of other native speakers I know who are sloppy as hell!) yet you can put a new English word in front of me, and I can still get it wrong, because we have *so* many exceptions and competing rules depending on which language the word originated from, that you either know a word, or you've just gotta take a stab at it and hope someone'll correct you if you need it.
Spanish's phonetic spelling pretty much removes that problem. Still, it does have other complexities in other areas that English is simpler on too.
"that it is somehow unethical to respond in kind to hacking is ridiculous and counterproductive"
No it's not, it's well founded and for good reasons, but in this instance it's unclear (to me, perhaps clearer to people more in the know) that those reasons necessarily apply.
We have laws. We have laws that say what is and isn't allowed, and what the consequences will be if they are broken. They allow for specific things within specific boundaries for self defense under specific situations, because people who are the victim of a crime are often not the best people to be deciding what should happen... they can want to strike back with a full vengance, and that's not a good path to start down. They can make mistakes about who's responsible, and take their anger out on an innocent. They could just be mislead; used to carry out a crime by someone else by proxy. All kinds of reasons, I'm sure you get it.
So that's the way we are... it's pretty engrained, and most of the time it's right... you have a problem like that, you let the law handle it, you don't take the law into your own hands, it's too dangerous to let people go down that route.
However I will concede that that only really works when you are protected by the law. Hacking attacks are too new a thing, with police not set up to deal with it, and perhaps no one that can... and in china? I'm guessing that best case scenario there is they're having similar types of problems, with worse case being that they just won't do anything by choice... well, no I guess the worse case is it's the government doing it to begin with, so they're not going to protect you.
This probably applies to a lot of what goes on, I deal with a fair few attacks that seem to be coming out of the middle east; there's no legal recourse for that. Fortuantely it's not a huge problem for me; I can lock them out, and can use it to prove to my clients they need to listen to me when I say something's insecure and will get them hacked. Not considering themselves a worthy target doesn't mean anything when it's automated scripts doing the search 'n exploit stage. You have an IP address, they will look at you!
It's definitely not a ridiculous attitude that people have though towards it though, it is based on doing what's right and what's best in situations that we're used to in the rest of life. People are starting to realise they need to break away from this a bit her though, and people have started taking down botnets themselves using "hacking" techniques etc.
People here hate patents and microsoft more than they care for facts... tho they're saying what rambus patented wasn't their own tech, but they raced to the patent office first... which would certainly counter your points. Me... I've no idea on this one!
Cheers, I was interested in the figures but not quite enough to have searched yet :-)
If you notice though, the total world population % with access to the internet is 1.3% lower than China's reported figure, so the figures pretty much balance out, whether looking at online figures or total population figures, it's about a sixth either way. Haha I was kinda banking on the the figures for the rest of the world balancing it out, as I did see that counter argument coming, I couldn't've hoped for them being only 1.3% apart! Almost as if I put those figures there myself... ;-)
Nah, I'm sure I would remember if I did :-)
I'm not saying I agree with your conclusion, as I don't believe there's evidence either to suggest that... there's enough motive to go round an awful long way, it's just as wrong to suggest it was any one of them without presenting reason to believe one motivated party were responsible over another motivated party... BUT... did ya notice how Google's (well, I read the original blog, not sure how much that's a corporate vs personal statement, but I'm guessing it was pretty google) statement, they had to kind of play both sides? Hackerz!!! Vs "Everything's fine, stay with us".
So, this attack meant the accounts were breached, BUT not through a security flaw of their own, the accounts were accessed using the correct username and password... and the privacy wasn't fully breached; they saw the email subject lines and dates etc, but didn't access any of the actual message bodies. Oh, and also, while the sophisticated attacks (ie, logging in???) weren't through a flaw in their system, they have increased security measures to protect accounts in the future... hmm, okay, I guess that last one isn't totally contradictary, you can mitigate against problems outside of your system, but still... this just doesn't quite add up.
They haven't said they believe it to be the government, but they have definitely eluded to it, by discussing talks to change their search engine with the government within the same statement in a rather linked way. If they don't have any reason to believe it's the government, but word their statements in a way designed to make people believe they do, perhaps to gain leverage for the talks, that would be a bad thing. But, if they did have reason to believe it was them, I can understand keeping it quiet to protect their staff in the country, as they could be arrested for what Google did, or worse. Personally I would want to pull them out of the country, and then go public, but it might be impossible pulling that many people out discreetly enough.
This is the problem, none of this is believable, because it's all hypothetical, nobody's actually come out and said anything, there's not been the slightest actual assertion, just a lot of eluding. I can understand reasons why that might be necessary... but what I don't understand is, how come everyone's acting like they know something I don't? Do they know something I don't, do they think they know it because they misunderstood Google's statement, are they just so easily convinced of everything based upon absolutely nothing at all, or do they not care as long as they get to be angry and hate someone in another country? Or of course, something else?*
(*What I have done here, is recognised and demonstrated that I have recognised that I might not have thought of everything, am open to the idea that I haven't, and invite additional information... how come people don't do that?!! It's not hard!!!)
