Actually, one of the important information locii listed in the report is biotechnology and genomic information, which is very relevant to starving people. A Green Revolution that doesn't require farmers to sell their souls to Monsanto is possibly the fastest way to make food prices drop and better health and nutrition available to the masses. Once there's a greater surplus per laborer, you can have more time for education, infrastructural development, and all the lovely uses for free information that were previously "not much use to the starving."
Of course, this assumes that the corporation in whose sweat shop the non-agrarian masses are working doesn't just lower wages again. That's why people in the developed world need information access (and interest), so that when something like that happens we can financially castrate them.
Even if the case goes to court, Slashdot wins. Even if the case goes to court and MS wins, Slashdot wins. Even if the case goes to court and MS wins and gets exclusive IP rights to Kerberos and the Justice Department feels so sorry that it decides not to break them up after all Slashdot... um... breaks even.
Because it's clear that the public is on our side now. These articles are not presenting Microsoft in a favorable light. They are giving a good accounting of open source, explaining what MS did, and citing third-party lawyers who mostly seem to agree with us.
If this becomes a trial situation, what we're going to have isn't a lawsuit against Slashdot, but an honest-to-god test case. And with a test case like this comes public support, angry letters, and the ACLU and their army of mutant squirrels. It would be the best thing we could hope for if one of the first cases prosecuted under DMCA were something well-known and obviously unjust. As long as there's not some kind of backlash in the next few days, I think the long-term outlook is quite lovely.
Open your eyes! This is a government-initiated plot to kill Napster et al. -- if THEY can initiate a CD price war, music downloads will decrease as purchases become easier. With the MP3 fans placated, there will be far less popular support for Gnutella and Freenet! Used only by a small population of privacy-lovers and computer-intelligensia, these powerful tools for anonymity and privacy abandoned will be easy pickings for the Jackbooted Thugs! Then they'll come for/., and then for my precious bodily fluids!
Friends, we must RESIST this manipulative plot! Don't be bought with the promise of cheap music! Rise up and DEMAND your right to be overcharged for CDs!
The distributors who own the vast majority of popular music were collaborating to fix prices at a level higher than retailers wanted to charge and customers wanted to pay. This is the kind of situation I'd like to see libertarians explain away. Although I agree that many things are over-regulated, it seems like government intervention on antitrust grounds is in this case positive for the consumer and good for business (i.e., the retail businesses gain more than the distributors lose). A small group of companies were using their power to our detriment, while their wide-ranging IP rights made a selective boycott impractical. I can't see how market forces could have solved this one; it's hard to vote with your pocketbook when there's no competition.
I suppose one might argue (as many have) that the MP3 explosion did represent a popular response to the problem. But that too is outside the libertarian system which, if I recall, does respect IP...
1: In the past, SF authors have been trying to predict what the rest of the world, running largely independently of them, will do. This involves some scientific extrapolation, but much more sociology, economics, politics, and so forth. The sheer number of disciplines involved makes it clear why the track record is pretty dismal. What a project like ITSF is doing is looking at SF for things the world might do and actively trying to implement them.
2: The flights of SF do not stop at technology. Science Fiction is largely about using technology to free stories from modern pragmatic constraints -- or about telling stories dealing with what may happen when those constraints are gone. The Diamond Age was not interesting because of its descriptions of nanotech per se, but because it showed us a society which had transformed itself for a nanotech age. Stephenson isn't going to teach the ESA how to pull diamond out of the air, but once we learn to do so he might be a good place to look to predict what people will value and how they'll live and think. Maybe we'll get free public compilers a decade early because he thought of it ahead of time.
Now that I've defended the general idea, I have to agree that I'm a bit discouraged by the ITSF project. Their introduction speaks of gleaning purely technological concepts, like rocket fins and orbital space stations. Details like this are historically not, and they need not be, the strength of SF. We should be looking to SF to figure out how to develop technology that's in the pipeline, to see how people currently understand it and how it might be used.
