OSI is getting exactly what they pushed: open code tied to closed devices.
Ten years ago, the FSF did not care about software embedded in devices, either, even though it was a printer which got Stallman started. I'm not even sure if much has changed; to some degree, that's understandable because restrictive hardware environments can make it difficult to empower users to program.
However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices.
With the GPLv3, the device vendor can rent the device to you, so that you can perform a service for them (like supplying power and Internet connectivity). In this case, they do not have to provide source code to you, and are even required to slap a very restrictive license on the software ("on terms that prohibit [you] from making any copies of [their] copyrighted material outside [your] relationship with [them]").
These problems have been known for a while and used to defeat e.g. systrace in OpenBSD (CVE-2007-4305). It also does not affect AV software per se, but anomaly-based detection, which kicks in only if something bad is already running on your machine. If this approach is actually used in the wild, detection logic will be added for it. Business as usual, really.
Still, it's better they target actual criminals than wasting our tax dollars supporting the likes of the RIAA.
Actually, this is not too far off. The devices in question are GBICs, which are available from various sources and are as close to a commodity items as it gets in this area of networking. However, the big network equipment suppliers (such as Cisco, but they aren't the only ones doing this) order modified GBICs (with device IDs) and restrict their hardware to run only with those, and not the much, much cheaper commodity ones. It turns out that some of these manufactures produce a surplus of those special GBICs and sell them through other channels, as compatible GBICs. It's still fraud if you sell them as originals (especially if you attach stickers with logos of the relevant router maker), but it's hard to see any national security implications. More often than not, these devices are the real thing, just not rubber-stamped by the respective router vendor.
And "counterfeit networking gear" makes it sound rather dramatic. It's more like fake ink cartridges.
We all know the basic definition of a hypertext narrative1.
The footnote "1" is missing, so this text appears to have been lifted from somewhere else. And I'm pretty sure that there is no definition of "hypertext" nor "narrative" which is universally agreed upon.
This way of storytelling does not seem to be particularly new, either. Gravity's Rainbow was published nearly 40 years ago.
A lot of stuff can bounce in practice if fraud is involved, even if there are supposed to be guarantees. I think the lesson here is that you better leave the money laundering to the big guys who can better deal with the risk.
With all those references to MPEG in the patent, couldn't they simply use Ogg Theora (or some other codec) to circumvent the patent?
The quoted patent does not seem overly broad to me (there's hardly an inventive step involved, but that's another matter). Are there other patents EchoStar is infringing?
That would be only if you copy and pasted the code in. Using the library itself would have no such issue.
We have statements from the copyright holders that they consider linking to OpenSSL a violation of the GPL. Even if the legal situation is actually different (which hard to tell, but it would certainly reduce copyleft to a mere political statement without legal force), I'm not sure it's a good idea to ignore the wishes of your upstream developers in such a blatant way.
But it is just a Apache licensed library, no? Why do you have to copypaste it?
The OpenSSL license is closer to other old, 4-clause BSD license with the advertising clause. The FSF claims that the GPL (all versions, including version 3) is incompatible with the advertising clause, and most copyright holders who use the GPL for their code presumably follow this interpretation.
I have to wonder about this approach, if it falls into the category of seemingly random today, because we simply don't yet know how to predict the outcome, but maybe someone in a few years' time figures out the necessary principles to predict what the outcome will be?
A secure implementation of this would use some deterministic post-processing element (these days based on the AES-128 or SHA-256 primitives), so that even when the source of non-determinacy fails, you still get unpredictable output, as long as the cryptographic primitive has not been breached.
On the other hand, we still haven't got a good random number generator in our libc, and we can't just use RAND_bytes everywhere for licensing reasons. So our problems are far more mundane.
This will only piss off the atheists, who won't like the cross in any form, and Christians, who don't like such blatant misuse of the cross in a commercial context, even with an allusion to infiniteness of G-d.
"Operation Infinite Justice" was a great slogan, too, wasn't it?
THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE for not being able to support multiple browsers. if you're not supporting links, you're doing it wrong (seriously, how the hell are supposed to work blind's web readers if your site is a javascript meatball?)
IE 6 has unique CSS layout issue, both bugs and less tolerant reactions to dodgy things in your CSS. There are some standard/recommended web design practices which tend to cause IE 6 rendering failures. And if you're unlikely, the failures are of such a kind that it makes part of the web site unusable. And even with templating and uniform page layout, such bugs tend to show only on specific pages, so you really need to do full tests with IE 6.
