Hmm. Barry Fox (author of the magazine story) has a reasonable reputation for his coverage of media-technical issues, and he's unlikely to have written it without reasonable grounds for believing that some of these doctored CDs had indeed been released as an experiement, but I'd have been happier if he had an actual example where the doctoring could be demonstrated.
The gist of the matter is that such CDs have been deliberately constructed to hinder copying of their contents. Now, whether that renders them defective would seem to depend on the jurisdiction and the labeling of the product. If the juridiction permits copying and the product is not clearly labelled as being copy-resistant, then you can make a good case that the product is defective. If, additionally, the product has been constructed in a way that the manufacturer knows has the potential to cause consequential damage when the buyer uses it only in legally permissible ways, well... at the very least I'd expect the consumer protection organisations to be very interested.
Different jurisdictions are going to be a pain to any company wanting to use such a scheme for a mass-market product (which is why they're lobbying for global consistency in IP and copyright laws, merged in whatever directions most favour their own interests). To use this copy-hinderance mechanism at present, they will either have to produce different labelling depending on the different laws (which will escape notice only until some enterprising journalist investigates the differences), or they have to produce a form of labelling that is legally safe in all major markets.
And even then, they can expect trouble from consumer organisations if they try to push a deliberately restricted product to buyers at the same price as its unrestricted predecessor. Be sympathetic, folks, it's not easy being a mass-market content distributor....
Is this a case of Microsoft being free to change its licensing rules whenever it pleases, or did Compaq and AOL screw up by letting the cat out of the bag about what they intended before they had signed license terms that would have allowed them to do it?
If I were an insurance adjuster trying to insure peoples' information technology assets, I would have my own experts supervising everyone who was on the insurance plan to ensure that they patched their fucking software.
If you're seeking insurance against the costs of a DDoS attack, your insurance assessor can reasonably insist on knowing details of your infrastructure and what procedures you have in place to decide what premiums to charge. But the administrators of the population of vulnerable machines that the DDoS attack is exploiting are not the ones likely to be asking for insurance (the report suggests from the distribution of attack host domains that "at home" machines on cable and DSL were playing a significant role, for example), so the scope for direct pressure is rather limited. And the statistics on what makes a vulnerable DDoS target are still very inexact, and will continue to be for as long as victim corporations are unwilling to go public and admit they've been DOS'd.
Or I would make it against the law not to patch one's software, similar to the laws ensuring the
vaccination of children, and for the same reasons; such an epidemic, viral or virtual, delivers a powerful blow to our economy and is a matter of national security.
I can't see that proposal flying. What I can see is that the current free-for-all where there are no controls whatever on the fitness for use of software products will be brought to an end. You want to produce software for commodity sale and use? Fine, then you/ your company must have the appropriate certificate of good practice and have your products and procedures reviewed regularly, and you'll probably need malpractice insurance, as well. If you just want to play with software as a hobby, then that's OK, but you need a license before you're allowed out on the public net, and/or you need to put your creations behind a certified firewall.
A remember a page of spoof advertisements that Byte magazine (RIP) ran in an April edition. One of them purported to be from a company that manufactured inexpensive facsimiles of the new-fangled portables for people who needed the kudos of having the latest executive/ techno gadget but who had neither the budget or the need for one that actually worked. There were two models, based on the TRS-80 and on a larger luggable one (the Osborne, perhaps). I didn't keep the ad, but I remember that the description included something along these lines:
<approximate quote>
The lids open to give access to storage space for people on the move. The TRS-80 model can easily hold a notebook, calculator, appointments diary, pens and pencils, and still have enough room for a lunchtime sandwich. The larger (Osborne) can in addition accomodate a change of shirt and underclothes for an overnight stay.
Great care has been taken over verisimilitude. Several of the keys on the TRS-80 are designed to easily fall off, and its "LCD" has several permanent black spots, while the (Osborne) is just slightly too large in all dimensions to easily fit in the luggage rack or under the seat in airline coach-class, and has built-in weights placed so as to make it difficult to carry and manoevre without frequently hitting or chafing the user's shin.
</approximate quote>
A little unfair on the TRS-80, perhaps, but pretty accurate for the first generation of luggables.
Unfortunately this isn't surprising: the US has a well-established reputation for denying consular access, some of which is doubtless due to simple ignorance (read also: incomplete training) of the law enforcement people involved, but some looks suspiciously deliberate.
Throw "death row consular access" at Google, and look at the Amnesty International link near the top of the list (be nice to Amnesty and use the Google cache copy).
I'll not be going to them when I've made foolish mistakes and can't deal with the results.
No, child, but if your understanding of your responsibilities is truly as limited as your posted comments suggest, they may very well be coming for you.
