/information technology/copyright
Actually craft an analogy that bears some remote resemblance to the situation you are talking about
Given that the main accusations of Monsanto's corporate control of farming center around alleged abuses of the patent system against less-powerful individuals and firms involved in farming, railing against the product category (GMOs) rather than the supposedly-abused IP regime (patents) is a pretty good analog to railing against information technology (the product category) because of the BSA's (or other unwelcome actor's) supposed abuses of copyright (IP regime) against small business owners.
Saying that GMO's are bad because you don't like Monsanto's business tactics is like saying computing technology is bad because you don't like Microsoft's (or Google's or Apple's, take your pick) business tactics, or that telecommunication is evil because you don't like AT&T's (etc.) business tactics.
Yeah, but they use build servers.... not personal computers.
So what? They could use mobile handsets and it wouldn't matter, because the terms specify what you can do with the SDK, and CM isn't using the Android SDK, they are using the OS source code from the Android Open Source Project, which has a completely different set of licensing terms.
Certainly. Google is just getting around to reducing the fragmentation in the OS levels on the myriad of devices out there, and now there is going to be a proprietary (Google) SDK as well as a fully open (Replicant) SDK.
Well, except that the language that is being pointed to as making the SDK proprietary has been in the license for previous versions of the SDK. So, insofar as there is now going to be a proprietary and fully open SDK, that's actually been the case for quite some time. The Android Open Source Project provides an OS that is free (libre) and open, which also happens to be at the core of the corresponding version of the Android-branded OS; neither the branded-Android OS nor the Android SDK has ever been free (libre) and open.
this is a stupid move by Google to try and keep Ubuntu/HTC/Samsung from gutting Android and creating a competing product.
No, its not an attempt to do that, and it would be ineffective it was, since changing the terms of licensing for the Android SDK won't do anything to prevent Ubuntu/HTC/Samsung from taking the operating system code (from the Android Open Source Project) and creating a competing OS, since the Android SDK and the AOSP are two separate things. The slight tweaks to the language of the SDK license (which aren't accurately described by TFS, since the language in TFS was in the license before the tweaks as well as remaining there after) might affect the ability the ability to use software in the SDK which doesn't have its own open source license with different permissions in making an SDK for a competing OS which itself was built on the work of the AOSP, but it can't do anything to prevent using AOSP code to create a competing Android-like OS.
The maker of an FTP client will know that someone is going to end up downloading child porn with it. I mean come on. His argument was fine.
No, it wasn't, because knowing that someone, somewhere will break the law is different than selling it to a particular paying customer knowing that that customer intends to break the law with it. The former is generally not a basis for criminal liability, the latter is a fairly well-established basis for criminal liability. The argument portrayed the former as an application of the logic which said that the latter was subject to liability, which is false.
The article is pretty scary... The authorities went WAY over the line in what they asked him to do as part of his "plea". Now that they have totally screwed the pooch they want to take it out on him. The whole situation is pretty kaffkaesque... They are treating it like looking for "drugs" but gambling is not illegal everywhere, even in the same state.
What they required is, except for the "with a computer" part, perfectly in line with what an accused member of a criminal enterprise who plea bargains to a lesser charge in return for cooperation against other accused members of the criminal enterprise is typically required to do.
Good question, did he or did he not know what it will be used for?Or should I put, are there any evidence that he did know?
The actual charge (rather than Stuart's characterization of it) is that Stuart and his employees "knowingly advanced and profited from unlawful gambling activity by engaging in bookmaking to the extent that they received and accepted in any one day more than five bets totaling more than five thousand dollars."
Not that they provided software which the purchaser of the software used (with or without their knowledge) to accept bets, but that Stuart and his employees actually received and accepted bets.
If Stuart is to be convicted, they will need to prove that charge to a jury.
So by your logic, anyone who writes FTP clients/servers, or Web Browsers, or ANYTHING that could be used for Illegal activity, then they should be held accountable?
