I thought the legal theory was that you couldn't patent an idea but you could copyright the expression of the idea?
Exactly. The written expression of an idea. You copyright it. I read it, take your idea, and write it down in a different way. What I wrote is copyrighted by me. The idea has no legal protection. And the guy who claimed ideas can be copyrighted was voted up by at least three clueless twats.
Ps - I realize that when I say the license is the contract, I'm assuming meeting of the minds. The license contract should be clear about printed renditions, so both parties know what they are agreeing to.
But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well). A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license. For copyrighted works, you would have very few rights if you didn't have a license.
If a right you would wish to have is not mentioned in the license, and you don't have the right by law, then you don't have that right.
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available. If you instead decide to follow the advice of someone who is totally unqualified, that's probably going to point you towards the wrong conclusion. Especially when, as in this case, everything turned out exactly as the experts predicted it would.
There seems to be an enormous distrust to experts in general. First hand experience: When the CSI TV show showed who digital photos could be magnified and give clear pictures in incredible ways, I tried to explain to my wife that this was just absolutely impossible. She wouldn't believe it. It was there on TV, so it had to be true. Never mind that at the time I was actually working in computer graphics, including reading scientific papers how to scale up digital images while making them look slightly less crappy, she wouldn't believe it.
Then she met some woman who was working in IT (never heard what that woman was doing in IT - I suppose helpdesk somewhere), and that woman said what CSI showed didn't work, and she came home and told me that actually photo enhancement as in CSI doesn't work. When I said "that's what I said all the time", she said "no you don't know about these things, but this woman is working in IT so she knows".
ibrahim Balic is apparently responsible for the breach (by his own admission).
What a stupid cunt. He probably thinks it's Ok because he only took information from some developers (that's what he's claiming). Consider this: If you stole information about Google's or Facebook's Apple developer account from Apple's website, what are the chances that these companies sue your ass off?
Actually the source of information was an email that Apple sent out earlier today regarding the situation. I have an iOS developer license so I got the email.
Both the text on the website and the contents of the email are identical, so the only information available is the identical text from the website or from developer emails. And that text was quite precisely and clearly worded: It said "we cannot rule out that some developer data was accessed". That's like me finding that the gate to my garden has been smashed in; at that point I cannot rule out that someone entered my house. If I find no evidence then I still cannot rule out that someone very clever entered my house; I can only rule out at that point that nobody stupid broke in. The alternative wording "some developer data may have been accessed" indicates a much higher likelihood. For example, if my patio door was unlocked I wouldn't say "I cannot rule out that someone entered", I would say "someone may have entered my house".
If the attacker didn't successfully get in why is Apple completely revamping the site? When I ran a small website it got attacked everyday, I can't even imagine how many people try to get into Apple's systems. So what's so different about this one? Something doesn't add up.
You don't just "get in successfully". A good website has multiple protections, and Apple's developer website should be the most protected website ever. So someone got past one protection level. Most likely no success at all, but it means the defence is now weaker than before. Result: A complete revamp that closes the way to get past _one_ protection.
Either these guys at CNet can't read, or they make it up as they go. CNet writes in its article "Apple says its developer site was targeted in an attack, and that any information that was taken was encrypted. ".
No, that's not what Apple says. Apple didn't say any data was taken, encrypted or not. Apple said the data that was targetted (not the same as "taken") was "securely encrypted".
The only source of information about this is what Apple says when you try to go to the iOS or Mac developer centre, which was correctly quoted by the article. Note that there is no mention that any intruder did actually get any access to anything, as the summary suggests. It says that someone _tried_ to access developers' information, that all this information is encrypted, but they can't rule out someone's information was accessed. Quite a difference.
More on topic: This whole thing with pardoning just Alan Turing because he happened to be a genius and helped to win a war makes me want to puke. If the law and the resulting persecution was wrong they should be apologizing and pardoning every single person who was ever prosecuted under that law. Not just Turing. What, those 49,000 others aren't good enough for a pardon? They weren't genius enough to earn an apology for being persecuted? Give me a break. If it was wrong, it was wrong. Otherwise it's just favoritism.
