The voting system was provided by Tieto and Scytl. In their News Page, Scytl declares: "Scytl's Pnyx.core successfully used in local elections in Finland" Shouldn't they update this...? It is even possible that the 2% of the votes lost was due to the Pnyx.core, instead of usability issues with the voting terminals, as has been commonly assumed - who knows.
In the Finnish municipal elections 2008, 0.17% of the paper votes were inadvertently spoiled (unclear marking in the ballot ticket etc.) and had to be dismissed. This can be compared with the 2% of the electronic votes lost in three municipalities in which the new voting system was piloted (see Effi's Electronic Voting FAQ, in Finnish).
The total fraction of the spoiled paper votes in the municipal elections was 0.6%. Most of the dismissed paper votes were due to a deliberate action by the voter (votes for Donald Duck - a popular candidate here!, empty ballot tickets etc.). There is no evidence to support the claim that the lost electronic votes were due to a deliberate action by the voters. On the contrary, in addition to the usability problems with the voting machines, there is evidence of system malfunctions which may have contributed to the lost votes (slow response times, freezing of the voting machines during the voting etc.). Additionally, the electronic voting did allow to cast an empty vote.
The original Ministry of Justice announcement (in Finnish) states: "A total of 12234 electronic votes vere cast in the electronic voting pilot of the 2008 municipal elections. - -"
232 is about 2% of 12234 and therefore the summary is correct.
According to the same announcement the total number of votes in the three municipalities in which the voting system was piloted was 21073 (Karkkila 4251, Kauniainen 4843, Vihti 11979), i.e., 8839 of all voters cast a paper ballot. (The voters could choose between the traditional paper ballot and trying the new electronic system.)
So, all they're really stating then is that they believe that since they (SCO) own the code that Caldera released under the GPL, Caldera had no right to do so. At least, that's my interpretation. How do you suppose they're going to explain why THEY THEMSELVES continue to use the GPL?
The current SCO and late Caldera are the same company
(they changed their name).
SCO's argument seems to be that "their code" was released in Linux kernel
under GPL without
authorization by some UNIX licensors (e.g. IBM).
If this were true they would probably have a case.
But there are several facts against them, for
example:
They have themselves distributed Linux
kernel under GPL and continue to do so
even today (Groklaw, 21 August 2003).
They
have been unwilling or unable to provide the public
any real proof to support
their claims. SCO is yet to identify
a single line in Linux kernel that
violates their rights.
Even if SCO would
identify such lines there would
still probably be lots of contractual issues
(was the UNIX licensor authorized to contribute
to the Linux kernel etc.).
Heise, a SCO lawyer, claimed that GPL was "pre-empted by federal copyright law", to which Eben Moglen,
FSF General Counsel, replied. Heise repeats his argument in the CNET interview.
But in the same CNET interview Heise also says:
[Question:] What if, during the course of discovery or another time, you find that the code was originally under the GPL?
[Heise:] Using that hypothetical, if Caldera (International) put something into the GPL, with copyright attribution, the whole nine yards, they can't make the claim about what that thing is that they put in there. - -
So - according to Heise - GPL is valid after all!
The only way to make any sense of this is that
Heise's real argument - at least today - is that
"GPL is pre-empted by federal copyright law"
if something is released under GPL without
right owners consent...
This is of course trivial:
if you release someone else's program under GPL
without her permission then the GPL is
obviously not valid (in that particular instance). But if you release your own or somebody else's code with her permission under GPL then
GPL is valid and enforceable.
Summarizing yesterday's events that
put SCO's demands of payments into perspective (for references read analysis
by Bruce Perens):
On Monday at their trade show in Las Vegas, SCO showed code that they claimed was copied illegally into Linux. Many who saw the slides in Vegas were
convinced
of SCO's case.
However, probably unknown to and unauthorized by SCO, the German
publisher Heise obtained photographs of two slides in SCO's presentation and
published them yesterday.
It turned out that the code SCO showed in Vegas originated from 1973.
The code has appeared in programming text books already in 70s and it has
been released under BSD license several times by
many parties, including SCO (then Caldera) itself last year. The
code SCO showed, allegedly violating their rights, was
therefore in Linux legally.
If this really was a sample of their "best evidence" then SCO and their executives are in
deep trouble - considering all unsubstantiated allegations they have made, legal threats,
demands of payments and stock pumping and insiders dumping.
The EU Copyright Directive is not the only
worry. EU is also considering IPR Enforcement Directive which would add even more
DMCA-like protections to technical measures.