Your strawman doesn't represent GP's logic because GP said that the programmer should be held responsible if he "knows that the client will use said feature/software for illicit activity." That's different than knowing that the software could be used for illegal activity, even for something so widely used that that knowledge also implies knowledge to a statistical certainty that some user, somewhere will eventually end up using for criminal activity.
And, frankly, it is pretty much the standard that, decades ago, when I worked in retail (at Radio Shack) we were trained to apply: if a customer told us something that made us believe they were going to use the product they were seeking to purchase for criminal activity, we shouldn't sell it to them, otherwise the we (the company and potentially the sales person) could be held culpable.
There's the case where a purchaser goes on to use a product illegally and the seller is innocent, and then there is a case where a criminal purpose known to both the seller and purchaser is the whole point of the sale. Obviously, the seller, when charged, has a vested interest in portraying the latter case as if it was the former; there's a reason we have trials with evidence rather than just deciding criminal cases based on public statements by either the prosecutor or the defendant.
I've got a better idea: Why don't we just draft bills and propose them in the standard way rather than taking the fruitless petition route?
Because, we're not members of Congress, who are the only people who can introduce bills. Petitioning government is the "standard way" for citizens who aren't in government to propose changes to government policy.
Note to the clueless: You don't answer rhetorical questions; The answer is tho point I'm making.
Sometimes, you answer rhetorical questions when the framing of the rhetorical question implies that the author doesn't really understand the subject matter about which he is trying to make a point.
I would have voted for him the second time around IF instead of creating an "official response" they actually got some lemming on congress to run with it, regardless of whether he agreed with the petition or not.
Members of Congress are not employees of the President, so its not as if the White House could direct them to do this even if it made sense.
Newsflash: The entire purpose of government is to restrain people and limit what they can do.
So how did that transform into transferring money from large groups of people to small groups of people?
Without debating the accuracy of either GP's described purpose of government or parent's described action of government, I would note that restraining large groups of people and limiting what they can do to include only those set of actions which involve giving substantial sums of money to a small group of people is perfectly consistent with both, so the idea that those two things are mutually inconsistent is misguided.
Points in time are *always* represented internally as seconds-since-epoch (or milliseconds, or whatever unit makes sense for your app). Calculations are always done on values which are seconds-since-epoch. The *only* time that a date is *ever* converted to a year/month/day hour:min:sec representation is strictly for display purposes.
Frequently, calculations require both points in times and intervals of time; the former can consistently be represented as seconds since epoch, the latter doesn't really have a usable equivalent (you could use just seconds, but then things don't work as expected, since often its actually important to the user that the interval be an exact number of days, weeks, months or years, which may not be reducible to a consistent number of seconds, but instead that will depend on how the point in time the offset is being calculated against is represented in Year/month/day/hour/minute/second form, because leap seconds, leap years, and different lengths of months all make interval calculations tricky.)
You can't restrict conversion of seconds-since-epoch to calendar format to display-purposes-only if you are going to do anything useful with dates.
You think Google lost here? The FTC has been trying for half a decade to bring an anti-trust case against Google
I don't think that's really all that true; if the FTC was trying to bring a case, it wouldn't agree to a Consent Order, and it would just bring a case.
Certain Google competitors have been pressing the FTC to bring a case, mostly about "search bias", and secondarily and more recently about use of standards-essential patents. The FTC, after investigating, has decided -- unanimously -- to drop the "search bias" issue, and -- narrowly, on a 3-2 vote -- to impose fairly limited restrictions in a Consent Order relating to the use of standards-essential patents, basically saying that Google has to give the other party a clear opportunity to commit to accepting a court determination of FRAND terms, where Google may include a requirement for reciprocal licensing, before it seeks an injunction.
This isn't a loss for the FTC or Google, but it may be a loss for the Google competitors that have been pushing for antitrust action.
All Google agreed was that the patents it holds which are essential to the implementation of certain mobile-telephony standards will be licensed under FRAND terms [wikipedia.org]. They didn't agree to let them be used for free or anything.
Why weren't those already the terms?