The sausage release comment reminds me of the Big Ball of Mud architecture.
Well, I prefer sausage. It's just as unsavory and haphazard as a BBoM in its composition, but (if you're a latest-patch stability-what's-that Mozilla-nightly-build fanatic) damn does it smell good.
I'm certainly not in favor of doing anything as crazy as using the sausage release, but assuredly someone is going to. And if that happens, I see no reason why the stable people shouldn't take advantage of the free testing...
I understand the complaints here. I also understand Taco's defense. Perhaps what is needed is three sets of code: stable, unstable, and sausage. The first two would require administration and be prone to the delays and inconsistencies attacked above. The "sausage" directory would contain code, unsubstantiated patches, unincorporated features, lips, dirt, bits of hair, etcetera. That way hardcore open-sourcers could get at the bleeding edge stuff themselves, and could even fork the project if the official maintainers weren't keeping things far enough up to date. But meanwhile, those controlling the project would be able to keep a well-organized, documented version that was officially unaffiliated with that vat of partially defatted fatty beef tissue over there.
Of course, there would still be complaints that patches weren't getting out of the sausage bin quickly enough. But at least then if the complainers became numerous enough, they could mount an effective response.
Well, I suppose I was assuming that the discontinued hardware would work. But I think that if what you have is satisfactory, then all other things being equal you'll tend to buy more of the same.
I don't see why this should be a difficult sell for any hardware manufacturer who's gotten out of stone-age source code jealousy. Why should they object to putting their boxes and their brand name on your desktop? The situation should be no different from the one in which Nike(TM) does everything it can to get its logo on the chests of millions, even if they're not athletes and say nothing about the quality of their shoes. If your IT people go to work and see "3COM(TM)" every day; if the administrators have the 3com(TM) name in front of them so that it's the name that pops into their head when its time to make more purchasing decisions; if they can generally get their name hard-coded into your product-inertia... how could they refuse?
Companies may not care about extending the life of products they no longer support. But extending the reach of their name -- that's something you can sell them on.
Seems to me that your uses (and the ones in the article, and the ones others have posted) are innovative and exciting applications... of the Web. I don't understand how they're enhanced by the use of a code that allows the computer to read the location itself. Perhaps I'm too hardcore to understand the average user, but is it really that painful to type in a URL?
I suppose one advantage of non-human-readable links is that it might reduce the value of domain-name squatting. . .
There is one important difference between Wal-Mart(TM) and a local ma&pa business: A locally-owned business is much more a tool of those who work for it; it exists as a way for a small group of people to pool their skills and make a living for themselves. Wal-Mart exists to make money for those who fund it, stockholders who are not involved with its operation. It is in their best interest to do everything possible to minimize costs, whether this means treating employees like machinery, recklessly polluting, or sucking capital right out of the community. Why should they care? They don't have to talk with these people, breathe their air, or live near them.
The idea that they're just giving us what we want is only a half-truth. Ask most McDonalds(TM) patrons (well, those over ten years old) what they like about the place. I suspect you'll hear "cheap," "fast," and "convenient," but you won't hear "I like the food" much. Size and lack of concern allows big corps to leverage the unscrupulous activities I mention above into lower prices, which tempt people into making short-term tradeoffs with long-term negative effects.
Am I suggesting that people are incapable of making good cost-benefit analyses, and should be protected from themselves? No. The way to stop this is through education, through making sure people can see the consequences of their choices as consumers and making them relevant at the moment money is being plunked down.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters) - The "I Love You" e-mail virus, which has crippled hundreds of businesses and ISPs in the U.K., has been traced to an American computer discussion site. "We were baffled as to where this deadly new threat had come from," said Richard Josephs of the FBI's computer crimes division, "until we learned that the source code to the virus was available on Slashdot.org." "Source code" refers to the computer-language instructions that a programmer "compiles" to produce a wide variety of applications, from Microsoft Word to Microsoft Excel.
