The irony here is that nobody is going to verify your signature, so it's worthless. It could be fake, and nobody would ever know, because it's not worth it to check. Encryption and authentication are useless unless they're transparently applied and verified systematically because nobody's going to do that by hand all the time.
Apple doesn't bend over backwards to preserve compatibility. They're just going to drop your app from the store if it doesn't work after upgrading the OS; hasn't that happened already?
It might have been as bad as it sounds, but I can also imagine it actually requiring two weeks for a new person to do the work you could do in a few hours. Depending on the complexity of your product/environment and the quality of your code, what could take you a few hours could take someone else weeks to dig into, investigate, and get working. The two weeks it took the junior might reflect the shitty code that's already been written (possibly by you), not their programming skills.
'Cyber', 'warriors', and 'troops' are embarrassing and funny, however this bill's focus on educating people about these issues is laudable, and I'm glad malicious behavior in other countries is a growing concern. But the way I see it, computer security laws disincentivize us from innovating technologies that remove known exploits, and instead we patch things up and wait for the same exploit to show up another day. Buffer overflows, injection attacks, spam, denial of service, malware, viruses, these are things we've chosen to prevent by punishment, rather than by enforcing survival of the fittest for the underlying technologies. I will have to deal with spam probably for the rest of my life, because law enforcement can only target so many spammers, and the smaller ones can get by. The responsibility is on the government to enforce good behavior, so there's no incentive for us to make anything better for ourselves.
While they're at it, they should also get rid of these. God, I hate them so. Never used them once, and they both force me to redo what I've already done. Just terrible. Mac keyboards don't have this cruft, I'm not sure why Lenovo catching up is newsworthy.
I've been reading IGN.com a long time, and I've consistently heard from the people there who stare at games all day long that 30 vs. 60 frames per second doesn't matter because it's hardly noticeable; it's the change in frame rate as you play that's noticeable and looks bad.
Based only on the article description, Japanese citizens are being assigned ID numbers, not ID cards. Using an ID card to authenticate yourself works well because it probably has a photo and maybe a fingerprint on it, as well as some other personal information. If someone uses your ID card, it's easy to catch them. On the other hand, using an ID number alone to authenticate yourself is a terrible idea because it's a lot easier to match an ID number with a person than using their ID card. The ID number is treated as a kind of password, as if only you could possibly know your own ID number, despite the fact that you give it to anyone who wants to know who you are (which they assume also proves that you're you). The odds are high that eventually someone, maybe even you, will make a mistake and someone else can then tie you to your ID number.
What's funny is that the U.S. government discourages you from using someone's social security number to both identify them and authenticate them, because of the obvious security problems we see every day. Yet businesses continue to use those numbers for authentication. An easy fix would be for the government to simply publish everyone's SSN at once. Then any business that uses SSNs to authenticate people will be castigated or lose business for being idiots.
I think it would be cool to separate authentication from identification. Everyone gets a unique ID number and chooses a private code that together produce a public code, or maybe many one-time throw-away codes, that you can use to identify yourself without giving away control of your identity.
Ah, perhaps you can address the point I actually made: it was my understanding that you can't copy something too closely, even if it is not verbatim. For example, you couldn't make a movie called "Runforgiven" with slightly different names for characters where everything is pretty much exactly the same, just not exactly the same. I couldn't just reword everything and call it my own, e.g. using "I wouldn't cut up that whore if I were you!" instead of "Don't cut up that whore!". Or can you? I don't pretend to be an expert, this is just the understanding I have.
I don't understand your distinction between idea and process. The process is the idea. I understand that you cannot patent the general idea of ordering drinks remotely. I was referring to the idea of ordering drinks from Starbucks through iPhones. I also was not asserting that the Starbucks/iPhone idea is worthy of a patent; I was merely using another story of the day as an example.
Depending on the watermarking technology they use, it could be possible to strip or corrupt watermarks from their song files. Judging by the DRM schemes that tend to be adopted, I would guess this will be more than possible.
So there is a law against "stealing" someone's idea? What law? In what country?
Patent and copyright law serve those purposes, I believe. For example, I'm Apple and I have an idea for ordering drinks through iPhones from nearby Starbucks and I get a patent for the idea. Now, no one else can use that exact idea and probably nothing too similar to it. I believe copyright also prevents you from copying another's work too closely, e.g. plot, characters, except under fair use.
