Does anybody still doubt if this government gets hold of Julian Assange, they'll have his soon-to-be-dead ass on its way to the United States faster than you can say "American Lapdog"?
Absolutely. I mean, yes, lots of people doubt that. When a person is extradited to another country, they can only be taken to court for crimes in the extradition request. At an extreme case, if you badly injure another person, flee to another country, get extradited, and _after you are extradited_ the victim dies, you cannot be convicted for murder because that wasn't in the request for extradition. (In practice, police are not stupid and delay the extradition in a case like that).
OMFG you think this isn't personal?!! I suppose all the Assange-hating isn't personal either.
All this extradition will achieve is that someone will go to a Swedish jail for a rather short time, and I'm sure there are many places in the world that are worse than a jail in Sweden.
In the case of Assange, he is in the public eye which is why we hear all these things, he is accused by two women of rape in Sweden, was supposed to meet the police for questioning (which in Sweden happens before you are charged, while in other countries you are first charged with a crime and then questioned), fled the country to the UK, was on bail while fighting an extradition order, violated his bail conditions by moving to the Ecuadorian embassy, which I believe is in itself a crime, plus the bail money that his supporters put up is now gone, and now Ecuadorian tax payers pay to feed him and give him a place to sleep. I can't see any particular hating here, everything happening to him is a normal consequence of his actions.
No, they started doing "something" only after the bad press that they got for the horrible working conditions they took advantage of for years (and the bad press they got was just a fraction of what they deserved - we even had reparatory articles here on slashdot, such as "can you really build anything without exploiting slavery?").
Actually, Apple had been auditing its suppliers, checking up on working conditions, reporting publicly on the number of underage employees they found, and cancelling contracts with some companies, since 2007. Contrary to that, according to Samsung there is "no evidence" that companies working for Samsung employed anyone underage. The only logical explanation is that Apple was looking a lot harder for problems, while Samsung is working hard to look away.
I'd like someone with more specific expertise to follow up on this branch of the thread, but iirc one of those IDs is used to encrypt the data on the ipod/iphone, and is also used to encrypt the data backed up to the computer when synced, if you select to encrypt the backup. (itunes option)
That's nonsense. Every iOS device has a Unique Device Identifier (UDID), which is used to identify the device and nothing else. Some idiot programmers used it to identify users, which is totally stupid because when you sell a used iOS device, the UDID stays with the device.
UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) on the other hand are created repeatedly. A well-written app that wants to keep track of one user of that app will generate a UUID and store it in the app's preferences. 100 different apps on the same iOS device will create 100 different UUIDs. The good thing for privacy is that you cannot use UUIDs to gather information about a user, because the same UUID will only come up in one context.
Neither are used to encrypt information on an iOS device. (An application _could_ use a UUID that it created to encrypt information, but that would be information coming from that one application).
Going to explain why they gave all the UID of their devices to the FBI?
Considering that we were talking about UDIDs here, and UDIDs are something totally different than UUIDs or GUIDs, any post referring to UIDs should never be marked as "interesting", but "imbecile".
Apple allows you to transfer YOUR music to at most 5 of your devices.
How's that not DRM?
And how many copies would copyright law on its own allow you? I think it is four fewer.
But wait... we are in an area now where we need to distinguish between Digital Rights Management and Copy Prevention (often misleadingly called Copy Protection). Apple actually allows (as in: doesn't prevent you from making) an unlimited number of copies. It is just that Apple will not make them for you. So there is Digital Rights Management - which means Apple doesn't help you doing things that would be illegal anyway, but there is no Copy Prevention - which means you can do whatever you want.
So, if I want to run OSX on a million Macs it's easy to copy, but I have to buy a millions Macs.... from Apple.
Well, yes. If you want to run OS X, or any software, on a million Macs, you have to buy a million Macs. You can probably explain why you'd want to do that, but you're certainly right.
Last time I tried to go into an iPod and copy music off of it, it was even less accessible than music that had DRM on it. So... thanks Steve Jobs... for "freeing" my music.