Google is required by the Consent Order to make a very specific offer regarding FRAND licensing (to the point that the order includes fill-in-the-blank demand letters Google is to use) before seeking injunctive relief; the FTC sees this as a correction to Google/MMI's past approach in these cases where, in the FTC's view, Google/MMI didn't do as much as it should have regarding seeking a FRAND licensing commitment before seeking injunctive relief.
Its not really a big loss for Google, since Google would be quite happy for other parties to have the option of making the commitment that the letter offers instead of going through an injunction process (which allows Google to demand reciprocal licensing as part of the offer), and even moreso Google would be quite happy with the FTC's stated intent that the proposed approach would become a general model for handling of disputes centered on the use of standards-essential patents.
Google unfairly ranking their own products higher on their search engines would be an abuse of monopoly power.
It might have been, if they did that, but the FTC investigated that claim and didn't find support for it, saying:
In sum, we find that the evidence presented at this time does not support the allegation
that Google’s display of its own vertical content at or near the top of its search results page was a
product design change undertaken without a legitimate business justification. Rather, we
conclude that Google’s display of its own content could plausibly be viewed as an improvement
in the overall quality of Google’s search product. Similarly, we have not found sufficient
evidence that Google manipulates its search algorithms to unfairly disadvantage vertical websites
that compete with Google-owned vertical properties. Although at points in time various vertical
websites have experienced demotions, we find that this was a consequence of algorithm changes
that also could plausibly be viewed as an improvement in the overall quality of Google’s search
results.
Although our careful review of the evidence in this matter supports our decision to close
this investigation, we will remain vigilant and continue to monitor Google for conduct that may
harm competition and consumers.
The only reason they completely overpaid for Motorola Mobility was for their patent portfolio. You could argue they have lost $12.5 billion.
The limitations in the no-injunction rule are fairly narrow; they don't prevent Google from getting license revenue, and they don't prevent Google from seeking injunctions if the other party doesn't agree to a specific set of commitments regarding actually paying FRAND licensing fees once they are settled. And they only apply to standards-essential patents. So, there's still quite a bit of value in the Motorola patent portfolio.
It does separate issues that are polarized (as almost all issues are these days) with issues that are simply pop-culture jokes. He doesn't indicate that it should be used to decide which issue is "the most agreed upon" but merely to decide which issue is debatable (legalize marijuana) vs which issue is worthless (the death star) although about 5 minutes and any sane person could tell you that anyway.
Of course, it assumes that people who register to vote on WTP would also be people who are not into promoting the pop-culture-joke-of-the-minute, which seems unlikely. Its not like the same venues that are used to motivate people to submit and sign petitions for pop-culture jokes couldn't also be used to encourage registration for voting on WTP to build a voting population skewed toward pop-culture jokes. (Who could then do even more damage to serious proposals than in the current system, as their disproportionate representation in the WTP voting population would, given the multi-level registered-user random voting proposal Haselton makes, potentially give them power to sink serious proposals without those proposals even becoming publicly visible.)
We the People is a system to:
(1) provide a low-cost venue with increased public visibility for individual citizen requests to the White House which might otherwise come in the form of individual email, individual paper mail, etc., and
(2) reduce the cost of reading, reviewing, and issuing even boilerplate acknowledgements to those requests by creating a simple significance threshold that must be reached before that occurs.
WTP is a good deal for both citizens and the government, because serious ideas presented through it can have more impact (because of the public visibility), whether or not they result in short-term positive responses (or even serious consideration) by the White House, and because the increased value of WTP as a platform for making requests encourages its use -- which is cheaper for the White House to address than if the concerns came individually.
Random sample voting of the type Haselton proposes, leaving aside problems with bias in the population of registered-for-WTP-voters vs. the general population/electorate and other implementation problems, might seem on the surface to increase the value on point (2), considered in isolation, but it would, even in the best case, undermine the attractiveness of the platform as a venue for citizen requests in point (1), which would reduce the perceived value of using the platform in the first place, which would thereby undermine point (2). And, frankly, even if it didn't undermine point (2), which is the direct value to government efficiency, its arguable that the bigger benefit of WTP to the public is actually (1) -- creation of a high-visibility platform for public requests to the federal government.
