I never said he did "break in". But clearly he copied 114,000 email addresses that he shouldn't have copied. As a "journalist" (that's what the article says; I doubt it) did _not_ say: "I felt like I was watching a trial with a defendant who admitted he doesn't understand the law". Or common decent behaviour. Or the fact that just because you figure out how to do something, doing it might still not be a good idea.
I suppose the prosecutors figured out that Auernheimer managed to lay his hands on over 100,000 email addresses that iPad owners had used to register their devices. So not random email addresses, but email addresses that were in actual use, and with some rather significant personal information attached.
So what exactly do they need to understand about computers beyond that?
If all nerds stay in their basements, then you're right, but...
There is a world out there and patent trolls influence the great work we nerds do.
So if one is going down, we celebrate and drink a root beer.
You should return your geek credentials. Prenda is not a patent troll. Read about what they were doing and notice there are no patents involved whatsoever.
Yes, but that diesel does not keep up with the gasoline engine. I looked into this in the past, and to get equivalent performance, the difference seems to average about $5000. Even then, the engine will end up being heavier, which will affect handling. And obviously the highest-powered gasoline engines have no diesel equivalent.
I think you have some misconceptions what "equivalent" engines are. Diesel engines work differently. If you take a typical 100hp Diesel engine and a typical 150hp petrol engine, you can bet that the Diesel engine will give you more acceleration over a huge speed range.
I like this idea. You can't make it legal to unlock phones, but you can probably make it illegal to sell locked phones in the first place. I already stated elsewhere in these comments that it's unnecessary to lock phones in the first place since there's already a contract with fees for breaking it, and the have the technological capability to blacklist phones that are still under a contract.
Unlocking phones is not the problem; unlocking it by circumventing DRM is the problem. If the manufacturer or carrier unlocks it, they are not circumventing anything. So this treaty may make it impossible to allow _you_ to unlock your phone by circumventing DRM, but the carrier can unlock it, and a law that _requires_ the carrier to unlock your phone wouldn't be against this treaty either.
Google grabbed (small bites of) data out of the air that had been broadcast on unencrypted channels, in the process of collecting potentially useful information about networks broadcasting their SSIDs. When confronted by authorities Google investigated the allegations, found them to be true, and cooperated in isolating and destroying the data collected.
Google grabbed _intentionally_. Someone thought it was a good idea to do this and wrote the code to achieve it. Next, Google did not cooperate. That's part of what the fine is for. They were supposed to delete everything and didn't.
People should take responsibility for their actions. Companies are considered persons, so they need to take responsibility for their actions as well. So far the posters here deny that principle.
Where the comparison is breaking down: It was apparently one guy in the Aaron Swartz household, and one guy in the Google company, who thought it was a good idea to get data that they shouldn't have (although in the Google case, many people ended up collection data that they shouldn't have). If you have a company with 10,000 employees, and one employee costs you 20% of a days profit, that multiplied by 10,000 would be 5000 days profit, which is a lot. (But then again, it _was_ more than one employee collecting data because one guy wrote the code).
What really annoys me is the trend to use speed bumps in these areas instead of cameras. You end up in a situation where someone in a large 4wd SUV drives through at 50mph but someone with a compact car has to slow to 20. I know people who have actually switched to a larger vehicle because of speed bumps.
Most so-called SUVs are just big but in no way capable of driving fast over speed bumps. When I go through my village and there is an SUV in front of me, I know it will take a _long_ time. I know one place where people tend to speed, and there is one nasty speed bump all alone. When someone drives aggressively too close behind me, I accelerate quite a bit, move to the other lane, brake hard just in front of that speed bump and watch them flying:-)
Yes. If you are going fast enough that if the light changed you wouldn't be able to go through it before it turns red, and you wouldn't be able to stop before the line then you are driving too fast for the current conditions.
If you are driving too fast for the current conditions then you should slow down. That may involve braking.
That's only the case if the time between changing to yellow and red is long enough. If the time is so short that someone going at correct speed for the conditions who cannot stop at the line will pass through red, then the time is too short and the whole thing is a scam.
...were I to own an Apple device, it would be like living in North Korea?
You are confused. It's Samsung, and it's not North Korea, it's South Korea. Apple devices make you feel like Southern California. Which is on an altogether different continent on the other side of the world.
