Dateline, Silicon Valley, Friday August 10th, 2001
The technology world was shocked this morning by the startling admission that Slashdot has been astroturfing itself for years.. and that, in fact, almost all of the nearly half-million "members" of Slashdot are nothing more than the imaginings of Slashdot's staff.
Bizarre stories have emerged in the last twenty four hours about the editors' antics, including Jon Katz's apparent habit of providing all the commentary for his own stories.
"This is really an incredible situation," said Alan Stark, a reporter for National Public Radio. "Just last month we did a report on how Slashdot had changed the face of news in the last half of the 90's, and now it looks like the whole thing is one gigantic hoax."
Originally created as a news site for the nerd culture, Slashdot grew to national prominence along with the Linux operating system, as a social voice behind the technological phenomenon of Open Source. But now it appears that the entire thing has been staged. An analysis of traffic to and from the Slashdot site, by an independent consulting agency, shows that most of the one million or so "hits" that Slashdot was once thought to have received in a day are actually generated through a combination of cyber-slight-of-hand and old-fashioned fraud.
In particular, there is the so-called Slashdot Effect, by which a web site experiences a flood in traffic and often suffers technical problems. This is now believed to be a mere cover-up for Internet flooding, or Denial-of-Service attacks, carried out by Commander Taco and Hemos, the site's so-called editors. The FBI is currently investigating.
The slap in the face goes beyond just a low bail. Consider this:
The Judge is allowing Dmitry out on bail without any intrusive monitoring device. The only thing keeping Dmitry in the US is the fact that the US is holding his passport.
The low bail and the very lax terms of his bail were set by an agreement between the EFF and the US Attourney's office. The judge just "rubberstamped" the deal.
I personally wouldn't consider this a slap in the face of the FBI, but perhaps a slap in the face of the DMCA. Clearly the US Atty. intends to prosecute, but I suspect that John Ashcroft not exactly enthusiastic to prosecute Sklyarov. If we keep up the political pressure on Ashcroft, we may indeed stop this prosecution altogether.
So, let's step up the pressure. Call John Ashcroft (the US Attourney General) at 202-353-1555 and let him know that you think Sklyarov's prosecution under DMCA is unjust.
This is an amazing victory for Sklyarov. $50,000 bail is a lot of money, I agree... but this is peanuts for an alleged criminal who poses a substantial flight risk (he does, after all, live in Russia). I'm personally hoping that this says good things for the judge's attitudes towards Sklyarov and his alleged "crime."
Here's a copy of what I sent to Torricelli and to my own two senators (Torricelli via website, my own senators via snail mail.) Feel free to copy and paste bits, or even the whole damn thing, as long as you put your own name on whatever you send your legislators. (How's that for copyleft?)
Senator,
I am writing to express my opposition to the the School Website Protection Act of 2001 (S 1252) and to urge you to vote against this bill.
This legislation to stop "hackers" in schools is misguided and (frankly speaking) fundamentally ignorant of the technological issues involved. In particular: Sec. 2 (a)(2) makes it a crime to:
knowingly (cause) the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally affects or impairs without authorization a computer of an elementary school or secondary school or institution of higher education;
The problem is with the phrase "affects or impairs." This makes ANY unauthorized action on a school computer, whether it is otherwise legal or not, into a criminal act, even if that act doesn't harm the computer in any way. This includes: moving a mouse, sending someone email, or tapping a key on the keyboard. This is because all of these actions cause a command to be transmitted to the kernel of the operating system (called an "interrupt") which causes the kernel to analyze the signal and the operating system to react accordingly. This doesn't slow the computer down by much, but it does slow it down as the processor(s) spend a few clock cycles processing each keystroke or mouse movement.
So let us take the following example: I attempt to log into a school UNIX box, believing that I have an account on that box (when in fact I do not). I create an ssh connection and type in what I believe are my login and password for that box. After being denied access, three times, I cut the connection. However, that UNIX box has been affected by my actions (the internal state of the machine changed as it decided not to give me access). Undoubtedly I intended to transmit the commands which caused this change, and obviously I was not authorized to do so. Under this bill, I have just committed a federal crime. Whether or not I will be prosecuted now depends on how zealous and paranoid the system administrators are, how ambitious the prosecutor is, how much fear the judge has about "evil hackers," etc.