Alan Turing did indeed a lot to help win the war, and at the time he was convicted it wasn't known. Not to the judge, and while whoever would have been responsible for a pardon might have known, his role in the war would have been top secret. Imagine back in 1955 it had been common knowledge that Turing was singlehandedly responsible for saving thousands of British lives. Would he have been pardoned, or should he have been pardoned? You call it "favoritism", but it really isn't. It would have been deserved.
I really don't think it is wrong to pardon someone because he was a not just a war hero, but in fact responsible for saving thousands of lives. Should he be treated better than for example someone he spent the war time looting bombed houses? I think so.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that these companies have future revenues and payouts that justify their exhorbitant prices?
Look at Apple's share price, their cash, and their annual profits. Shares are worth about cash + 5 1/2 years of current profits. I'd say that is badly undervalued.
Or more to the point Microsoft wrote down $900million a few days ago and now magically their value is $30billion lower?
It's not the $900 million writeoff alone. There was an assumption that Microsoft could enter the tablet market, and maybe make a billion this year, two billions next year, and three billions every year after. And this assumption was proven to be false.
There was generally the assumption that whenever the PC market stops to make good amounts of money (and it starts making less), Microsoft would be able to adapt and use its expertise to enter different markets and make money there. That now seems a lot less likely. So if you take the long term view, and you must for stock investments, Microsoft now looks a lot worse than a few days ago. $30 billion worse.
The harsh truth is, the experience of reading eBooks STILL basically sucks. 80% of that reason? They're too goddamn slow for random-access reading of technical books.
What you say is rather bizarre. I read books in ePub on an iPad. I also looked at how it works. An ePub book is just a zip file containing the chapters of the book as files in in xhtml format. A zip file allows random access to each file. The xhtml is displayed using Webkit. It's just like displaying any old website. Nothing slow about this.
They're not just throwing stuff and seeing what sticks; it's more insidious than that --- back when they explained the reason for removing the start menu -- they were showing data using the customer improvement program; about how the start menu is rarely ever used.
Fact is that people don't use it _often_: Once to start each program, once to shut down the computer. That's not often. The problem is that these very few uses are absolutely essential to the user.
Changing the protocol made the cryptanalysis method unusable, but the real damage was done at that point.
Before WWII started, Enigma was used with the same settings for a month. After gathering about 80 encrypted messages, with only the knowledge that each message started with the letters XYZXYZ for three unknown letters X, Y, and Z, and with a bit of espionage to discover the plug connections (something that a cleaner might have written down if the machine wasn't carefully hidden away), it was possible to actually reverse engineer the internal wiring of the three rotor wheels used. Without that knowledge, any decryption would have been completely impossible.
OpenCL or CUDA is a real pain, and a lot to learn. But any modern Intel quad core processor can deliver 50 billion floating point operations per second if you treat it right.
Use C or C++ with the Clang compiler (gcc will do fine as well probably) and vector extensions. Newer Intel processors have 256 bit vector registers, so you can define vector types with 32 8-bit integers, 16 16-bit integers, 8 32-bit integers or 8 single precision floating point numbers, or 4 double precision floating point numbers. You can do two operations with such vectors per cycle if you take care about latency. And on a more expensive processor, you can run 8 threads in parallel.
If 50 billion floating point operations per second is enough, then you're fine. And if you can't manage to produce 50 billion FLOPS/sec in C or C++, then you don't even need to try OpenCL.
These individuals (at the moment) are not trained and have no oversight. So when the thefts and such start occurring, you have zero recourse and absolutely no hope of resolution.
My suggestion would be an introduction of laws that make theft by anyone authorised to make searches a crime that is punished much more than ordinary theft. Let's say if a police officer with a search warrant enters your house (legally) and steals money from their home, they should be automatically punished a lot harder than a burglar doing the same thing. Same for someone searching luggage at an airport. Lots of one-handed TSA employees on the airport who got caught once; when you're caught twice you lose your job as well.
