There is so much wrong with that statement, I hardly know where to begin. First of all, monopolies take advantage of the lack of competition to keep prices artificially high, not low. Secondly, even if Amazon was keeping prices artificially low, what they were doing was completely legal. On the other side, Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to make it absolutely impossible for other resellers to sell their books cheaper than Apple. If Apple had just demanded that they got the same or lower price on ebooks as other resellers, then they would have likely escaped litigation. Instead, they conspired with publisher to fix the prices that other resellers could actually sell their products and that is classic price fixing. The publishers knew that and promptly pled guilty, but Apple thought they could get one by the legal system and got a sudden dose of reality. This isn't just another typical case of Slashdot hating on Apple - in this case there is legal justification for it and mountains of legal precedence.
It's rarely a good thing to be ahead of your time, and that applies twofold to technology. Releasing technology before it is capable of providing a solid user experience is counterproductive because it gives the technology a bad name, reducing interest in the required research necessary to provide a solid experience.
In the past, Virtual Reality did not work because the helmets were too heavy, the graphics were too demanding, the screen resolutions and refresh rates were too low, and the motion sensors were too slow. All of these issues combined to create a horrible user experience. But due to many advances made in the past couple of decades, graphics processing is much faster, screen resolutions and refresh rates are much higher, screens weigh much less, motion capture is much faster, and all of these technologies are becoming drastically cheaper. This means that Virtual Reality is quickly approaching a point where it will finally be feasible to provide the proper experience it has always attempted.
With that said, there are still a lot of tasks required to get all of the technologies integrated with each other to provide a smooth user experience, so I don't think that 2014 will be the year of Virtual Reality. But I would be surprised if there wasn't a solid product available by 2016.
Verizon did that to my connection to YouTube. It worked great over when I VPNed but I couldn't even stream more than 5% of a video without VPN. That was one of several reasons I dropped FIOS.
Remember how many people tried to tell you Network Neutrality was the road to a heavily regulated internet...
Well here you go. If you regulate any aspect, eventually all aspects will fall under a web of regulations.
WTF are you talking about? Level 3 is complaining because they are now being extorted by ISPs who are trying to double-dip and charge them hefty fees for peering agreements. This was not a problem when net neutrality regulations were in place, but after Verizon won their case over net neutrality, it took Comcast only five weeks to go on a rampage and start extorting fees from other providers. So this is exactly what you get when you DON'T have net neutrality and you DON'T have regulation.
It's great for companies like Level 3
It's not great for companies like Level 3 because they are the ones being extorted. The current lack of regulation is great for companies like Comcast who are threatening to throttle connections of their own users if content providers don't pay Comcast an extortion fee. Again, it only took five weeks of the regulations being removed before Comcast started pulling this shit. It may be time for you to admit that moderate and sensible regulation is not a bad thing.
I guess ultimately I just wish copyright worked more like patents. With patents, you must disclose details about the work in order to get protection as part of the social contract. If you don't want to divulge the details, then you stick with trade secrets. But copyright provides all of the protection with no required disclosure. While that may be perfectly legal under current law, I can't think of any reasonable justification for this difference. If you truly believe that your work is worthy of copyright protection, then you should be perfectly happy going through a brief registration process. The registration could be as simple as a microtransaction on a government-sponsored web site. Then, similar to patents, when the copyright expires, the registration site could act like a public domain distribution site. This is fairly analogous to how the USPTO web site currently works (besides the fact that patent registration isn't exactly brief). Yes, I know that this would violate the Berne Convention but I'm not arguing what the law is, I'm arguing what I believe it should be.
I do realize that a work entering the public domain does not automatically mean that it has to, or even should, be made available. But with technology being what it is today, if we can develop a wayback machine, then why can't we do something to preserve cultural works? I guess I just feel that if everyone in society is giving up the freedom to copy certain works (as odd of a freedom as that may seem in the modern Western world), then we should get back as much as we can once that copyright expires. But that is clearly my opinion and obviously not a reflection of the current laws in place. In any event, I appreciate the info you have provided. Given my stance on intellectual property, I don't have too many civilized conversations with IP lawyers, so this was a nice change of pace and I was able to learn more details about the law, even if I don't necessarily agree with them.
The Library's collections remain in the library. If you wanted to go there, manually duplicate millions of lines of decades-old code, and then redistribute it, that'd be your only option.
At least that provides some option. And if someone did that for code that entered the public domain, they would be free to disseminate it to anyone who wished to host it online.
