Taking it one step more. Encryption is just a layer added over the root method of communication.
Now, if you wanted to prevent terrorists communicating, you'd outlaw language.
Nobody could learn to read/write/otherwise gain meaning from any language.
Once this was done, then, we'd all be safe, no?
In this, I'm including mathematics too, as it's easy to get meaning from mathematical formulae, and so glean meaning.
If you think that's silly, just think:
Encryption is just a form of mathematical formulae. Banning that is in essence banning a form of mathematics.
There's a good piece on The Register about this, that's worth a look at too.
And I wholeheartedly agree with your view. Making a tool illegal which can in some extremely rare situations, be used for illegal purposes will do nothing. The illegal activity will continue, and as they're already doing illegal things, adding one more won't make them lose any sleep. However, all the usual law abiding people now can't use that tool for anything beneficial.
In fact, it's making certain that the tool will now largely be used against society rather than for it, which, in my view, is about 10 steps backwards.
The ones who should feel ashamed are those who let their personal agendas get in the way of progress, who would rather see us back in age where the privileged few have all the power and the masses are huddled together in the dark looking to superstition for salvation.
Urr.. Isn't this exactly where the new "Corporate Nations of Legislation" are trying to take us?
Superstition, in this case, being the belief in the marketing spiel that "It'll all be alright once big company 'a' controls everything in here, and makes it work right in the next version, which will honestly be cheaper and more efficient, and do everything you ever wanted in life".
That aside, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment you express.
If such a tool is ever brought about, it's likely to be the result of years of research and development.
And most likely, paid for by one government or another.
The chances are, however, that such a use will be a twist on some other technology that's actually designed to advance science, and benefit humankind to a huge degree. It always seems that when a huge now technology comes around, either it was developed by the military, or they very rapidly find a way to use it.
I don't think it's the crackers you need to worry about, thinking this up, it's the researchers in government labs. Any government.
Shortly after the great tragedy, I found myself wondering, "How long until the Media picks up on the Computer Gaming culture, and starts trying to blame that?". In the time since, I've heard people bandying around the idea that Microsoft Flight Simulator could have been used as a training tool to pilot a plane..
At that point, I knew the world had truly gone barking mad again.
It's the same with Crypto. Something that people don't understand is automatically to blame.
How we look back on the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution, and consider them unenlightened barbarians.
Going around and destroying the things they didn't understand because they felt threatened by it, without realising what they were truly rebelling against.
Now, have a look at what's happening to the Internet, science, and the digital age as a whole...
Each advance is slowly be destroyed by those that don't understand it, and can't work out how to control it, except this time, it's being done with a web of legislation and an army of lawyers.
Methinks in many years to come, these will be remembered as the Luddites of our current age.
Crypto is just one of the machines they're trying to break.
Hear hear.
I almost wish that posting had a space to add my signature to, in the way of petitions. I guess I'll have to do with adding this reply, and thank you for putting the time in to express what so many of us feel, so well.
The simple solution is: Talk to customer support.
From what I hear with my ISP that does exactly this measure (dropping you offline after a warning, and you're infected), you talk to Customer Service, who let you back on, just to get the patch, you patch, and they check to see you disinfected (you can do rough disinfect pre patch).
That's what Customer Service are for. To let you back online, so you can keep paying them. But they don't want a few people ruining the show for everyone.
Heh, my ISP is in the UK too..
When the Engineer came round to set up my Cable install, he told me I needed a Windows installation (after I told him that this was Linux, not a prettified windows) to set up the cable modem. When it came down to me having to pull a full tower case into a small room from another room in the flat, he asked if there was any way to just get a browser on the Linux box. So up came Mozilla, and he was just blown away with how easy it was to run. I left him tooling round on X for a while, and maybe we got a convert out of that.:) He took away an ISO of Red Hat, and one of FreeBSD for when he was feeling a tad more adventurous.:)
Hey, I bought just about every version of windows out.
There again, I make money from supporting it from time to time (or used to, I now work happily in a Linux shop, running 50 odd Debian servers flat out around the world).
Just knowing how to play with Windows and install/maintain is worth good money in times of hardship, and well worth the price I pay (I run it through my books, and get it deducted from tax anyway).
So, now you've met someone who buys Windows.
Make you any happier??:)
Yes, I believe we are all wary of 'seemingly reasonable' decisions.
However, I think pulling the plug on infected machines is a good thing.
The only way to show people there's a problem is to make them wake up and smell the coffee.
My ISP (Blueyonder.co.uk) is pretty rough in a lot of areas. However, they were one of the first (when Code Red was running) to come to the decision to pull the plug. They sent an email to all users saying Code Red (and now Nimda) were in the wild. They explained how it propogated, and sent a set of links in the email to the patches, and sites for further info.
They then warned strongly that the connection would be severed if the machines were found to be infected within a couple of days.