The FBI was informed of the code at 8:03 Wednesday by a courageous anonymous hero, who claimed he has been monitoring the slashdot.org page for evidence of illegal activity ever since it published the "source code" for DeCSS, a program invented by hackers to illegally copy and resell copyrighted DVDs over the Web.
The Department of Justice is preparing to file charges against the hacker-friendly slashdot.org, despite protests from its owners. One, a shadowy figure known only as "CmdrTac0" claims that the source code could have come from anyone who received the virus. But experts say this is unlikely, because there is no known way to keep Microsoft Outlook from launching the virus program upon receipt.
We have been unable to find the anonymous hero who reported the presence of the code on Slashdot.org, but the FBI official who spoke with him said he repeatedly asked if they had the unlisted phone number of actress Natalie Portman.
You're not entirely right about the impermanence of Freenet. First of all, nothing is ever discarded unless the allotted storage space is used up. Since this can be set by the node's owner, it is conceivable that nothing will be lost for a long time (especially in smaller Freenets which could operate primarily among academics). This is discussed further in this section of the FAQ. Additionally, one of the developers tells me that when fully implemented it may be possible to have a node set to request a file before deleting it, so that it can determine if it has the last copy available. If so, the file could instead be compressed and archived, so that it can be recovered if need be. Again, this would probably work better on an independent academic freenet than on a WWW-like one, where enough crap gets posted that saving everything would be cumbersome.
Then again, something about these storage-space arguments strikes me as silly, in a world where there are multiple complete archives of Usenet...
Yeah,/. does appear to be a RPG. You have experience points, and when you collect enough you learn new ways to manipulate reality (well, of course everyone here plays a magic-user). I'm still questing for the elusive "meta-moderate" spell.
And then there are the trolls, fireballs, multiple planes (freshmeat.net, or the closely-guarded nyt.com), gods/wizards/implementors, and famous characters ("...BREAK HEAD WITH OPENSOURCE CD!!!"). And the all-important plusses. Sadly, I myself am stuck on a cursed -3 box of windowing...
- Michael Cohn
e-washing machine's old news...
on
Quickies Rock!
·
· Score: 2
I'm much more impressed by the new developments in cyberdefecation.
Probably the worst game I've ever seen was this Draconian Overlord Simulator that came with my first PC. The people who bundled it must have been really proud of it, since they set it to launch on startup, but I couldn't see the point. It was some kind of political sim, but it really sucked! It didn't have any graphics, just a stupid blinking cursor. So I tried entering commands like Destroy Insurrectionist Rebels (good thing I knew computer types liked acronyms) and a bunch of wierd-named factions in my country appeared. If I typed DIR and the name of a faction, everything changed. After a while I tried to be softer on them and Delegate some of my powers, but that made the stupid game crash!
I see the Draconian Overlord Simulator all the time on my friends' Linus computers. It can't be a very good system if that's the best game they can get their hands on...
I agree that voluntary relinquishing of privacy isn't something people need to be protected from. It will, as you say, help us remember why we valued it in the first place. The reason my agreement is interesting is that I think of myself as a socialist! But my ideal socialism is about empowering people, not crippling them for their own protection. Selling your information won't stop you from eating, learning, or living a fulfilled life. It won't deprive your kids of a quality education.
I'm in favor of requiring full(er) disclosure regarding these information-collecting promotions, but beyond that the results aren't so horrifying that people need to be protected...
I agree with you that a company which makes computers understandable, accessable, and friendly to the average person is a good thing.
But what would you say about a company that also forced the average person to spend beyond her means to keep up with the technology, or to use a computer that's dodgy and unstable because its processor and RAM are overburdened?
This is what Microsoft's policy of frequent version changes and no backwards compatability has done. Now, if 10% of the population (among whom are, naturally, many employers and other bigwigs) owns Word 2000, lots of other people are going to have to buy it (and the associated OS) just to read others' messages. And that means a lot of old, perfectly servicable computers are going to have to be scrapped.