The vanity petitions aren't that big of a cost -- a single minimal response to each is cheap -- and will decline as WTP is less of a novelty. Its not worth undermining the whole value proposition of the system to try to fight them.
If they have just released a fixed version than how can it be said that ALL versions are vulnerable?
ALL versions prior to the just-released fix are vulnerable, which means all versions actually in use when the announcement (simultaneous with the release of the fix) was made.
Forgive me if this is a silly question, but isnt "sending fake credentials to the front-end app" significantly less worrisome than "can send arbitrary SQL commands to the backend DB"?
It shouldn't really be, because if the backend DB is secured properly, "can send fake credentials to the front-end app" and "can explot the front-end app to send arbitrary SQL to the back-end DB" should be exactly equivalent, since the backend DB should only allow the front-end app's account to do things that the front-end app is allowed to do, so that sending arbitrary SQL through the app shouldn't allow you to cause any havoc that impersonating the most-privileged-user to the app wouldn't also allow you to do.
Though, that being said, I suspect there are a lot of Rails apps out there where the backend DB isn't secured properly.
...but let's be honest: They're behaving better than Google and Apple these days
How? They are spending more time whining about other companies supposedly doing things that Microsoft has done in much worse forms since the market in which they are dominant has slowly become less relevant, but I don't see them behaving any better than anyone else.
If Microsoft's allegations are true and there is no reasonably technical justification for it then there is nothing to celebrate here.
On the contrary, if Microsoft made a claim that was substantially and meaningfully true about a major competitor, that would be something to celebrate.
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Given that the main accusations of Monsanto's corporate control of farming center around alleged abuses of the patent system against less-powerful individuals and firms involved in farming, railing against the product category (GMOs) rather than the supposedly-abused IP regime (patents) is a pretty good analog to railing against information technology (the product category) because of the BSA's (or other unwelcome actor's) supposed abuses of copyright (IP regime) against small business owners.
Saying that GMO's are bad because you don't like Monsanto's business tactics is like saying computing technology is bad because you don't like Microsoft's (or Google's or Apple's, take your pick) business tactics, or that telecommunication is evil because you don't like AT&T's (etc.) business tactics.
So what? They could use mobile handsets and it wouldn't matter, because the terms specify what you can do with the SDK, and CM isn't using the Android SDK, they are using the OS source code from the Android Open Source Project, which has a completely different set of licensing terms.
If it doesn't involve the SDK, you don't need a license to the SDK to do it, so the SDK license terms are irrelevant.
Well, except that the language that is being pointed to as making the SDK proprietary has been in the license for previous versions of the SDK. So, insofar as there is now going to be a proprietary and fully open SDK, that's actually been the case for quite some time. The Android Open Source Project provides an OS that is free (libre) and open, which also happens to be at the core of the corresponding version of the Android-branded OS; neither the branded-Android OS nor the Android SDK has ever been free (libre) and open.
No, its not an attempt to do that, and it would be ineffective it was, since changing the terms of licensing for the Android SDK won't do anything to prevent Ubuntu/HTC/Samsung from taking the operating system code (from the Android Open Source Project) and creating a competing OS, since the Android SDK and the AOSP are two separate things. The slight tweaks to the language of the SDK license (which aren't accurately described by TFS, since the language in TFS was in the license before the tweaks as well as remaining there after) might affect the ability the ability to use software in the SDK which doesn't have its own open source license with different permissions in making an SDK for a competing OS which itself was built on the work of the AOSP, but it can't do anything to prevent using AOSP code to create a competing Android-like OS.
If you read the actual charge, he is charged with actually receiving bets, not as either a programmer or a guy selling software.