Bruce Willis has decided to fight for the right to will his music collection to his kids openly and legally, rather than doing it under the table. This is a principled stand, and it might ultimately lead to a more rational status of electronic property. Good for him! But in practice, it doesn't really affect your ability to pass your music onto your kids after you die--or before, for that matter.
If the kids can inherit the music collection, then they can probably sell it. Imagine "Bruce Willis complete music collection" on eBay. It would probably make some good money.
Because I've found authors/artists often expect their work should continue receiving money for 110 years (almost six generations), but they want to terminate the customer's use of the work as soon as possible. Like ten if they could get away with it. It's an unfair and double standard.
Well, there is Cliff Richard in Britain, one of the strongest proponents of longer copyrights on music. 35 years ago I heard him on the radio and thought "what a has been". I really don't think he deserves any money for his music.
But then I thought: No, that's not what I really think. What I think is that _I_ wouldn't want his music if it was free, and I definitely wouldn't want to give him money for it. However, there _are_ people who are willing to listen to his music, and who even like. And if they want to listen to his music, and they haven't bought it in the last forty years, then I suppose it's getting time that they finally pay for it.
With all that said, I think it is only fair that once I bought some music, it is only fair if it is mine as long as I can hold on to it, and should be mine to pass on to someone else.
Just wondering: If a builder builds an extension to my house, and dies just after it is finished, do you think the heirs have a moral right to payment?
Are we talking about the same Steve Jobs? The most famous ass in the entire world of tech and all-time champion of locked and proprietary software?
If anyone in the entire world would willingly lock down user's rights it would be Apple and Steve Jobs.
And you have any evidence for that? By evidence I mean things that don't get torn apart in a millisecond by anyone with a brain? MacOS X _still_ doesn't have any protection that prevents you from running copies on any number of Macs you want.
He 'spent thousands of dollars on digital music'? Great, now he can spent hundreds of hours converting them to mp3s.
Typical slashdotter with the attention span of a gnat. Any music purchased on iTunes can be copied easily (you can completely legally remove all DRM that may have been on some music years ago by upgrading for something like $0.30 per song, or by using iTunes Match). The problem is to transfer _legal ownership_ of the music he purchased to his heirs.
Apart from that, it doesn't take even a minute to tell my Mac to convert all my about 18,000 or so songs in AAC format to MP3. The Mac will admittedly take a while to do so, but who cares?
False. Every time I bash Apple (mainly because it costs 2x as much) my post gets modded down into invisibility. This forum is very protective of the Apple brand and punished anybody who says something negative about it.
You should go to one of the Apple vs. Samsung threads then. You will enjoy it.
- tech time spent on password resets: zero. This is real encryption, there's no such thing available as "password reset", there's only a passphrase which cannot be recovered. If it can, then this means you have zero security
Nonsense. For example, Apple uses three keys: 1. The actual encryption key for the disk. It is never accessible to the user, it is stored in encrypted form on the disk, and by overwriting that portion of the disk, you can wipe a disk within milliseconds. 2. The master key. This key is used to decrypt the real key. It's a long hex number; you can write it down _and put the paper in your safe_. You'll never need it unless you need to do a password reset. 3. The user's password. The user has a password which is used to recover the master key. Multiple users can have different passwords. The password can be changed at any time without having to re-encrypt the data, because it is only used to decrypt the master password.
So you can do password resets, but only if you have the master key. Which is used _only_ for that purpose.
The other side of the coin is managing it properly. For example I've had to restore from an unencrypted backup purely because somebody who was managing their own disk encryption had forgotten how to access their files and needed whatever earlier copies were available as a matter of urgency.
Apple found that the most common problem is this sequence: User turns on encryption, user is asked to create a password, drive is encrypted, user never wrote down or remembered the password. There is a simple user interface change avoiding this problem.
and they didn't shift nearly as many as they expected, once most people had worked out that they could buy the same actual Apple functionality in a more 'normal' box for a fraction of the amount.
The Cube was released just when the stock market collapsed around 2001 or so. A year earlier, plenty of people would have bought it. It looked very, very nice, and it wasn't much more expensive. When you have plenty of spare cash and no worries about getting more, buying something that looks very, very nice for not much more is a good idea. When have no spare cash and you worry about money, you do without it.