Even if we were to remove the word "affects," it would not be enough; since the computer is slowed down ever so slightly by my attempts to log in, I have now "impaired" the computer also. In fact this legislation is overzealous unless the phrase "affects or impairs" is changed to "substantially impairs or substantially alters information stored on." This covers what I think Senator Torricelli trying to legislate against: denial-of-service attacks, virus transmissions, web page defacements, etc.
I might also point out that there are already several laws on the books which prohibit destruction of school property, in addition to regulations of the school. We do not need a federal law to protect schools; "evil hackers" already are subject to prosecution. If they cross state lines, they may even be subject to prosecution in *two* states. There is no reason for the Federal government to become involved, even on an interstate level.
I urge you to vote against this bill. It proposes a recklessly overzealous change in policy.
while he wears headphones listening to a real audio stream of Rush Limbaugh; yes, the typical programmer is far to the political Right despite the popular "counterculture" image of tech people on TV.
Odd that, all the programmers in the shop where I work are somewhere to the left of Bill Clinton. Not that that's particularly hard....
Don't confuse ignorance for corruption. Chances are your elected Senators don't know dick about what's going on, and need for someone to tell them.
Trust me, I've got first-hand knowledge of how legislators work. Tell them there's a problem, pref. through snail mail. They will at least write you back. Just be sure to include your name, address, and zip code.
There is, however, mention of the DMCA and the ACLU's amicus brief supporting fair use.
If I had to make anything of it, it's that the ACLU, like most of the rest of the political world, is horribly and depressingly ignorant of
what's going on. We need to make them aware.
For what it is worth, I almost always get a reply from my Congressmen (Rep and two Senators) for email that I send them.
The key is to include your full address, including zip code, and your full name. Then they can verify that you are a constituent.
However, I agree that snail mail is more effective, as are faxes, if only because it makes a hell of a lot more of an impression when your fax machine gets jammed with "FREE DIMITRY".
You can also call the US Attorney General at 202-353-1555 and demand that he end the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov.
You might want to CC this to your Congresscritter, too. Make sure your elected officials know how DMCA is being abused.
You can find your congresscritter at
Congress.Org and inserting your zip code into the proper fields. When you do this, be sure to include your name, address and zip code in the letter.
Alternatively, you could send the following (NB, I haven't checked for spelling mistakes):
Dear (Senator/Representative) N.
I am writing today to express my displeasure concerning the way the FBI has conducted itself in regards to Dmitry Sklyarov and Elcomsoft.
Mr. Sklyarov gave a talk at a computer security conference on the security weaknesses of Adobe's eBook product, which were apparently easily discovered and exploited. Instead of thanking Mr. Sklyarov for his work, Adobe complained to the FBI and Mr. Sklyarov was detained for violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
I believe that copyright holders must have methods to secure their works. But as is obvious thanks to Elcomsoft's work, the protection afforded by Adobe's eBook products is easily overcome. There is no doubt that THOUSANDS of people have been taking advantage of this, silently, and thus ripping off legitimate copyright holders. Elcomsoft has only vocalized what was already occuring.
This is not the first time that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been abused like this, and it won't be the last. In its short life we have seen many security consultants and even college and university professors threatened with prosecution under DMCA for exposing weaknesses in computer security... activity which would otherwise be protected under the First Amendment and the traditions of academic freedom. It is apparent that the DMCA must be changed or perhaps repealed.
I know this system would be a pain in the tuckus. It would involve Napster officials checking every submitted song to make sure that the submittor actually held rights to the music, or that nobody held rights to it.
That's what I thought at first myself.
But, the involvement of human beings in the process does not remove the potential for error. In practise, all that it does is buy you better process justifiability before a judge or similar technologically illiterate decision-maker, at the expense of a lot more time per song, a lot more money per song, and (probably) a worse false negative rate. Anything on the scale of Napster has to be automated. Even if Napster weren't that big, it wouldn't be perfect.
Apparently this judge doesn't understand the technology required to ensure compliance with the
court order.
Checking that a music file (X) matches another
music file (known copyrighted material Y) is a matter of doing a checksum, or otherwise scanning features of X and checking them against features of Y. If the files are exactly the same then you can do a CRC on each file, and if the checksums match, you have a 1-in-four-billion chance that
the two files are *not* the same.
But the two files being exactly the same is one hell of an assumption. An intrepid music pirate could feed Y through some kind of distortion to produce Y', which would look different to a CRC. That means you have to look for features in the sound itself. Even with the algorithm produced by the genius 20-year-old, I am very doubtful that you'd have 0% false negative rate. There's always going to be something crawling through. That's the nature of pattern recognition.