A return to registration requirements (prohibited under the 1886 Berne Convention) would not solve the issue you seem to have a problem with, which is the refusal of copyright holders to make articles generally available to the public during the copyright term.
It doesn't have to be during the term of the copyright. But after the copyright expires and the work is supposed to enter the public domain, it would be nice to know that there will be a copy available somewhere. Part of the social contract in offering patents and copyrights to creators is that the public will be free to copy those works and the knowledge and culture will persist. Thanks to neverending extensions of copyright terms, it will likely be incredibly hard to get a copy of a work by the time it enters public domain.
but if it's something you can read, then it's something copyrighted
I thought that there were exemptions to things that can be copyrighted such as recipes. Is that true?
You're already talking to one.
And I appreciate your input and the possibility to learn about an important facet of modern society. While I have your attention, can you confirm that source code is in fact covered under trade secret AND copyright law or only one of those? Thanks.
That sounds reasonable enough. However, in your example where the employee leaves a printout on a printer in a cafe, copyright law would forbid you from making or disseminating copies of that work while I don't believe trade secret would prevent you from doing whatever you wanted with it.
So in this case, a copy of the Windows source taken from a cafe printer would be useless (in the U.S.) while the recipe to Coca-Cola on a cafe printer could be a goldmine. Again, I'm not an IP lawyer - these are simply suppositions based on my slight-better-than-average knowledge of IP law.
General public release has NEVER been a requirement for copyright.
You are correct, but for a long time it was required that you register the copyrighted work with the government. When the copyright expired on that work, the government could then release that work since it would fall under public domain.
Copyright to software code works no differently. If you want to keep it secret, then you rely on trade secret and contractual nondisclosure requirements. If it leaks beyond that, then you have (and HAVE ALWAYS HAD) the right to prohibit further reproduction.
I have always heard different. What has been told to me is that once the trade secret has been revealed, the cat is out of the bag and your legal options are extremely limited (beyond suing the shit out of the party that leaked the secret). This would be the perfect time for an IP lawyer to jump in and set us straight.
And since Windows 8 is available to the public - I fail to see how your claim that the system is broken has any merit.
The compiled binaries are released to the public and they are covered under copyright law. The source code used to build those compiled binaries is also covered under copyright law (yet the source isn't usually released) AND it is simultaneously covered by trade secret.
Copyright has never required the creator to release the work products used in the creation, only the final work
But in this case, the copyright violation is on the work products used in the creation (the source code). Microsoft claims copyright on the Windows source and on the Windows binaries.
Further, that internal work products (like interim builds and unfinished releases) can be treated as confidential and trade secrets is a well established principle.
I'm not debating that they're considered trade secrets, my point is that they are covered under trade secret AND copyright at the same time which is highly unusual - I am not aware of any other work that gets both of those protections simultaneously. Throw in patents on top of it and you get a triple decker of IP madness.
Your belief that the system is broken is based on a fundamental cluelessness about how the system works.
Ah, Slashdot! Where everyone knows more than everyone else!
Copyrighted works need never be released to the public.
You're only proving my point. Copyright works currently do NOT need to be released despite the fact that the original intention of copyright law was to make sure the work WAS released.
No I am not. Patents and copyright were BOTH set up for the purpose of encouraging people to release their work.
The intention of copyright law is that you write things.
No, the intention of copyright law is to encourage people to make their works available to the public by motivating the creator with the power of monetization. It's the ARTS in the constitutional clause "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
There is nothing wrong with writing things and keeping them secret.
Of course not. But if you want a monopoly on a body of work, you are supposed to actually release that work, not sit on it.
On Slashdot, we often talk about how ridiculous it is that software is covered by copyright AND patents, but no one addresses the fact that source code is also covered under trade secret law. This is a conflict of interest and shows how screwed up our intellectual property system is. The intent of copyright is that you get protection in return for making your works public. But in the case of source code, companies get all of the protections of copyright law on that code without being required to ever actually release the code to the public. That is made evident by this exact case.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not suggesting that every software development company should be forced to release its code, but I do think they should have to choose between receiving copyright protection by releasing the code or receive no copyright protection and keep the code guarded by trade secret. I can't think of any other industry that gets protection from both copyright and trade secret and I haven't heard anyone suggest why software should be made an exception.