Links support is easier in comparison, except that some text-mode browsers do not support <button> (but I think that was w3m).
In the end, you need to listen what your users want. If the sporadic IE 6 layout issue is fine with them, don't test on IE 6.
The situation in the U.S. is quite different because even the fundamentalists value education (just not a sound one in theology, but that tends not to matter because religion is almost a taboo subject). There seems to be a general belief that you must educate your children well, so that they can lead a better life.
In Germany, your own social status determines the your children's path to a much larger extent than in most other industrialized nations, so sadly, some parents develop a rather fatalistic attitude about their children's education, not caring much about it all. I fear that there are still some rural areas were secondary education for girls is frowned upon.
Homeschooling risks violating the children's rights under Article 26 (1). School isn't always fair (and so is life), but denying your children the right to learn in a school environment isn't fair, either.
In this case, the parents seem to fear that their children could become too open-minded about the world around them. But there are other communities in Germany who do not value education at all, especially for girls (and that's not even restricted to religious fundamentalists and immigrants). In such an environment, a homeschooling ban may not be ideal, but it makes some sense and opens up opportunities to children who would get only very limited education otherwise.
I agree. Hell, even PostgreSQL’s documentation is literally fun to read. It’s clean, it’s complete, it’s concise. Other projects should learn from them.
Contrast this with the sad fact that most (all?) the MySQL forks lack almost all documentation because MySQL AB never received the documentation under a free license.
Also, beyond the large installed user base, is there anything particularly important about MySQL as a database that other open source databases cannot do?
The strong brand?
Its SQL dialect isn't compatible with anything else (which is true for all SQL databases without any joint development history, of course). Oh, and the MySQL documentation is only available under a proprietary license which does not permit modification and redistribution.
They have a link to Chillingeffects or at least had one a while back.
The link exists, but the letter that is presented there is completely redacted. It does not show the responsible government agency, nor the affected content. In all likelyhood, that's because there's no official request to filter the search results.
The footer of google.cn reads "According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown." (google translation)
Google shows this on some German search results as well, even though it's rather likely that they haven't received an authoritative request to alter the results (it's hard to prove a negative, though).
Wildly different results, the CN domain returning no image of Tank Man and the DE domain returns nothing BUT him.
Search results are skewed to perceived national interests. For instance, if you use the U.S. version of Google to search for "germany", Wikipedia's "Nazi Germany" entry appears at the top of the second page. If you search for "germany" in the German version, this doesn't happen. Similar ranking differences can be observed for the names of Nazi collaborator groups using other national versions of Google ("vichy" in the French version, for instance).
I don't think this is censorship, at least it cannot be proven from the outside, just by looking at search result, that it is the real thing. Part of it is probably Google's self-defense: if they rank results which are served locally higher than others, it is less likely that they get sued because they can show that the original content is served from the same country, and tell the plaintiff to get rid off it directly at the source. For many users, the results may actually be more useful as a result of national skewing. But the whole scheme breaks down for searching tech topics: you get tons of obscure local blogs reposting original U.S. content instead the original sources, which is rather useless most of the time.
Sorry, but I have no duty to treat a murderer the same way I would treat an innocent person, even if they've served their sentence. The German parliament made a poor decision to pass a law protecting a murderer from the disgust of the public.
You got that backwards. Precisely due to the lack of that duty, their names need to be withheld so that they can start a new life outside of prison. The alternative would be to keep most offenders in prison forever, but that's not what's currently being done over here.
I wasn't aware anyone seriously used it. I used it for school and I've been on Eclipse since I started doing real projects.
Apparently, some people use it productively, but I've always found that hard to believe. Some things are just annoying (like nested dialogs that don't show your previous location when you open them again). Other things appear to be more fundamental, like the lack of a single window (or file) listing all (and I mean all) compiler errors and warnings for a project.
And it's really strange that Netbeans development requires Java 1.5, even though that version has recently reached end-of-life.
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OSI is getting exactly what they pushed: open code tied to closed devices.
Ten years ago, the FSF did not care about software embedded in devices, either, even though it was a printer which got Stallman started. I'm not even sure if much has changed; to some degree, that's understandable because restrictive hardware environments can make it difficult to empower users to program.
However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices.