To be fair, Apple also does this a lot. But Apple seems to have developed some kind of religious following where even when they do something that utterly pisses everyone off, their followers truely seem to believe that Apple knows best. MS wishes they could command that kind of following, but they just can't.
It seems you still haven't understood how Apple has been working in the last 15 years. Putting "Apple" and "religion" together shows that you have no idea how good software and hardware design works.
...or sell them at a stupidly low price? Why "sit" on a stockpile of rapidly depreciating tech? If the price were less than half the price of an iPad they would sell easily. What Microsoft need just now is market penetration. With enough users the apps and accessories will sell, and then the developers will come once there's sufficient volume to make actual money, and THEN they can think about profiting off the NEXT generation, but for now they need to admit this one is a bust and almost give them away. Currently an iPad is what £350.....the Surface tablet would have to be at £100 to tempt me....
If you give them away or sell them cheap, there is no going back. You removed yourself from the market. Nobody is ever going to buy from you at the "normal" price again. Even with the price reduction that Microsoft has done they'll get in trouble, because they can't sell ever again for a higher price. And I'm sure building a Surface costs Microsoft as much or more as it costs Apple to build an iPad, so that price reduction is basically all profit gone.
An app which refuses to acknowledge the possibility that it might be denied permission, is an app you should not use. It's really trivial to handle, especially for a non-critical app feature.
For example, an app that wants to read my address book must expect and handle the case that my address book is absolutely empty. Or an app wanting my location must handle the case that the iPhone doesn't know its location, because WiFi is turned off and GPS has no reception.
On the other hand, as a developer I should be told the reason why there is no data. I might want display an error message if the phone can't give me its location because the GPS doesn't work, but no error message if the user refused to allow me access to the location.
These large corporations are claiming to have the people's interests in mind, yet they are only asking for a very narrow change that really doesn't affect the status quo. If they really are concerned with the extent of the surveillance, why don't they use their extensive lobbying clout to propose actual changes to the laws that would require transparency to the entire process starting with requiring judicial approval for any monitoring.
Right now, these companies are blamed for the rumored amount of monitoring. They want to be blamed for the true amount of monitoring instead. Reducing the amount of monitoring doesn't help them, if the rumors stay the same. And you don't know how much or little they have pushed back on monitoring, because they are not allowed to tell you, and they want permission to tell you.
This is PR damage-control, nothing else. They're trying to create the impression they were unwilling accomplices.
What exactly would you do if you were the CEO of Google, Apple or Microsoft, if you cared about your users' rights, at least when violating your users' rights gives you no benefits and if rumors about these violations hurt your company, and you didn't have any intention to go to jail?
Yeah, this doesnt seem like exciting news to me at all. Dual-licensing it to get it in the app store is a failure, not a victory. If the app store isnt compatible with GPL software, then the app store shouldnt be getting access to GPL software. Dual-licensing to work around Apples error seems actively counterproductive to me.
The question is not whether the app store is compatible with GPL software. The question is whether a copyright holder asks Apple to remove the software. It's a DMCA notice, and when Apple gets a DMCA notice, they take it down. The strange thing is that on Slashdot a DMCA takedown notice is considered a dick move - unless it is about GPL licensed software taken down from the app store.
The UI layer is MPL, but the actual guts of the app is libVLC which is not rewritten and licensed under LGPL. So, unless they rewrote that and I missed it I don't see how they can be in the clear.
They are in the clear as long as none of the copyright holders complains to Apple and demands that the app is removed. And once one of the copyright holders complains, it doesn't matter whether the app store is compatible with GPL or not, because Apple will remove it when asked to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the legal theory was that you couldn't patent an idea but you could copyright the expression of the idea?