Lo and behold, 2 days later, several connections were severed. However, the info email let a lot of people prepare for the event. If it wasn't patched by then, it was a case of either someone was away (in which case wouldn't miss the connection), or didn't know how to work through the patch. In which case, they were forced to call tech support, who would then give them great service on how to cure the ills.
I think pulling the plug on home users while they're infected is a great move. It saves bandwidth, and helps everyone have a better time. And they may also be responsible for helping prevent further infection, saving more people's time and money.
It's just a case of training. A gentle tap to say "No, this is naughty" is fair. It's no draconian act. And more than just "Seeming reasonable", I consider it both reasonable and fair.
Ok.. So the Microsoft huge sales figures come from where?
Most of these people ARE likely to be legit users of IIS.
Unless you're a tech in the company in question, you'll never have access to the install disks (those, usually being locked in fireproof cabs, or held in the technical offices for most places I've worked).
Therefore, if it was a tech 'borrowing and installing' IIS for home use (DSL), they'd be much more likely to keep it patched, and know how to when they recieve the email. And a lot more likely to be checking.
This does reek of a home user who has no clue that it's installed, or how to remedy the problem.
From words I hear, the lack of security isn't due to lack of programming skill, or any other such thing.
It all comes down to MS knowing that anything they put in will eventually be hacked by some enterprising person.
Now, if they claim they've built a secure OS, and it gets hacked, they may open themselves to litigation from many people, which is financially not a good thing.
Therefore, they don't claim to have a highly secure OS.
And as they don't claim to have a highly secure OS, then there's not much value in spending lots of R&D money it it to put it in the product if you can't tout it and leverage it for more sales.
So, they put very basic 'security' in there (read, just about none), and never claim to have it anyway. So, no legal comeback, as they haven't made the claim, and lots of wide open holes that screw users over, as it's not financial sense for MS (not the rest of the world tho) to include reasonable security measures.
I don't think MS really care too much how much money it costs businesses as a whole, who get virus infections, and need constant patching, as long as that burden of cost doesn't fall on them.
Good financial sense, crap ethics.
The problem of protecting a nation does not truly lie in the scope of a government.
The government may orchestrate this defense in a time of full scale conventional war, but, it will never be able to cope with the granularity required to stop one dedicated person causing horrifying harm.
That responsibility lies with the people. And it's a responsibility that happens when the questions of personal rights stop being considered.
The example that displays this most, is the one of the plane where the passengers voted to try to overpower the hijackers.
Not all laws and regulations in the world could force a group of human beings to stand up, and take responsibility for a greater number of other lives, at a likely complete cost to themselves.
Each of those who stood up, as individuals taking responsibility for the protection of the lives of countless others, as free people, did, and always will have more power to protect the world from greater harm than any government passing gargantuan laws and restricting freedom.
I think it's something understood by almost every doctor, nurse, fireman, policeman, and so on...
Sometimes, bad things happen. Nothing could stop them happening.. But when free people stand up, and take responsibility for the lives of others, the magnitude of these disasters is vastly reduced.
Sometimes, acting early can prevent the whole thing. Not always, but sometimes..
With the larger plans of terror, part of the planning is to make sure you operate in a manner that nobody knows what you plan. For every restriction on communication, then there will be one of myriads of ways of communicating that those who wish ill will stop using, at least blatantly. It will not, however, stop them communicating.
The solution of safety to travel and work, and live isn't, and never will be, in the realms of the powers of any Government, no matter how many measures are taken, or how strict the police state.
It's not a question of telling the children of those that were lost that the action being taken is to remove the freedom of many in an effort to prevent this kind of thing. That's tantamount to telling them they're useless, and there's nothing they can do. It's to let them know that they can help prevent it happening again, and they matter in the world. They may be a single person, but many single people with a common wish are what changes the world. When everyone has the wish to protect others, that's when you'll really be safe. Not when a government tells you.
I apoligise in advance, if this post offends any who are affected by the devastation. I just see the true heroes and the people who made the most difference are the people who stood up, and tried their best to help. No amount of bullets and bombs and political posturing will ever do as much good as those individual souls acting together for the benefit of all.
That's just the way I feel.
Couldn't agree more.
Still, all comes back to them making something someone actually wants to look at, rather than trying to ram it down their throats...
For all this data collected from all the surfers to a busy site, where on earth are they going to store it all for any length of time??
I work for a company with a sizable web traffic (250 million pageviews/month). The bane of my life is the logs. Processing them, and storing them for the length of time to draw meaningful trends takes a huge amount of space. All of which needs to be on a RAID, just in case..
Then, of course, there's the software to mine this collection of data, the amount of time required to search the disks for the relevant data, and the setting of the resolution of the data capture from the mouse (needs to be pretty fine resolution to achieve any meaningful results)...
Just think, if they adopted this scheme, it'd be great fun to write a device driver for a pseudomouse that sat the cursor over the web browser, and randomly moved it around, generating millions of data events, all of which get logged on the web site archives...