With the GPLv3, the device vendor can rent the device to you, so that you can perform a service for them (like supplying power and Internet connectivity). In this case, they do not have to provide source code to you, and are even required to slap a very restrictive license on the software ("on terms that prohibit [you] from making any copies of
[their] copyrighted material outside [your] relationship with [them]").
Except that .EDU is open to educational institutions worldwide.
These problems have been known for a while and used to defeat e.g. systrace in OpenBSD (CVE-2007-4305). It also does not affect AV software per se, but anomaly-based detection, which kicks in only if something bad is already running on your machine. If this approach is actually used in the wild, detection logic will be added for it. Business as usual, really.
Still, it's better they target actual criminals than wasting our tax dollars supporting the likes of the RIAA.
Actually, this is not too far off. The devices in question are GBICs, which are available from various sources and are as close to a commodity items as it gets in this area of networking. However, the big network equipment suppliers (such as Cisco, but they aren't the only ones doing this) order modified GBICs (with device IDs) and restrict their hardware to run only with those, and not the much, much cheaper commodity ones. It turns out that some of these manufactures produce a surplus of those special GBICs and sell them through other channels, as compatible GBICs. It's still fraud if you sell them as originals (especially if you attach stickers with logos of the relevant router maker), but it's hard to see any national security implications. More often than not, these devices are the real thing, just not rubber-stamped by the respective router vendor.
And "counterfeit networking gear" makes it sound rather dramatic. It's more like fake ink cartridges.
No, it's not an open source license. You get to see the source code, but you have no rights beyond that. Preparing derivative works is not allowed.
I believe source code access functionality is now integrated into Visual Studio, so it is not surprising that the web site is not updated anymore.
The footnote "1" is missing, so this text appears to have been lifted from somewhere else. And I'm pretty sure that there is no definition of "hypertext" nor "narrative" which is universally agreed upon.
This way of storytelling does not seem to be particularly new, either. Gravity's Rainbow was published nearly 40 years ago.
Does lack of stereopsis really count as a disability? Most people don't need it at all, AFAIK.
A lot of stuff can bounce in practice if fraud is involved, even if there are supposed to be guarantees. I think the lesson here is that you better leave the money laundering to the big guys who can better deal with the risk.
With all those references to MPEG in the patent, couldn't they simply use Ogg Theora (or some other codec) to circumvent the patent?
The quoted patent does not seem overly broad to me (there's hardly an inventive step involved, but that's another matter). Are there other patents EchoStar is infringing?
That would be only if you copy and pasted the code in. Using the library itself would have no such issue.
We have statements from the copyright holders that they consider linking to OpenSSL a violation of the GPL. Even if the legal situation is actually different (which hard to tell, but it would certainly reduce copyleft to a mere political statement without legal force), I'm not sure it's a good idea to ignore the wishes of your upstream developers in such a blatant way.
But it is just a Apache licensed library, no? Why do you have to copypaste it?
The OpenSSL license is closer to other old, 4-clause BSD license with the advertising clause. The FSF claims that the GPL (all versions, including version 3) is incompatible with the advertising clause, and most copyright holders who use the GPL for their code presumably follow this interpretation.
For licensing reasons = because of soft patent madness?
No, the OpenSSL license is incompatible with the GPL, so you have to think twice before using code from libcrypto, however convenient it might be.
I have to wonder about this approach, if it falls into the category of seemingly random today, because we simply don't yet know how to predict the outcome, but maybe someone in a few years' time figures out the necessary principles to predict what the outcome will be?
A secure implementation of this would use some deterministic post-processing element (these days based on the AES-128 or SHA-256 primitives), so that even when the source of non-determinacy fails, you still get unpredictable output, as long as the cryptographic primitive has not been breached.
On the other hand, we still haven't got a good random number generator in our libc, and we can't just use RAND_bytes everywhere for licensing reasons. So our problems are far more mundane.
This will only piss off the atheists, who won't like the cross in any form, and Christians, who don't like such blatant misuse of the cross in a commercial context, even with an allusion to infiniteness of G-d.
"Operation Infinite Justice" was a great slogan, too, wasn't it?
THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE for not being able to support multiple browsers. if you're not supporting links, you're doing it wrong (seriously, how the hell are supposed to work blind's web readers if your site is a javascript meatball?)
