Posts by James Butler

Guessing is nice, but it's not journalism

From the horse's mouth: http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/

A real journalist seeks more information about the questions in their articles. If this author had done that, and if they were capable of extended thought instead of making silly guesses, they might have been able to figure out that it's not the very basic "local search capabilities" provided by any indexing service for any local repository, but rather the impressive approach to reworking IMAP and the thoughtfulness of the programmer regarding mail in general that caught Google's eye.

Add to the lazy reporting the ridiculous perpetuation of the "wonka" metaphor, and you've got a profile of a newbie writer who's sucking up to their editor. You ended up with a silly article full of guesses and wise cracks written by someone who knows nothing about their topic. Great job, El Reg. More crack reporting intersected with side-splitting humour. Nice work.

Verbal Sewage

So now the only data Bing will retain (indefinitely) is everything *but* the irrelevant IP address?

Must be sweet to be able to fool most of the people all of the time. It's quite simple: 6 months is how long it takes Microsoft to mine the data and assign variables like "geo_location" and "service_provider" to each record they keep, making the ridiculously useless IP address data completely irrelevant. Why clutter up your records with useless data when you've reassigned the info?

So if Google made this same promise, will The Register cut them some slack? Not bloody likely. You've reserved a special place in hell for Google, and even this nonsense from Microsoft, the single most obtrusive, data-hungry corporation on the planet, cannot save Google from your bad graces.

Love! The! New! El! Reg! Order!

"This post has been deleted by a moderator"

So ... a post is first moderated by a moderator, and if it does not suit a different moderator, the post can be removed ... sweet. It must be nice for your moderators to know that they are being moderated. Now all you need is a placeholder that says," This post was rejected by a moderator" so their moderator overlords don't need to break a sweat!

(I know ... not a Yahoo! comment, but El Reg is just so COOL when they throw around the extra exclamation points. It's positively oompa-loompy!)

And Orlowski needs to get a thicker skin. Knee jerk responses to flames is so 2009.

GPL/LGPL

According to a few analyses I have seen, the code that triggered this fury seems to have been lifted from 7-Zip for use in the ImageMaster project (hosted on CodePlex) and subsequently used by Microsoft.

It is VERY important to note that 7-Zip is released under the LGPL ... not the GPL.

As such, if 7-Zip used the LGPL, and the snippets of code used by ImageMaster and Microsoft came from that LGPL code, then neither needs to (a) include any kind of source notice nor (b) restrict themselves to publishing open source software. The LGPL does not require any kind of notice or copyright statement, and it is completely fine to use LGPL code in a proprietary project without any reference whatsoever to the original author. If ImageMaster chose to publish under the GPL, its use of some LGPL code does not conflict with that at all. Similarly, if Microsoft chose to publish under a proprietary license, its use of some LGPL code does not conflict with that at all.

Both are allowed under the LGPL, as long as those bits of LGPL code remain under an LGPL license, which can easily coexist with every other type of license. (i.e. You can use LGPL code in your super-secret proprietary app, but that LGPL portion of your app must remain exposed or available, if compiled, for others to use.)

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt

To The Author: Class Action

The decision to create a "class" action out of a lawsuit has nothing to do with allowing others to join in the lawsuit ... they can do that, anyway, by joining as plaintiffs or by suing individually, or in groups of plaintiffs. "Class" action status is granted to make things easier for judges and is WAAAAY more favorable to the company being sued.

The decision to make a generic lawsuit into a "class" action is all about two things: (1) Increasing what otherwise would be a puny set of damages, by claiming that a whole "class" of people has been affected, and not just the few actual plaintiffs for whom actual damages would be paltry, and (2) thus allowing the actual plaintiffs to petition for and then collect many more times the actual damages they suffered, should the lawsuit be settled in their favor. This ALWAYS ends up being FAR less than a violating company would have been forced to pay if everyone who had a viable lawsuit for the same thing won or settled their cases separately.