I think the judge has made this court order impossible to comply with, barring one option: Napster closes down. That strikes me as more than adequate grounds for appeal.
When I learned calculus, I never bothered with
a graphing calculator; I figured that it was too
much bother and expense to get one of those
things, and besides, I'd be better off in the long
run learning how to do that stuff in my head.
Turns out I was right...one day I walked into
a Physics exam and my (scientific) calculator went bust before the exam started. (This was Physics 152 at Purdue University...very painful course.) Because I was able to do the math mostly in my head, plus some pen-and-paper work, I managed to finish the exam, without a calculator, with a half hour to spare, and still get a 90%. I think the cutoff for an A was something insane like 66%.
It made for an interesting discussion with my study partner:
partner I got a hundred. me I got a ninety. But I have a good excuse. partner Oh really.. me I didn't have my calculator. partner Oh. (pause) That's a good excuse.
Here's my take on why Mono should be ported to BSD:
MS has already announced that they are going to port.NET to BSD. Keep in mind that BSD still has a few technical advantages over Linux as a server OS, and it has a few really big users (Yahoo! for example). So, there's a lot of money involved. It makes for Ximian to want to grab that share of support dollars.
For this same reason (BSD as server), BSD support becomes important for expanding Mono's mindshare. Knowing MS, they will probably introduce certain "features" into.NET to make it completely and utterly incompatible with Mono. That means that any company that is using BSD for serving applications is going to have to choose between Mono and.NET for compatibility. With MS behind.NET, Mono is going to have a hard time in that market space, even if Mono is a superior product. With no BSD support for Mono, the choice is automatic.
Ximian can't afford to screw around on this. If they get Mono right, it could be a company maker.
I'm very happy to see Ximian working on this project, and I think it will do much to help Open Source at least stay level with Microsoft. However, I am curious as to what advantages Mono and.NET would offer over Java.
Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that Java already gives us a virtual machine (for compile-once-run-anywhere), Enterprise already gives us CORBA (as opposed to COM), and the Java language at least gives us XML tools. Also, there are already
several languages ported to JVM, including Perl and Python. So, from my eyes, everything that.NET/Mono offers seems to already be present for Java. The only thing missing would be a decent set of GUI components (Swing is bloated and slow!), and Microsoft's marketing.
Is there something I'm missing here? Is there some way in which.NET/Mono is not just a reproduction of Java's efforts?
Occasionally the gov't does release GPL software (e.g., NASA's ethernet card drivers, Beowulf, etc). This happens when the software they are modifying is itself GPL'd. Perhaps this is what MS is afraid of?
Maybe what we need is an alternative to the GPL
which allows persons to use the code in closed-source programs on the one hand, but requires that changes to the source be distributed freely on the other. Maybe like the modified LGPL of wxWindows. Then apply this license to all non-classified US government written code. Microsoft doesn't have grounds to bitch now, but they'll have even less grounds with this new license.
Given the way the Senate behaved when the GOP was running it ("Oh Lawdy oh Lawdy, where did my Blue Card go?"), I suspect that most of these judges were left over from the Reagan and Bush years.
Not that I care either way. Break 'em up, don't break 'em up, I hold stock either way. What really matters is that their conviction for using their market status illegally has been upheld, which, despite being a no-brainer, means that Microsoft has to play nice.
On the other hand, we also have William Rhenquist (another so-called "strict constructionist") on the side of the dissent.
And who's voting with Scalia on this one? Clarence Thomas, Ruth Baider Ginsberg, Steven Breyer, and David Souter. Some of those Justices are the ones pointed to by GOP aparachniks as examples of "judicial activism."
I would appreciate it greatly if someone could post information about the various projects of open-source firewall-type software available today. Thanks.
As far as I can tell, just because Mandrake is selling their stock doesn't mean that is has to be publicly traded. In fact, shares of the Green Bay Packers are not listed on any exchange that I know of.
The idea, I suppose, is not so much that one buys Mandrake stock as a financial investment, but that one buys Mandrake stock in order to (1) financially support and maybe (2) have some power for directing a Linux-friendly company.
As the article stated, the SEC would most definitely allow this under Regulation A. Quoth the article:
That doesn't necessarily mean that a Linux company can't have a successful stock offering. In fact, smaller U.S. Linux companies don't need lots of lawyers, or even a terribly convincing bottom line to offer stock. They simply need a community that rabidly supports them, pure financial considerations aside. The best fund-raising vehicle for such companies looking to raise $3 million to $5 million is called a Regulation A offering.