I said that because most companies use hiring agencies to gather candidates for interviews and it has been my experience that the first question these hiring agencies ask is what you are looking to be paid. The second question is how firm are you on that price. The reason for this is that the employer gives the hiring agency a very specific salary range they are willing to pay and the hiring agencies want to get the best possible candidates without wasting the employer's time with candidates out of their price range. Therefore, whether you like it or not, the conversation usually starts with price and then moves over to discussing experience.
I didn't recognize it as an Ask Slashdot question because the question was incredibly broad, barely gave any detail, and did not ask for specific advice about a technical issue. But it'll generate page clicks (it got ours).
I personally believe that the experience older programmers provide over younger counterparts makes them a desirable hiring option. The catch is that the price has to be right. Some of the older developers demand two to three times the salary of younger programmers. When you do that, you have to ask yourself if you deliver quantity and/or quality two to three times greater than those younger programmers. If you honestly believe you do, then your next task is to prove that to prospective employers, but it's going to be a tough sell. It can take close to a year for someone to realize that they hired a fraud, so you're a more expensive gamble to that employer than a younger employee.
There are certainly older programmers who can produce much better software at faster rates than their younger counterparts, but it is difficult to prove and requires the employer to take a greater risk in hiring you.
Finally, is it me or was there no article at all? Seriously, Slashdot - WTF?
Everyone in the article keeps saying that Jackson is "shining a spotlight" on the problem. Is he really? He pointed out the lack of blacks and latinos in the tech industry and did fuck-all to state what he believes to be the problem and what we can do to resolve it. If he had come out with figures that showed that there were tons of unemployed or underployed blacks and latinos in the tech industry and that the underlying problem is due to discrimination, then that would give us something to work with. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all. What does he expect these companies to do? Hire underqualified people just to get the numbers to match?
This sounds like what my dad was telling me the other day. He used to work for the federal government and they had very detailed lists of minorities in each department. Every department was often under stress to get their numbers to match percentage of populations. But what population do you go by? National? Regional? Many of these departments were more focused on meeting these quotas than hiring the most qualified candidates, so overall these systems are counterproductive.
And if we're so focused on quotas of fairness, should we put a quota that only 13.9% of NFL players should be black? The fact is that Mr. Jackson did a lot of good when qualified black people couldn't find work due directly to discrimination. And while discrimination may not be completely gone, it is a lot better than it used to be and not every case of underrepresentation today is due to discrimination. So keep fighting the good fight against discrimination, but if you're going to complain about underrepresentation and completely fail to show that it is a result of discrimination rather than a lack of interest or qualification, then you can kindly STFU.
So your argument is that the article is wrong since it doesn't come to the conclusion you've already made up in your mind without ever using the other product in the comparison. That may be great for you, but for someone starting out and wondering which IDE would suit their needs better, the article may very well make sense.
(Am I the only person who on seeing this thought "Hrm, a potentially cheaper than all the others VR headset, how will I be able to hack this for PC use etc.?")
You think Sony is going to release a product that is cheaper than the competition? Good luck with that.
Also, those whining that the PS4 doesn't have enough horsepower to run it are clearly dumber than pond scum, the PS3 had enough horsepower to do it. You may need a little less detail, explosions/reflections etc. might be a tad less realistic but does it matter? Do you sit there pausing the game and criticising the graphics or actually play the damn thing, good lord.
In order to run at 1080p (which is a minimum requirement given the close proximity of the image to your eye) and 60 frames per second (30 fps for each eye) with two different stereoscopic images, the PS3 would be drastically underpowered. The PS4 is closer to having the necessary power, but I think you are missing something: in order to scale down the graphics enough to render the stereoscopic images at the required res and fps, the visual details would need to be turned way down. That may be acceptable if you commited the game for VR only, but if you want to make your game work without VR, your graphical detail would not be sufficient to be competitive with other non-VR games. At that point, you would need to optimize the game for two different platforms (VR and non-VR) on the same console. The game engine could automatically detect the display type and run the appropriate optimization profile, but the point is that the game developers would need to put in twice the effort on optimization.
Ultimately, if you're going to do VR, you have to do it right. We already went through one generation of crappy VR in the 90's and it failed miserably. I think we're on the verge of all of the technologies finally being affordable and portable enough to make a comfortable display, but it requires a smooth integration of many different technologies if it's going to create a realistic experience.
While I admit that I did not read the full article, the title of the article specifically says it was a trojan. If the body of the article declares that the attack vector is unknown, then they should not have used the word trojan anywhere, let alone the headline.
