Wondering the intellectual property ramifications of the virus code. USPTO says once something is published, we need to file within one year for patent. After one year published work can not be patented. Our lawyers force us to use complex #IF_PATENT_PENDING / #ENDIF constructs to keep patentable code away from daily builds and release builds. Even if there is no pathway for the code to be executed, the lawyers claim it does not matter. Inactive, unusable algorithms that were built and shipped would count. So they say.
So if there is an interesting, innovative, novel device in some virus, will it be counted as prior art? The security researchers who see this code first hand might try to patent it, of course. Now USPTO has moved from first-to-invent to first-to-file. So they might even get the patent, but only if they do it within one year since it was released. Has anyone cited some work in a virus to argue challenge a patent claim as not-novel, covered by prior art?
When malware were named viruses and borrowed terminology from biology and germ theory of diseases, initially (I mean back in early 1990s) it was kind of funny almost snark. But the the behavior of the malware evolved very similar to the way biological viruses evolve, and the comparison and terminology became increasingly relevant. Bio viruses reduce their own lethality [*1] to improve their own chances of survival and propagation. Even the original C-brain floppy disk virus of 1988 waited for 50 copies being made before it would take adverse action. Keeping a few weapons in the reserve, not attacking all possible hosts etc are all things bio viruses do too.
So where would it go? Some viruses reduced their lethality a lot and helped their hosts survive better so that these viruses could also survive better. At some point they benefit they added was so much, they were more symbiotes rather than a pathogen. Some eventually gave up all attempts find new host or propagation and became totally dependent on their hosts. The mitochondria in each of our cells that is actually the powerhouse that generates energy for the organisms, was once a free living bacteria [*2]. The gut bacteria of so many animals are totally dependent on their host. Some of the viruses got spliced into our DNA itself! There are genes from viruses in our DNA happily churning out proteins for us!
Malware authors can not claim copyright, nor can they enforce any intellectual property rights on their creation. There is nothing to stop OS developers from picking up useful bits of algorithms and code from these viruses and using it in legitimate code. Very interesting to think about what could happen. Of course, the biota is still full of harmful viruses and bacteria. So not all viruses will be tamed. But there is some potential to harvest these viruses for any good code/algorithm/logic they might have in them.
[*1] no no no, I am not saying these viruses are sentient and they deliberately did X to achieve Y. Some viruses did X, that was beneficial due to Y, and they survived better than the ones that did not do X, thus eventually only the viruses that did X are the only ones still alive. Anthropomorphizing and attributing purpose to an evolutionary process is simply a shorthand used by biologists. Read Daniel Dennett, he explains it far better than I do.
True for the current generation of the captchas. Once google improves its captcha, the cost of upgrading the cracking software and training it would be very high. Human beings, should adapt instantly.
Captcha generation can be scaled up quite cheaply and the cracking it automatically does not scale well. But why bother to create a complex system to mimic a human brain, when human brain itself is available for hire for a pittance? You could hire someone in India to manually solve some 30 to 60 captcha an hour for about 100 Rs per hour, or less than $1.50. This method of cracking captcha is unbeatable because, you can not make Captcha more difficult without hampering legitimate users.
Most people could not bring themselves to eating cakes or candy shaped to look like poop. If a cup was dipped in a clean toilet bowl, people would refuse to drink using that cup, even after washing the cup in boiling hot water.
Feeling disgust is important survival tool, it helped people avoid infections, develop better sanitation, etc.
I used to work for a software company that was an OEM vendor to HP. The Logo police declared on the top left corner of the window, we should have the logo. So we created it that way. Then we created a cool animation that will "spin" the logo, as though it has been etched on a glass plate spinning on a vertical axis. It would spin if you click on that corner. A small inconsequential easter egg.
No! The logo police came down on it like a ton of bricks. The aspect ratio of the log does not match the company spec during the animation. They made us pull the release candidate and rebuild the whole software.
We had the last laugh though, we spun off the OEM software under our own brand, and HP competed with us, then spun off its software division as Agilent, and then we beat Agilent in that business. They eventually sold their customer base who used the competing version created by them to us and exited the business. Anyone who spent that much time enforcing logo display deserved to go out of business.
Not knowing what Im talking about never stopped me, why start now? Who knows if I know nothing and not be shamed by it, may be I could run for the presidency...
You laugh at X-10. But the wily pop under from X10 is the one that made so many people to learn how to download and install firefox and then install the pop-up blocker. Without the douchbaggery of X10, firefox would have languished.
