The GPS devices in question were perfectly adequately filtered, assuming that the adjacent spectrums were used for purpose.
LightSquared bought spectrum space on the cheap and then tried to use them for unintended purposes. That's like me buying a house in a suburban neighborhood, putting a night club in it, and when my neighbors complain about the noise, blaming the people who built their house for not adequately soundproofing.
LightSquared aren't 'scrappy innovators' - they're rude jerks who found out that their plan to cheap and and cut corners at the expense of their neighbors isn't actually ok.
Even in major enterprise, it's almost impossible to comply with Adobe's licensing conditions. In a previous business with 800 users, connecting to a citrix farm - we had 20 users through the business who needed adobe professional.
With most applications, we would simply install the product on the citrix farm and restrict user access to the executable through security groups, or install the app and then publish it through citrix to be only available to members of a security group that would be restricted to the number of purchased licenses.
Neither of these solutions are suitable for Adobe. To install this product in a citrix farm - you either need to Silo all users of this product to a single server instance (regardless of their geographic location, making their entire user experience awful because they want to make PDF's and don't want to use the free print to pdf from word option) or purchase an additional product at increased cost and with extensive management overhead.
Had we failed to comply with these idiotic requirements, and been audited by Adobe - we would have been up for $320k, because we had 20 users who wanted to use a product, even though we had already paid $8k to license those users, and they were the only users who could actually use the application.
In another buisness with a thousand users, where we wanted to mass update Adobe freeware products within the enterprise in response to major security exploits, and lock down certain behaviours to prevent new security issues as we moved forward with correcting the SOE, we found that we couldn't actually do it without obtaining a distribution license - otherwise we would be in breach of the terms of installation by altering the behaviour of the application install packages or accepting the terms and conditions. All the tools for doing what we wanted to do were published without any kind of warning that we would be breaching the license, in Adobe KB articles or blogs. We had to choose between risking Adobe's notorious audit nightmare or leaving critical security vulnerabilities in place through the enterprise.
As an admin, it has become immensely in my interests to fight tooth and nail against the deployment of any Adobe product. If a developer wants Cold Fusion? It's a nightmare unless I can talk them out of it and into Blue Dragon or something. If we want a PDF reader - almost any of the third party alternatives will be vastly more practical to maintain in the SOE or managed desktop environments. If people want to produce PDF's? It's easier to teach them to use a third party product and a print to pdf driver than to try and manage the products in an enterprise environment. I hate Apple's anti flash stance on iOS devices, but it's a nightmare to allow it in my business environment. Air is a ludicrous hassle to maintain. The creative suite products (Photoshop, dreamweaver, etc) are all a HUGE pain in the ass to support on anything except single user dedicated fat clients.
Just auditing the internal environment to minimize harm in the event of an Adobe audit requires a custom auditing solution or SCCM or something - and for several of my clients, those solutions are tremendously expensive, and have insufficient business benefit to justify them - except for the looming threat of Adobe BS.
No matter how good their products might be, it's almost certainly cheaper for an enterprise scale business to just not use any of them.
If you don't think Cyberwar is credible, I would urge you to look into Stuxnet further. Someone else mentioned it - but seriously - check this sucker out. It specifically targets SIEMENS SCADA systems, and includes the capability to reprogram the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and hide the changes.
Fundamentally - that's weaponized software. It's a viral malware app that is designed to compromise SCADA systems - the only reason to do that is destructive and the potential destruction from a compromised SCADA system is freaking crazy.
There are points of commonality with the APR's that were used to target Google during that google hack, and there's a strong suspiscion of spear phishing being involved to get it deployed initially into the Iranian infrastructure that was believed to be it's target. It had no information gathering or finance generating capabilities and it's development was incredibly high level.
By high level - I mean it was extremely well developed and probably took months to years of man hours to develop - implying a team of high level developers working on a long duration project to create it. The developers would have required not only a very high skill level, but a high level of experience with SCADA solutions - meaning they could have obtained legal and highly paid work easily - not attributes commonly held by people developing malware, letalone malware that could see people killed or major disasters as a result.
It used four Zero day exploits - reporting those zero day exploits probably would have generated a nice chunk of change from the vendor, or earned the researcher who found them a nice bonus from their legit employer. Malware developers do pay for Zero day exploits and they have a high value and short window of availability (usually). They also used stolen but otherwise entirely legitimate digital certificates - That's serious tech skills and seriously high value.
We can infer Stuxnet had a total development cost of easily $100k USD - that estimate is incredibly conservative and the reality was probably much higher. Pushed as a legitware application to aid vendors/infrastructure owners in controlling their SCADA solutions and pushing changes to PLCs - it could have been very marketable software - and the Zero day exploits and stolen certs also had a huge value attached to them. The fact that this thing is in the wild as malware indicates that someone was willing to spend a lot of money and sacrifice a lot of profit potential to take control of Iranian power infrastructure.