Exactly. The written expression of an idea. You copyright it. I read it, take your idea, and write it down in a different way. What I wrote is copyrighted by me. The idea has no legal protection. And the guy who claimed ideas can be copyrighted was voted up by at least three clueless twats.
Ps - I realize that when I say the license is the contract, I'm assuming meeting of the minds. The license contract should be clear about printed renditions, so both parties know what they are agreeing to.
But a license is _not_ a contract (not in US law; it may be in other places but there usually all the other laws are different as well). A license is something that gives you certain rights that you wouldn't have without a license. For copyrighted works, you would have very few rights if you didn't have a license.
If a right you would wish to have is not mentioned in the license, and you don't have the right by law, then you don't have that right.
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available. If you instead decide to follow the advice of someone who is totally unqualified, that's probably going to point you towards the wrong conclusion. Especially when, as in this case, everything turned out exactly as the experts predicted it would.
There seems to be an enormous distrust to experts in general. First hand experience: When the CSI TV show showed who digital photos could be magnified and give clear pictures in incredible ways, I tried to explain to my wife that this was just absolutely impossible. She wouldn't believe it. It was there on TV, so it had to be true. Never mind that at the time I was actually working in computer graphics, including reading scientific papers how to scale up digital images while making them look slightly less crappy, she wouldn't believe it.
Then she met some woman who was working in IT (never heard what that woman was doing in IT - I suppose helpdesk somewhere), and that woman said what CSI showed didn't work, and she came home and told me that actually photo enhancement as in CSI doesn't work. When I said "that's what I said all the time", she said "no you don't know about these things, but this woman is working in IT so she knows".
ibrahim Balic is apparently responsible for the breach (by his own admission).
What a stupid cunt. He probably thinks it's Ok because he only took information from some developers (that's what he's claiming). Consider this: If you stole information about Google's or Facebook's Apple developer account from Apple's website, what are the chances that these companies sue your ass off?
Actually the source of information was an email that Apple sent out earlier today regarding the situation. I have an iOS developer license so I got the email.
Both the text on the website and the contents of the email are identical, so the only information available is the identical text from the website or from developer emails. And that text was quite precisely and clearly worded: It said "we cannot rule out that some developer data was accessed". That's like me finding that the gate to my garden has been smashed in; at that point I cannot rule out that someone entered my house. If I find no evidence then I still cannot rule out that someone very clever entered my house; I can only rule out at that point that nobody stupid broke in. The alternative wording "some developer data may have been accessed" indicates a much higher likelihood. For example, if my patio door was unlocked I wouldn't say "I cannot rule out that someone entered", I would say "someone may have entered my house".
If the attacker didn't successfully get in why is Apple completely revamping the site? When I ran a small website it got attacked everyday, I can't even imagine how many people try to get into Apple's systems. So what's so different about this one? Something doesn't add up.
You don't just "get in successfully". A good website has multiple protections, and Apple's developer website should be the most protected website ever. So someone got past one protection level. Most likely no success at all, but it means the defence is now weaker than before. Result: A complete revamp that closes the way to get past _one_ protection.
Either these guys at CNet can't read, or they make it up as they go. CNet writes in its article "Apple says its developer site was targeted in an attack, and that any information that was taken was encrypted. ".
No, that's not what Apple says. Apple didn't say any data was taken, encrypted or not. Apple said the data that was targetted (not the same as "taken") was "securely encrypted".
The only source of information about this is what Apple says when you try to go to the iOS or Mac developer centre, which was correctly quoted by the article. Note that there is no mention that any intruder did actually get any access to anything, as the summary suggests. It says that someone _tried_ to access developers' information, that all this information is encrypted, but they can't rule out someone's information was accessed. Quite a difference.
More likely the NSA installing more spyware backdoors.
Bloody idiot.
More on topic: This whole thing with pardoning just Alan Turing because he happened to be a genius and helped to win a war makes me want to puke. If the law and the resulting persecution was wrong they should be apologizing and pardoning every single person who was ever prosecuted under that law. Not just Turing. What, those 49,000 others aren't good enough for a pardon? They weren't genius enough to earn an apology for being persecuted? Give me a break. If it was wrong, it was wrong. Otherwise it's just favoritism.