The story indicates to me that Negroponte is more concerned that Intel and Microsoft might bring more cheap laptops to third-world countries than him. He should be happy that his endeavor is motivating these for-profit companies to innovate, which in turn benefits those people. If he is worried about them driving OLPC out of business and then driving up prices again, he should make that argument. I didn't see that mentioned anywhere in the article.
Slightly related to the concern for web architecture: it seems that Flash destroys the textuality/interoperability of the web. Given an all-Flash interface, Google or anyone else can no longer parse your document to establish the citation-like links between pages or parse your content. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't want anyone to do that, which amounts to converting all your pages into images. But it essentially turns web pages into standalone programs, in which case you cannot examine their connections or content in a larger scope.
Analogies are dangerous and rarely fit the actual situation they are applied to perfectly. Blindness and websites are not the same as wheelchairs and buildings. Web sites are a service provided voluntarily by businesses; they are text files residing on someone's computer account and served up by a web server. However they're interpreted or displayed isn't up to them. Moreover, there is no standard for conveying information such that everyone will understand it. I can see fine and some web site layouts don't make sense to me. Do I have a right to bitch about it to them? Hell no. It's nice if they care enough to change it to accommodate me, but I shouldn't have a right to dictate the content they publish.
Why don't you consider the real-world impact of your ideas? For example, if businesses were required to make their web pages accessible to blind people, how would that affect small business owners or individuals? If I wanted to sell my couch and put an ad for it on my personal web site, I could be perceived to be a business and therefore required to redesign my web page to be accessible.
Another implication of this that I don't like is that "accessible" isn't very well defined in this context. The story seemed to say that Target was sued because the web site reader used by the blind person couldn't interpret the web site correctly. So are the companies who make these web site readers going to dictate what is and is not "accessible" to blind users? What if those programs change over time? Would web sites be required to be overhauled if the most popular site reader changed dramatically? There's no recognized, standard way of representing information and services online. And that's because there's no "best" way to represent all information; some info is best viewed one way, and some info another. Some content is only visual and has no textual analog. What if my web site is an expression of myself, a work of art, or an experiment in user interfaces? Should I be forced to change it because a portion of my site has a business aspect and some people can't use it? These kinds of rulings have implications that go far beyond problems for big businesses.
Where does fair use come into play here (assuming this was in the U.S.)? You're allowed to copy another's works in part for criticism or parody. Aren't you covered as long as you only quote the relevant parts that illustrate that they're giant asshats and criticize them for it?
There are many good games out there that wouldn't be possible without large budgets, and such a large investment requires more income, which isn't possible if retailers like Walmart don't sell the game.
I would argue that larger budgets improve graphical polish, not game play mechanics, which in the end doesn't end up making games any more fun, but it still makes them more enjoyable.
By "conspire" I meant plan. I bet most businesses have plans for how they're going to compete with and, god willing, put out of business their competitors. There's nothing wrong with wanting and getting all the business in your market.
Selling your products under cost to kill the competition isn't illegal:
A common complaint is that some companies try to monopolize a market through "predatory" or below-cost pricing. This can drive out smaller firms that cannot compete at those prices. But the lower prices a large retailer offers may simply reflect efficiencies from spreading overhead costs over a larger volume of sales. Because the antitrust laws encourage competition that leads to low prices, courts and antitrust authorities challenge predatory activities only when they will lead to higher prices.
Why would sites like Facebook open up their most valuable asset, its community and the data that ties it together, for anyone to use? That would reduce their value to its users. Their main source of income seems to be advertising to their users. Fewer users -> less income.
In particular, anticompetitive behavior is not a legal or moral way to make money.
Yep, except Intel isn't being anticompetitive by creating superior processors or withholding them for the right time. Many businesses, like movie studios and game publishers, delay releasing their content to maximize their profits. It's not illegal to conspire to put your competitors out of business.
It wouldn't make sense to punish a company for making products so superior that it drove their competitors out of business. If that were so, there would be no incentive to innovate. It's my understanding that monopolies aren't illegal but that it's illegal to use a monopoly to stifle the competition in another field (i.e. Microsoft using its OS monopoly to force their user apps down our throats).
Slashdot Mirror
...the small print taketh away."