Most customers assumed "lifetime free upgrade/support" to mean the lifetime of the device. Common misunderstanding. What they meant was lifetime of the company that was offering the upgrade and support.
Corporations are people, my friend. With all the rights and privileges including, free will and religious faith. But they are special people who can't be jailed, who can transfer all the assets to another coporation people, keep all the liabilities, and declare bankruptcy and dodge it all. Welcome to Coporation People, People Version 2, the reimagined bug fixed version of stupid people.
Yesterday there was a thread about some popular Chrome extension. The original developer who built trust sold it out On March 23. The buyer loaded it up with malware, session hijacks, routing through shady proxies etc. Took about 2 weeks for Google to eventually pull the extension off. In the comments I saw some android apps too have the same issue.
Now what happens when a distro developer builds a loyal following and then sells out?
There will be some people who deride all new things. Some people will deride all the old things.
Decades later, people will dig up the quotes about the new thing that has survived all these years, make a big story about it and feel smug about it. Many new things that actually turned out to be dumb (NeXT? Newton? That Timex+Microsoft chimera watch that downloaded data by the blinking[*] CRT montor? Plasma TV? HD-DVD? TurboPascal? FoxBase? Quattro spreadsheet? ), and the new things that were merely ahead of their time (geocities? myspace?) will be forgotten...
[*] Actual blinking, blinking not used as a euphemism
The original developer who built up the trust, sold out on Mar 23. It took the users some time to notice it, and in two weeks the extension is off the store. And other extensions have been spotted. So in some sense, not so bad.
On the other hand the permissions model seems to be broken. So many users give the apps all the permissions it asks for. Once a permission is granted, it is often difficult to go back and turn off permissions. I don't know how to make it easy to use and to let the user have the flexibility of control.
May be has so many files and data cached for faster response and it knows what can be safely deleted and what's not. At some point the settings trigger a clear old cache process and frees up the memory. Digging around it should be possible to figure this out and trigger it without paying a buck to apple
I work in software and I sit through endless hours of meeting where we mull over mundane user interface changes. We agonize over minor things like reorganizing a menu tree that has grown too big. Or replacing an icon chosen ages ago in a hurry, which does not really represent the feature it stands for, but our users are used to it and have learned to associate it. Is it worth replacing it? etc.
Then comes google and android. Menu items and user interface paradigms and rules are changed at the whim. One day it is the "gear", suddenly it is gone and there is a the three lines, suddenly it is nine dots in a matrix, then dot dot dot... Some thing that appears to be some decoration in the phone app is the "new" interface for a well known functionality used to be located somewhere else.
Ages ago I watched a young boy play Super Mario Brothers. He ran along some path, stopped at some seemingly random location, banged his head on the brick 8 times, a gold bar fell out. Pocketed the points and ran along. I asked him, "how did you know there is a gold bar on that brick?". He said, "Well, you keep banging your head on every brick in the wall to see if there is something?". "You banged your head on EVERY brick eight times on this tunnel?", He goes, "nah, I banged some 30 or 40 times, this brick needs only 8 hits".
I wonder if that boy grew up, got a job designing user interface for Android apps. They seem to think, after every release the user should try every gesture on every pixel to re-learn how to use this app.
The leading theory is: Desolder the memory chip, make an off line copy, then reattach the chip, try 10 unlock codes. If it scrambles the memory restore from back up and try next 10 unlock codes.
The downside seems to be: It is a delicate operation to desolder and remove the memory chip. But if it is successfully removed, then they will probably attach a harness so that they can detach/restore/reattach a memory chip many times to try different codes.
I don't know how necessary it would be detach the chip to read the memory. If the leads are accessible, they can build some leadframe to attach to the other side
and try to read the chip without powering up the original phone, and try to restore memory, but sure it is possible.
There is a long history of public transit systems, especially rail systems, being systematically sabotaged by vested interests. An illegal and secret cartel of Firestone, Standard Oil and Ford bought many street car systems and shut them down.
Local car dealers constantly work with city officials behind the scenes to make public transit fail.
Indian Railways that carries 23 million passengers a day, 50 times more than BART, uses the 5' 6" gauge. It is the most popular and broadly used gauge in the world railways. May be BART can import trucks/bogies and wheel sets
from India. But India is also facing a severe manufacturing capacity crunch. It desperately needs more rolling stock and locomotives. As does Pakistan.
And Pakistan's imported Chinese locomotives are plagued by maintenance issues. Pakistan is lobbying India to get some diesel locomotives. So even if BART is willing to import, it would take some doing to get India to export any.