And that means that people who want a computer not to be hackers-in-training, but simply to communicate with the rest of the world, are getting hurt.
I don't think this is such a glowing testimony to open source as it is a lukewarm observation of fact. They staple-gunned themselves in the foot and someone bandaged them. *applause*
You have a point. Open Source created the bug as well as fixed it. How much damage OSS itself deserves for the potential damage depends, to my mind, on where the backdoor was and how long it's been around.
I confess ignorance with respect to this. If the backdoor was part of some relatively new and experimental software, RedHat is to blame for putting it in a box and distributing it worldwide. If the it was in some code that's been around a long time and could also have propagated "naturally," then it is a problem for Open Sourcce that the insecurity was able to survive.
As an analogy, consider the difference between private and public speech. If you go on/. and post "CmdrTaco and Hemos are a bunch of corporate shills!" then you're to blame when the masses flame you. But if you say it in the privacy of your home and a journalist puts it on the main page of the New York Times (and suspends mandatory login for the day), you'd be justified in blaming your infamy on the journalist.
I hope someone can clarify which situation pertains regarding this security hole.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
There have been a few responses to this, which I'd like to draw together:
1) The victory is that the problem was found. It was found quickly, before any damage was done, and it was found expressly because a member of the community had free and easy access to the code.
The gentleman who found the flaw frets that "Anybody else who's viewed the source code could have found the vulnerability and been exploiting it all along," but this ignores the community-spiritedness of opensource as well as the loose lips of most crackers. Things like this go public. And. . .
2) The problem can be fixed, in a variety of ways, by anyone. No waiting for patches from The Source.
3) This reflects very well on open source. But it is a blow to Redhat.
If a Linux for serious hackers shipped with a few holes, the make-rs might reasonably claim that their product wasn't meant to be polished and perfect (they'd be asses not to abase themselves and offer a fix, though).
But Redhat,, which even more than other distros claims to make Linux easy and user-friendly, desperately needs to be just that. They're the ones who should be allowing users to trade up-to-the-minute kewlness for reliability and security. There's no shame in that, but there is shame in doing it badly.
Summary:
Redhat screwed up. Open source fixed it.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
NSI "urged ICANN to designate two new proof of concept" top-level domains right away to avoid 'months or even years spent in further analysis, debate about abstract criteria, and lengthy, complex and contentious procedures and negotiations.'"
I don't know... I don't really see the.com name crush as being one of the pressing social woes of our time. It sounds like NSI has something up its sleeve...
NSI "that a 'sunrise period' be enacted to allow 'certain trademark holders' the right to register their marks in the new domains."
Ah-hah. Looks like the people who think this is just a way to make more money from cross-registering have something here. That NSI thinks the sunrise period will be used indicates that they believe everyone who currently has a.com will want a.shop/.banc address. That they're offering it indicates that they're getting some nice benefts from said.com owners (otherwise, they could just open it up for the squatters to gobble). Nor do I see any great benefit to the rest of us... does anyone really believe that (say) NationsBank(TM) will give up nationsbank.com just because then can get nationsbank.banc?
(well, maybe if they think they can sue whoever buys it next)
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
I won't go into my opinion on the publish/not publish debate, but I'd like to thank Katz & Taco for giving it their public attention. The anger aired by objectors was turning into a firefight, but instead they've made fertile ground for discussion.
The editors of/. get hammered a lot for what they will or won't post, archive, or comment on. I've even seen them called corporate shills. I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell them they've done something distinctly honorable.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, one of the important information locii listed in the report is biotechnology and genomic information, which is very relevant to starving people. A Green Revolution that doesn't require farmers to sell their souls to Monsanto is possibly the fastest way to make food prices drop and better health and nutrition available to the masses. Once there's a greater surplus per laborer, you can have more time for education, infrastructural development, and all the lovely uses for free information that were previously "not much use to the starving."