It's fine to do this for a small scale site, with plenty of funding, but I think there'd be huge problems with the sheer logistics of collecting and analysing this data for anyone without almost bottomless pockets as far as funding goes...
Personally, I don't reckon this will be a big brother tech anytime in the near future...
Cheers,
Malk
Re:People's time is worth something.
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 2
Nope, It's rather more like asking your neighbour to remove his car from your driveway by pushing his doorbell, and waiting to talk to him, rather than talking to someone down the street that works with your neighbour, asking them to ask someone else who knows him to ask him to move his car, then calling the lawyer when he hasn't done it 2 hours later.
Doing things the accepted way means that the people dealing with it are the people supposed to be dealing with it, and who:
A) Know what they're doing
B) Give a rats ass.
When you go with the procedure, and keep the documents, you can prove what you were trying to do, and what the other was refusing, rather than emails/notes/calls to unrelated people.
It still amazes me that the big guys haven't cottoned on to the fact that if they did a VERY cheap 'pay to download' service on the ROMs, a lot of people wouldn't be that averse to paying a few dollars for a bunch of well outdated arcade games they loved, or old nintendo game, or whatever...
That way, they'd have a small revenue stream from obsolete games that nobody would normally buy these days at all...
And then a lot of people that are forced to use Warez ROMs 'cos they can't get hold of the game for love nor money anywhere other than warez sites can rest easy knowing they've done their bit for society and progress, and the company that produced the game in the first place doesn't have so much to gripe about.
Despite all this blabbering on about the requirement for copy protect, I think most people just want to pay once for something they use, and don't mind paying a fair price for what they do use...
I for one would love a nice easy, high bandwith site I could drop onto, pay a couple of dollars for a bundle of ancient games, and just enjoy.
I do like the stuff this guy's done with the box tho..:)
And there was me thinking he had to connect them with real aligators.:)
Drivers and ATI.
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Something that seems to be concensus opinion across the sites is that the card was previewed too early.
Like most pre-releases, it's nowhere near it's potential, and, if all it as in the past, ATI will have problems getting the most out of the hardware due to this.
Is it just me, or does it seem like they could get a boost by releasing all the specs and driver details to the open source world?
For starters, this would make for great driver porting and supporting, and as a side, could help ATI come up with better performance as patches and improvements are fed back to them.
There is one paragraph that cuts through all the bull that surrounds the DMCA and all the other stunts being pulled by the legal vultures...
Lessig: Yes. I think we should go back to the principles that defined us originally, which was about open societies with free people who should obey the law but you don't get them to obey the law by basically coding it so that they can't do anything different. You get them to obey the law by making the law reasonable and getting people to be respectful of it, and that's the direction we ought to be going.
Now, to me that makes sense.. In all of history, when organisations have overreached themselves, and tried to force control on everything, then other groups have leaped up and revolted.
The more serious the overreach, the more serious the backlash.
The whole reason the States seceeded from England was because the king of the time was forcing unfair measures on each and every person there. And lo, they all got a little upset, and went independant.
Now, several hundred years later, the lawyers of the US seems to be forming laws that are just as unfair and predatory as those that were around back then.
Personally, I know very little about "The Law". At least from a technical point of view. I'd hazard a guess that I comply about 99.9% with it, simply by following the rules of common sense.
I have respect for those rules that are actually put there to protect people, and civilisation as a whole, and make the world a better place.
However, I strenuously object to those laws that are in place solely to allow money to speak, and ensure that it makes more money, at the expense of the little guy.
It seems almost like a throwback to medieval feudalism, with IP laws instead of land, and the consumer being the peon that does all the work, provides all the input to keep things moving, and at the end of the day gets shafted by the 'lords' with no recourse or protection.
So, I laud anyone who simply says "Make the law fair.. Make it something people can look at and respect, and lo, it shall be respected.".
That's sense.
At the moment, the law is saying "You'll respect me and like it, because I tell you so", which bears far more resemblance to a tinpot dictatorship than the enlightened society that the Western World is supposed to be.
Once disrespect begins to grow, it weakens the credibility of the whole.
The whole reason that there are software companies now is that the original concept of copyright seemed fair.
People didn't just copy everything in sight.. They actually respected the right of the producing companies to receive their payment, and the law that protected that.
The DMCA is a law that just begs to be disrespected, and one wonders what effect that'll have on the public perception of the rights that's intended to protect...
Hrmm.. It seems this judge has a weird view of Open Source in the statment that it has the objective of "making as much material as possible available on the internet".
I'd always thought it was about researching the bounds of computing and helping advance knowledge and understanding.
Now, if your average person accused another average person of this, it seems in the states, they'd jump up and down and scream slander, and defamation of character..
Isn't this just what's going on here, but nobody's pressing this issue?
I go for books every time.. I flat out refuse to buy an e-Book, 'cos it's not convenient.. I can't use it to unwind when I loaf on the sofa or the bed.. I can't take it hiking, or on trips..