How soon they forget. When Steve Jobs came back Microsoft was having to prop up the company to avoid monopoly charges and Apple was still trying to sell slower technology for twice the money. Say it takes a team all you want, without Jobs Apple would have likely gone bankrupt so I'd give him some credit for their success.
Microsoft made a token payment, and signed a contract to continue developing and selling Microsoft Office for five years - the tons of money that Office for Macintosh makes was one reason, the fact that Apple had them by the balls for having code copied from Quicktime inside Windows was another.
"Only" $100 a year? Android is free. And $100 is too expensive for me.
Sorry to say, but if you think $100 is too expensive, then both Apple and Android can live very happily without you. $100 is less than a tenth of a percent of the cost of a decent developer per year. The coffee that I drink at work in a month would cost more than $100 if I had to pay for it.
t appears to me that Sweden is becoming the centre of internet freedom battles. Is this geographical, cultural,legal or just luck of the draw?
Your impression seems to be wrong. To me, it looks like Swedish police is just not very good at holding on to convicted criminals and to suspects in criminal cases. One guy convicted to a year in jail and he disappears (now found in Cambodia of all places), another guy accused of rape, leaves the country when his lawyer tells him that he is wanted for questioning, caught in Britain and released on bail, then disappearing into some embassy in breach of his bail conditions, which _does_ make him a criminal in the UK.
If the patent for "the process for setting a mobile phone to only vibrate during an incoming call when in a particular location" was really granted to them, I think the prior art for that was seen about 20 minutes after the first mobile phone was put into a consumer's hand. Really, who signs off on this shit?
Please explain. Do you have a phone that will only vibrate in certain locations, but ring in others, without having to change it?
Well, from all I've heard, the US jury really dropped the ball on following instructions in the US trial, it sounds like Japanese jurors looked at things differently.
Not from "all you heard". Only from the "Apple is patenting rounded rectangles" android fan crowd which has been overtaking Slashdot apparently (and they seem to be switching to "Apple has patented all rectangles" recently).
In Japan, the case was about different patents, the patent law is different, so the results are unrelated. And the jury in the USA got a list of a few hundred questions, answered them all, and only an idiot would claim that they didn't follow jury instructions (there are of course a lot of them about).
Jury instructions were: If you think that Apple has shown convincing evidence that Samsung's patents are invalid, then state that they are invalid, otherwise state that they are valid. And if you think that Samsung has shown convincing evidence that Apple's patents are invalid, then state that they are invalid, otherwise state that they are valid. The jury followed these instructions. The fandroids don't like it, many think the decisions were wrong (of course only as far as Apple's patents are concerned), and they are welcome to their opinion, but saying that the jury didn't follow jury instructions is a lie.
If you have 40 people writing spaghetti code, then you need _one_ good developer and code reviews, and reject bad code until they learn. Many bad developers are bad because they haven't learned how to do it better. Those that can't learn - sorry, but their productivity is negative, so let them go. What you don't need is a dozen "rock stars". You need developers who can lead by example and let them do it, and who can solve difficult problems that turn up, and you need more people who are reliable, not necessarily bright, who can do all the boring bits - of which there are usually lots.
What I can't understand is how the author talks about smart people making smart designs that don't work. If the design doesn't work, it wasn't smart in the first place. If someone creates a design that isn't smart in the first place, that person wasn't smart. So this seems to be about people who can bamboozle others into thinking they are smart, creating designs that nobody understands.
When you put HTC phones, iPhone, and certain (not all) Samsung phones side by side, the HTC ones are the ones that look different. Which means Apple won't succeed, and won't try to succeed, with charges related to design patents. On the other hand, the different looks may also be the reason or part of the reason why Samsung is selling more phones right now than HTC.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody still doubt if this government gets hold of Julian Assange, they'll have his soon-to-be-dead ass on its way to the United States faster than you can say "American Lapdog"?