IPR Enforcement Directive would also introduce
a "conviction of shame": if you are found guilty
of rights infringment you must publish the
judgement in a publication chosen by the rights owner at your own cost. See a statement by Electronic Frontier Finland on the proposed directive.
On the other hand, if SCO loses, it will send a strong message to the world: "Stay away from anything GPL, or you'll find your proprietary code taken away from you."
I have
never really understood why this is seen as a problem.
On the contrary: the right holders should understand
that if you release your proprietary
code under GPL your code can be used, modified
and redistributed
freely under the terms of GPL.
65.59.224.128/25 could be blacklisted [by SPEWS], but I happen to know that they have quite a few hosting customers, most of who know nothing about the other customers.. Legitimately blacklisted?? - -
ORDB has my ex-girlfriend's mail server listed. She develops and hosts sites. No spamming at all.
Servers are added to ORDB (FAQ) after they have been tested to be open mail relays.
So most probably your girlfriend's server was an open mail relay. Since open relays are exactly what ORDB claims to list, the listing was most probably correct.
An open relay is incorrectly configured mail server. Rather than to complain about the ORDB listing you should be grateful that they pointed out the flaw in your configuration before it was exploited by a spammer (or was it?).
It is also important to understand that ORDB only provides information of open relays. The owners of the recipients' mail servers decide whether they want to filter out mail originating from open relays.
The same applies to other blocking lists, such as SPEWS. The listing criteria are clearly stated on the SPEWS web page. They explicitly state that they escalate listings, i.e. they may also list non-spamming client's of the spammers spammers ISP (see Q16 of the SPEWS FAQ). Given this information, it is up to the owner of the recipients' mail server to decide whether to filter mail using SPEWS.
you would be allowed to send spam to ask permission to send more spam.
Isn't this necessary to support double-opt in?
No, this is not about confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in).
The Finnish Direct Marketing Association has for many years been lobbying for the view that asking permission to send direct marketing would not be considered direct marketing in itself. So sending unsolicited email "Subscribe to Slashdot!" would be considered direct marketing and it would be illegal. But unsolicited email "Would you like to receive advertisements on Slashdot subscriptions?" would not be considered direct marketing and sending it to potentially millions of unwilling recipients (who don't necessarily have had any prior contact with the advertiser) would thus be legal. And apparently if ask-permission messages would not be considered marketing the consumer protection act would not apply to them, either (the Nordic countries have quite a strong tradition in the field of consumer rights).
If you missed the fine legal theory behind the reasoning as to why ask-permission messages should not be considered direct marketing then you are not alone. I hope that this will be corrected in the final law proposal.
EU has already made unsolicited commercial email (UCE) illegal, see article 13 of the Directive on privacy and electronic communications (2002/58/EC), after intense lobbying e.g. by EuroCAUCE.
The directive must be implemented by the member states by 31 October 2003.
They should have to show in some way that you have opted in in the e-mail itself. Some sort of unique number that you gave them (or even an IP address, but this wouldn't be good enough). They would then have to have an e-mail AND some number to match up. There must also be a huge fine to back this up. This way, any business that sends an e-mail that says you opted in, can be automatically fined.
As a general principle, the burden of proof of the existence of consent rests on the side that claims the existence of the consent. In other words, you cannot be required to prove that you have not given your consent. (E.g. if somebody claims that you owe him 100 euros, and you disagree, it is up to him to prove his claim.)
This applies also to commercial email. If the advertiser can't prove that you have given her permission to send you commercial email, then she has broken the law that forbids sending unsolicited commercial email. Therefore, ID number that you suggest is not really necessary (although it would help the advertiser to prove the existence of consent).
Btw, the opt-in legislation means in practice that the advertisers must use verified opt-in. If anybody can subscribe commercial emails using your email address then the advertiser obviously cannot prove that it was you (and not e.g. your friend) who gave them permission to send you email advertisements.
- - Unfortunate yes, a better process would have been to flag those accounts holding 'MP3's
and to check them out. But the real blame lies with the pirates.
Example: If it weren't for car thieves we'd not have to bother locking our cars.
People that pirate material make things less easy for the rest of us, the honest people. We
shouldn't have to put up with people deleting things from our web sites, but then, bands
shouldn't have to put up with people copying their art around the internet to avoid paying for
something they want.
So now it is MP3==crime?