I believe that the claim is that the GPL (both v2 and v3) say you can't add additional licensing restrictions on end users when you distribute it, which distributing via the App Store does [as you have to agree to Apple's licensing terms to download apps].
I think it is more complicated. I think copyright allows you to do almost nothing, and a license gives you rights to do things. Like the GPL license gives you the right to do certain things, the App Store license gives you different rights. To distribute through the App Store, a developer must agree that anyone downloading from the App Store will have (at least) the rights that Apple states; if the developer has their own license that gives more rights, the user will have those rights as well.
Clearly Apple will not help you to exercise the rights that GPL would give you, but I don't see why they have to.
I was of the understanding that the reason Firefox hasn't been ported to iOS because it is open source. Same reason that VLC got yoinked from the App Store. Since there is no method to distribute the source from the same location as the finished product, it violates the F/OSS nature of the product.
That's quite clueless. All MacOS X and iOS apps are stored in "bundles", which are basically directories with a flag that tells the OS to show them to the user as one unit. You can put _anything_ into a bundle. Including the complete source code. So it is quite easy to distribute the source code to _everybody_ downloading the app, without giving them even the choice to get it.
VLC was pulled because one of the developers of one of the libraries that it uses threatened to sue Apple, so Apple pulled it. Whether distribution on the App Store is a GPL violation is an open question, but clearly Apple is right to respect the wishes of the copyright holder (whether they are required to do so legally or not).
In fact, if you read the article, "SSL Labs, a report card system from security firm Qualys that rates the quality of websites' HTTPS protections, gives Apple's App Store a failing grade" despite the update.
$125 for one ISBN is only "very expensive" when you consider that ten ISBNs is $250. There are plenty of people who are willing to sell you an extra ISBN for cheap.
I had a look at UK prices, and the price structure is not quite what the article suggests.
In the UK, you can buy blocks of 10, 100, or 1000. The first purchase is more expensive. You basically pay £50 to become part of their system, plus £70 for 10 ISBNs, so £120 for the first purchase, £70 for the next etc. 100 ISBNs cost about £220 (plus £50 if that is your first purchase), 1000 ISBNs cost about £700. I suppose the US pricing structure will be similar. All in all I'd call it a small annoyance if you want to publish your own book, but no big deal really.
If it really had been a bug, it would rule out any and all uses of MS software in any professional environment if things this crass could slip through testing. They definitely cannot. Not even at MS.
I'm sure it was a bug. I fully agree with the rest of your sentence:-) (For the fine, it wouldn't make a difference. The were ordered to do something, and unless Microsoft could come up with some reasoning why it was impossible to comply, all that matters is their non-compliance. )
And I'm not saying don't hit MS hard. But this is 732 Million dollars for a browser infraction. At a time where the reality is the citizens of Europe do not have a broswer monopoly problem. Its fucking lunacy.
Not really. Microsoft was found guilty a while ago, a fine was calculated, and the fine was reduced because Microsoft agreed to do certain things. They didn't, so they have to pay the additional fine.
It doesn't matter that the actual problem has gone away. There are many people in jail for murder who haven't killed anyone for many years.
It's WAY more anticompetitive than anything Microsoft has done recently.
How would that be? Competitors for iPhones are for example Samsung phones. Is Samsung hurt in any way, especially in any illegal way, if Apple doesn't allow you to install different browsers on an iPhone?
Look up Apples two year warranty obligations under EU law. They really, really, really don't like it and make the customer believe it's only one year.
That's because Apple has no warranty obligations under EU law for the devices it produces. It has obligations for devices that it sells to consumers, and that would include cameras, hard drives, cables etc. that you buy from Apple that are not made by Apple. Whoever sells you a product made by anyone, including Apple, has obligations towards you.
Let me repeat that: The manufacturer has no obligations. The shop selling to the consumer has.
This makes a pretty clear statement. "When you agree to do stuff - you'd better do it. It might even be worth paying someone on your staff (perhaps in the audit/compliance dept) to do a check once a month to make sure you are keeping your promises."
One full time employee doing nothing but checking for this compliance would have been an awful lot cheaper than paying the fine.
Frightening thought: If Microsoft actually realised this as well and _did_ hire one person to do nothing but check compliance with this one judgement (should be an easy job), someone has lost their job now.
Mac hardware sucks compared to the PC. A PC running OSX on a virtual machine is better than a Mac and cheaper.