Alan Turing did indeed a lot to help win the war, and at the time he was convicted it wasn't known. Not to the judge, and while whoever would have been responsible for a pardon might have known, his role in the war would have been top secret. Imagine back in 1955 it had been common knowledge that Turing was singlehandedly responsible for saving thousands of British lives. Would he have been pardoned, or should he have been pardoned? You call it "favoritism", but it really isn't. It would have been deserved.
I really don't think it is wrong to pardon someone because he was a not just a war hero, but in fact responsible for saving thousands of lives. Should he be treated better than for example someone he spent the war time looting bombed houses? I think so.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that these companies have future revenues and payouts that justify their exhorbitant prices?
Look at Apple's share price, their cash, and their annual profits. Shares are worth about cash + 5 1/2 years of current profits. I'd say that is badly undervalued.
Or more to the point Microsoft wrote down $900million a few days ago and now magically their value is $30billion lower?
It's not the $900 million writeoff alone. There was an assumption that Microsoft could enter the tablet market, and maybe make a billion this year, two billions next year, and three billions every year after. And this assumption was proven to be false.
There was generally the assumption that whenever the PC market stops to make good amounts of money (and it starts making less), Microsoft would be able to adapt and use its expertise to enter different markets and make money there. That now seems a lot less likely. So if you take the long term view, and you must for stock investments, Microsoft now looks a lot worse than a few days ago. $30 billion worse.
The harsh truth is, the experience of reading eBooks STILL basically sucks. 80% of that reason? They're too goddamn slow for random-access reading of technical books.
What you say is rather bizarre. I read books in ePub on an iPad. I also looked at how it works. An ePub book is just a zip file containing the chapters of the book as files in in xhtml format. A zip file allows random access to each file. The xhtml is displayed using Webkit. It's just like displaying any old website. Nothing slow about this.
They're not just throwing stuff and seeing what sticks; it's more insidious than that --- back when they explained the reason for removing the start menu -- they were showing data using the customer improvement program; about how the start menu is rarely ever used.
Fact is that people don't use it _often_: Once to start each program, once to shut down the computer. That's not often. The problem is that these very few uses are absolutely essential to the user.
Changing the protocol made the cryptanalysis method unusable, but the real damage was done at that point.
Before WWII started, Enigma was used with the same settings for a month. After gathering about 80 encrypted messages, with only the knowledge that each message started with the letters XYZXYZ for three unknown letters X, Y, and Z, and with a bit of espionage to discover the plug connections (something that a cleaner might have written down if the machine wasn't carefully hidden away), it was possible to actually reverse engineer the internal wiring of the three rotor wheels used. Without that knowledge, any decryption would have been completely impossible.
OpenCL or CUDA is a real pain, and a lot to learn. But any modern Intel quad core processor can deliver 50 billion floating point operations per second if you treat it right.
Use C or C++ with the Clang compiler (gcc will do fine as well probably) and vector extensions. Newer Intel processors have 256 bit vector registers, so you can define vector types with 32 8-bit integers, 16 16-bit integers, 8 32-bit integers or 8 single precision floating point numbers, or 4 double precision floating point numbers. You can do two operations with such vectors per cycle if you take care about latency. And on a more expensive processor, you can run 8 threads in parallel.
If 50 billion floating point operations per second is enough, then you're fine. And if you can't manage to produce 50 billion FLOPS/sec in C or C++, then you don't even need to try OpenCL.
These individuals (at the moment) are not trained and have no oversight. So when the thefts and such start occurring, you have zero recourse and absolutely no hope of resolution.
My suggestion would be an introduction of laws that make theft by anyone authorised to make searches a crime that is punished much more than ordinary theft. Let's say if a police officer with a search warrant enters your house (legally) and steals money from their home, they should be automatically punished a lot harder than a burglar doing the same thing. Same for someone searching luggage at an airport. Lots of one-handed TSA employees on the airport who got caught once; when you're caught twice you lose your job as well.