In the caffeine-crazed Pacific Northwest, one of the most successful Reg A filings in recent memory was for Tully's Coffee, a cult-like business that sold common stock back in 1997 at $2.25 a share. Unlike a traditional IPO, Regulation A allows companies to promote their stock offering to their enthusiasts, through radio, direct mail, or other devices. Tully's employees wore buttons that said, "Ask me about our stock," and the company promoted the offering on its coffee cups. Reg A offering tend to work best for companies with an affinity group -- a set of customers who are so loyal they'll buy stock as well as product, essentially underwriting their financial investment by their continued patronage. Regulation A is tailor made for the Linux community. For those companies whose evangelists vastly outnumber their paying customers, this might be a reasonable way to raise needed cash.
I'm thinking that Mandrake could (for example) offer a GPL-version copy of their software and five shares of MandrakeSoft for (say) $80, via their website.
Absolutely you should be doing all of those things. However, buying a piece of the company wouldn't hurt either, especially considering that this would give us users more of a voice in the way that the company is run. Not to mention more of a motivation to get off our tushes and contribute something.:)
Re:And for all the military member who read /.
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 2
Alec Baldwin's a communist for saying that he'd leave the country if Bush got elected?
Hell, the way things have been evolving since then, I'm wondering if he doesn't have the right idea...Bush's first 100 days are, to say the least, unimpressive. And the Democrats are so brain dead right now (gas price caps????? wtF!??!?) that it's unlikely they'll be able to help things much even if they control the Senate. So, I wouldn't blame Baldwin for leaving. It's a cop out on his part, and not particularly patriotic (he should stay here and fight that retard in the White House), but such a statement doesn't strike me as communist in particular.
Of course, if you're one of those types who thought that Bill Clinton was a UN conspiracy to Take Our Guns[1], who believes (deep down to your core) that Liberals are out to deliberately destroy America's economy, and whose brains would spontaneously combust if someone ever desecrated a flag within 100 yards, then I can understand where you'd think that Baldwin is Communist (where "Communist" in this context really means "Vaguely offensive to my right-of-Augusto-Pinochet political, social and moral values," or more generally, "the opposite of Patriotic.")
That having been said, I think I'm going to celebrate Memorial Day by doing something besides watching the latest Titanic. Like renting "Saving Private Ryan." There's already plenty of reasons for me not to watch this monstrosity of a film.
[1] I know he wasn't exactly a friend of the Second Amendment. And, speaking as a gun owner, I can see at least a few bright sides to the Retard President. But come on...the UN is not going to send in troops to take individually owned handguns, rifles, "assault rifles" or shotguns away from American citizens anytime soon. With all the paranoia on the side of the pro-second-amendment crowd, it's no wonder that the left thinks that gun owners are criminally insane.
Makes sense from the RIAA point of view. They spend way the fuck too much money Britney Spears and they want to recoup their costs; people buying records put out by some other band that they didn't blow as money on doesn't do it, because those bands will eventually earn more than their advance and actually collect royalties. The exception to this is Classic Rock (in case you were wondering why there are so many Classic Rock stations out there and all the contemporary music coming from the radio sounds like total shit).
What this lawsuit indicates, to me, is that the RIAA, for all their talk about copyright protection, is really just trying to adapt the Internet to their old, tired, payola-centric business models. It isn't going to work. The sooner they figure this out and adapt, the less expensive it will be for everyone involved. The worst thing that could happen from the RIAA point of view would be if a group of independent labels (Alternative Tentacles, Atomic Pop, etc.) with a sufficient pool of talent got together, licensed Launch's technology, and started their own Launchlike site. A company like that would soon become a major player, and the RIAA's constituent companies would be forced to (a) become like the independent, artist-friendly labels or (b) become unable to sign new talent and rely solely on their old recordings. It's a sure bet that they'll all choose (a), but they'll be playing catch-up once they make that decision. You do not want to play catch up in that business.
Slashdot Mirror
The technology world was shocked this morning by the startling admission that Slashdot has been astroturfing itself for years .. and that, in fact, almost all of the nearly half-million "members" of Slashdot are nothing more than the imaginings of Slashdot's staff.
Bizarre stories have emerged in the last twenty four hours about the editors' antics, including Jon Katz's apparent habit of providing all the commentary for his own stories.