Once you don't compare "cheapest PC" vs. "cheapest Mac", but "the Mac I want" vs. "a PC with the same specs, bought from a reputable company", the Mac hardware will beat most PCs of the same price.
A PC running MacOS X on a virtual machine is running unlicensed software. First, it is running a modified VM that you probably had no right to modify, second it runs an unlicensed copy of MacOS X that has just enough copy prevention built in to make it a DMCA violation.
1. The 68000 instruction set changed considerably. Around the 68020 Motorola went bonkers making it CISCier all the time. Around 68060 time all the real CISCy stuff was again deprecated and ran sloooooow so you just didn't use it.
2. The 68881/2 didn't support 64 bit floating-point math. They did IEEE 80-bit floating point. Like the x87 coprocessors.
There are currently more manufacturers of 3.5" Floppy drives, than of Harddisks. There's 3 left. Count them WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.
That was initially surprising, but the reason is probably that there is zero development cost involved with 3.5" Floppy drives. They can use the same machines to build them ten years from now if there is any demand. With a hard drive, try selling a current hard drive two years from now, not a chance against the competition. So staying in the HD business is expensive.
An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.
I think your maths is way off. Any old 5400 rpm drive will easily read/write 30 MB/sec or 240 Mb/sec on the innermost and slowest tracks. That's recording two 20 MBit/second channels, playing back one, and encoding another one, and then having 2/3rds of capacity unused. And do you actually have a PVR that encodes stuff?
So other than "It can run OS-X" what are you getting with a ton o' minis?
You can give every customer their own separate computer. Which means there is no risk, real or perceived, that someone else's VM running on the same server might escape and get at your VM. Depending on your business, that might be a requirement.
Does that mean I could run a recent Intel only OS-X on my powerpc eMac on top of FreeBSD and an emulator?
Maybe I should write "crawl" instead of "run", but I'm sure you get the idea.
Perfectly legal. If you can run it on an x86 emulator on a 1984 Mac or even an Apple II, it would be legally fine. Requirement is "Apple branded hardware". For 10.6, "Apple labeled hardware". I suppose that means Apple Corps (the Beatles record company) can't run 10.7 or 10.8 on their home-built computers with an Apple label on them.
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I never said he did "break in". But clearly he copied 114,000 email addresses that he shouldn't have copied. As a "journalist" (that's what the article says; I doubt it) did _not_ say: "I felt like I was watching a trial with a defendant who admitted he doesn't understand the law". Or common decent behaviour. Or the fact that just because you figure out how to do something, doing it might still not be a good idea.
I suppose the prosecutors figured out that Auernheimer managed to lay his hands on over 100,000 email addresses that iPad owners had used to register their devices. So not random email addresses, but email addresses that were in actual use, and with some rather significant personal information attached.
So what exactly do they need to understand about computers beyond that?
If all nerds stay in their basements, then you're right, but...
There is a world out there and patent trolls influence the great work we nerds do.
So if one is going down, we celebrate and drink a root beer.
You should return your geek credentials. Prenda is not a patent troll. Read about what they were doing and notice there are no patents involved whatsoever.
Yes, but that diesel does not keep up with the gasoline engine. I looked into this in the past, and to get equivalent performance, the difference seems to average about $5000. Even then, the engine will end up being heavier, which will affect handling. And obviously the highest-powered gasoline engines have no diesel equivalent.
I think you have some misconceptions what "equivalent" engines are. Diesel engines work differently. If you take a typical 100hp Diesel engine and a typical 150hp petrol engine, you can bet that the Diesel engine will give you more acceleration over a huge speed range.
I like this idea. You can't make it legal to unlock phones, but you can probably make it illegal to sell locked phones in the first place. I already stated elsewhere in these comments that it's unnecessary to lock phones in the first place since there's already a contract with fees for breaking it, and the have the technological capability to blacklist phones that are still under a contract.
Unlocking phones is not the problem; unlocking it by circumventing DRM is the problem. If the manufacturer or carrier unlocks it, they are not circumventing anything. So this treaty may make it impossible to allow _you_ to unlock your phone by circumventing DRM, but the carrier can unlock it, and a law that _requires_ the carrier to unlock your phone wouldn't be against this treaty either.
Google grabbed (small bites of) data out of the air that had been broadcast on unencrypted channels, in the process of collecting potentially useful information about networks broadcasting their SSIDs. When confronted by authorities Google investigated the allegations, found them to be true, and cooperated in isolating and destroying the data collected.