My entire high school started at 7:30 a.m. every morning!
These kids had it better than most already.
Small quibble: this law doesn't give you a privacy right, it just makes opening mail illegal. Look to constitutional amendments for your rights.
The irony here is that nobody is going to verify your signature, so it's worthless. It could be fake, and nobody would ever know, because it's not worth it to check. Encryption and authentication are useless unless they're transparently applied and verified systematically because nobody's going to do that by hand all the time.
Unless you're a character in 24, and Jack Bauer commandeers your property for his own purposes.
Apple doesn't bend over backwards to preserve compatibility. They're just going to drop your app from the store if it doesn't work after upgrading the OS; hasn't that happened already?
It might have been as bad as it sounds, but I can also imagine it actually requiring two weeks for a new person to do the work you could do in a few hours. Depending on the complexity of your product/environment and the quality of your code, what could take you a few hours could take someone else weeks to dig into, investigate, and get working. The two weeks it took the junior might reflect the shitty code that's already been written (possibly by you), not their programming skills.
'Cyber', 'warriors', and 'troops' are embarrassing and funny, however this bill's focus on educating people about these issues is laudable, and I'm glad malicious behavior in other countries is a growing concern. But the way I see it, computer security laws disincentivize us from innovating technologies that remove known exploits, and instead we patch things up and wait for the same exploit to show up another day. Buffer overflows, injection attacks, spam, denial of service, malware, viruses, these are things we've chosen to prevent by punishment, rather than by enforcing survival of the fittest for the underlying technologies. I will have to deal with spam probably for the rest of my life, because law enforcement can only target so many spammers, and the smaller ones can get by. The responsibility is on the government to enforce good behavior, so there's no incentive for us to make anything better for ourselves.
While they're at it, they should also get rid of these. God, I hate them so. Never used them once, and they both force me to redo what I've already done. Just terrible. Mac keyboards don't have this cruft, I'm not sure why Lenovo catching up is newsworthy.
I've been reading IGN.com a long time, and I've consistently heard from the people there who stare at games all day long that 30 vs. 60 frames per second doesn't matter because it's hardly noticeable; it's the change in frame rate as you play that's noticeable and looks bad.
Based only on the article description, Japanese citizens are being assigned ID numbers, not ID cards. Using an ID card to authenticate yourself works well because it probably has a photo and maybe a fingerprint on it, as well as some other personal information. If someone uses your ID card, it's easy to catch them. On the other hand, using an ID number alone to authenticate yourself is a terrible idea because it's a lot easier to match an ID number with a person than using their ID card. The ID number is treated as a kind of password, as if only you could possibly know your own ID number, despite the fact that you give it to anyone who wants to know who you are (which they assume also proves that you're you). The odds are high that eventually someone, maybe even you, will make a mistake and someone else can then tie you to your ID number.
What's funny is that the U.S. government discourages you from using someone's social security number to both identify them and authenticate them, because of the obvious security problems we see every day. Yet businesses continue to use those numbers for authentication. An easy fix would be for the government to simply publish everyone's SSN at once. Then any business that uses SSNs to authenticate people will be castigated or lose business for being idiots.
I think it would be cool to separate authentication from identification. Everyone gets a unique ID number and chooses a private code that together produce a public code, or maybe many one-time throw-away codes, that you can use to identify yourself without giving away control of your identity.
Ah, perhaps you can address the point I actually made: it was my understanding that you can't copy something too closely, even if it is not verbatim. For example, you couldn't make a movie called "Runforgiven" with slightly different names for characters where everything is pretty much exactly the same, just not exactly the same. I couldn't just reword everything and call it my own, e.g. using "I wouldn't cut up that whore if I were you!" instead of "Don't cut up that whore!". Or can you? I don't pretend to be an expert, this is just the understanding I have.
I don't understand your distinction between idea and process. The process is the idea. I understand that you cannot patent the general idea of ordering drinks remotely. I was referring to the idea of ordering drinks from Starbucks through iPhones. I also was not asserting that the Starbucks/iPhone idea is worthy of a patent; I was merely using another story of the day as an example.
Depending on the watermarking technology they use, it could be possible to strip or corrupt watermarks from their song files. Judging by the DRM schemes that tend to be adopted, I would guess this will be more than possible.