Of course, this assumes that the corporation in whose sweat shop the non-agrarian masses are working doesn't just lower wages again. That's why people in the developed world need information access (and interest), so that when something like that happens we can financially castrate them.
- Michael Cohn
Slashdot wins.
Even if the case goes to court, Slashdot wins.
Even if the case goes to court and MS wins, Slashdot wins.
Even if the case goes to court and MS wins and gets exclusive IP rights to Kerberos and the Justice Department feels so sorry that it decides not to break them up after all Slashdot... um... breaks even.
Because it's clear that the public is on our side now. These articles are not presenting Microsoft in a favorable light. They are giving a good accounting of open source, explaining what MS did, and citing third-party lawyers who mostly seem to agree with us.
If this becomes a trial situation, what we're going to have isn't a lawsuit against Slashdot, but an honest-to-god test case. And with a test case like this comes public support, angry letters, and the ACLU and their army of mutant squirrels. It would be the best thing we could hope for if one of the first cases prosecuted under DMCA were something well-known and obviously unjust. As long as there's not some kind of backlash in the next few days, I think the long-term outlook is quite lovely.
- Michael Cohn
Open your eyes! This is a government-initiated plot to kill Napster et al. -- if THEY can initiate a CD price war, music downloads will decrease as purchases become easier. With the MP3 fans placated, there will be far less popular support for Gnutella and Freenet! Used only by a small population of privacy-lovers and computer-intelligensia, these powerful tools for anonymity and privacy abandoned will be easy pickings for the Jackbooted Thugs! Then they'll come for /., and then for my precious bodily fluids!
Friends, we must RESIST this manipulative plot! Don't be bought with the promise of cheap music! Rise up and DEMAND your right to be overcharged for CDs!
The distributors who own the vast majority of popular music were collaborating to fix prices at a level higher than retailers wanted to charge and customers wanted to pay. This is the kind of situation I'd like to see libertarians explain away. Although I agree that many things are over-regulated, it seems like government intervention on antitrust grounds is in this case positive for the consumer and good for business (i.e., the retail businesses gain more than the distributors lose). A small group of companies were using their power to our detriment, while their wide-ranging IP rights made a selective boycott impractical. I can't see how market forces could have solved this one; it's hard to vote with your pocketbook when there's no competition.
I suppose one might argue (as many have) that the MP3 explosion did represent a popular response to the problem. But that too is outside the libertarian system which, if I recall, does respect IP...
- Michael Cohn
There are two responses to this:
1: In the past, SF authors have been trying to predict what the rest of the world, running largely independently of them, will do. This involves some scientific extrapolation, but much more sociology, economics, politics, and so forth. The sheer number of disciplines involved makes it clear why the track record is pretty dismal. What a project like ITSF is doing is looking at SF for things the world might do and actively trying to implement them.
2: The flights of SF do not stop at technology. Science Fiction is largely about using technology to free stories from modern pragmatic constraints -- or about telling stories dealing with what may happen when those constraints are gone. The Diamond Age was not interesting because of its descriptions of nanotech per se, but because it showed us a society which had transformed itself for a nanotech age. Stephenson isn't going to teach the ESA how to pull diamond out of the air, but once we learn to do so he might be a good place to look to predict what people will value and how they'll live and think. Maybe we'll get free public compilers a decade early because he thought of it ahead of time.
Now that I've defended the general idea, I have to agree that I'm a bit discouraged by the ITSF project. Their introduction speaks of gleaning purely technological concepts, like rocket fins and orbital space stations. Details like this are historically not, and they need not be, the strength of SF. We should be looking to SF to figure out how to develop technology that's in the pipeline, to see how people currently understand it and how it might be used.
- Michael Cohn
The sausage release comment reminds me of the Big Ball of Mud architecture.
Well, I prefer sausage. It's just as unsavory and haphazard as a BBoM in its composition, but (if you're a latest-patch stability-what's-that Mozilla-nightly-build fanatic) damn does it smell good.