Google grabbed _intentionally_. Someone thought it was a good idea to do this and wrote the code to achieve it. Next, Google did not cooperate. That's part of what the fine is for. They were supposed to delete everything and didn't.
People should take responsibility for their actions. Companies are considered persons, so they need to take responsibility for their actions as well. So far the posters here deny that principle.
Where the comparison is breaking down: It was apparently one guy in the Aaron Swartz household, and one guy in the Google company, who thought it was a good idea to get data that they shouldn't have (although in the Google case, many people ended up collection data that they shouldn't have). If you have a company with 10,000 employees, and one employee costs you 20% of a days profit, that multiplied by 10,000 would be 5000 days profit, which is a lot. (But then again, it _was_ more than one employee collecting data because one guy wrote the code).
What really annoys me is the trend to use speed bumps in these areas instead of cameras. You end up in a situation where someone in a large 4wd SUV drives through at 50mph but someone with a compact car has to slow to 20. I know people who have actually switched to a larger vehicle because of speed bumps.
Most so-called SUVs are just big but in no way capable of driving fast over speed bumps. When I go through my village and there is an SUV in front of me, I know it will take a _long_ time. I know one place where people tend to speed, and there is one nasty speed bump all alone. When someone drives aggressively too close behind me, I accelerate quite a bit, move to the other lane, brake hard just in front of that speed bump and watch them flying :-)
Yes. If you are going fast enough that if the light changed you wouldn't be able to go through it before it turns red, and you wouldn't be able to stop before the line then you are driving too fast for the current conditions.
If you are driving too fast for the current conditions then you should slow down. That may involve braking.
That's only the case if the time between changing to yellow and red is long enough. If the time is so short that someone going at correct speed for the conditions who cannot stop at the line will pass through red, then the time is too short and the whole thing is a scam.
...were I to own an Apple device, it would be like living in North Korea?
You are confused. It's Samsung, and it's not North Korea, it's South Korea. Apple devices make you feel like Southern California. Which is on an altogether different continent on the other side of the world.
I believe that the claim is that the GPL (both v2 and v3) say you can't add additional licensing restrictions on end users when you distribute it, which distributing via the App Store does [as you have to agree to Apple's licensing terms to download apps].
I think it is more complicated. I think copyright allows you to do almost nothing, and a license gives you rights to do things. Like the GPL license gives you the right to do certain things, the App Store license gives you different rights. To distribute through the App Store, a developer must agree that anyone downloading from the App Store will have (at least) the rights that Apple states; if the developer has their own license that gives more rights, the user will have those rights as well.
Clearly Apple will not help you to exercise the rights that GPL would give you, but I don't see why they have to.
I was of the understanding that the reason Firefox hasn't been ported to iOS because it is open source. Same reason that VLC got yoinked from the App Store. Since there is no method to distribute the source from the same location as the finished product, it violates the F/OSS nature of the product.
That's quite clueless. All MacOS X and iOS apps are stored in "bundles", which are basically directories with a flag that tells the OS to show them to the user as one unit. You can put _anything_ into a bundle. Including the complete source code. So it is quite easy to distribute the source code to _everybody_ downloading the app, without giving them even the choice to get it.
VLC was pulled because one of the developers of one of the libraries that it uses threatened to sue Apple, so Apple pulled it. Whether distribution on the App Store is a GPL violation is an open question, but clearly Apple is right to respect the wishes of the copyright holder (whether they are required to do so legally or not).
In fact, if you read the article, "SSL Labs, a report card system from security firm Qualys that rates the quality of websites' HTTPS protections, gives Apple's App Store a failing grade" despite the update.
And what exactly does that mean?
$125 for one ISBN is only "very expensive" when you consider that ten ISBNs is $250. There are plenty of people who are willing to sell you an extra ISBN for cheap.
I had a look at UK prices, and the price structure is not quite what the article suggests.
In the UK, you can buy blocks of 10, 100, or 1000. The first purchase is more expensive. You basically pay £50 to become part of their system, plus £70 for 10 ISBNs, so £120 for the first purchase, £70 for the next etc. 100 ISBNs cost about £220 (plus £50 if that is your first purchase), 1000 ISBNs cost about £700. I suppose the US pricing structure will be similar. All in all I'd call it a small annoyance if you want to publish your own book, but no big deal really.