There are people who copy music illegally in MP3 format. Therefore your ISP has a right to delete all files with.mp3-suffix from your account? Without even asking whether your files just might be fully legal; without even hearing your side of the story? I, for one, have hundreds of megabytes of MP3-files. And believe it or not, they are all legal.
There are a huge number of things that can also be used to commit crimes (crowbars, knives, tights,...). However, you are still not allowed to confiscate every crowbar your see, "just in case" ("you know, that janitor-looking fellow might well be a burglar").
It is too bad if the ISPs are afraid of being sued by the copyright owners. Maybe, instead of deleting another people's property, they should be in some other business that would be more "legally safe". Or at least they should have an acceptable use policy, signed by all of their users, that clearly states that all files ending with.mp3 may be deleted without warning...
In this particular case it seems that the real blame does not lie with the pirates, but with a clueless ISP.
This means, the "individual" gets a gentle slap on the wrist (if that), and they go about their business. PSI,
UUNet, and all the big ISPs don't give a rat's ass about spammers. That's why a *very* good percentage of
spam you get has 38.x.x.x or 63.x.x.x in the headers. 38 being PSI, and 63 being UUNet. Try it sometime. It'll
suprise you.
According to the SpamCop statistics the biggest sources of spam are currently:
The update system that can upgrade every package on the system with just two commands (apt-get
update; apt-get upgrade). For busy people that don't have time to pore over every single update
notice that comes in the mail or gets posted on the Web, that's worth a black-market price right
there.
AutoRPM offers similar functionality for RPM based systems like Red Hat. You can for example use the AutoRPM to check the updated packages daily from the Red Hat ftp site (or from mirror sites). AutoRPM can then update the packages automagically.
This is an interesting contrast to, say, Finland (home of cellular giants like Nokia), where cell phones are everywhere but people actually use them to talk.
Actually sending SMS-messages (Short Message Service) is extremely popular at least here in Finland (where the mobile phone density is highest in the world, well over 50%). Admittedly, people also use the phones to talk.:)
In addition to text messages the SMS system can be used to send e.g. email, faxes, pictorial greetings and sounds for the mobile phone, either using GSM phone or web interface.
With a simple cronjob and Perl's wonderfulLWP module package, not to mention the other implemtations of tracking web-pages, any relativly smart administrator should already be doing this.
Maybe the cause is already lost in the new country, but for Europe there is still hope.:)
There are no software patents as such in EU (see freepatents.org). However, the European Commission is apparently pushing for more software patents. You may want to tell your opinion to your MEP or to the people in charge, now while there is still time.
I wrote: It does apply e.g. to programs designed for other purposes and that could have similar properties as virus programs (e.g. when misused).
It should have read: It [the new law] does not apply e.g. to programs designed for other purposes and that could have similar properties as virus programs (e.g. when misused).
I checked the article several times, but still managed to reverse the meaning of this sentence... Sorry about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Finnish e-voting results annulled, municipalities to hold new elections by Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi), the best summary in English, IMO;
Helsingin Sanomat;
Helsinki Times;
The Brad Blog;
NewsRoom Finland;
YLE; and
Turre (the lawyers that won the case).
The voting system was provided by Tieto and Scytl. In their News Page, Scytl declares: "Scytl's Pnyx.core successfully used in local elections in Finland" Shouldn't they update this...? It is even possible that the 2% of the votes lost was due to the Pnyx.core, instead of usability issues with the voting terminals, as has been commonly assumed - who knows.
In the Finnish municipal elections 2008, 0.17% of the paper votes were inadvertently spoiled (unclear marking in the ballot ticket etc.) and had to be dismissed. This can be compared with the 2% of the electronic votes lost in three municipalities in which the new voting system was piloted (see Effi's Electronic Voting FAQ, in Finnish).
The total fraction of the spoiled paper votes in the municipal elections was 0.6%. Most of the dismissed paper votes were due to a deliberate action by the voter (votes for Donald Duck - a popular candidate here!, empty ballot tickets etc.). There is no evidence to support the claim that the lost electronic votes were due to a deliberate action by the voters. On the contrary, in addition to the usability problems with the voting machines, there is evidence of system malfunctions which may have contributed to the lost votes (slow response times, freezing of the voting machines during the voting etc.). Additionally, the electronic voting did allow to cast an empty vote.
The original Ministry of Justice announcement (in Finnish) states: "A total of 12234 electronic votes vere cast in the electronic voting pilot of the 2008 municipal elections. - -"
232 is about 2% of 12234 and therefore the summary is correct.