No, it wasn't, because knowing that someone, somewhere will break the law is different than selling it to a particular paying customer knowing that that customer intends to break the law with it. The former is generally not a basis for criminal liability, the latter is a fairly well-established basis for criminal liability. The argument portrayed the former as an application of the logic which said that the latter was subject to liability, which is false.
What they required is, except for the "with a computer" part, perfectly in line with what an accused member of a criminal enterprise who plea bargains to a lesser charge in return for cooperation against other accused members of the criminal enterprise is typically required to do.
The actual charge (rather than Stuart's characterization of it) is that Stuart and his employees "knowingly advanced and profited from unlawful gambling activity by engaging in bookmaking to the extent that they received and accepted in any one day more than five bets totaling more than five thousand dollars."
Not that they provided software which the purchaser of the software used (with or without their knowledge) to accept bets, but that Stuart and his employees actually received and accepted bets.
If Stuart is to be convicted, they will need to prove that charge to a jury.
Your strawman doesn't represent GP's logic because GP said that the programmer should be held responsible if he "knows that the client will use said feature/software for illicit activity." That's different than knowing that the software could be used for illegal activity, even for something so widely used that that knowledge also implies knowledge to a statistical certainty that some user, somewhere will eventually end up using for criminal activity.
And, frankly, it is pretty much the standard that, decades ago, when I worked in retail (at Radio Shack) we were trained to apply: if a customer told us something that made us believe they were going to use the product they were seeking to purchase for criminal activity, we shouldn't sell it to them, otherwise the we (the company and potentially the sales person) could be held culpable.
There's the case where a purchaser goes on to use a product illegally and the seller is innocent, and then there is a case where a criminal purpose known to both the seller and purchaser is the whole point of the sale. Obviously, the seller, when charged, has a vested interest in portraying the latter case as if it was the former; there's a reason we have trials with evidence rather than just deciding criminal cases based on public statements by either the prosecutor or the defendant.
Because, we're not members of Congress, who are the only people who can introduce bills. Petitioning government is the "standard way" for citizens who aren't in government to propose changes to government policy.
Sometimes, you answer rhetorical questions when the framing of the rhetorical question implies that the author doesn't really understand the subject matter about which he is trying to make a point.
Members of Congress are not employees of the President, so its not as if the White House could direct them to do this even if it made sense.
Without debating the accuracy of either GP's described purpose of government or parent's described action of government, I would note that restraining large groups of people and limiting what they can do to include only those set of actions which involve giving substantial sums of money to a small group of people is perfectly consistent with both, so the idea that those two things are mutually inconsistent is misguided.
Frequently, calculations require both points in times and intervals of time; the former can consistently be represented as seconds since epoch, the latter doesn't really have a usable equivalent (you could use just seconds, but then things don't work as expected, since often its actually important to the user that the interval be an exact number of days, weeks, months or years, which may not be reducible to a consistent number of seconds, but instead that will depend on how the point in time the offset is being calculated against is represented in Year/month/day/hour/minute/second form, because leap seconds, leap years, and different lengths of months all make interval calculations tricky.)
You can't restrict conversion of seconds-since-epoch to calendar format to display-purposes-only if you are going to do anything useful with dates.
I don't think that's really all that true; if the FTC was trying to bring a case, it wouldn't agree to a Consent Order, and it would just bring a case.
Certain Google competitors have been pressing the FTC to bring a case, mostly about "search bias", and secondarily and more recently about use of standards-essential patents. The FTC, after investigating, has decided -- unanimously -- to drop the "search bias" issue, and -- narrowly, on a 3-2 vote -- to impose fairly limited restrictions in a Consent Order relating to the use of standards-essential patents, basically saying that Google has to give the other party a clear opportunity to commit to accepting a court determination of FRAND terms, where Google may include a requirement for reciprocal licensing, before it seeks an injunction.
This isn't a loss for the FTC or Google, but it may be a loss for the Google competitors that have been pushing for antitrust action.