Absolutely. I mean, yes, lots of people doubt that. When a person is extradited to another country, they can only be taken to court for crimes in the extradition request. At an extreme case, if you badly injure another person, flee to another country, get extradited, and _after you are extradited_ the victim dies, you cannot be convicted for murder because that wasn't in the request for extradition. (In practice, police are not stupid and delay the extradition in a case like that).
OMFG you think this isn't personal?!! I suppose all the Assange-hating isn't personal either.
All this extradition will achieve is that someone will go to a Swedish jail for a rather short time, and I'm sure there are many places in the world that are worse than a jail in Sweden.
In the case of Assange, he is in the public eye which is why we hear all these things, he is accused by two women of rape in Sweden, was supposed to meet the police for questioning (which in Sweden happens before you are charged, while in other countries you are first charged with a crime and then questioned), fled the country to the UK, was on bail while fighting an extradition order, violated his bail conditions by moving to the Ecuadorian embassy, which I believe is in itself a crime, plus the bail money that his supporters put up is now gone, and now Ecuadorian tax payers pay to feed him and give him a place to sleep. I can't see any particular hating here, everything happening to him is a normal consequence of his actions.
No, they started doing "something" only after the bad press that they got for the horrible working conditions they took advantage of for years (and the bad press they got was just a fraction of what they deserved - we even had reparatory articles here on slashdot, such as "can you really build anything without exploiting slavery?").
Actually, Apple had been auditing its suppliers, checking up on working conditions, reporting publicly on the number of underage employees they found, and cancelling contracts with some companies, since 2007. Contrary to that, according to Samsung there is "no evidence" that companies working for Samsung employed anyone underage. The only logical explanation is that Apple was looking a lot harder for problems, while Samsung is working hard to look away.
I'd like someone with more specific expertise to follow up on this branch of the thread, but iirc one of those IDs is used to encrypt the data on the ipod/iphone, and is also used to encrypt the data backed up to the computer when synced, if you select to encrypt the backup. (itunes option)
That's nonsense. Every iOS device has a Unique Device Identifier (UDID), which is used to identify the device and nothing else. Some idiot programmers used it to identify users, which is totally stupid because when you sell a used iOS device, the UDID stays with the device.
UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) on the other hand are created repeatedly. A well-written app that wants to keep track of one user of that app will generate a UUID and store it in the app's preferences. 100 different apps on the same iOS device will create 100 different UUIDs. The good thing for privacy is that you cannot use UUIDs to gather information about a user, because the same UUID will only come up in one context.
Neither are used to encrypt information on an iOS device. (An application _could_ use a UUID that it created to encrypt information, but that would be information coming from that one application).
Going to explain why they gave all the UID of their devices to the FBI?
Considering that we were talking about UDIDs here, and UDIDs are something totally different than UUIDs or GUIDs, any post referring to UIDs should never be marked as "interesting", but "imbecile".
Apple allows you to transfer YOUR music to at most 5 of your devices. How's that not DRM?
And how many copies would copyright law on its own allow you? I think it is four fewer.
But wait... we are in an area now where we need to distinguish between Digital Rights Management and Copy Prevention (often misleadingly called Copy Protection). Apple actually allows (as in: doesn't prevent you from making) an unlimited number of copies. It is just that Apple will not make them for you. So there is Digital Rights Management - which means Apple doesn't help you doing things that would be illegal anyway, but there is no Copy Prevention - which means you can do whatever you want.
So, if I want to run OSX on a million Macs it's easy to copy, but I have to buy a millions Macs.... from Apple.
Well, yes. If you want to run OS X, or any software, on a million Macs, you have to buy a million Macs. You can probably explain why you'd want to do that, but you're certainly right.
Last time I tried to go into an iPod and copy music off of it, it was even less accessible than music that had DRM on it. So... thanks Steve Jobs... for "freeing" my music.
Was that really _your_ music?
Bruce Willis has decided to fight for the right to will his music collection to his kids openly and legally, rather than doing it under the table. This is a principled stand, and it might ultimately lead to a more rational status of electronic property. Good for him! But in practice, it doesn't really affect your ability to pass your music onto your kids after you die--or before, for that matter.