The user/admin can also flick the switch to allow unsigned code which was my entire point - trojans are a security risk because of the person who installs them and not some inherent flaw in the OS.
There is not a single OS that is not vulnerable to a trojan. If this was a virus, drive-by download, or infection of a repository, then that would be disconcerting, but there will always be people who fall for trojans and the OS they use has little to do with it.
Now is the perfect time to build out a test server, fire up your applications, and start looking for all of the regressions. File the bug reports early and make sure that all of them are fixed before you even attempt to deploy this to your servers. Lately Oracle has been one of the worst offenders for regressions to the point that it seems like they threaten death to developers who test anything other than the new features.
Actually, the usual saying is "I was only following orders" and is usually meant to rationalize behavior of people in organizations that started out somewhat innocuous but descended into immorality. In this case, we found out that an agency that was created from the outset to spy on other countries is currently spying on other countries. Out of all of the horrible things that have been revealed about the NSA, this is the least surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
There is so much wrong with that statement, I hardly know where to begin. First of all, monopolies take advantage of the lack of competition to keep prices artificially high, not low. Secondly, even if Amazon was keeping prices artificially low, what they were doing was completely legal. On the other side, Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to make it absolutely impossible for other resellers to sell their books cheaper than Apple. If Apple had just demanded that they got the same or lower price on ebooks as other resellers, then they would have likely escaped litigation. Instead, they conspired with publisher to fix the prices that other resellers could actually sell their products and that is classic price fixing. The publishers knew that and promptly pled guilty, but Apple thought they could get one by the legal system and got a sudden dose of reality. This isn't just another typical case of Slashdot hating on Apple - in this case there is legal justification for it and mountains of legal precedence.
It's rarely a good thing to be ahead of your time, and that applies twofold to technology. Releasing technology before it is capable of providing a solid user experience is counterproductive because it gives the technology a bad name, reducing interest in the required research necessary to provide a solid experience.
In the past, Virtual Reality did not work because the helmets were too heavy, the graphics were too demanding, the screen resolutions and refresh rates were too low, and the motion sensors were too slow. All of these issues combined to create a horrible user experience. But due to many advances made in the past couple of decades, graphics processing is much faster, screen resolutions and refresh rates are much higher, screens weigh much less, motion capture is much faster, and all of these technologies are becoming drastically cheaper. This means that Virtual Reality is quickly approaching a point where it will finally be feasible to provide the proper experience it has always attempted.
With that said, there are still a lot of tasks required to get all of the technologies integrated with each other to provide a smooth user experience, so I don't think that 2014 will be the year of Virtual Reality. But I would be surprised if there wasn't a solid product available by 2016.
Verizon did that to my connection to YouTube. It worked great over when I VPNed but I couldn't even stream more than 5% of a video without VPN. That was one of several reasons I dropped FIOS.
WTF are you talking about? Level 3 is complaining because they are now being extorted by ISPs who are trying to double-dip and charge them hefty fees for peering agreements. This was not a problem when net neutrality regulations were in place, but after Verizon won their case over net neutrality, it took Comcast only five weeks to go on a rampage and start extorting fees from other providers. So this is exactly what you get when you DON'T have net neutrality and you DON'T have regulation.
It's not great for companies like Level 3 because they are the ones being extorted. The current lack of regulation is great for companies like Comcast who are threatening to throttle connections of their own users if content providers don't pay Comcast an extortion fee. Again, it only took five weeks of the regulations being removed before Comcast started pulling this shit. It may be time for you to admit that moderate and sensible regulation is not a bad thing.
I guess ultimately I just wish copyright worked more like patents. With patents, you must disclose details about the work in order to get protection as part of the social contract. If you don't want to divulge the details, then you stick with trade secrets. But copyright provides all of the protection with no required disclosure. While that may be perfectly legal under current law, I can't think of any reasonable justification for this difference. If you truly believe that your work is worthy of copyright protection, then you should be perfectly happy going through a brief registration process. The registration could be as simple as a microtransaction on a government-sponsored web site. Then, similar to patents, when the copyright expires, the registration site could act like a public domain distribution site. This is fairly analogous to how the USPTO web site currently works (besides the fact that patent registration isn't exactly brief). Yes, I know that this would violate the Berne Convention but I'm not arguing what the law is, I'm arguing what I believe it should be.