Google is required by the Consent Order to make a very specific offer regarding FRAND licensing (to the point that the order includes fill-in-the-blank demand letters Google is to use) before seeking injunctive relief; the FTC sees this as a correction to Google/MMI's past approach in these cases where, in the FTC's view, Google/MMI didn't do as much as it should have regarding seeking a FRAND licensing commitment before seeking injunctive relief.
Its not really a big loss for Google, since Google would be quite happy for other parties to have the option of making the commitment that the letter offers instead of going through an injunction process (which allows Google to demand reciprocal licensing as part of the offer), and even moreso Google would be quite happy with the FTC's stated intent that the proposed approach would become a general model for handling of disputes centered on the use of standards-essential patents.
It might have been, if they did that, but the FTC investigated that claim and didn't find support for it, saying:
The limitations in the no-injunction rule are fairly narrow; they don't prevent Google from getting license revenue, and they don't prevent Google from seeking injunctions if the other party doesn't agree to a specific set of commitments regarding actually paying FRAND licensing fees once they are settled. And they only apply to standards-essential patents. So, there's still quite a bit of value in the Motorola patent portfolio.
Of course, it assumes that people who register to vote on WTP would also be people who are not into promoting the pop-culture-joke-of-the-minute, which seems unlikely. Its not like the same venues that are used to motivate people to submit and sign petitions for pop-culture jokes couldn't also be used to encourage registration for voting on WTP to build a voting population skewed toward pop-culture jokes. (Who could then do even more damage to serious proposals than in the current system, as their disproportionate representation in the WTP voting population would, given the multi-level registered-user random voting proposal Haselton makes, potentially give them power to sink serious proposals without those proposals even becoming publicly visible.)
We the People is a system to:
(1) provide a low-cost venue with increased public visibility for individual citizen requests to the White House which might otherwise come in the form of individual email, individual paper mail, etc., and
(2) reduce the cost of reading, reviewing, and issuing even boilerplate acknowledgements to those requests by creating a simple significance threshold that must be reached before that occurs.
WTP is a good deal for both citizens and the government, because serious ideas presented through it can have more impact (because of the public visibility), whether or not they result in short-term positive responses (or even serious consideration) by the White House, and because the increased value of WTP as a platform for making requests encourages its use -- which is cheaper for the White House to address than if the concerns came individually.
Random sample voting of the type Haselton proposes, leaving aside problems with bias in the population of registered-for-WTP-voters vs. the general population/electorate and other implementation problems, might seem on the surface to increase the value on point (2), considered in isolation, but it would, even in the best case, undermine the attractiveness of the platform as a venue for citizen requests in point (1), which would reduce the perceived value of using the platform in the first place, which would thereby undermine point (2). And, frankly, even if it didn't undermine point (2), which is the direct value to government efficiency, its arguable that the bigger benefit of WTP to the public is actually (1) -- creation of a high-visibility platform for public requests to the federal government.
The vanity petitions aren't that big of a cost -- a single minimal response to each is cheap -- and will decline as WTP is less of a novelty. Its not worth undermining the whole value proposition of the system to try to fight them.
ALL versions prior to the just-released fix are vulnerable, which means all versions actually in use when the announcement (simultaneous with the release of the fix) was made.
It shouldn't really be, because if the backend DB is secured properly, "can send fake credentials to the front-end app" and "can explot the front-end app to send arbitrary SQL to the back-end DB" should be exactly equivalent, since the backend DB should only allow the front-end app's account to do things that the front-end app is allowed to do, so that sending arbitrary SQL through the app shouldn't allow you to cause any havoc that impersonating the most-privileged-user to the app wouldn't also allow you to do. Though, that being said, I suspect there are a lot of Rails apps out there where the backend DB isn't secured properly.
How? They are spending more time whining about other companies supposedly doing things that Microsoft has done in much worse forms since the market in which they are dominant has slowly become less relevant, but I don't see them behaving any better than anyone else.
On the contrary, if Microsoft made a claim that was substantially and meaningfully true about a major competitor, that would be something to celebrate.
Presuming that an open-source violent video game exists, Step 1 (the one that takes the most effort) is unnecessary.