I'm certainly not in favor of doing anything as crazy as using the sausage release, but assuredly someone is going to. And if that happens, I see no reason why the stable people shouldn't take advantage of the free testing...
- Michael Cohn
I understand the complaints here. I also understand Taco's defense. Perhaps what is needed is three sets of code: stable, unstable, and sausage. The first two would require administration and be prone to the delays and inconsistencies attacked above. The "sausage" directory would contain code, unsubstantiated patches, unincorporated features, lips, dirt, bits of hair, etcetera. That way hardcore open-sourcers could get at the bleeding edge stuff themselves, and could even fork the project if the official maintainers weren't keeping things far enough up to date. But meanwhile, those controlling the project would be able to keep a well-organized, documented version that was officially unaffiliated with that vat of partially defatted fatty beef tissue over there.
Of course, there would still be complaints that patches weren't getting out of the sausage bin quickly enough. But at least then if the complainers became numerous enough, they could mount an effective response.
- Michael Cohn
Well, I suppose I was assuming that the discontinued hardware would work. But I think that if what you have is satisfactory, then all other things being equal you'll tend to buy more of the same.
- Michael Cohn
I don't see why this should be a difficult sell for any hardware manufacturer who's gotten out of stone-age source code jealousy. Why should they object to putting their boxes and their brand name on your desktop? The situation should be no different from the one in which Nike(TM) does everything it can to get its logo on the chests of millions, even if they're not athletes and say nothing about the quality of their shoes. If your IT people go to work and see "3COM(TM)" every day; if the administrators have the 3com(TM) name in front of them so that it's the name that pops into their head when its time to make more purchasing decisions; if they can generally get their name hard-coded into your product-inertia... how could they refuse?
Companies may not care about extending the life of products they no longer support. But extending the reach of their name -- that's something you can sell them on.
- Michael Cohn
Seems to me that your uses (and the ones in the article, and the ones others have posted) are innovative and exciting applications... of the Web. I don't understand how they're enhanced by the use of a code that allows the computer to read the location itself. Perhaps I'm too hardcore to understand the average user, but is it really that painful to type in a URL?
I suppose one advantage of non-human-readable links is that it might reduce the value of domain-name squatting. . .
- Michael Cohn
There is one important difference between Wal-Mart(TM) and a local ma&pa business: A locally-owned business is much more a tool of those who work for it; it exists as a way for a small group of people to pool their skills and make a living for themselves. Wal-Mart exists to make money for those who fund it, stockholders who are not involved with its operation. It is in their best interest to do everything possible to minimize costs, whether this means treating employees like machinery, recklessly polluting, or sucking capital right out of the community. Why should they care? They don't have to talk with these people, breathe their air, or live near them.
The idea that they're just giving us what we want is only a half-truth. Ask most McDonalds(TM) patrons (well, those over ten years old) what they like about the place. I suspect you'll hear "cheap," "fast," and "convenient," but you won't hear "I like the food" much. Size and lack of concern allows big corps to leverage the unscrupulous activities I mention above into lower prices, which tempt people into making short-term tradeoffs with long-term negative effects.
Am I suggesting that people are incapable of making good cost-benefit analyses, and should be protected from themselves? No. The way to stop this is through education, through making sure people can see the consequences of their choices as consumers and making them relevant at the moment money is being plunked down.
It's what I hope I'm doing right now.
- Michael Cohn
I was halfway afraid he was going to start spelling "republic" with a K.
- MC
Oh, great.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters) - The "I Love You" e-mail virus, which has crippled hundreds of businesses and ISPs in the U.K., has been traced to an American computer discussion site. "We were baffled as to where this deadly new threat had come from," said Richard Josephs of the FBI's computer crimes division, "until we learned that the source code to the virus was available on Slashdot.org." "Source code" refers to the computer-language instructions that a programmer "compiles" to produce a wide variety of applications, from Microsoft Word to Microsoft Excel.