If you're running the betting, my money's on about 14 months (that's about the time it takes the average expanding startup to run out of venture capital, downsize a couple of times, and slowly have the last few dollars walk away in pens to sign the cheques for the last of the bills they owe...).
No doubt they'll get some purchases, maybe enough in royalties to keep a small staff going, but, I wouldn't bet on any sizable company from this idea..
I know a lot of people out there speed read.. I can pull a good speed on a book if I want to..
I wonder how long until people all get that skill, and can read the whole thing inside the 10 hr limit?
Then, to all intents and purposes, those who pay the buck get the full book for that buck, instead of the five or so that it'd normally cost..
Bye bye lots of profit..
And what happens then? Companies make you pay $1 for an hour's reading?
If, as it seems, the 10 hours is to allow a feel for the book to see if you want to spend the price of a book to purchase a 'permanent license' (i.e. you have the book in all but physical terms), then reducing to one hour won't let the non-speed readers get a look in..
Oh, what a tangled web they do weave...
As I seem to remember it, even after being exposed, a lot of people still asked his advice..
This indicates that in, at least an area where Lawyers were practicinf, and perchance gaining a lot of money, the actual basis was common sense. As they say, even a child could understand it.
Now, the idea of being in a profession is to know things that others really don't, thus providing a great use.
It says something when you have to sell something that everyone knows really, but they've been conditioned to ask a particular person, so they can have an arbitrary rubber stamp.
This creates an artificial surplus of this profession that is really counterproductive.
The more like this kid that think for themselves, and answer stuff for themselves that they can, the better.. It's what free thinking society is about.
And incidentally, I seem to remember that the kid in question actually only answered the questions that made sense to him.. Not the really detailed ones that actually required a lawyer...
I can remember, as a kid, understanding a lot more than most adults gave me credit for.. At least until they looked back years later, and said "You really DID understand all that, didn't you.."..
This kid seems to do that too.. It really is just called "thinking for yourself". It's been happening since the first thoughts. It'll (hopefully) be happening until the last.
I don't condone him claiming professional qualifications like he did for a time, but.. He makes people happy, and apparently gives good advice... As long as people accept that's what it is... I say go for it...
Now, if a programmer came to me, and wanted work, I'd see what he was capable of doing.. If it was very little, but kept a fair part of a customer base happy, then, there's no problem with hiring someone like this, at a fair price for the work, doing work for the ones that are happy with it.
After all, it'd let me get on with doing the real code for the people who pay far more and expect far more.
I really DO have far more of the real magic to do than worry about the stuff that an untrained teenager (not, of course, the hardcore teenagers, many these days who could prolly run rings round me in some areas) could deal with.
If the yunder generation can do something, and they offer their skills, then, fair renumeration for fair skills.. It's what a meritocracy is all about.. And I'm all for meritocracy..
Malk
Back when I was younger, I remember when computers first hit the home market.. A fair section of the games were produced by the teenage age group (back in teh very early 80's, when I was Just hitting teenage myself..:) ).
This was supposed to shift the balance of the market to youth.. And I guess this was supposed to happen with the child prodigies that also produced a lot of classical music back in earlier centuries.
The simple matter is that this is temporary. Most of the info in the net is generated by adults, so what the teenagers find, and absorb, is frequently the ideals of the adults that placed it, with a fresh slant (as the younger mind is usually more creative than the adult).
As for this imbuing the teenager with the power to look down on the adults, and lead the way... Well, they need a roof over their heads, and a cred card to buy most services, and various other things that are still currently restricted to adults..
Every generation has it's new toys that allow the next generation to supercede the previous. Every dog has it's day.
It's called evolution. That hasn't changed one bit, except, it may have speeded up an awful lot.
Actually, that depends on install base of all products on the market.
If M$ make more and more incompatible, then they'll end up making them not work with all the stuff that's out there (I know people, home users, who're still happy using DOS or Win 3.x because they simply don't need more).
At the moment, all this 'old' install base works quite happily, so they carry on adding to the figures that MS is compliant with.
Now, should MS break legacy compliancy, they'll irritate a lot of people who now can't communicate with the legacy MS installations, who need to look elsewhere (as they often loathe buying a whole new PC just so they can view the latest MS word files).
The whole point of MS keeping market share is to make things just compliant enough that old MS tech works, while making nudges that the new software is worth the cost of an upgrade.
Breaking the compliancy will remove a lot of legacy systems which will likely move to open source solutions/other compliant commercial systems, eroding MS Market share.
Rather than that hitting MS badly, they'll just improve legacy support in patches, making sure that all the open source stuff works with the latest MS.
Legacy is the whole reason we have the x86 architecture around still today.. And it'll be the reason that things still carry on working (to an extent) with MS into the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking it one step more. Encryption is just a layer added over the root method of communication.