I rather doubt that Microsoft's PR department were involved in this episode at all.
If they had been,/.ers would probably currently be ridiculing an MS press release about how the company had worked out an educational discount with the schools board that ensured that there would be enough legal copies of the relevant software available to teachers at an affordable cost, so there would no longer be the temptation to engage in piracy, and how this demonstrated Microsoft's understanding of the responsibility it had as a major software supplier to be a good corporate member of society.
It seems more likely to me that the falling popularity of toys like Meccano is a symptom of the generally low status of the engineering profession in the UK - indeed, the UK must be about the only western European country where "the professions" is commonly understood to refer only to the lawyer/ docter/ bank manager/ teacher class of white-collar activities, and most certainly not to anything as dull and dirty as engineering.
Altavista reckons there are enough companies whose systems and internal web sites are a mess that it's worth releasing a customised version of their technology to help the staff at those companies track down information.
Whether search engine technology will actually help is a moot point: at the place I work (multinational, financial services sector) the internal network is approaching unnavigability, even with a search engine and a structured topic list that's intended to point to the official starting pages for the more important areas. The trouble is that the company web has been growing without supervision and structure, there are no rules on flagging content with keywords, and the structured topic list which was hailed as the salvation of the company web when the prototype was rolled out never got the funding needed to stay current.
As for privacy implications, different jurisdictions have different rules. If you don't like the rules in the place where you live and work, give up the self-indulgent group whines and get involved in changing them.
From the article, it would seem that the dispute is now centering on the area of financial services, where confidentiality of personal data should be a matter of course.
Sounds as though the underlying problem is differences between the US and the EU on what is considered to be financial wrongdoing.
If these people are serious about engaging in such an expensive form of therapy, they may as well aim at a useful target: the two-shells short of a magazine ****wits at the NRA who have been peddling a mischievously edited misquotation from the US constitution for last few decades as part of their campaign to ensure that any dickhead can get hold of firearms with less checking and training than is needed for a driving license.
"Now, Dr Holloway, of the astronomer pressure group Spaceguard UK, and Dr Asher, from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, have demonstrated that it is possible to turn an asteroid into a weapon." (My emphasis.)
They're trying to drum up some funding, that's all.
Come friendly rocks and fall on Slough,
It is not fit for humans now.
( - apologies to John Betjemann )
You say you're involved in a research project and are looking for people with a "by programmers for scientists" attitude. I concur with the other suggestions of looking for someone with the appropriate scientific background who can also program; what surprises me is the implication that such individuals don't exist in your particular field of interest.
You see, I started programming while studying for a physics degree in the late 1960s, at a time when CS was a rare academic discipline even at the postgraduate level, and like many acquaintances in the math/ physical sciences/ engineering fields I went into the IT business because it paid us well for work that we found easy and even (at that time) fun. And my impression is that since that time, knowing how to use computers as a tool has become a standard part of the curriculum in just about any university-level scientific discipline.
It sounds to me as though there's a mismatch between your field and what you're wanting done, and it's difficult to suggest useful approaches without knowing more about both.
See here at The Register for a summary of the shenanigans that the TopLevelDummies at ICANN were pulling at the Melbourne meet. (Putting ICANN into El Reg's search box gives a few other interesting recent stories.)
Time, I think, to get the big guns to work: there exist organisations which have an interest in ensuring that the integrity and accessibility of their own data does not get compromised by trojan horses implemented at the behest of an industry cartel to enforce its selective and mischievous reinterpretation of the purpose of copyright. The big corporations. Believe me, when a purchasing officer is waving an order for a few tens of thousands of units, plus contracts for their deployment and servicing, then the suppliers tend to take notice of their preferences.
So if you have the (arguable) good fortune to hold a responsible position in the IT department of one of those behemoths, make a point of drawing the purchasing section's attention to what's going on. It won't do any harm, and may help to keep reaonably-sized manufacturing runs going for disk drives that haven't been hamstrung by Hollywood lawyers.
As others have commented, a major risk in these proposals is that legalistic and market-volume pressures will combine to make access-controlling hard drives the de-facto norm in reasonably-priced equipment. A recognisable demand for the continued availability of significant numbers of drives which are free of this mischievous and abusable technology will help to reduce that risk. And fortunately there is a section of the PC-buying marketplace which has every interest in not having the integrity and availability of its data put at risk by the presence of trojan horses built at the behest of an industry cartel to enforce its own interpretation of copyright law.
The big corporations.