If it really had been a bug, it would rule out any and all uses of MS software in any professional environment if things this crass could slip through testing. They definitely cannot. Not even at MS.
I'm sure it was a bug. I fully agree with the rest of your sentence :-) (For the fine, it wouldn't make a difference. The were ordered to do something, and unless Microsoft could come up with some reasoning why it was impossible to comply, all that matters is their non-compliance. )
And I'm not saying don't hit MS hard. But this is 732 Million dollars for a browser infraction. At a time where the reality is the citizens of Europe do not have a broswer monopoly problem. Its fucking lunacy.
Not really. Microsoft was found guilty a while ago, a fine was calculated, and the fine was reduced because Microsoft agreed to do certain things. They didn't, so they have to pay the additional fine.
It doesn't matter that the actual problem has gone away. There are many people in jail for murder who haven't killed anyone for many years.
It's WAY more anticompetitive than anything Microsoft has done recently.
How would that be? Competitors for iPhones are for example Samsung phones. Is Samsung hurt in any way, especially in any illegal way, if Apple doesn't allow you to install different browsers on an iPhone?
Look up Apples two year warranty obligations under EU law. They really, really, really don't like it and make the customer believe it's only one year.
That's because Apple has no warranty obligations under EU law for the devices it produces. It has obligations for devices that it sells to consumers, and that would include cameras, hard drives, cables etc. that you buy from Apple that are not made by Apple. Whoever sells you a product made by anyone, including Apple, has obligations towards you.
Let me repeat that: The manufacturer has no obligations. The shop selling to the consumer has.
This makes a pretty clear statement. "When you agree to do stuff - you'd better do it. It might even be worth paying someone on your staff (perhaps in the audit/compliance dept) to do a check once a month to make sure you are keeping your promises."
One full time employee doing nothing but checking for this compliance would have been an awful lot cheaper than paying the fine.
Frightening thought: If Microsoft actually realised this as well and _did_ hire one person to do nothing but check compliance with this one judgement (should be an easy job), someone has lost their job now.
Mac hardware sucks compared to the PC. A PC running OSX on a virtual machine is better than a Mac and cheaper.
Once you don't compare "cheapest PC" vs. "cheapest Mac", but "the Mac I want" vs. "a PC with the same specs, bought from a reputable company", the Mac hardware will beat most PCs of the same price.
A PC running MacOS X on a virtual machine is running unlicensed software. First, it is running a modified VM that you probably had no right to modify, second it runs an unlicensed copy of MacOS X that has just enough copy prevention built in to make it a DMCA violation.
1. The 68000 instruction set changed considerably. Around the 68020 Motorola went bonkers making it CISCier all the time. Around 68060 time all the real CISCy stuff was again deprecated and ran sloooooow so you just didn't use it.
2. The 68881/2 didn't support 64 bit floating-point math. They did IEEE 80-bit floating point. Like the x87 coprocessors.
There are currently more manufacturers of 3.5" Floppy drives, than of Harddisks. There's 3 left. Count them WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.
That was initially surprising, but the reason is probably that there is zero development cost involved with 3.5" Floppy drives. They can use the same machines to build them ten years from now if there is any demand. With a hard drive, try selling a current hard drive two years from now, not a chance against the competition. So staying in the HD business is expensive.
An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.
I think your maths is way off. Any old 5400 rpm drive will easily read/write 30 MB/sec or 240 Mb/sec on the innermost and slowest tracks. That's recording two 20 MBit/second channels, playing back one, and encoding another one, and then having 2/3rds of capacity unused. And do you actually have a PVR that encodes stuff?
So other than "It can run OS-X" what are you getting with a ton o' minis?
You can give every customer their own separate computer. Which means there is no risk, real or perceived, that someone else's VM running on the same server might escape and get at your VM. Depending on your business, that might be a requirement.
Does that mean I could run a recent Intel only OS-X on my powerpc eMac on top of FreeBSD and an emulator?
Maybe I should write "crawl" instead of "run", but I'm sure you get the idea.
Perfectly legal. If you can run it on an x86 emulator on a 1984 Mac or even an Apple II, it would be legally fine. Requirement is "Apple branded hardware". For 10.6, "Apple labeled hardware". I suppose that means Apple Corps (the Beatles record company) can't run 10.7 or 10.8 on their home-built computers with an Apple label on them.