The FBI was informed of the code at 8:03 Wednesday by a courageous anonymous hero, who claimed he has been monitoring the slashdot.org page for evidence of illegal activity ever since it published the "source code" for DeCSS, a program invented by hackers to illegally copy and resell copyrighted DVDs over the Web.
The Department of Justice is preparing to file charges against the hacker-friendly slashdot.org, despite protests from its owners. One, a shadowy figure known only as "CmdrTac0" claims that the source code could have come from anyone who received the virus. But experts say this is unlikely, because there is no known way to keep Microsoft Outlook from launching the virus program upon receipt.
We have been unable to find the anonymous hero who reported the presence of the code on Slashdot.org, but the FBI official who spoke with him said he repeatedly asked if they had the unlisted phone number of actress Natalie Portman.
You're not entirely right about the impermanence of Freenet. First of all, nothing is ever discarded unless the allotted storage space is used up. Since this can be set by the node's owner, it is conceivable that nothing will be lost for a long time (especially in smaller Freenets which could operate primarily among academics). This is discussed further in this section of the FAQ. Additionally, one of the developers tells me that when fully implemented it may be possible to have a node set to request a file before deleting it, so that it can determine if it has the last copy available. If so, the file could instead be compressed and archived, so that it can be recovered if need be. Again, this would probably work better on an independent academic freenet than on a WWW-like one, where enough crap gets posted that saving everything would be cumbersome.
Then again, something about these storage-space arguments strikes me as silly, in a world where there are multiple complete archives of Usenet...
- Michael Cohn
In case anyone is wondering, he's not making this up.
- Michael Cohn
Yeah, /. does appear to be a RPG. You have experience points, and when you collect enough you learn new ways to manipulate reality (well, of course everyone here plays a magic-user). I'm still questing for the elusive "meta-moderate" spell.
And then there are the trolls, fireballs, multiple planes (freshmeat.net, or the closely-guarded nyt.com), gods/wizards/implementors, and famous characters ("...BREAK HEAD WITH OPENSOURCE CD!!!"). And the all-important plusses. Sadly, I myself am stuck on a cursed -3 box of windowing...
- Michael Cohn
I'm much more impressed by the new developments in cyberdefecation.
- Michael Cohn
Probably the worst game I've ever seen was this Draconian Overlord Simulator that came with my first PC. The people who bundled it must have been really proud of it, since they set it to launch on startup, but I couldn't see the point. It was some kind of political sim, but it really sucked! It didn't have any graphics, just a stupid blinking cursor. So I tried entering commands like Destroy Insurrectionist Rebels (good thing I knew computer types liked acronyms) and a bunch of wierd-named factions in my country appeared. If I typed DIR and the name of a faction, everything changed. After a while I tried to be softer on them and Delegate some of my powers, but that made the stupid game crash!
I see the Draconian Overlord Simulator all the time on my friends' Linus computers. It can't be a very good system if that's the best game they can get their hands on...
- Michael Cohn
I agree that voluntary relinquishing of privacy isn't something people need to be protected from. It will, as you say, help us remember why we valued it in the first place. The reason my agreement is interesting is that I think of myself as a socialist! But my ideal socialism is about empowering people, not crippling them for their own protection. Selling your information won't stop you from eating, learning, or living a fulfilled life. It won't deprive your kids of a quality education.
I'm in favor of requiring full(er) disclosure regarding these information-collecting promotions, but beyond that the results aren't so horrifying that people need to be protected...
- Michael Cohn
I agree with you that a company which makes computers understandable, accessable, and friendly to the average person is a good thing.
But what would you say about a company that also forced the average person to spend beyond her means to keep up with the technology, or to use a computer that's dodgy and unstable because its processor and RAM are overburdened?