"This is really an incredible situation," said Alan Stark, a reporter for National Public Radio. "Just last month we did a report on how Slashdot had changed the face of news in the last half of the 90's, and now it looks like the whole thing is one gigantic hoax."
Originally created as a news site for the nerd culture, Slashdot grew to national prominence along with the Linux operating system, as a social voice behind the technological phenomenon of Open Source. But now it appears that the entire thing has been staged. An analysis of traffic to and from the Slashdot site, by an independent consulting agency, shows that most of the one million or so "hits" that Slashdot was once thought to have received in a day are actually generated through a combination of cyber-slight-of-hand and old-fashioned fraud.
In particular, there is the so-called Slashdot Effect, by which a web site experiences a flood in traffic and often suffers technical problems. This is now believed to be a mere cover-up for Internet flooding, or Denial-of-Service attacks, carried out by Commander Taco and Hemos, the site's so-called editors. The FBI is currently investigating.
Take Mozilla for example....
I personally wouldn't consider this a slap in the face of the FBI, but perhaps a slap in the face of the DMCA. Clearly the US Atty. intends to prosecute, but I suspect that John Ashcroft not exactly enthusiastic to prosecute Sklyarov. If we keep up the political pressure on Ashcroft, we may indeed stop this prosecution altogether.
So, let's step up the pressure. Call John Ashcroft (the US Attourney General) at 202-353-1555 and let him know that you think Sklyarov's prosecution under DMCA is unjust.
(Usual disclaimers: IANAL etc.)
Senator,
I am writing to express my opposition to the the School Website Protection Act of 2001 (S 1252) and to urge you to vote against this bill.
This legislation to stop "hackers" in schools is misguided and (frankly speaking) fundamentally ignorant of the technological issues involved. In particular: Sec. 2 (a)(2) makes it a crime to:
The problem is with the phrase "affects or impairs." This makes ANY unauthorized action on a school computer, whether it is otherwise legal or not, into a criminal act, even if that act doesn't harm the computer in any way. This includes: moving a mouse, sending someone email, or tapping a key on the keyboard. This is because all of these actions cause a command to be transmitted to the kernel of the operating system (called an "interrupt") which causes the kernel to analyze the signal and the operating system to react accordingly. This doesn't slow the computer down by much, but it does slow it down as the processor(s) spend a few clock cycles processing each keystroke or mouse movement.
So let us take the following example: I attempt to log into a school UNIX box, believing that I have an account on that box (when in fact I do not). I create an ssh connection and type in what I believe are my login and password for that box. After being denied access, three times, I cut the connection. However, that UNIX box has been affected by my actions (the internal state of the machine changed as it decided not to give me access). Undoubtedly I intended to transmit the commands which caused this change, and obviously I was not authorized to do so. Under this bill, I have just committed a federal crime. Whether or not I will be prosecuted now depends on how zealous and paranoid the system administrators are, how ambitious the prosecutor is, how much fear the judge has about "evil hackers," etc.
Even if we were to remove the word "affects," it would not be enough; since the computer is slowed down ever so slightly by my attempts to log in, I have now "impaired" the computer also. In fact this legislation is overzealous unless the phrase "affects or impairs" is changed to "substantially impairs or substantially alters information stored on." This covers what I think Senator Torricelli trying to legislate against: denial-of-service attacks, virus transmissions, web page defacements, etc.
I might also point out that there are already several laws on the books which prohibit destruction of school property, in addition to regulations of the school. We do not need a federal law to protect schools; "evil hackers" already are subject to prosecution. If they cross state lines, they may even be subject to prosecution in *two* states. There is no reason for the Federal government to become involved, even on an interstate level.
I urge you to vote against this bill. It proposes a recklessly overzealous change in policy.
signature
Odd that, all the programmers in the shop where I work are somewhere to the left of Bill Clinton. Not that that's particularly hard....
Trust me, I've got first-hand knowledge of how legislators work. Tell them there's a problem, pref. through snail mail. They will at least write you back. Just be sure to include your name, address, and zip code.
If I had to make anything of it, it's that the ACLU, like most of the rest of the political world, is horribly and depressingly ignorant of what's going on. We need to make them aware.
The key is to include your full address, including zip code, and your full name. Then they can verify that you are a constituent.
However, I agree that snail mail is more effective, as are faxes, if only because it makes a hell of a lot more of an impression when your fax machine gets jammed with "FREE DIMITRY".