Well that shifts it away from the one sixth figure... but as much of the rest of the world can't either, that shifts it back.
Attacks I deal with tend to come out of the middle east, but to be fair, there's a high chance it's coming from someone with a compromised machine just proxying the attack, so I try not to hold it against the country of origin. I've been at the other end of that once, net cut off 'n stuff, tho my machine wasn't compromised, they just hadn't thought about the fact that having an IP address on something doesn't necessarily mean it actually came from there (this was 10 years ago, when it didn't mean that a lot more than it doesn't mean it today).
Still, doesn't mean you can cut off a country home to a sixth of the worlds population, even if some of them are responsible for the attacks you get. If you're going to start down that road, just unplug your system from the internet... that's where 100% of them come from!!!
Google said the attacks "originated from within China". They said there were "sophisticated attacks" against human rights activists, which involved accessing their accounts by use of the "correct username and password". I have yet to find where they have said there is any evidence to believe it was the Chinese government "as a nation" who carried this out, despite what news outlets have said (like they'd ever blow something out of proportion or report something uncertain as being certain). Originating in China narrows it down to a tiny ONE SIXTH of the worlds population! There're so many other possible explanations, such as it being carried out by someone wanting to make it look like it was Chinese government to get sympathy for their cause, or it could be that so many activists out there are dumb as hell and clicked stuff that other people didn't... how many NON human rights activists were hit by this attack? Was every single person whose account was hit one of the activists?
Now, with the Chinese governments history, I would hardly call it surprising if it was them... but making the leap from it originating within the largest country in the world, and therefore it must be the government, is far too much of a leap for me to take without there being at least some other small piece of suppporting evidence.
Does anyone have anything to offer? Pictures of people being killed or whatever don't count, they only support claims that people are killed. Of course, if you're okay with killing, you're probably okay with hacking, but there are more people that kill than the chinese government, and they can't all be responsible for the hacking thing, so that doesn't prove, or even suggest, that it was them.
Have I missed a statement from Google or something that someone can point me so where they actually say they believe the government was responsible? Even if they're not disclosing evidence, have they even said they've seen any?
Am I the only person who refuses to believe something purely on the grounds that it makes me angry? These aren't unreasonable questions.
Originating from China... so that narrows it down to what, one sixth of the worlds population? Can you see any problem with your argument?
Overly broad patents often wouldn't actually stand up in court, as the courts end up doing the job that the patent office has failed to and invalidate them. Problem is, when somebody's bigger than you, they can still far too easily use their wrongly issued patent to extort money out of you, even if you know the patent would be invalidated in court, they could bankrupt you before you've even gotten that far. To me, that stinks even more than the patents do, as that problem affects even more than patents.
Erm... what? That is what happens... if you build something using patented tech, you have to pay the patent holder. If a patent never gets used, nobody ever has to pay 'em anything. All this legal stuff comes from companies saying "What? Patented? This? Nooo no no no, this is erm... erm... this is something else... it's a chicken" and then the nvidia guy holds up a chip and starts making chicken noises pretending all like it's a chicken, which made me even more hungry than talking about chips alone. If what you have to pay for is the use of patented tech, and companies are trying to compete in a price driven market, then it doesn't matter what route the money takes to get to the inventors. Companies are going to try and cut corners.
As for limiting the funds... what if your patented tech took $200bln to develop? Remember that high end silicon stuff is not cheap, we've all seen the pictures from IBM of them moving individual atoms to spell out their name or whatever, that's not just for fun, that's a required step of developing an the scale which next generations of chips 'n stuff are going to require. Think they should be limited to get return on those investments to the level of whoever "invented" the 200+ patents covering a dyson vacuum cleaner?
Totally... but comparable to photos from Hubble? Sure, I guess "not as good as" is a comparison. Living here in Britain I can confirm getting pictures of the sky like that is no easy feat, and are definitely impressive... but there's no way you could achieve anything like Hubble's output, what a silly thing for them to say! I expected better from news outlets than that... haha jk.
"Get ANY of the Rambus patents and build something with it? OK? Failed already?"
Err, yep! I left my design miniaturising laser and silicon fabrication plant in my other trousers.
Erm, you can't play games on an nvidia chip without a whole host of other chips 'n circuitry... does that mean you have patents on nvidia chips, or intel chips, because they are only components in a complete system, not a complete system in themselves? Either components of a complex system are patentable or they're not. If they're not, the only people who can hold the patents will be people like Dell, who put them together to form a working full system. If they are, and rambus technology is a component of the system (or a component of a component of a system, etc), then it gets one too. If you can't build something with it, then nvidia would've had nothing to worry about, as they couldn't possibly have built something that infringed on the patents. They have, so they have, ergo you can.