IE 6 has unique CSS layout issue, both bugs and less tolerant reactions to dodgy things in your CSS. There are some standard/recommended web design practices which tend to cause IE 6 rendering failures. And if you're unlikely, the failures are of such a kind that it makes part of the web site unusable. And even with templating and uniform page layout, such bugs tend to show only on specific pages, so you really need to do full tests with IE 6.
Links support is easier in comparison, except that some text-mode browsers do not support <button> (but I think that was w3m).
In the end, you need to listen what your users want. If the sporadic IE 6 layout issue is fine with them, don't test on IE 6.
I call sampling bias. 8-)
The situation in the U.S. is quite different because even the fundamentalists value education (just not a sound one in theology, but that tends not to matter because religion is almost a taboo subject). There seems to be a general belief that you must educate your children well, so that they can lead a better life.
In Germany, your own social status determines the your children's path to a much larger extent than in most other industrialized nations, so sadly, some parents develop a rather fatalistic attitude about their children's education, not caring much about it all. I fear that there are still some rural areas were secondary education for girls is frowned upon.
Homeschooling risks violating the children's rights under Article 26 (1). School isn't always fair (and so is life), but denying your children the right to learn in a school environment isn't fair, either.
In this case, the parents seem to fear that their children could become too open-minded about the world around them. But there are other communities in Germany who do not value education at all, especially for girls (and that's not even restricted to religious fundamentalists and immigrants). In such an environment, a homeschooling ban may not be ideal, but it makes some sense and opens up opportunities to children who would get only very limited education otherwise.
I agree. Hell, even PostgreSQL’s documentation is literally fun to read. It’s clean, it’s complete, it’s concise. Other projects should learn from them.
Contrast this with the sad fact that most (all?) the MySQL forks lack almost all documentation because MySQL AB never received the documentation under a free license.
Also, beyond the large installed user base, is there anything particularly important about MySQL as a database that other open source databases cannot do?
The strong brand?
Its SQL dialect isn't compatible with anything else (which is true for all SQL databases without any joint development history, of course). Oh, and the MySQL documentation is only available under a proprietary license which does not permit modification and redistribution.
They have a link to Chillingeffects or at least had one a while back.
The link exists, but the letter that is presented there is completely redacted. It does not show the responsible government agency, nor the affected content. In all likelyhood, that's because there's no official request to filter the search results.
The footer of google.cn reads "According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown." (google translation)
Google shows this on some German search results as well, even though it's rather likely that they haven't received an authoritative request to alter the results (it's hard to prove a negative, though).
Wildly different results, the CN domain returning no image of Tank Man and the DE domain returns nothing BUT him.
Search results are skewed to perceived national interests. For instance, if you use the U.S. version of Google to search for "germany", Wikipedia's "Nazi Germany" entry appears at the top of the second page. If you search for "germany" in the German version, this doesn't happen. Similar ranking differences can be observed for the names of Nazi collaborator groups using other national versions of Google ("vichy" in the French version, for instance).
I don't think this is censorship, at least it cannot be proven from the outside, just by looking at search result, that it is the real thing. Part of it is probably Google's self-defense: if they rank results which are served locally higher than others, it is less likely that they get sued because they can show that the original content is served from the same country, and tell the plaintiff to get rid off it directly at the source. For many users, the results may actually be more useful as a result of national skewing. But the whole scheme breaks down for searching tech topics: you get tons of obscure local blogs reposting original U.S. content instead the original sources, which is rather useless most of the time.
Why is the taxpayer's money being spent on this nonsense?
It's one way of doing science PR these days, I guess.
Sorry, but I have no duty to treat a murderer the same way I would treat an innocent person, even if they've served their sentence. The German parliament made a poor decision to pass a law protecting a murderer from the disgust of the public.
You got that backwards. Precisely due to the lack of that duty, their names need to be withheld so that they can start a new life outside of prison. The alternative would be to keep most offenders in prison forever, but that's not what's currently being done over here.
I wasn't aware anyone seriously used it. I used it for school and I've been on Eclipse since I started doing real projects.
Apparently, some people use it productively, but I've always found that hard to believe. Some things are just annoying (like nested dialogs that don't show your previous location when you open them again). Other things appear to be more fundamental, like the lack of a single window (or file) listing all (and I mean all) compiler errors and warnings for a project.
And it's really strange that Netbeans development requires Java 1.5, even though that version has recently reached end-of-life.