The only likely circumstance that leads to this thing being produced and deployed is if a national interest group with a national defense budget was behind it. There are other unlikely circumstances (wealthy insane genius/Super Villains, a crazy blurring of reality and Bruce Willis movies), Siemens promoting their new anti-malware solutions (which they're giving away for free to at-risk parties)... but only one solution actually holds water when compared to the reality of this thing. Some country made a serious effort at taking out major infrastructure with weaponized malware. Maybe it was a research project that leaked. Maybe it was a failed attempt at damaging Iranian infrastructure. Maybe it was a scare tactic. But it's still scary as all hell.
Maybe (I do have an opinion, but it's not relevant to the point) - but maybe, parties who have leaked documents to Wikileaks are guilty of Treason or are Traitors - but as far as I can tell, Wikileaks isn't a US organisation and the owner and primary operators aren't US citizens.
On one hand, I know that most American's are smart, and not unreasonably arrogant. On the other hand - it's getting really easy to generalize American's as having no grasp of the fact that there is a world outside of America and that people who don't have any particular interest in American law or American national interest aren't necessarily part of the terrorist conspiracy.
I might be renouncing my geek creds here - but if the school isn't doing anything terribly innovative or interesting with mobile devices, but is instead finding that the devices aren't being beneficially used anywhere in the school, except by kids who are goofing off instead of paying attention, why not ban them - or at least require that they aren't used during school hours?
I normally loathe the somebody think of the children arguments - but in this case - a gaming environment where a significant proportion of the user base are in fact minors - it seems like requiring a real name for posting on the forums is a gift for predators who might want to groom through WoW and stalk through social networks. Taking away the ability to remain anonymous takes away the ability of kids who actually have an excuse for not knowing better to abstract their real identity and keep privacy in place for safety online.
I wonder if Third Party liability will extend to the first person raped by a stalker who was only able to locate them because of the inability to use Blizzard's service anonymously?
Spanish law isn't notably different in it's copywrite interpretations, but somehow Spanish judges actually seem to be savvy enough to understand how the technology is being used to identify breaches worth suing over and garbage that should be ignored.
There must be some way to get these Spanish Judges to go on some kind of roaming lecture circuit sabbatical to educate Judges from other countries about the cases that they're ruling on.
Wait... You don't like the odds at a Lottery - where you could say bet on Black at a roulette table, or count cards at a Blackjack table untill the house decided they didn't want to play with you any more (and possibly broke your arms on the way out)... but you play the Lottery, where your odds of winning are worse then your odds of walking up to a stranger in a high transit airport and guessing their phone number? Where your odds of winning are lower then your odds of being killed by falling space debris? Srsly?
I'm not a gambler - but if you are going to play, even casino machines have much better odds than large lotteries.
Strangely enough, the people who program ATM's manage to not give out erroneous ammounts of money terribly often. They actually have quality control on their software development process. Gaming isn't exactly alow profit industry that would struggle to remain afload if required to invest in their own quality control standards.
Now see, I agree that patent trolling is bad. Patenting things that are in common usage, or things that are a logical extension of the existing products is stupid.
But the CSIRO owns the patent on a data transformation equation that was developed to solve a previously unsolvable problem. It required very extensive facillities and extensive specialist research and a high degree of specialist insight and creativity to develop.
If the equation had been say... the Formula for a vaccine to prevent a specific type of cancer (which incidentally, they do own a few of, and they're one of the world's leading research groups in the pursuit of others, which they make available much more reasonably then Phizer), Nobody would argue that they owned the patent, no question.
Hell, nobody argued that this was a perfectly reasonable patent to own when It was released under license to parties who agreed to pay licensing feeds and then magically became an industry standard - with no money actually going to the patent holders - even though there was a clear agreement that there should be.
So to clarify - a research company, who do lots of altruistic, nice things because they're a pure research group with a non profit model who use their patents to fund further research, spent a shitload of money on equipment, funded a shitload of expensive researcher time and had a very clever specialist solve a previously unsolvable problem.
They then licensed that solution to some for profit companies who never actually paid them. Despite agreeing to do so before gaining access to the research in the first place.
After 10 years of polite reminders and 5 years of lawsuits - they finally actually got paid. Hooray. For once, scientists actually got funding as a result of major contributions to the betterment of technology. There's no motive of shareholders trying to keep dividends and share prices high and restricting innovation.
Now, they're looking to recover some money (which to re-iterate, will go to a non-profit, pure research group who works extensively on developing cheap medicines and making communication tools available to the very poor and releasing cheap information to try and help reduce obesity and cuddly hippy shit like that) from other companies who took the patented results of their very extensive investment that lead to solving an otherwise unsolvable problem and made a shitload of money from it.