This is what Microsoft's policy of frequent version changes and no backwards compatability has done. Now, if 10% of the population (among whom are, naturally, many employers and other bigwigs) owns Word 2000, lots of other people are going to have to buy it (and the associated OS) just to read others' messages. And that means a lot of old, perfectly servicable computers are going to have to be scrapped.
And that means that people who want a computer not to be hackers-in-training, but simply to communicate with the rest of the world, are getting hurt.
- Michael Cohn
I don't think this is such a glowing testimony to open source as it is a lukewarm observation of fact. They staple-gunned themselves in the foot and someone bandaged them. *applause*
/. and post "CmdrTaco and Hemos are a bunch of corporate shills!" then you're to blame when the masses flame you. But if you say it in the privacy of your home and a journalist puts it on the main page of the New York Times (and suspends mandatory login for the day), you'd be justified in blaming your infamy on the journalist.
You have a point. Open Source created the bug as well as fixed it. How much damage OSS itself deserves for the potential damage depends, to my mind, on where the backdoor was and how long it's been around.
I confess ignorance with respect to this. If the backdoor was part of some relatively new and experimental software, RedHat is to blame for putting it in a box and distributing it worldwide. If the it was in some code that's been around a long time and could also have propagated "naturally," then it is a problem for Open Sourcce that the insecurity was able to survive.
As an analogy, consider the difference between private and public speech. If you go on
I hope someone can clarify which situation pertains regarding this security hole.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
There have been a few responses to this, which I'd like to draw together:
1) The victory is that the problem was found. It was found quickly, before any damage was done, and it was found expressly because a member of the community had free and easy access to the code.
The gentleman who found the flaw frets that "Anybody else who's viewed the source code could have found the vulnerability and been exploiting it all along," but this ignores the community-spiritedness of opensource as well as the loose lips of most crackers. Things like this go public. And. . .
2) The problem can be fixed, in a variety of ways, by anyone. No waiting for patches from The Source.
3) This reflects very well on open source. But it is a blow to Redhat.
If a Linux for serious hackers shipped with a few holes, the make-rs might reasonably claim that their product wasn't meant to be polished and perfect (they'd be asses not to abase themselves and offer a fix, though).
But Redhat,, which even more than other distros claims to make Linux easy and user-friendly, desperately needs to be just that. They're the ones who should be allowing users to trade up-to-the-minute kewlness for reliability and security. There's no shame in that, but there is shame in doing it badly.
Summary:
Redhat screwed up. Open source fixed it.
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
It's kind of a relief to learn that I'm not the only one who's been hearing about Benchmark's Laser Printer Toner sale for the past three years.
- Michael
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
NSI "urged ICANN to designate two new proof of concept" top-level domains right away to avoid 'months or even years spent in further analysis, debate about abstract criteria, and lengthy, complex and contentious procedures and negotiations.'"
.com name crush as being one of the pressing social woes of our time. It sounds like NSI has something up its sleeve...
.com will want a .shop/.banc address. That they're offering it indicates that they're getting some nice benefts from said .com owners (otherwise, they could just open it up for the squatters to gobble). Nor do I see any great benefit to the rest of us... does anyone really believe that (say) NationsBank(TM) will give up nationsbank.com just because then can get nationsbank.banc?
I don't know... I don't really see the
NSI "that a 'sunrise period' be enacted to allow 'certain trademark holders' the right to register their marks in the new domains."
Ah-hah.
Looks like the people who think this is just a way to make more money from cross-registering have something here. That NSI thinks the sunrise period will be used indicates that they believe everyone who currently has a
(well, maybe if they think they can sue whoever buys it next)
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.
I won't go into my opinion on the publish/not publish debate, but I'd like to thank Katz & Taco for giving it their public attention. The anger aired by objectors was turning into a firefight, but instead they've made fertile ground for discussion.
/. get hammered a lot for what they will or won't post, archive, or comment on. I've even seen them called corporate shills. I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell them they've done something distinctly honorable.
The editors of
- Michael Cohn
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.