If the kids can inherit the music collection, then they can probably sell it. Imagine "Bruce Willis complete music collection" on eBay. It would probably make some good money.
Because I've found authors/artists often expect their work should continue receiving money for 110 years (almost six generations), but they want to terminate the customer's use of the work as soon as possible. Like ten if they could get away with it. It's an unfair and double standard.
Well, there is Cliff Richard in Britain, one of the strongest proponents of longer copyrights on music. 35 years ago I heard him on the radio and thought "what a has been". I really don't think he deserves any money for his music.
But then I thought: No, that's not what I really think. What I think is that _I_ wouldn't want his music if it was free, and I definitely wouldn't want to give him money for it. However, there _are_ people who are willing to listen to his music, and who even like. And if they want to listen to his music, and they haven't bought it in the last forty years, then I suppose it's getting time that they finally pay for it.
With all that said, I think it is only fair that once I bought some music, it is only fair if it is mine as long as I can hold on to it, and should be mine to pass on to someone else.
Just wondering: If a builder builds an extension to my house, and dies just after it is finished, do you think the heirs have a moral right to payment?
I imagine his movies are distributed under the same restrictive license. Is he also trying to loosen up the cpyright restrictions on his creations?
Yes. He wants to give you the right to pass on all your movies to your heirs. After you're dead.
Are we talking about the same Steve Jobs? The most famous ass in the entire world of tech and all-time champion of locked and proprietary software? If anyone in the entire world would willingly lock down user's rights it would be Apple and Steve Jobs.
And you have any evidence for that? By evidence I mean things that don't get torn apart in a millisecond by anyone with a brain? MacOS X _still_ doesn't have any protection that prevents you from running copies on any number of Macs you want.
He 'spent thousands of dollars on digital music'? Great, now he can spent hundreds of hours converting them to mp3s.
Typical slashdotter with the attention span of a gnat. Any music purchased on iTunes can be copied easily (you can completely legally remove all DRM that may have been on some music years ago by upgrading for something like $0.30 per song, or by using iTunes Match). The problem is to transfer _legal ownership_ of the music he purchased to his heirs.
Apart from that, it doesn't take even a minute to tell my Mac to convert all my about 18,000 or so songs in AAC format to MP3. The Mac will admittedly take a while to do so, but who cares?
False. Every time I bash Apple (mainly because it costs 2x as much) my post gets modded down into invisibility. This forum is very protective of the Apple brand and punished anybody who says something negative about it.
You should go to one of the Apple vs. Samsung threads then. You will enjoy it.
- tech time spent on password resets: zero. This is real encryption, there's no such thing available as "password reset", there's only a passphrase which cannot be recovered. If it can, then this means you have zero security
Nonsense. For example, Apple uses three keys: 1. The actual encryption key for the disk. It is never accessible to the user, it is stored in encrypted form on the disk, and by overwriting that portion of the disk, you can wipe a disk within milliseconds. 2. The master key. This key is used to decrypt the real key. It's a long hex number; you can write it down _and put the paper in your safe_. You'll never need it unless you need to do a password reset. 3. The user's password. The user has a password which is used to recover the master key. Multiple users can have different passwords. The password can be changed at any time without having to re-encrypt the data, because it is only used to decrypt the master password.
So you can do password resets, but only if you have the master key. Which is used _only_ for that purpose.
The other side of the coin is managing it properly. For example I've had to restore from an unencrypted backup purely because somebody who was managing their own disk encryption had forgotten how to access their files and needed whatever earlier copies were available as a matter of urgency.
Apple found that the most common problem is this sequence: User turns on encryption, user is asked to create a password, drive is encrypted, user never wrote down or remembered the password. There is a simple user interface change avoiding this problem.
and they didn't shift nearly as many as they expected, once most people had worked out that they could buy the same actual Apple functionality in a more 'normal' box for a fraction of the amount.
The Cube was released just when the stock market collapsed around 2001 or so. A year earlier, plenty of people would have bought it. It looked very, very nice, and it wasn't much more expensive. When you have plenty of spare cash and no worries about getting more, buying something that looks very, very nice for not much more is a good idea. When have no spare cash and you worry about money, you do without it.