Now, if you wanted to prevent terrorists communicating, you'd outlaw language.
Nobody could learn to read/write/otherwise gain meaning from any language.
Once this was done, then, we'd all be safe, no?
In this, I'm including mathematics too, as it's easy to get meaning from mathematical formulae, and so glean meaning.
If you think that's silly, just think:
Encryption is just a form of mathematical formulae. Banning that is in essence banning a form of mathematics.
There's a good piece on The Register about this, that's worth a look at too.
And I wholeheartedly agree with your view. Making a tool illegal which can in some extremely rare situations, be used for illegal purposes will do nothing. The illegal activity will continue, and as they're already doing illegal things, adding one more won't make them lose any sleep. However, all the usual law abiding people now can't use that tool for anything beneficial.
In fact, it's making certain that the tool will now largely be used against society rather than for it, which, in my view, is about 10 steps backwards.
Malk
The ones who should feel ashamed are those who let their personal agendas get in the way of progress, who would rather see us back in age where the privileged few have all the power and the masses are huddled together in the dark looking to superstition for salvation.
Urr.. Isn't this exactly where the new "Corporate Nations of Legislation" are trying to take us?
Superstition, in this case, being the belief in the marketing spiel that "It'll all be alright once big company 'a' controls everything in here, and makes it work right in the next version, which will honestly be cheaper and more efficient, and do everything you ever wanted in life".
That aside, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment you express.
If such a tool is ever brought about, it's likely to be the result of years of research and development.
And most likely, paid for by one government or another.
The chances are, however, that such a use will be a twist on some other technology that's actually designed to advance science, and benefit humankind to a huge degree. It always seems that when a huge now technology comes around, either it was developed by the military, or they very rapidly find a way to use it.
I don't think it's the crackers you need to worry about, thinking this up, it's the researchers in government labs. Any government.
Malk
Shortly after the great tragedy, I found myself wondering, "How long until the Media picks up on the Computer Gaming culture, and starts trying to blame that?". In the time since, I've heard people bandying around the idea that Microsoft Flight Simulator could have been used as a training tool to pilot a plane..
At that point, I knew the world had truly gone barking mad again.
It's the same with Crypto. Something that people don't understand is automatically to blame.
How we look back on the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution, and consider them unenlightened barbarians.
Going around and destroying the things they didn't understand because they felt threatened by it, without realising what they were truly rebelling against.
Now, have a look at what's happening to the Internet, science, and the digital age as a whole...
Each advance is slowly be destroyed by those that don't understand it, and can't work out how to control it, except this time, it's being done with a web of legislation and an army of lawyers.
Methinks in many years to come, these will be remembered as the Luddites of our current age.
Crypto is just one of the machines they're trying to break.
Malk
Hear hear.
I almost wish that posting had a space to add my signature to, in the way of petitions. I guess I'll have to do with adding this reply, and thank you for putting the time in to express what so many of us feel, so well.
Malk
The simple solution is: Talk to customer support.
From what I hear with my ISP that does exactly this measure (dropping you offline after a warning, and you're infected), you talk to Customer Service, who let you back on, just to get the patch, you patch, and they check to see you disinfected (you can do rough disinfect pre patch).
That's what Customer Service are for. To let you back online, so you can keep paying them. But they don't want a few people ruining the show for everyone.
Malk
Heh, my ISP is in the UK too.. :) He took away an ISO of Red Hat, and one of FreeBSD for when he was feeling a tad more adventurous. :)
When the Engineer came round to set up my Cable install, he told me I needed a Windows installation (after I told him that this was Linux, not a prettified windows) to set up the cable modem. When it came down to me having to pull a full tower case into a small room from another room in the flat, he asked if there was any way to just get a browser on the Linux box. So up came Mozilla, and he was just blown away with how easy it was to run. I left him tooling round on X for a while, and maybe we got a convert out of that.
Malk
Hey, I bought just about every version of windows out. :)
There again, I make money from supporting it from time to time (or used to, I now work happily in a Linux shop, running 50 odd Debian servers flat out around the world).
Just knowing how to play with Windows and install/maintain is worth good money in times of hardship, and well worth the price I pay (I run it through my books, and get it deducted from tax anyway).
So, now you've met someone who buys Windows.
Make you any happier??
Malk
Yes, I believe we are all wary of 'seemingly reasonable' decisions.
However, I think pulling the plug on infected machines is a good thing.
The only way to show people there's a problem is to make them wake up and smell the coffee.
My ISP (Blueyonder.co.uk) is pretty rough in a lot of areas. However, they were one of the first (when Code Red was running) to come to the decision to pull the plug. They sent an email to all users saying Code Red (and now Nimda) were in the wild. They explained how it propogated, and sent a set of links in the email to the patches, and sites for further info.
They then warned strongly that the connection would be severed if the machines were found to be infected within a couple of days.