I do realize that a work entering the public domain does not automatically mean that it has to, or even should, be made available. But with technology being what it is today, if we can develop a wayback machine, then why can't we do something to preserve cultural works? I guess I just feel that if everyone in society is giving up the freedom to copy certain works (as odd of a freedom as that may seem in the modern Western world), then we should get back as much as we can once that copyright expires. But that is clearly my opinion and obviously not a reflection of the current laws in place. In any event, I appreciate the info you have provided. Given my stance on intellectual property, I don't have too many civilized conversations with IP lawyers, so this was a nice change of pace and I was able to learn more details about the law, even if I don't necessarily agree with them.
At least that provides some option. And if someone did that for code that entered the public domain, they would be free to disseminate it to anyone who wished to host it online.
It doesn't have to be during the term of the copyright. But after the copyright expires and the work is supposed to enter the public domain, it would be nice to know that there will be a copy available somewhere. Part of the social contract in offering patents and copyrights to creators is that the public will be free to copy those works and the knowledge and culture will persist. Thanks to neverending extensions of copyright terms, it will likely be incredibly hard to get a copy of a work by the time it enters public domain.
I thought that there were exemptions to things that can be copyrighted such as recipes. Is that true?
And I appreciate your input and the possibility to learn about an important facet of modern society. While I have your attention, can you confirm that source code is in fact covered under trade secret AND copyright law or only one of those? Thanks.
That sounds reasonable enough. However, in your example where the employee leaves a printout on a printer in a cafe, copyright law would forbid you from making or disseminating copies of that work while I don't believe trade secret would prevent you from doing whatever you wanted with it.
So in this case, a copy of the Windows source taken from a cafe printer would be useless (in the U.S.) while the recipe to Coca-Cola on a cafe printer could be a goldmine. Again, I'm not an IP lawyer - these are simply suppositions based on my slight-better-than-average knowledge of IP law.
You are correct, but for a long time it was required that you register the copyrighted work with the government. When the copyright expired on that work, the government could then release that work since it would fall under public domain.
I have always heard different. What has been told to me is that once the trade secret has been revealed, the cat is out of the bag and your legal options are extremely limited (beyond suing the shit out of the party that leaked the secret). This would be the perfect time for an IP lawyer to jump in and set us straight.
The compiled binaries are released to the public and they are covered under copyright law. The source code used to build those compiled binaries is also covered under copyright law (yet the source isn't usually released) AND it is simultaneously covered by trade secret.
But in this case, the copyright violation is on the work products used in the creation (the source code). Microsoft claims copyright on the Windows source and on the Windows binaries.
I'm not debating that they're considered trade secrets, my point is that they are covered under trade secret AND copyright at the same time which is highly unusual - I am not aware of any other work that gets both of those protections simultaneously. Throw in patents on top of it and you get a triple decker of IP madness.
Ah, Slashdot! Where everyone knows more than everyone else!
You're only proving my point. Copyright works currently do NOT need to be released despite the fact that the original intention of copyright law was to make sure the work WAS released.
No I am not. Patents and copyright were BOTH set up for the purpose of encouraging people to release their work.
No, the intention of copyright law is to encourage people to make their works available to the public by motivating the creator with the power of monetization. It's the ARTS in the constitutional clause "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Of course not. But if you want a monopoly on a body of work, you are supposed to actually release that work, not sit on it.
On Slashdot, we often talk about how ridiculous it is that software is covered by copyright AND patents, but no one addresses the fact that source code is also covered under trade secret law. This is a conflict of interest and shows how screwed up our intellectual property system is. The intent of copyright is that you get protection in return for making your works public. But in the case of source code, companies get all of the protections of copyright law on that code without being required to ever actually release the code to the public. That is made evident by this exact case.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not suggesting that every software development company should be forced to release its code, but I do think they should have to choose between receiving copyright protection by releasing the code or receive no copyright protection and keep the code guarded by trade secret. I can't think of any other industry that gets protection from both copyright and trade secret and I haven't heard anyone suggest why software should be made an exception.
I said that because most companies use hiring agencies to gather candidates for interviews and it has been my experience that the first question these hiring agencies ask is what you are looking to be paid. The second question is how firm are you on that price. The reason for this is that the employer gives the hiring agency a very specific salary range they are willing to pay and the hiring agencies want to get the best possible candidates without wasting the employer's time with candidates out of their price range. Therefore, whether you like it or not, the conversation usually starts with price and then moves over to discussing experience.
I didn't recognize it as an Ask Slashdot question because the question was incredibly broad, barely gave any detail, and did not ask for specific advice about a technical issue. But it'll generate page clicks (it got ours).