Not true unless you destroy the time machines before the police get you for the torture. Just because you change the future so you never invent the time machine doesn't mean the ones already in the past will suddenly disappear. Dispite the grandfather paradox, time just doesn't work like that.
You'd end up with a situation where there are just two time machines, found in a time before man kind was ready and able to produce them itself, yet perfectly able to decypher the buttons. Well *rubs hands* I can't see how that could possibly go wrong... so thanks for that, you human hater.
A patent can't cover binary encoding of numbers. It can cover an implentation of the binary encoding of numbers, eg, a particular way of wiring transistors up with capacitors to store the number, which probably has been subjected to many patents in the past that are now expired, and so the information is public domain, widely known, thus "obvious".
I think the problem with rambus wasn't so much the patenting and licensing of their tech, but the amount they wanted for the licensing of the tech, in manys' eyes, was holding technological progress to ransom, which is why those RDRAM based PCs never properly took off like other memory technologies. Memory's hazy tho (mine) and I never looked into it deeply, so I couldn't comment on how warrented such an impression was.
"because I'm first"
No it's not. It's "because I'm first to publish". Patents are about getting information into the public as quickly as possible, by giving a financial/market incentive to whomever does it first. Imagine if companies wanting to keep their techs to themselves and those who pay towards their r&d had to find other ways to keep others out, such as covering all their chips in a substance that would destroy it if you tried to remove it. How much of their r&d budget would have to go into developing that? As much as they spend on lawyers? Perhaps, but this way, at least we get to keep the gunk off the chips we want to put into our laptops, and instead in courtrooms where it belongs.
I can see where you're coming from on the blaming lawyers front, it is very fulfilling, but truth is they are as supply on demand as everything else. Sure, their existance does ensure their continued demand, in that you must hire good lawyers (in the terms of success, not as in good vs evil) to defend against good lawyers, but it's the companies doing this to each other. The lawyers are like expensive weapons, they amplify the damage those using the weapons wish to inflict, and just as in any arms race, where spending more on bigger better weapons helps you defend against others' bigger better weapons, surviving without them when you have a lot to protect and defend lies somewhere between difficult and laughably impossible.
Lawyers don't sue people. People do. Seems silly to blame the weapon for the intent of those holding it. The mistake that you have made here (dumbass;) was in thinking that unlike missiles and bullets, lawyers are people with minds of their own and can choose not to do the things they do, but don't because they lack morals. This is simply not the case. Lawyers aren't people. They're weapons. Just like a child pulled out of an African village to be turned into a weapon and used in a local war, the soul hides away in some darkened corner somewhere and what's left appears only human to the eye, or of course, the dissector's scalpal. The difference being of course, lawyers aren't lawyers through being forced into it, and thus one must conclude the lack of any soul to begin with. Therefore, the moral onus must fall upon those who purchase them for use against other human beings.
You have been enlightened. Enjoy.
Plugs are different in different countries, and the mains voltage varies too... batteries, now they're consistant wherever you go, so by your argument, a battery powered toaster would be the best. Sounds like a pain in the ass if you're a cafe or something and you're going to be making a lot of toast. If you've got a load of four pronged wall sockets around though to use, maybe one of those four pronged *powered* toasters mightn't actually be such a bad idea.
If by "don't like standards" you're implying adverse to them, no I'm not. I'm adverse to the idea of failing to give the best solution just because it's nonstandard. For example, a client of mine was interested in switching to exchange email server. I told him it'd have to be without me, and gave him details of someone else who would support it. He's sticking with me and an open solution. In that instance, what I can implement on top of oss software 'n open standards is by far a better solution for his business, and for me to be providing.
However there is a vaste amount of stuff I've been providing my clients and by proxy, their customers, for many years now, that used features available only in IE. Was this a problem? No, it allowed them to connect with >95% of people who'd come to their site. The loss of the remaining few % was considered to be offset by the increase conversion rate they were getting by making these features available. Other browsers are now starting to implement those features, which is great because they have more of the market now. It's good that there are more choices of software that provide the solutions people wish to use. But the thing you're obviously struggling with the notion of, is that before then, while there was only one piece of software providing the solution, DIDN'T make the PROBLEM go away.
You try telling someone that an implementation for a solution they want to implement for their business or for their customers is waiting standards ratification and so they're going to have to wait three years, because the solution available at the moment doesn't have an ISO number, and you'll be laughed out the place, and someone else will be brought in, quite rightly so.
Technology is not going to stand still for bureaucracy, however much you want it to.
Technology should stand still to give people time to catch up??? Erm, no. Best tool for the job in hand. If Microsoft are the only ones who offer it, I'll use MS. If lots of people offer it, I can use someone else. I'm not going to ignore any options, especially over some illusion of there being an industry standard that's anything more than some academic papers that don't describe reality.
The day all of our problems start following "standards", our solutions will be able to too.