For example, if a single person wanted to sue Storm8 for this, what are their actual damages? Maybe the costs incurred from getting a new phone number, if that. If that person and their lawyers can convince a judge that the suit is deserving of "class" action status because lots of people were "probably" affected, then those damages just got multiplied by the number of individuals estimated to be in the "class", and now we're talking some real money.

At the end of a "class" action lawsuit, assuming it settles in favor of the plaintiffs, the lawyers get the biggest chunk of money, often in the several millions of dollars, the original plaintiffs get the next biggest chunk of money, frequently in the tens of thousands of dollars, and the rest of the "class" members get squat. Usually literally.

I refer you to the recently-settled "class" action lawsuit regarding Yahoo's policies with respect to all of the "parked" and otherwise unsavory domains they used to show your PPC ads on. The lawyers got several million dollars (more than $40M, as I recall), the original plaintiffs each received over $10,000, and the rest of us get nothing if we are still in business, or you get $20 if you went out of business during the 5 years it took to settle the case. Oh ... and Yahoo has to do exactly nothing if the deal with Microsoft goes through. That would not have prevented them from being required to make good on the award if this were NOT a "class" action.

What? You didn't know that you were a member of the "class" until the lawsuit was settled, and now you can't sue Yahoo for the same thing because those plaintiffs have already settled it for you? What a shame. Oh well, that's how "class" action lawsuits work ... either you are the plaintiff or the lawyer, or you get nothing.

I sincerely hope that this lawsuit does NOT attain "class" action status, but rather that concerned people who want to join in the lawsuit do so the RIGHT way ... by becoming official co-plaintiffs. "Class" action lawsuits are a scourge and a disgrace, and should be removed as a legal "remedy".

We don't need no steenking research!

On my Linux boxen (Fedora 4-10) I'm seeing that mmap_min_addr is set to 64k by default ... the recommended fix for this security issue. I'll bet that every other distro besides RHEL (as noted in the article) also has mmap_min_addr set to something other than 0.

Methinks it's a slow news day, or else this researcher reallyreally wants people to take him seriously. The author could take a few minutes to do some actual research, as well. Torvalds was right ... this isn't a kernel problem, and it looks to be pretty much a non-issue, contrary to the alarmist headline.

And to you freaks who are taking this opportunity to slam Linux ... your ignorance is showing.

Negligent Politicians

So it's okay for kids to be indoctrinated into the Bing culture? Where are the outraged Republicans on this one?!? I want equal time to indoctrinate the kids into the Google culture! Where's my Google-tune?!?

Spin Doctor

Spin:

"We didn't hire as quickly as we'd planned," he said, "and that contributed to about a third of the under-run. Though we would have preferred to ramp headcount at the originally forecasted past, we're taking the time to ensure we're hiring the right people in the right places."

Plain English:

We fired thousands of employees, last quarter, so we saved a bunch of money on salaries.

What other explanation is there?

@Jay Castle et al.

As some have implied, US law is quite simple, and really not hard to understand in this case:

If, in the course of committing a crime, someone is killed, then all participants in the crime can be charged with that killing.

If the crime-in-progress is not a felony, the charge is manslaughter.

If the crime-in-progress is a felony, the charge is murder.

Street racing is a crime ... a misdemeanor, usually, but that is determined by the state in which the crime occurs, often with "enhancements" added by the local community ... so any death of any kind related to that crime will result in a manslaughter charge.

If the other driver had not killed himself, but rather an innocent bystander had died, then both he and the woman he was racing would have been charged with that same crime.

IANAL, but this is pretty standard stuff, in the USA.

@CD001

Thanks for the illustration of the typical blindingly poor understanding of how ICANN has worked, up to this point.