How soon they forget. When Steve Jobs came back Microsoft was having to prop up the company to avoid monopoly charges and Apple was still trying to sell slower technology for twice the money. Say it takes a team all you want, without Jobs Apple would have likely gone bankrupt so I'd give him some credit for their success.
Microsoft made a token payment, and signed a contract to continue developing and selling Microsoft Office for five years - the tons of money that Office for Macintosh makes was one reason, the fact that Apple had them by the balls for having code copied from Quicktime inside Windows was another.
"Only" $100 a year? Android is free. And $100 is too expensive for me.
Sorry to say, but if you think $100 is too expensive, then both Apple and Android can live very happily without you. $100 is less than a tenth of a percent of the cost of a decent developer per year. The coffee that I drink at work in a month would cost more than $100 if I had to pay for it.
t appears to me that Sweden is becoming the centre of internet freedom battles. Is this geographical, cultural,legal or just luck of the draw?
Your impression seems to be wrong. To me, it looks like Swedish police is just not very good at holding on to convicted criminals and to suspects in criminal cases. One guy convicted to a year in jail and he disappears (now found in Cambodia of all places), another guy accused of rape, leaves the country when his lawyer tells him that he is wanted for questioning, caught in Britain and released on bail, then disappearing into some embassy in breach of his bail conditions, which _does_ make him a criminal in the UK.
If the patent for "the process for setting a mobile phone to only vibrate during an incoming call when in a particular location" was really granted to them, I think the prior art for that was seen about 20 minutes after the first mobile phone was put into a consumer's hand. Really, who signs off on this shit?
Please explain. Do you have a phone that will only vibrate in certain locations, but ring in others, without having to change it?
Well, from all I've heard, the US jury really dropped the ball on following instructions in the US trial, it sounds like Japanese jurors looked at things differently.
Not from "all you heard". Only from the "Apple is patenting rounded rectangles" android fan crowd which has been overtaking Slashdot apparently (and they seem to be switching to "Apple has patented all rectangles" recently).
In Japan, the case was about different patents, the patent law is different, so the results are unrelated. And the jury in the USA got a list of a few hundred questions, answered them all, and only an idiot would claim that they didn't follow jury instructions (there are of course a lot of them about).
Jury instructions were: If you think that Apple has shown convincing evidence that Samsung's patents are invalid, then state that they are invalid, otherwise state that they are valid. And if you think that Samsung has shown convincing evidence that Apple's patents are invalid, then state that they are invalid, otherwise state that they are valid. The jury followed these instructions. The fandroids don't like it, many think the decisions were wrong (of course only as far as Apple's patents are concerned), and they are welcome to their opinion, but saying that the jury didn't follow jury instructions is a lie.
If you have 40 people writing spaghetti code, then you need _one_ good developer and code reviews, and reject bad code until they learn. Many bad developers are bad because they haven't learned how to do it better. Those that can't learn - sorry, but their productivity is negative, so let them go. What you don't need is a dozen "rock stars". You need developers who can lead by example and let them do it, and who can solve difficult problems that turn up, and you need more people who are reliable, not necessarily bright, who can do all the boring bits - of which there are usually lots.
What I can't understand is how the author talks about smart people making smart designs that don't work. If the design doesn't work, it wasn't smart in the first place. If someone creates a design that isn't smart in the first place, that person wasn't smart. So this seems to be about people who can bamboozle others into thinking they are smart, creating designs that nobody understands.
Agreed. Having served on a jury, this is the kind of thing a foreman is supposed to prevent / report. It turns out that they chose the wrong foreman.
You mean the kind of foreman that allows a decision that is contrary to the opinion of the slashdot crowd. That must surely be disallowed.
When you put HTC phones, iPhone, and certain (not all) Samsung phones side by side, the HTC ones are the ones that look different. Which means Apple won't succeed, and won't try to succeed, with charges related to design patents. On the other hand, the different looks may also be the reason or part of the reason why Samsung is selling more phones right now than HTC.