The ones where PC upgrades mean bulk purchases of tens of thousands of units with accompanying big contracts to handle deployment and support. So, to those/. readers who have the good fortune (;-) to hold responsible positions in the IT departments in these places, a suggestion:
politely draw the attention of your IT purchasing section to this issue - the consolidated CPRM coverage at the increasingly essential The Register is a good resource - and suggest that it might be a good idea if they were to get in touch with their preferred suppliers and emphasised that they would be most unhappy if their control over their own data were compromised by pressures from third parties with no standing over its use.
Point taken. And as indicated elsewhere in this discussion and in the piece on this in The Register DoD can have good reason for keeping the system going until an alternative is in place, and $72M for perhaps 2 years of operation is pretty good value for money.
Pity they had to spoil it by cooking up a silly excuse, though.
So it's bad for me to give some small change to a downtown beggar, but it's OK for the DoD to shell out $72M to spare the blushes of some prosperous corporate types after one of their business judgements went pear-shaped?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else put in mind of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation? (RIP Douglas)
The gist of the matter is that such CDs have been deliberately constructed to hinder copying of their contents. Now, whether that renders them defective would seem to depend on the jurisdiction and the labeling of the product. If the juridiction permits copying and the product is not clearly labelled as being copy-resistant, then you can make a good case that the product is defective. If, additionally, the product has been constructed in a way that the manufacturer knows has the potential to cause consequential damage when the buyer uses it only in legally permissible ways, well... at the very least I'd expect the consumer protection organisations to be very interested.
Different jurisdictions are going to be a pain to any company wanting to use such a scheme for a mass-market product (which is why they're lobbying for global consistency in IP and copyright laws, merged in whatever directions most favour their own interests). To use this copy-hinderance mechanism at present, they will either have to produce different labelling depending on the different laws (which will escape notice only until some enterprising journalist investigates the differences), or they have to produce a form of labelling that is legally safe in all major markets.
And even then, they can expect trouble from consumer organisations if they try to push a deliberately restricted product to buyers at the same price as its unrestricted predecessor. Be sympathetic, folks, it's not easy being a mass-market content distributor....
Is this a case of Microsoft being free to change its licensing rules whenever it pleases, or did Compaq and AOL screw up by letting the cat out of the bag about what they intended before they had signed license terms that would have allowed them to do it?
Just curious.
Still, Kruger insists: "We don't visit any of these companies. The ones getting the letters are not under investigation."
(My italics.)
So the BSA is sending out thousands of letters deliberately worded to promote Fear'n'Doubt, to people who are not under suspicion?
Sounds like grounds for a cease and desist order, or even a class action suit.
If you're seeking insurance against the costs of a DDoS attack, your insurance assessor can reasonably insist on knowing details of your infrastructure and what procedures you have in place to decide what premiums to charge. But the administrators of the population of vulnerable machines that the DDoS attack is exploiting are not the ones likely to be asking for insurance (the report suggests from the distribution of attack host domains that "at home" machines on cable and DSL were playing a significant role, for example), so the scope for direct pressure is rather limited. And the statistics on what makes a vulnerable DDoS target are still very inexact, and will continue to be for as long as victim corporations are unwilling to go public and admit they've been DOS'd.
Or I would make it against the law not to patch one's software, similar to the laws ensuring the vaccination of children, and for the same reasons; such an epidemic, viral or virtual, delivers a powerful blow to our economy and is a matter of national security.
I can't see that proposal flying. What I can see is that the current free-for-all where there are no controls whatever on the fitness for use of software products will be brought to an end. You want to produce software for commodity sale and use? Fine, then you/ your company must have the appropriate certificate of good practice and have your products and procedures reviewed regularly, and you'll probably need malpractice insurance, as well. If you just want to play with software as a hobby, then that's OK, but you need a license before you're allowed out on the public net, and/or you need to put your creations behind a certified firewall.
<approximate quote>
The lids open to give access to storage space for people on the move. The TRS-80 model can easily hold a notebook, calculator, appointments diary, pens and pencils, and still have enough room for a lunchtime sandwich. The larger (Osborne) can in addition accomodate a change of shirt and underclothes for an overnight stay.
Great care has been taken over verisimilitude. Several of the keys on the TRS-80 are designed to easily fall off, and its "LCD" has several permanent black spots, while the (Osborne) is just slightly too large in all dimensions to easily fit in the luggage rack or under the seat in airline coach-class, and has built-in weights placed so as to make it difficult to carry and manoevre without frequently hitting or chafing the user's shin.
</approximate quote>
A little unfair on the TRS-80, perhaps, but pretty accurate for the first generation of luggables.
Unfortunately this isn't surprising: the US has a well-established reputation for denying consular access, some of which is doubtless due to simple ignorance (read also: incomplete training) of the law enforcement people involved, but some looks suspiciously deliberate.