Patent and copyright law serve those purposes, I believe. For example, I'm Apple and I have an idea for ordering drinks through iPhones from nearby Starbucks and I get a patent for the idea. Now, no one else can use that exact idea and probably nothing too similar to it. I believe copyright also prevents you from copying another's work too closely, e.g. plot, characters, except under fair use.
Sometimes I wonder that myself.
The story indicates to me that Negroponte is more concerned that Intel and Microsoft might bring more cheap laptops to third-world countries than him. He should be happy that his endeavor is motivating these for-profit companies to innovate, which in turn benefits those people. If he is worried about them driving OLPC out of business and then driving up prices again, he should make that argument. I didn't see that mentioned anywhere in the article.
Slightly related to the concern for web architecture: it seems that Flash destroys the textuality/interoperability of the web. Given an all-Flash interface, Google or anyone else can no longer parse your document to establish the citation-like links between pages or parse your content. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't want anyone to do that, which amounts to converting all your pages into images. But it essentially turns web pages into standalone programs, in which case you cannot examine their connections or content in a larger scope.
Sure, as a convenience. But they don't get to display ads in the same way, if at all, if your mail is being displayed in an app they don't control.
Analogies are dangerous and rarely fit the actual situation they are applied to perfectly. Blindness and websites are not the same as wheelchairs and buildings. Web sites are a service provided voluntarily by businesses; they are text files residing on someone's computer account and served up by a web server. However they're interpreted or displayed isn't up to them. Moreover, there is no standard for conveying information such that everyone will understand it. I can see fine and some web site layouts don't make sense to me. Do I have a right to bitch about it to them? Hell no. It's nice if they care enough to change it to accommodate me, but I shouldn't have a right to dictate the content they publish.
Why don't you consider the real-world impact of your ideas? For example, if businesses were required to make their web pages accessible to blind people, how would that affect small business owners or individuals? If I wanted to sell my couch and put an ad for it on my personal web site, I could be perceived to be a business and therefore required to redesign my web page to be accessible.
Another implication of this that I don't like is that "accessible" isn't very well defined in this context. The story seemed to say that Target was sued because the web site reader used by the blind person couldn't interpret the web site correctly. So are the companies who make these web site readers going to dictate what is and is not "accessible" to blind users? What if those programs change over time? Would web sites be required to be overhauled if the most popular site reader changed dramatically? There's no recognized, standard way of representing information and services online. And that's because there's no "best" way to represent all information; some info is best viewed one way, and some info another. Some content is only visual and has no textual analog. What if my web site is an expression of myself, a work of art, or an experiment in user interfaces? Should I be forced to change it because a portion of my site has a business aspect and some people can't use it? These kinds of rulings have implications that go far beyond problems for big businesses.
Where does fair use come into play here (assuming this was in the U.S.)? You're allowed to copy another's works in part for criticism or parody. Aren't you covered as long as you only quote the relevant parts that illustrate that they're giant asshats and criticize them for it?
Welcome to the life of a Nintendo 64/GameCube fan. Now the tables have turned! Bwa ha ha! Suck it, Sony!
There are many good games out there that wouldn't be possible without large budgets, and such a large investment requires more income, which isn't possible if retailers like Walmart don't sell the game.
I would argue that larger budgets improve graphical polish, not game play mechanics, which in the end doesn't end up making games any more fun, but it still makes them more enjoyable.
By "conspire" I meant plan. I bet most businesses have plans for how they're going to compete with and, god willing, put out of business their competitors. There's nothing wrong with wanting and getting all the business in your market.
Selling your products under cost to kill the competition isn't illegal:
Why would sites like Facebook open up their most valuable asset, its community and the data that ties it together, for anyone to use? That would reduce their value to its users. Their main source of income seems to be advertising to their users. Fewer users -> less income.
Yep, except Intel isn't being anticompetitive by creating superior processors or withholding them for the right time. Many businesses, like movie studios and game publishers, delay releasing their content to maximize their profits. It's not illegal to conspire to put your competitors out of business.
It wouldn't make sense to punish a company for making products so superior that it drove their competitors out of business. If that were so, there would be no incentive to innovate. It's my understanding that monopolies aren't illegal but that it's illegal to use a monopoly to stifle the competition in another field (i.e. Microsoft using its OS monopoly to force their user apps down our throats).