Lo and behold, 2 days later, several connections were severed. However, the info email let a lot of people prepare for the event. If it wasn't patched by then, it was a case of either someone was away (in which case wouldn't miss the connection), or didn't know how to work through the patch. In which case, they were forced to call tech support, who would then give them great service on how to cure the ills.
I think pulling the plug on home users while they're infected is a great move. It saves bandwidth, and helps everyone have a better time. And they may also be responsible for helping prevent further infection, saving more people's time and money.
It's just a case of training. A gentle tap to say "No, this is naughty" is fair. It's no draconian act. And more than just "Seeming reasonable", I consider it both reasonable and fair.
Malk
Ok.. So the Microsoft huge sales figures come from where?
Most of these people ARE likely to be legit users of IIS.
Unless you're a tech in the company in question, you'll never have access to the install disks (those, usually being locked in fireproof cabs, or held in the technical offices for most places I've worked).
Therefore, if it was a tech 'borrowing and installing' IIS for home use (DSL), they'd be much more likely to keep it patched, and know how to when they recieve the email. And a lot more likely to be checking.
This does reek of a home user who has no clue that it's installed, or how to remedy the problem.
Malk
From words I hear, the lack of security isn't due to lack of programming skill, or any other such thing.
It all comes down to MS knowing that anything they put in will eventually be hacked by some enterprising person.
Now, if they claim they've built a secure OS, and it gets hacked, they may open themselves to litigation from many people, which is financially not a good thing.
Therefore, they don't claim to have a highly secure OS.
And as they don't claim to have a highly secure OS, then there's not much value in spending lots of R&D money it it to put it in the product if you can't tout it and leverage it for more sales.
So, they put very basic 'security' in there (read, just about none), and never claim to have it anyway. So, no legal comeback, as they haven't made the claim, and lots of wide open holes that screw users over, as it's not financial sense for MS (not the rest of the world tho) to include reasonable security measures.
I don't think MS really care too much how much money it costs businesses as a whole, who get virus infections, and need constant patching, as long as that burden of cost doesn't fall on them.
Good financial sense, crap ethics.
Malk
The problem of protecting a nation does not truly lie in the scope of a government.
The government may orchestrate this defense in a time of full scale conventional war, but, it will never be able to cope with the granularity required to stop one dedicated person causing horrifying harm.
That responsibility lies with the people. And it's a responsibility that happens when the questions of personal rights stop being considered.
The example that displays this most, is the one of the plane where the passengers voted to try to overpower the hijackers.
Not all laws and regulations in the world could force a group of human beings to stand up, and take responsibility for a greater number of other lives, at a likely complete cost to themselves.
Each of those who stood up, as individuals taking responsibility for the protection of the lives of countless others, as free people, did, and always will have more power to protect the world from greater harm than any government passing gargantuan laws and restricting freedom.
I think it's something understood by almost every doctor, nurse, fireman, policeman, and so on...
Sometimes, bad things happen. Nothing could stop them happening.. But when free people stand up, and take responsibility for the lives of others, the magnitude of these disasters is vastly reduced.
Sometimes, acting early can prevent the whole thing. Not always, but sometimes..
With the larger plans of terror, part of the planning is to make sure you operate in a manner that nobody knows what you plan. For every restriction on communication, then there will be one of myriads of ways of communicating that those who wish ill will stop using, at least blatantly. It will not, however, stop them communicating.
The solution of safety to travel and work, and live isn't, and never will be, in the realms of the powers of any Government, no matter how many measures are taken, or how strict the police state.
It's not a question of telling the children of those that were lost that the action being taken is to remove the freedom of many in an effort to prevent this kind of thing. That's tantamount to telling them they're useless, and there's nothing they can do. It's to let them know that they can help prevent it happening again, and they matter in the world. They may be a single person, but many single people with a common wish are what changes the world. When everyone has the wish to protect others, that's when you'll really be safe. Not when a government tells you.
I apoligise in advance, if this post offends any who are affected by the devastation. I just see the true heroes and the people who made the most difference are the people who stood up, and tried their best to help. No amount of bullets and bombs and political posturing will ever do as much good as those individual souls acting together for the benefit of all.
That's just the way I feel.
Malk
Couldn't agree more.
Still, all comes back to them making something someone actually wants to look at, rather than trying to ram it down their throats...
Well, one thing that strikes me about this is:
For all this data collected from all the surfers to a busy site, where on earth are they going to store it all for any length of time??
I work for a company with a sizable web traffic (250 million pageviews/month). The bane of my life is the logs. Processing them, and storing them for the length of time to draw meaningful trends takes a huge amount of space. All of which needs to be on a RAID, just in case..
Then, of course, there's the software to mine this collection of data, the amount of time required to search the disks for the relevant data, and the setting of the resolution of the data capture from the mouse (needs to be pretty fine resolution to achieve any meaningful results)...
Just think, if they adopted this scheme, it'd be great fun to write a device driver for a pseudomouse that sat the cursor over the web browser, and randomly moved it around, generating millions of data events, all of which get logged on the web site archives...