According to the same announcement the total number of votes in the three municipalities in which the voting system was piloted was 21073 (Karkkila 4251, Kauniainen 4843, Vihti 11979), i.e., 8839 of all voters cast a paper ballot. (The voters could choose between the traditional paper ballot and trying the new electronic system.)
The patent claims functionality that IKI.FI, among others, has been providing publicly for thousands of users since 1995.
IKI.FI has a web page that documents the prior art for the patent 6,617,714.
FYI, there is now also a press release on the open letter in the EFFI web pages (I just put it there).
The current SCO and late Caldera are the same company (they changed their name).
SCO's argument seems to be that "their code" was released in Linux kernel under GPL without authorization by some UNIX licensors (e.g. IBM). If this were true they would probably have a case. But there are several facts against them, for example:
Heise, a SCO lawyer, claimed that GPL was "pre-empted by federal copyright law", to which Eben Moglen, FSF General Counsel, replied. Heise repeats his argument in the CNET interview.
But in the same CNET interview Heise also says:
So - according to Heise - GPL is valid after all!
The only way to make any sense of this is that Heise's real argument - at least today - is that "GPL is pre-empted by federal copyright law" if something is released under GPL without right owners consent... This is of course trivial: if you release someone else's program under GPL without her permission then the GPL is obviously not valid (in that particular instance). But if you release your own or somebody else's code with her permission under GPL then GPL is valid and enforceable.
Summarizing yesterday's events that put SCO's demands of payments into perspective (for references read analysis by Bruce Perens):
On Monday at their trade show in Las Vegas, SCO showed code that they claimed was copied illegally into Linux. Many who saw the slides in Vegas were convinced of SCO's case.
However, probably unknown to and unauthorized by SCO, the German publisher Heise obtained photographs of two slides in SCO's presentation and published them yesterday.
It turned out that the code SCO showed in Vegas originated from 1973. The code has appeared in programming text books already in 70s and it has been released under BSD license several times by many parties, including SCO (then Caldera) itself last year. The code SCO showed, allegedly violating their rights, was therefore in Linux legally.
If this really was a sample of their "best evidence" then SCO and their executives are in deep trouble - considering all unsubstantiated allegations they have made, legal threats, demands of payments and stock pumping and insiders dumping.
Bruce Perens has written an analysis of the code that SCO claims was wrongfully copied into Linux: http://perens.com/Articles/SCOCopiedCode.html
The EU Copyright Directive is not the only worry. EU is also considering IPR Enforcement Directive which would add even more DMCA-like protections to technical measures. IPR Enforcement Directive would also introduce a "conviction of shame": if you are found guilty of rights infringment you must publish the judgement in a publication chosen by the rights owner at your own cost. See a statement by Electronic Frontier Finland on the proposed directive.
(For what it is worth, the Finnish parliament did not pass the national implementation of the EU Copyright Directive.)
I have never really understood why this is seen as a problem.
On the contrary: the right holders should understand that if you release your proprietary code under GPL your code can be used, modified and redistributed freely under the terms of GPL.
Servers are added to ORDB (FAQ) after they have been tested to be open mail relays.
So most probably your girlfriend's server was an open mail relay. Since open relays are exactly what ORDB claims to list, the listing was most probably correct.
An open relay is incorrectly configured mail server. Rather than to complain about the ORDB listing you should be grateful that they pointed out the flaw in your configuration before it was exploited by a spammer (or was it?).
It is also important to understand that ORDB only provides information of open relays. The owners of the recipients' mail servers decide whether they want to filter out mail originating from open relays.
The same applies to other blocking lists, such as SPEWS. The listing criteria are clearly stated on the SPEWS web page. They explicitly state that they escalate listings, i.e. they may also list non-spamming client's of the spammers spammers ISP (see Q16 of the SPEWS FAQ). Given this information, it is up to the owner of the recipients' mail server to decide whether to filter mail using SPEWS.
No, this is not about confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in).
The Finnish Direct Marketing Association has for many years been lobbying for the view that asking permission to send direct marketing would not be considered direct marketing in itself. So sending unsolicited email "Subscribe to Slashdot!" would be considered direct marketing and it would be illegal. But unsolicited email "Would you like to receive advertisements on Slashdot subscriptions?" would not be considered direct marketing and sending it to potentially millions of unwilling recipients (who don't necessarily have had any prior contact with the advertiser) would thus be legal. And apparently if ask-permission messages would not be considered marketing the consumer protection act would not apply to them, either (the Nordic countries have quite a strong tradition in the field of consumer rights).