In the last "new" release Apple succumbed to the pressure brought on it by Donald Trump to make it small enough to fit in his hand. Will they stick to the slightly smaller than large size going forward? Or are they going to make the phone bigger?
i gather there is some scene in some village drama the hero also called Village, goes on long soliloqui with a skull as a prop. One day the assistant art director forgot to bring it. So Mr Shakespere lent his own skull.
The treaty of Hudaibuyah" is famous for the reason given for its abrogation. Mohammad claimed the treaty signed when had been weak was no longer enforceable, once he became strong.
All the names people gave themselves when we database programmers were weak is no longer enforceable once we became strong. Now we enter the name of the baby at birth in the hospital. If the name could not be entered, tough luck, pick a new name proud parents! Not born in a hospital? Hospital does not have computer? tough luck, no social security number to your baby, no way to do anything in US of A. We are the dbase programmers, we rule the world.
Iceland does not allow babies to be named in a way that does not conjugate correctly in Icelandic for all the case endings. And when the new story broke it caused much mirth and amusement among the "land of the free" who bragged about their freedom to be named Lakshumanan Satyavakeeswaran or Venkatachalapathy Ramanujadasan Seshadrinadhan Kodandaraman Aiyengar. Now, who is laughing?
It is high time the government refuses to register any name that is not Unicode compliant, within so many bytes with some reserved names that are not allowed. No more onefortymandaktwosixtwojamuna to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Will the offer be more or less than 44.6 billion dollars.
So if there is an interesting, innovative, novel device in some virus, will it be counted as prior art? The security researchers who see this code first hand might try to patent it, of course. Now USPTO has moved from first-to-invent to first-to-file. So they might even get the patent, but only if they do it within one year since it was released. Has anyone cited some work in a virus to argue challenge a patent claim as not-novel, covered by prior art?
So where would it go? Some viruses reduced their lethality a lot and helped their hosts survive better so that these viruses could also survive better. At some point they benefit they added was so much, they were more symbiotes rather than a pathogen. Some eventually gave up all attempts find new host or propagation and became totally dependent on their hosts. The mitochondria in each of our cells that is actually the powerhouse that generates energy for the organisms, was once a free living bacteria [*2]. The gut bacteria of so many animals are totally dependent on their host. Some of the viruses got spliced into our DNA itself! There are genes from viruses in our DNA happily churning out proteins for us!
Malware authors can not claim copyright, nor can they enforce any intellectual property rights on their creation. There is nothing to stop OS developers from picking up useful bits of algorithms and code from these viruses and using it in legitimate code. Very interesting to think about what could happen. Of course, the biota is still full of harmful viruses and bacteria. So not all viruses will be tamed. But there is some potential to harvest these viruses for any good code/algorithm/logic they might have in them.
[*1] no no no, I am not saying these viruses are sentient and they deliberately did X to achieve Y. Some viruses did X, that was beneficial due to Y, and they survived better than the ones that did not do X, thus eventually only the viruses that did X are the only ones still alive. Anthropomorphizing and attributing purpose to an evolutionary process is simply a shorthand used by biologists. Read Daniel Dennett, he explains it far better than I do.
[*2] Endosymbiosis.
Has amazon made any profits yet?
True for the current generation of the captchas. Once google improves its captcha, the cost of upgrading the cracking software and training it would be very high. Human beings, should adapt instantly.
Captcha generation can be scaled up quite cheaply and the cracking it automatically does not scale well. But why bother to create a complex system to mimic a human brain, when human brain itself is available for hire for a pittance? You could hire someone in India to manually solve some 30 to 60 captcha an hour for about 100 Rs per hour, or less than $1.50. This method of cracking captcha is unbeatable because, you can not make Captcha more difficult without hampering legitimate users.
Feeling disgust is important survival tool, it helped people avoid infections, develop better sanitation, etc.
No! The logo police came down on it like a ton of bricks. The aspect ratio of the log does not match the company spec during the animation. They made us pull the release candidate and rebuild the whole software.
We had the last laugh though, we spun off the OEM software under our own brand, and HP competed with us, then spun off its software division as Agilent, and then we beat Agilent in that business. They eventually sold their customer base who used the competing version created by them to us and exited the business. Anyone who spent that much time enforcing logo display deserved to go out of business.
Not knowing what Im talking about never stopped me, why start now? Who knows if I know nothing and not be shamed by it, may be I could run for the presidency ...