Still not patent trolling.
CSIRO is a really, genuinely good organization who do a bunch of really genuinely good work and don't get nearly enough funding. Being angry at them actually expecting to get paid in this circumstance is ridiculous. Lumping them in with Patent Troll's is just offensive.
On behalf of all Australians, I'd like to Appologise for Conroy. He's an idiot and we're not sure how he became a state official, much less how he ended up in charge of telecommunications.
Am I the only person more annoyed about the claims that the Navi are based on Native Americans than the idea that Cameron might have ripped someone off?
The story of the Navi, being screwed by (almost entirely caucasian) mining groups, and the Navi culture seems to be almost entirely derived from African history rather than North American.
And cue the claims that Cameron ripped off 'Blood Diamond' and 'The Power of One'.
Shennanigans. They over played their hand by "claiming that 75% of ISPs have "cooperated fully." Shennanigans I say. I think this is an entirely fictious event intended to scare people away from downloading the movie. ISP's only ever cooperate with this sort of nonsense when they're under court order or when they've got an executive with crossed interests. It's bad for their business.
But I bet if this move gets media traction and hits CNN.com's front page - a pretty hefty number of people who would have downloaded it will avoid the torrents now just to be safe.
Depending on how much consumer backlash actually occurs - it might even play out. I think honestly, most of the people I know who wanted to watch Hurt Locker, will still want to watch it, even after hearing about this.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Scootah.
The GPS devices in question were perfectly adequately filtered, assuming that the adjacent spectrums were used for purpose.
LightSquared bought spectrum space on the cheap and then tried to use them for unintended purposes. That's like me buying a house in a suburban neighborhood, putting a night club in it, and when my neighbors complain about the noise, blaming the people who built their house for not adequately soundproofing.
LightSquared aren't 'scrappy innovators' - they're rude jerks who found out that their plan to cheap and and cut corners at the expense of their neighbors isn't actually ok.
Even in major enterprise, it's almost impossible to comply with Adobe's licensing conditions. In a previous business with 800 users, connecting to a citrix farm - we had 20 users through the business who needed adobe professional.
With most applications, we would simply install the product on the citrix farm and restrict user access to the executable through security groups, or install the app and then publish it through citrix to be only available to members of a security group that would be restricted to the number of purchased licenses.
Neither of these solutions are suitable for Adobe. To install this product in a citrix farm - you either need to Silo all users of this product to a single server instance (regardless of their geographic location, making their entire user experience awful because they want to make PDF's and don't want to use the free print to pdf from word option) or purchase an additional product at increased cost and with extensive management overhead.
Had we failed to comply with these idiotic requirements, and been audited by Adobe - we would have been up for $320k, because we had 20 users who wanted to use a product, even though we had already paid $8k to license those users, and they were the only users who could actually use the application.
In another buisness with a thousand users, where we wanted to mass update Adobe freeware products within the enterprise in response to major security exploits, and lock down certain behaviours to prevent new security issues as we moved forward with correcting the SOE, we found that we couldn't actually do it without obtaining a distribution license - otherwise we would be in breach of the terms of installation by altering the behaviour of the application install packages or accepting the terms and conditions. All the tools for doing what we wanted to do were published without any kind of warning that we would be breaching the license, in Adobe KB articles or blogs. We had to choose between risking Adobe's notorious audit nightmare or leaving critical security vulnerabilities in place through the enterprise.
As an admin, it has become immensely in my interests to fight tooth and nail against the deployment of any Adobe product. If a developer wants Cold Fusion? It's a nightmare unless I can talk them out of it and into Blue Dragon or something. If we want a PDF reader - almost any of the third party alternatives will be vastly more practical to maintain in the SOE or managed desktop environments. If people want to produce PDF's? It's easier to teach them to use a third party product and a print to pdf driver than to try and manage the products in an enterprise environment. I hate Apple's anti flash stance on iOS devices, but it's a nightmare to allow it in my business environment. Air is a ludicrous hassle to maintain. The creative suite products (Photoshop, dreamweaver, etc) are all a HUGE pain in the ass to support on anything except single user dedicated fat clients.
Just auditing the internal environment to minimize harm in the event of an Adobe audit requires a custom auditing solution or SCCM or something - and for several of my clients, those solutions are tremendously expensive, and have insufficient business benefit to justify them - except for the looming threat of Adobe BS.
No matter how good their products might be, it's almost certainly cheaper for an enterprise scale business to just not use any of them.