To be fair, Apple also does this a lot. But Apple seems to have developed some kind of religious following where even when they do something that utterly pisses everyone off, their followers truely seem to believe that Apple knows best. MS wishes they could command that kind of following, but they just can't.
It seems you still haven't understood how Apple has been working in the last 15 years. Putting "Apple" and "religion" together shows that you have no idea how good software and hardware design works.
What's surprising to me is the sheer scale of the failure - they have almost one billion dollars worth of inventory sitting around.
I feel for them. Maybe it helps if Apple invests $150,000,000 in non-voting stock.
...or sell them at a stupidly low price? Why "sit" on a stockpile of rapidly depreciating tech? If the price were less than half the price of an iPad they would sell easily. What Microsoft need just now is market penetration. With enough users the apps and accessories will sell, and then the developers will come once there's sufficient volume to make actual money, and THEN they can think about profiting off the NEXT generation, but for now they need to admit this one is a bust and almost give them away. Currently an iPad is what £350.....the Surface tablet would have to be at £100 to tempt me....
If you give them away or sell them cheap, there is no going back. You removed yourself from the market. Nobody is ever going to buy from you at the "normal" price again. Even with the price reduction that Microsoft has done they'll get in trouble, because they can't sell ever again for a higher price. And I'm sure building a Surface costs Microsoft as much or more as it costs Apple to build an iPad, so that price reduction is basically all profit gone.
An app which refuses to acknowledge the possibility that it might be denied permission, is an app you should not use. It's really trivial to handle, especially for a non-critical app feature.
For example, an app that wants to read my address book must expect and handle the case that my address book is absolutely empty. Or an app wanting my location must handle the case that the iPhone doesn't know its location, because WiFi is turned off and GPS has no reception.
On the other hand, as a developer I should be told the reason why there is no data. I might want display an error message if the phone can't give me its location because the GPS doesn't work, but no error message if the user refused to allow me access to the location.
These large corporations are claiming to have the people's interests in mind, yet they are only asking for a very narrow change that really doesn't affect the status quo. If they really are concerned with the extent of the surveillance, why don't they use their extensive lobbying clout to propose actual changes to the laws that would require transparency to the entire process starting with requiring judicial approval for any monitoring.
Right now, these companies are blamed for the rumored amount of monitoring. They want to be blamed for the true amount of monitoring instead. Reducing the amount of monitoring doesn't help them, if the rumors stay the same. And you don't know how much or little they have pushed back on monitoring, because they are not allowed to tell you, and they want permission to tell you.
This is PR damage-control, nothing else. They're trying to create the impression they were unwilling accomplices.
What exactly would you do if you were the CEO of Google, Apple or Microsoft, if you cared about your users' rights, at least when violating your users' rights gives you no benefits and if rumors about these violations hurt your company, and you didn't have any intention to go to jail?
Yeah, this doesnt seem like exciting news to me at all. Dual-licensing it to get it in the app store is a failure, not a victory. If the app store isnt compatible with GPL software, then the app store shouldnt be getting access to GPL software. Dual-licensing to work around Apples error seems actively counterproductive to me.
The question is not whether the app store is compatible with GPL software. The question is whether a copyright holder asks Apple to remove the software. It's a DMCA notice, and when Apple gets a DMCA notice, they take it down. The strange thing is that on Slashdot a DMCA takedown notice is considered a dick move - unless it is about GPL licensed software taken down from the app store.
The UI layer is MPL, but the actual guts of the app is libVLC which is not rewritten and licensed under LGPL. So, unless they rewrote that and I missed it I don't see how they can be in the clear.
They are in the clear as long as none of the copyright holders complains to Apple and demands that the app is removed. And once one of the copyright holders complains, it doesn't matter whether the app store is compatible with GPL or not, because Apple will remove it when asked to do so.