I personally believe that the experience older programmers provide over younger counterparts makes them a desirable hiring option. The catch is that the price has to be right. Some of the older developers demand two to three times the salary of younger programmers. When you do that, you have to ask yourself if you deliver quantity and/or quality two to three times greater than those younger programmers. If you honestly believe you do, then your next task is to prove that to prospective employers, but it's going to be a tough sell. It can take close to a year for someone to realize that they hired a fraud, so you're a more expensive gamble to that employer than a younger employee.
There are certainly older programmers who can produce much better software at faster rates than their younger counterparts, but it is difficult to prove and requires the employer to take a greater risk in hiring you.
Finally, is it me or was there no article at all? Seriously, Slashdot - WTF?
Everyone in the article keeps saying that Jackson is "shining a spotlight" on the problem. Is he really? He pointed out the lack of blacks and latinos in the tech industry and did fuck-all to state what he believes to be the problem and what we can do to resolve it. If he had come out with figures that showed that there were tons of unemployed or underployed blacks and latinos in the tech industry and that the underlying problem is due to discrimination, then that would give us something to work with. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all. What does he expect these companies to do? Hire underqualified people just to get the numbers to match?
This sounds like what my dad was telling me the other day. He used to work for the federal government and they had very detailed lists of minorities in each department. Every department was often under stress to get their numbers to match percentage of populations. But what population do you go by? National? Regional? Many of these departments were more focused on meeting these quotas than hiring the most qualified candidates, so overall these systems are counterproductive.
And if we're so focused on quotas of fairness, should we put a quota that only 13.9% of NFL players should be black? The fact is that Mr. Jackson did a lot of good when qualified black people couldn't find work due directly to discrimination. And while discrimination may not be completely gone, it is a lot better than it used to be and not every case of underrepresentation today is due to discrimination. So keep fighting the good fight against discrimination, but if you're going to complain about underrepresentation and completely fail to show that it is a result of discrimination rather than a lack of interest or qualification, then you can kindly STFU.
So your argument is that the article is wrong since it doesn't come to the conclusion you've already made up in your mind without ever using the other product in the comparison. That may be great for you, but for someone starting out and wondering which IDE would suit their needs better, the article may very well make sense.
In a perfect world, nothing would exist.
You think Sony is going to release a product that is cheaper than the competition? Good luck with that.
In order to run at 1080p (which is a minimum requirement given the close proximity of the image to your eye) and 60 frames per second (30 fps for each eye) with two different stereoscopic images, the PS3 would be drastically underpowered. The PS4 is closer to having the necessary power, but I think you are missing something: in order to scale down the graphics enough to render the stereoscopic images at the required res and fps, the visual details would need to be turned way down. That may be acceptable if you commited the game for VR only, but if you want to make your game work without VR, your graphical detail would not be sufficient to be competitive with other non-VR games. At that point, you would need to optimize the game for two different platforms (VR and non-VR) on the same console. The game engine could automatically detect the display type and run the appropriate optimization profile, but the point is that the game developers would need to put in twice the effort on optimization.
Ultimately, if you're going to do VR, you have to do it right. We already went through one generation of crappy VR in the 90's and it failed miserably. I think we're on the verge of all of the technologies finally being affordable and portable enough to make a comfortable display, but it requires a smooth integration of many different technologies if it's going to create a realistic experience.
While I admit that I did not read the full article, the title of the article specifically says it was a trojan. If the body of the article declares that the attack vector is unknown, then they should not have used the word trojan anywhere, let alone the headline.
The user/admin can also flick the switch to allow unsigned code which was my entire point - trojans are a security risk because of the person who installs them and not some inherent flaw in the OS.
There is not a single OS that is not vulnerable to a trojan. If this was a virus, drive-by download, or infection of a repository, then that would be disconcerting, but there will always be people who fall for trojans and the OS they use has little to do with it.
Now is the perfect time to build out a test server, fire up your applications, and start looking for all of the regressions. File the bug reports early and make sure that all of them are fixed before you even attempt to deploy this to your servers. Lately Oracle has been one of the worst offenders for regressions to the point that it seems like they threaten death to developers who test anything other than the new features.
Actually, the usual saying is "I was only following orders" and is usually meant to rationalize behavior of people in organizations that started out somewhat innocuous but descended into immorality. In this case, we found out that an agency that was created from the outset to spy on other countries is currently spying on other countries. Out of all of the horrible things that have been revealed about the NSA, this is the least surprising.