It's fine to do this for a small scale site, with plenty of funding, but I think there'd be huge problems with the sheer logistics of collecting and analysing this data for anyone without almost bottomless pockets as far as funding goes...
Personally, I don't reckon this will be a big brother tech anytime in the near future...
Cheers,
Malk
Nope, It's rather more like asking your neighbour to remove his car from your driveway by pushing his doorbell, and waiting to talk to him, rather than talking to someone down the street that works with your neighbour, asking them to ask someone else who knows him to ask him to move his car, then calling the lawyer when he hasn't done it 2 hours later.
Doing things the accepted way means that the people dealing with it are the people supposed to be dealing with it, and who:
A) Know what they're doing
B) Give a rats ass.
When you go with the procedure, and keep the documents, you can prove what you were trying to do, and what the other was refusing, rather than emails/notes/calls to unrelated people.
Malk
It still amazes me that the big guys haven't cottoned on to the fact that if they did a VERY cheap 'pay to download' service on the ROMs, a lot of people wouldn't be that averse to paying a few dollars for a bunch of well outdated arcade games they loved, or old nintendo game, or whatever... :)
That way, they'd have a small revenue stream from obsolete games that nobody would normally buy these days at all...
And then a lot of people that are forced to use Warez ROMs 'cos they can't get hold of the game for love nor money anywhere other than warez sites can rest easy knowing they've done their bit for society and progress, and the company that produced the game in the first place doesn't have so much to gripe about.
Despite all this blabbering on about the requirement for copy protect, I think most people just want to pay once for something they use, and don't mind paying a fair price for what they do use...
I for one would love a nice easy, high bandwith site I could drop onto, pay a couple of dollars for a bundle of ancient games, and just enjoy.
I do like the stuff this guy's done with the box tho..
Cheers,
Malk
And there was me thinking he had to connect them with real aligators. :)
Something that seems to be concensus opinion across the sites is that the card was previewed too early.
Like most pre-releases, it's nowhere near it's potential, and, if all it as in the past, ATI will have problems getting the most out of the hardware due to this.
Is it just me, or does it seem like they could get a boost by releasing all the specs and driver details to the open source world?
For starters, this would make for great driver porting and supporting, and as a side, could help ATI come up with better performance as patches and improvements are fed back to them.
Malk
There is one paragraph that cuts through all the bull that surrounds the DMCA and all the other stunts being pulled by the legal vultures...
Lessig: Yes. I think we should go back to the principles that defined us originally, which was about open societies with free people who should obey the law but you don't get them to obey the law by basically coding it so that they can't do anything different. You get them to obey the law by making the law reasonable and getting people to be respectful of it, and that's the direction we ought to be going.
Now, to me that makes sense.. In all of history, when organisations have overreached themselves, and tried to force control on everything, then other groups have leaped up and revolted.
The more serious the overreach, the more serious the backlash.
The whole reason the States seceeded from England was because the king of the time was forcing unfair measures on each and every person there. And lo, they all got a little upset, and went independant.
Now, several hundred years later, the lawyers of the US seems to be forming laws that are just as unfair and predatory as those that were around back then.
Personally, I know very little about "The Law". At least from a technical point of view. I'd hazard a guess that I comply about 99.9% with it, simply by following the rules of common sense.
I have respect for those rules that are actually put there to protect people, and civilisation as a whole, and make the world a better place.
However, I strenuously object to those laws that are in place solely to allow money to speak, and ensure that it makes more money, at the expense of the little guy.
It seems almost like a throwback to medieval feudalism, with IP laws instead of land, and the consumer being the peon that does all the work, provides all the input to keep things moving, and at the end of the day gets shafted by the 'lords' with no recourse or protection.
So, I laud anyone who simply says "Make the law fair.. Make it something people can look at and respect, and lo, it shall be respected.".
That's sense.
At the moment, the law is saying "You'll respect me and like it, because I tell you so", which bears far more resemblance to a tinpot dictatorship than the enlightened society that the Western World is supposed to be.
Once disrespect begins to grow, it weakens the credibility of the whole.
The whole reason that there are software companies now is that the original concept of copyright seemed fair.
People didn't just copy everything in sight.. They actually respected the right of the producing companies to receive their payment, and the law that protected that.
The DMCA is a law that just begs to be disrespected, and one wonders what effect that'll have on the public perception of the rights that's intended to protect...
Malk
Hrmm.. It seems this judge has a weird view of Open Source in the statment that it has the objective of "making as much material as possible available on the internet".
I'd always thought it was about researching the bounds of computing and helping advance knowledge and understanding.
Now, if your average person accused another average person of this, it seems in the states, they'd jump up and down and scream slander, and defamation of character..
Isn't this just what's going on here, but nobody's pressing this issue?