If you missed the fine legal theory behind the reasoning as to why ask-permission messages should not be considered direct marketing then you are not alone. I hope that this will be corrected in the final law proposal.
EU has already made unsolicited commercial email (UCE) illegal, see article 13 of the Directive on privacy and electronic communications (2002/58/EC), after intense lobbying e.g. by EuroCAUCE.
The directive must be implemented by the member states by 31 October 2003.
(I just wrote statement [in Finnish] to the Finnish ministry of transports and communications on behalf of Electronic Frontier Finland of our proposed local implementation of the directive (which at the current form would allow ask-permission-spam (i.e. you would be allowed to send spam to ask permission to send more spam. :( )))
As a general principle, the burden of proof of the existence of consent rests on the side that claims the existence of the consent. In other words, you cannot be required to prove that you have not given your consent. (E.g. if somebody claims that you owe him 100 euros, and you disagree, it is up to him to prove his claim.)
This applies also to commercial email. If the advertiser can't prove that you have given her permission to send you commercial email, then she has broken the law that forbids sending unsolicited commercial email. Therefore, ID number that you suggest is not really necessary (although it would help the advertiser to prove the existence of consent).
Btw, the opt-in legislation means in practice that the advertisers must use verified opt-in. If anybody can subscribe commercial emails using your email address then the advertiser obviously cannot prove that it was you (and not e.g. your friend) who gave them permission to send you email advertisements.
So now it is MP3==crime?
There are people who copy music illegally in MP3 format. Therefore your ISP has a right to delete all files with .mp3-suffix from your account? Without even asking whether your files just might be fully legal; without even hearing your side of the story? I, for one, have hundreds of megabytes of MP3-files. And believe it or not, they are all legal.
There are a huge number of things that can also be used to commit crimes (crowbars, knives, tights, ...). However, you are still not allowed to confiscate every crowbar your see, "just in case" ("you know, that janitor-looking fellow might well be a burglar").
It is too bad if the ISPs are afraid of being sued by the copyright owners. Maybe, instead of deleting another people's property, they should be in some other business that would be more "legally safe". Or at least they should have an acceptable use policy, signed by all of their users, that clearly states that all files ending with .mp3 may be deleted without warning...
In this particular case it seems that the real blame does not lie with the pirates, but with a clueless ISP.
According to the SpamCop statistics the biggest sources of spam are currently:
UU.NET wins this contest easily... :(
You don't need to prevent swapping to disk. For example OpenBSD2.7 supports encrypting swap space.
Encrypting swap (or filesystem) should be possible also in Linux (see Encryption HOWTO) and Windows (see e.g. SafeGuard Easy).
The update system that can upgrade every package on the system with just two commands (apt-get update; apt-get upgrade). For busy people that don't have time to pore over every single update notice that comes in the mail or gets posted on the Web, that's worth a black-market price right there.
AutoRPM offers similar functionality for RPM based systems like Red Hat. You can for example use the AutoRPM to check the updated packages daily from the Red Hat ftp site (or from mirror sites). AutoRPM can then update the packages automagically.
Actually sending SMS-messages (Short Message Service) is extremely popular at least here in Finland (where the mobile phone density is highest in the world, well over 50%). Admittedly, people also use the phones to talk.:)
In addition to text messages the SMS system can be used to send e.g. email, faxes, pictorial greetings and sounds for the mobile phone, either using GSM phone or web interface.
The Poynter Eyetrack study was discussed, with interesting commentary, in May 14 edition of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.
I once made such a short Perl script to check the links on my own web pages: http://www.iki.fi/kaip/linkkuri.html
Maybe the cause is already lost in the new country, but for Europe there is still hope. :)
There are no software patents as such in EU (see freepatents.org). However, the European Commission is apparently pushing for more software patents. You may want to tell your opinion to your MEP or to the people in charge, now while there is still time.
For those interested, the original articles and articles that cite (and comment) it can be found from the web: gr-qc/9808081
I wrote: It does apply e.g. to programs designed for other purposes and that could have similar properties as virus programs (e.g. when misused).
It should have read: It [the new law] does not apply e.g. to programs designed for other purposes and that could have similar properties as virus programs (e.g. when misused).
I checked the article several times, but still managed to reverse the meaning of this sentence... Sorry about this.