Throw "death row consular access" at Google, and look at the Amnesty International link near the top of the list (be nice to Amnesty and use the Google cache copy).
Arthur C. Clarke
No, child, but if your understanding of your responsibilities is truly as limited as your posted comments suggest, they may very well be coming for you.
I rather doubt that Microsoft's PR department were involved in this episode at all.
/.ers would probably currently be ridiculing an MS press release about how the company had worked out an educational discount with the schools board that ensured that there would be enough legal copies of the relevant software available to teachers at an affordable cost, so there would no longer be the temptation to engage in piracy, and how this demonstrated Microsoft's understanding of the responsibility it had as a major software supplier to be a good corporate member of society.
If they had been,
It seems more likely to me that the falling popularity of toys like Meccano is a symptom of the generally low status of the engineering profession in the UK - indeed, the UK must be about the only western European country where "the professions" is commonly understood to refer only to the lawyer/ docter/ bank manager/ teacher class of white-collar activities, and most certainly not to anything as dull and dirty as engineering.
"Any software whose terms of use attempt to hinder ethically-challenged corporations from taking it and attempting to pass it off as their own work."
See also Copyright, Violation of.
Whether search engine technology will actually help is a moot point: at the place I work (multinational, financial services sector) the internal network is approaching unnavigability, even with a search engine and a structured topic list that's intended to point to the official starting pages for the more important areas. The trouble is that the company web has been growing without supervision and structure, there are no rules on flagging content with keywords, and the structured topic list which was hailed as the salvation of the company web when the prototype was rolled out never got the funding needed to stay current.
As for privacy implications, different jurisdictions have different rules. If you don't like the rules in the place where you live and work, give up the self-indulgent group whines and get involved in changing them.
Sounds as though the underlying problem is differences between the US and the EU on what is considered to be financial wrongdoing.
If these people are serious about engaging in such an expensive form of therapy, they may as well aim at a useful target: the two-shells short of a magazine ****wits at the NRA who have been peddling a mischievously edited misquotation from the US constitution for last few decades as part of their campaign to ensure that any dickhead can get hold of firearms with less checking and training than is needed for a driving license.
Guns don't kill people.
Computer Games kill people.
</Sarcasm>
"Now, Dr Holloway, of the astronomer pressure group Spaceguard UK, and Dr Asher, from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, have demonstrated that it is possible to turn an asteroid into a weapon." (My emphasis.)
They're trying to drum up some funding, that's all.
You see, I started programming while studying for a physics degree in the late 1960s, at a time when CS was a rare academic discipline even at the postgraduate level, and like many acquaintances in the math/ physical sciences/ engineering fields I went into the IT business because it paid us well for work that we found easy and even (at that time) fun. And my impression is that since that time, knowing how to use computers as a tool has become a standard part of the curriculum in just about any university-level scientific discipline.
It sounds to me as though there's a mismatch between your field and what you're wanting done, and it's difficult to suggest useful approaches without knowing more about both.
See here at The Register for a summary of the shenanigans that the TopLevelDummies at ICANN were pulling at the Melbourne meet. (Putting ICANN into El Reg's search box gives a few other interesting recent stories.)
Time, I think, to get the big guns to work: there exist organisations which have an interest in ensuring that the integrity and accessibility of their own data does not get compromised by trojan horses implemented at the behest of an industry cartel to enforce its selective and mischievous reinterpretation of the purpose of copyright. The big corporations. Believe me, when a purchasing officer is waving an order for a few tens of thousands of units, plus contracts for their deployment and servicing, then the suppliers tend to take notice of their preferences.
So if you have the (arguable) good fortune to hold a responsible position in the IT department of one of those behemoths, make a point of drawing the purchasing section's attention to what's going on. It won't do any harm, and may help to keep reaonably-sized manufacturing runs going for disk drives that haven't been hamstrung by Hollywood lawyers.
The big corporations.
The ones where PC upgrades mean bulk purchases of tens of thousands of units with accompanying big contracts to handle deployment and support. So, to those /. readers who have the good fortune (;-) to hold responsible positions in the IT departments in these places, a suggestion:
politely draw the attention of your IT purchasing section to this issue - the consolidated CPRM coverage at the increasingly essential The Register is a good resource - and suggest that it might be a good idea if they were to get in touch with their preferred suppliers and emphasised that they would be most unhappy if their control over their own data were compromised by pressures from third parties with no standing over its use.
My first reaction to the headline was "yes, very probably true". Then I remembered that fall is the US word for autumn.
Pity they had to spoil it by cooking up a silly excuse, though.
So it's bad for me to give some small change to a downtown beggar, but it's OK for the DoD to shell out $72M to spare the blushes of some prosperous corporate types after one of their business judgements went pear-shaped?