Malk
I go for books every time.. I flat out refuse to buy an e-Book, 'cos it's not convenient.. I can't use it to unwind when I loaf on the sofa or the bed.. I can't take it hiking, or on trips..
If you're running the betting, my money's on about 14 months (that's about the time it takes the average expanding startup to run out of venture capital, downsize a couple of times, and slowly have the last few dollars walk away in pens to sign the cheques for the last of the bills they owe...).
No doubt they'll get some purchases, maybe enough in royalties to keep a small staff going, but, I wouldn't bet on any sizable company from this idea..
Malk
I know a lot of people out there speed read.. I can pull a good speed on a book if I want to..
I wonder how long until people all get that skill, and can read the whole thing inside the 10 hr limit?
Then, to all intents and purposes, those who pay the buck get the full book for that buck, instead of the five or so that it'd normally cost..
Bye bye lots of profit..
And what happens then? Companies make you pay $1 for an hour's reading?
If, as it seems, the 10 hours is to allow a feel for the book to see if you want to spend the price of a book to purchase a 'permanent license' (i.e. you have the book in all but physical terms), then reducing to one hour won't let the non-speed readers get a look in..
Oh, what a tangled web they do weave...
Malk
As I seem to remember it, even after being exposed, a lot of people still asked his advice..
This indicates that in, at least an area where Lawyers were practicinf, and perchance gaining a lot of money, the actual basis was common sense. As they say, even a child could understand it.
Now, the idea of being in a profession is to know things that others really don't, thus providing a great use.
It says something when you have to sell something that everyone knows really, but they've been conditioned to ask a particular person, so they can have an arbitrary rubber stamp.
This creates an artificial surplus of this profession that is really counterproductive.
The more like this kid that think for themselves, and answer stuff for themselves that they can, the better.. It's what free thinking society is about.
And incidentally, I seem to remember that the kid in question actually only answered the questions that made sense to him.. Not the really detailed ones that actually required a lawyer...
I can remember, as a kid, understanding a lot more than most adults gave me credit for.. At least until they looked back years later, and said "You really DID understand all that, didn't you.."..
This kid seems to do that too.. It really is just called "thinking for yourself". It's been happening since the first thoughts. It'll (hopefully) be happening until the last.
I don't condone him claiming professional qualifications like he did for a time, but.. He makes people happy, and apparently gives good advice... As long as people accept that's what it is... I say go for it...
Now, if a programmer came to me, and wanted work, I'd see what he was capable of doing.. If it was very little, but kept a fair part of a customer base happy, then, there's no problem with hiring someone like this, at a fair price for the work, doing work for the ones that are happy with it.
After all, it'd let me get on with doing the real code for the people who pay far more and expect far more.
I really DO have far more of the real magic to do than worry about the stuff that an untrained teenager (not, of course, the hardcore teenagers, many these days who could prolly run rings round me in some areas) could deal with.
If the yunder generation can do something, and they offer their skills, then, fair renumeration for fair skills.. It's what a meritocracy is all about.. And I'm all for meritocracy..
Malk
Back when I was younger, I remember when computers first hit the home market.. A fair section of the games were produced by the teenage age group (back in teh very early 80's, when I was Just hitting teenage myself.. :) ).
This was supposed to shift the balance of the market to youth.. And I guess this was supposed to happen with the child prodigies that also produced a lot of classical music back in earlier centuries.
The simple matter is that this is temporary. Most of the info in the net is generated by adults, so what the teenagers find, and absorb, is frequently the ideals of the adults that placed it, with a fresh slant (as the younger mind is usually more creative than the adult).
As for this imbuing the teenager with the power to look down on the adults, and lead the way... Well, they need a roof over their heads, and a cred card to buy most services, and various other things that are still currently restricted to adults..
Every generation has it's new toys that allow the next generation to supercede the previous. Every dog has it's day.
It's called evolution. That hasn't changed one bit, except, it may have speeded up an awful lot.
Malk
Actually, that depends on install base of all products on the market.
If M$ make more and more incompatible, then they'll end up making them not work with all the stuff that's out there (I know people, home users, who're still happy using DOS or Win 3.x because they simply don't need more).
At the moment, all this 'old' install base works quite happily, so they carry on adding to the figures that MS is compliant with.
Now, should MS break legacy compliancy, they'll irritate a lot of people who now can't communicate with the legacy MS installations, who need to look elsewhere (as they often loathe buying a whole new PC just so they can view the latest MS word files).
The whole point of MS keeping market share is to make things just compliant enough that old MS tech works, while making nudges that the new software is worth the cost of an upgrade.
Breaking the compliancy will remove a lot of legacy systems which will likely move to open source solutions/other compliant commercial systems, eroding MS Market share.
Rather than that hitting MS badly, they'll just improve legacy support in patches, making sure that all the open source stuff works with the latest MS.
Legacy is the whole reason we have the x86 architecture around still today.. And it'll be the reason that things still carry on working (to an extent) with MS into the future.
Malk