You can also call the US Attorney General at 202-353-1555 and demand that he end the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov.
You can find your congresscritter at Congress.Org and inserting your zip code into the proper fields. When you do this, be sure to include your name, address and zip code in the letter.
Alternatively, you could send the following (NB, I haven't checked for spelling mistakes):
Dear (Senator/Representative) N.
... activity which would otherwise be protected under the First Amendment and the traditions of academic freedom. It is apparent that the DMCA must be changed or perhaps repealed.
I am writing today to express my displeasure concerning the way the FBI has conducted itself in regards to Dmitry Sklyarov and Elcomsoft.
Mr. Sklyarov gave a talk at a computer security conference on the security weaknesses of Adobe's eBook product, which were apparently easily discovered and exploited. Instead of thanking Mr. Sklyarov for his work, Adobe complained to the FBI and Mr. Sklyarov was detained for violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
I believe that copyright holders must have methods to secure their works. But as is obvious thanks to Elcomsoft's work, the protection afforded by Adobe's eBook products is easily overcome. There is no doubt that THOUSANDS of people have been taking advantage of this, silently, and thus ripping off legitimate copyright holders. Elcomsoft has only vocalized what was already occuring.
This is not the first time that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been abused like this, and it won't be the last. In its short life we have seen many security consultants and even college and university professors threatened with prosecution under DMCA for exposing weaknesses in computer security
I look foreward to your position on this issue.
Sincerely, (name, address including zip)
That's what I thought at first myself.
But, the involvement of human beings in the process does not remove the potential for error. In practise, all that it does is buy you better process justifiability before a judge or similar technologically illiterate decision-maker, at the expense of a lot more time per song, a lot more money per song, and (probably) a worse false negative rate. Anything on the scale of Napster has to be automated. Even if Napster weren't that big, it wouldn't be perfect.
Checking that a music file (X) matches another music file (known copyrighted material Y) is a matter of doing a checksum, or otherwise scanning features of X and checking them against features of Y. If the files are exactly the same then you can do a CRC on each file, and if the checksums match, you have a 1-in-four-billion chance that the two files are *not* the same.
But the two files being exactly the same is one hell of an assumption. An intrepid music pirate could feed Y through some kind of distortion to produce Y', which would look different to a CRC. That means you have to look for features in the sound itself. Even with the algorithm produced by the genius 20-year-old, I am very doubtful that you'd have 0% false negative rate. There's always going to be something crawling through. That's the nature of pattern recognition.
I think the judge has made this court order impossible to comply with, barring one option: Napster closes down. That strikes me as more than adequate grounds for appeal.
Turns out I was right...one day I walked into a Physics exam and my (scientific) calculator went bust before the exam started. (This was Physics 152 at Purdue University...very painful course.) Because I was able to do the math mostly in my head, plus some pen-and-paper work, I managed to finish the exam, without a calculator, with a half hour to spare, and still get a 90%. I think the cutoff for an A was something insane like 66%.
It made for an interesting discussion with my study partner:
partner I got a hundred.
me I got a ninety. But I have a good excuse.
partner Oh really..
me I didn't have my calculator.
partner Oh. (pause) That's a good excuse.
MS has already announced that they are going to port .NET to BSD. Keep in mind that BSD still has a few technical advantages over Linux as a server OS, and it has a few really big users (Yahoo! for example). So, there's a lot of money involved. It makes for Ximian to want to grab that share of support dollars.
For this same reason (BSD as server), BSD support becomes important for expanding Mono's mindshare. Knowing MS, they will probably introduce certain "features" into .NET to make it completely and utterly incompatible with Mono. That means that any company that is using BSD for serving applications is going to have to choose between Mono and .NET for compatibility. With MS behind .NET, Mono is going to have a hard time in that market space, even if Mono is a superior product. With no BSD support for Mono, the choice is automatic.
Ximian can't afford to screw around on this. If they get Mono right, it could be a company maker.
Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that Java already gives us a virtual machine (for compile-once-run-anywhere), Enterprise already gives us CORBA (as opposed to COM), and the Java language at least gives us XML tools. Also, there are already several languages ported to JVM, including Perl and Python. So, from my eyes, everything that .NET/Mono offers seems to already be present for Java. The only thing missing would be a decent set of GUI components (Swing is bloated and slow!), and Microsoft's marketing.