What, specifically, are you referring to with your "dictatorship" comment? And how does that differ from the process now being adopted? Are you implying that ICANN was a "dictatorship"? Is it simply because now there will be even more global players, not just the varied lot that has comprised ICANN's board and operational unit to-date? What are some of the things ICANN has done "badly", in your opinion, that will now be done "better" as a result of this change? Do you even have any idea what ICANN is, or how it is structured, or what, exactly, being "under the control" of the US government has meant to the activities it engages in?

I think you don't know what you are talking about, and are just jumping on the anti-American bandwagon armed with the barest awareness of what this corporation's structural modification means to the rest of the world.

Versioning

Ah HA! NOW Microsoft's ridiculous versioning system seems to make sense, I mean ... which would you rather use: version 8 of something or version 3? Looks like it's time for Firefox 12 ...

(Evil Jobs because it looks more like evil Ballmer, now that Jobs has gone Skeletor on us.)

Goose/Gander

So it's okay for Apple to spoof hardware encryption so the iPhone can pretend to support a security mechanism enterprise admins who run MS Exchange might attempt to enforce, and so that Apple can attempt to gain enterprise market share by lying about their device's capabilities, but it's not okay for Palm to spoof Apple's device id to make life easier for iTunes users who happen to prefer the Pre to the iPhone? Pfft.

Bigger Fish to Fry

I'm much more worried about Apple's self-disclosed jailbreak problem (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/jailbreak/ for the Wired article and http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/07/applejailbreakresponse.pdf for Apple's claims).

To wit:

"By tinkering with [iPhone’s BBP - the “baseband processor” software, which enables a connection to cell phone towers], 'a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data..'”

Apple claims that any jailbroken iPhone can be used to disrupt cell tower service.

Frankly, the cute little SMS issue was a little piece of fluff compared to the national-security-compromising jailbreak problem. Seems to me, in the interest of protecting America, all iPhones should be withdrawn from the market and all existing units returned for a full refund until Apple figures out a way to "fix" this.

They know it. We know it. Hackers know it. It's only a matter of time ...

Trimming Microsoft Employees

It seems like the first employees to be "downsized" by Microsoft must have been in QA. How else to explain this and the buffer overrun issue caused by the complete absence of testing of the MSVidCtl ActiveX widget? (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/30/typo_caused_massive_ms_bug/)

Thank Gawd!

I'm just glad I live in America, where the repetitive sounds of copier machine parties can blare without concern for whether they will be mistaken for a rave ... where birthday celebrations involving under 20 people on private property are still regarded as non-threatening events ... and where it costs way more than 200 bucks to dispatch a police helicopter. Enjoy your warm beer and boiled beef, dudes. That's as good as it gets.

Silly Rosetta

You cannot bar people from using terms that have general interest meanings, like "rosetta stone" or "language library". At issue is whether ALL instances of registered trademarks may be banned for use by ANY advertiser. US trademark law clearly says that a trademark infringement can ONLY come when a trademarked term is used in such a way that is CAUSES CONSUMER CONFUSION regarding the company using the term and the trademark holder. In other words, if I have a baby sitting service trademarked as "The Babysitters", then other baby sitter services cannot advertise themselves as "The Babysitters", or any derivative that might confuse a consumer into giving business to the wrong company. Using AdWords to bid on keywords that are, themselves, trademarks is NOT such a situation. Even using the keywords in the ads that display would not constitute infringement UNLESS the company doing the advertising BOTH was in competition with the trademark holder AND caused consumer confusion. Google was right to lift its ban on bidding on trademarked terms, and Rosetta Stone is within its rights to try and get them to bar it's competition from using it's trademarked terms, however Google is under no legal obligation whatsoever to submit to those demands. It is on Rosetta Stone to take the offending advertisers to court over their infringement, not for Google to be a trademark judge and jury. In the same way, a television network that ran an ad that included the term "Ford Motor Company" but is actually for "Joe's Used Cars" could NOT be compelled to pull the ad, unless a court FIRST ruled that Joe's Used Cars committed trademark infringement.

Great comments

Thanks for some really good comments.

We don't get these that often at the Reg. Especially when Google is mentioned.