You laugh at X-10. But the wily pop under from X10 is the one that made so many people to learn how to download and install firefox and then install the pop-up blocker. Without the douchbaggery of X10, firefox would have languished.
Corporations are people, my friend. With all the rights and privileges including, free will and religious faith. But they are special people who can't be jailed, who can transfer all the assets to another coporation people, keep all the liabilities, and declare bankruptcy and dodge it all. Welcome to Coporation People, People Version 2, the reimagined bug fixed version of stupid people.
Now what happens when a distro developer builds a loyal following and then sells out?
Did not close all windows before restarting the car? All unsecured items in the car are gone after restart!
Decades later, people will dig up the quotes about the new thing that has survived all these years, make a big story about it and feel smug about it. Many new things that actually turned out to be dumb (NeXT? Newton? That Timex+Microsoft chimera watch that downloaded data by the blinking[*] CRT montor? Plasma TV? HD-DVD? TurboPascal? FoxBase? Quattro spreadsheet? ), and the new things that were merely ahead of their time (geocities? myspace?) will be forgotten...
[*] Actual blinking, blinking not used as a euphemism
On the other hand the permissions model seems to be broken. So many users give the apps all the permissions it asks for. Once a permission is granted, it is often difficult to go back and turn off permissions. I don't know how to make it easy to use and to let the user have the flexibility of control.
May be has so many files and data cached for faster response and it knows what can be safely deleted and what's not. At some point the settings trigger a clear old cache process and frees up the memory. Digging around it should be possible to figure this out and trigger it without paying a buck to apple
Then comes google and android. Menu items and user interface paradigms and rules are changed at the whim. One day it is the "gear", suddenly it is gone and there is a the three lines, suddenly it is nine dots in a matrix, then dot dot dot... Some thing that appears to be some decoration in the phone app is the "new" interface for a well known functionality used to be located somewhere else.
Ages ago I watched a young boy play Super Mario Brothers. He ran along some path, stopped at some seemingly random location, banged his head on the brick 8 times, a gold bar fell out. Pocketed the points and ran along. I asked him, "how did you know there is a gold bar on that brick?". He said, "Well, you keep banging your head on every brick in the wall to see if there is something?". "You banged your head on EVERY brick eight times on this tunnel?", He goes, "nah, I banged some 30 or 40 times, this brick needs only 8 hits".
I wonder if that boy grew up, got a job designing user interface for Android apps. They seem to think, after every release the user should try every gesture on every pixel to re-learn how to use this app.
The downside seems to be: It is a delicate operation to desolder and remove the memory chip. But if it is successfully removed, then they will probably attach a harness so that they can detach/restore/reattach a memory chip many times to try different codes.
I don't know how necessary it would be detach the chip to read the memory. If the leads are accessible, they can build some leadframe to attach to the other side and try to read the chip without powering up the original phone, and try to restore memory, but sure it is possible.
Local car dealers constantly work with city officials behind the scenes to make public transit fail.
Indian Railways that carries 23 million passengers a day, 50 times more than BART, uses the 5' 6" gauge. It is the most popular and broadly used gauge in the world railways. May be BART can import trucks/bogies and wheel sets from India. But India is also facing a severe manufacturing capacity crunch. It desperately needs more rolling stock and locomotives. As does Pakistan. And Pakistan's imported Chinese locomotives are plagued by maintenance issues. Pakistan is lobbying India to get some diesel locomotives. So even if BART is willing to import, it would take some doing to get India to export any.
In the last "new" release Apple succumbed to the pressure brought on it by Donald Trump to make it small enough to fit in his hand. Will they stick to the slightly smaller than large size going forward? Or are they going to make the phone bigger?
i gather there is some scene in some village drama the hero also called Village, goes on long soliloqui with a skull as a prop. One day the assistant art director forgot to bring it. So Mr Shakespere lent his own skull.
All the names people gave themselves when we database programmers were weak is no longer enforceable once we became strong. Now we enter the name of the baby at birth in the hospital. If the name could not be entered, tough luck, pick a new name proud parents! Not born in a hospital? Hospital does not have computer? tough luck, no social security number to your baby, no way to do anything in US of A. We are the dbase programmers, we rule the world.
It is high time the government refuses to register any name that is not Unicode compliant, within so many bytes with some reserved names that are not allowed. No more onefortymandaktwosixtwojamuna to you.
[The charged] were identified Tuesday as Prakuni Patel and Rahul Gandhi, both of Jobs Road,
Wait till Indian news papers get wind of this story ...