Is there something I'm missing here? Is there some way in which .NET/Mono is not just a reproduction of Java's efforts?
Occasionally the gov't does release GPL software (e.g., NASA's ethernet card drivers, Beowulf, etc). This happens when the software they are modifying is itself GPL'd. Perhaps this is what MS is afraid of? Maybe what we need is an alternative to the GPL which allows persons to use the code in closed-source programs on the one hand, but requires that changes to the source be distributed freely on the other. Maybe like the modified LGPL of wxWindows. Then apply this license to all non-classified US government written code. Microsoft doesn't have grounds to bitch now, but they'll have even less grounds with this new license.
Not that I care either way. Break 'em up, don't break 'em up, I hold stock either way. What really matters is that their conviction for using their market status illegally has been upheld, which, despite being a no-brainer, means that Microsoft has to play nice.
On the other hand, we also have William Rhenquist (another so-called "strict constructionist") on the side of the dissent. And who's voting with Scalia on this one? Clarence Thomas, Ruth Baider Ginsberg, Steven Breyer, and David Souter. Some of those Justices are the ones pointed to by GOP aparachniks as examples of "judicial activism."
I would appreciate it greatly if someone could post information about the various projects of open-source firewall-type software available today. Thanks.
As far as I can tell, just because Mandrake is selling their stock doesn't mean that is has to be publicly traded. In fact, shares of the Green Bay Packers are not listed on any exchange that I know of.
The idea, I suppose, is not so much that one buys Mandrake stock as a financial investment, but that one buys Mandrake stock in order to (1) financially support and maybe (2) have some power for directing a Linux-friendly company.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
"I'll buy 100 shares if you put wxWindows and wxPython in your distribution."
Hm.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
I'm thinking that Mandrake could (for example) offer a GPL-version copy of their software and five shares of MandrakeSoft for (say) $80, via their website.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Absolutely you should be doing all of those things. However, buying a piece of the company wouldn't hurt either, especially considering that this would give us users more of a voice in the way that the company is run. Not to mention more of a motivation to get off our tushes and contribute something. :)
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Alec Baldwin's a communist for saying that he'd leave the country if Bush got elected?
Hell, the way things have been evolving since then, I'm wondering if he doesn't have the right idea...Bush's first 100 days are, to say the least, unimpressive. And the Democrats are so brain dead right now (gas price caps????? wtF!??!?) that it's unlikely they'll be able to help things much even if they control the Senate. So, I wouldn't blame Baldwin for leaving. It's a cop out on his part, and not particularly patriotic (he should stay here and fight that retard in the White House), but such a statement doesn't strike me as communist in particular.
Of course, if you're one of those types who thought that Bill Clinton was a UN conspiracy to Take Our Guns[1], who believes (deep down to your core) that Liberals are out to deliberately destroy America's economy, and whose brains would spontaneously combust if someone ever desecrated a flag within 100 yards, then I can understand where you'd think that Baldwin is Communist (where "Communist" in this context really means "Vaguely offensive to my right-of-Augusto-Pinochet political, social and moral values," or more generally, "the opposite of Patriotic.")
That having been said, I think I'm going to celebrate Memorial Day by doing something besides watching the latest Titanic. Like renting "Saving Private Ryan." There's already plenty of reasons for me not to watch this monstrosity of a film.
[1] I know he wasn't exactly a friend of the Second Amendment. And, speaking as a gun owner, I can see at least a few bright sides to the Retard President. But come on...the UN is not going to send in troops to take individually owned handguns, rifles, "assault rifles" or shotguns away from American citizens anytime soon. With all the paranoia on the side of the pro-second-amendment crowd, it's no wonder that the left thinks that gun owners are criminally insane.
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What this lawsuit indicates, to me, is that the RIAA, for all their talk about copyright protection, is really just trying to adapt the Internet to their old, tired, payola-centric business models. It isn't going to work. The sooner they figure this out and adapt, the less expensive it will be for everyone involved. The worst thing that could happen from the RIAA point of view would be if a group of independent labels (Alternative Tentacles, Atomic Pop, etc.) with a sufficient pool of talent got together, licensed Launch's technology, and started their own Launchlike site. A company like that would soon become a major player, and the RIAA's constituent companies would be forced to (a) become like the independent, artist-friendly labels or (b) become unable to sign new talent and rely solely on their old recordings. It's a sure bet that they'll all choose (a), but they'll be playing catch-up once they make that decision. You do not want to play catch up in that business.
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