Credibility of Cyberwar
If you don't think Cyberwar is credible, I would urge you to look into Stuxnet further. Someone else mentioned it - but seriously - check this sucker out. It specifically targets SIEMENS SCADA systems, and includes the capability to reprogram the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and hide the changes.
Fundamentally - that's weaponized software. It's a viral malware app that is designed to compromise SCADA systems - the only reason to do that is destructive and the potential destruction from a compromised SCADA system is freaking crazy.
There are points of commonality with the APR's that were used to target Google during that google hack, and there's a strong suspiscion of spear phishing being involved to get it deployed initially into the Iranian infrastructure that was believed to be it's target. It had no information gathering or finance generating capabilities and it's development was incredibly high level.
By high level - I mean it was extremely well developed and probably took months to years of man hours to develop - implying a team of high level developers working on a long duration project to create it. The developers would have required not only a very high skill level, but a high level of experience with SCADA solutions - meaning they could have obtained legal and highly paid work easily - not attributes commonly held by people developing malware, letalone malware that could see people killed or major disasters as a result.
It used four Zero day exploits - reporting those zero day exploits probably would have generated a nice chunk of change from the vendor, or earned the researcher who found them a nice bonus from their legit employer. Malware developers do pay for Zero day exploits and they have a high value and short window of availability (usually). They also used stolen but otherwise entirely legitimate digital certificates - That's serious tech skills and seriously high value.
We can infer Stuxnet had a total development cost of easily $100k USD - that estimate is incredibly conservative and the reality was probably much higher. Pushed as a legitware application to aid vendors/infrastructure owners in controlling their SCADA solutions and pushing changes to PLCs - it could have been very marketable software - and the Zero day exploits and stolen certs also had a huge value attached to them. The fact that this thing is in the wild as malware indicates that someone was willing to spend a lot of money and sacrifice a lot of profit potential to take control of Iranian power infrastructure.
The only likely circumstance that leads to this thing being produced and deployed is if a national interest group with a national defense budget was behind it. There are other unlikely circumstances (wealthy insane genius/Super Villains, a crazy blurring of reality and Bruce Willis movies), Siemens promoting their new anti-malware solutions (which they're giving away for free to at-risk parties)... but only one solution actually holds water when compared to the reality of this thing. Some country made a serious effort at taking out major infrastructure with weaponized malware. Maybe it was a research project that leaked. Maybe it was a failed attempt at damaging Iranian infrastructure. Maybe it was a scare tactic. But it's still scary as all hell.
Treason and Traitors
Maybe (I do have an opinion, but it's not relevant to the point) - but maybe, parties who have leaked documents to Wikileaks are guilty of Treason or are Traitors - but as far as I can tell, Wikileaks isn't a US organisation and the owner and primary operators aren't US citizens.
On one hand, I know that most American's are smart, and not unreasonably arrogant. On the other hand - it's getting really easy to generalize American's as having no grasp of the fact that there is a world outside of America and that people who don't have any particular interest in American law or American national interest aren't necessarily part of the terrorist conspiracy.
I might be renouncing my geek creds here - but if the school isn't doing anything terribly innovative or interesting with mobile devices, but is instead finding that the devices aren't being beneficially used anywhere in the school, except by kids who are goofing off instead of paying attention, why not ban them - or at least require that they aren't used during school hours?
Won't somebody think of the children?
I normally loathe the somebody think of the children arguments - but in this case - a gaming environment where a significant proportion of the user base are in fact minors - it seems like requiring a real name for posting on the forums is a gift for predators who might want to groom through WoW and stalk through social networks. Taking away the ability to remain anonymous takes away the ability of kids who actually have an excuse for not knowing better to abstract their real identity and keep privacy in place for safety online.
I wonder if Third Party liability will extend to the first person raped by a stalker who was only able to locate them because of the inability to use Blizzard's service anonymously?
Roaming Sabbaticals?
Spanish law isn't notably different in it's copywrite interpretations, but somehow Spanish judges actually seem to be savvy enough to understand how the technology is being used to identify breaches worth suing over and garbage that should be ignored.
There must be some way to get these Spanish Judges to go on some kind of roaming lecture circuit sabbatical to educate Judges from other countries about the cases that they're ruling on.
Re: Anyone who gambles on machines in casinos deserves to lose
Wait... You don't like the odds at a Lottery - where you could say bet on Black at a roulette table, or count cards at a Blackjack table untill the house decided they didn't want to play with you any more (and possibly broke your arms on the way out)... but you play the Lottery, where your odds of winning are worse then your odds of walking up to a stranger in a high transit airport and guessing their phone number? Where your odds of winning are lower then your odds of being killed by falling space debris? Srsly?
I'm not a gambler - but if you are going to play, even casino machines have much better odds than large lotteries.
Re: Re: glitches
Strangely enough, the people who program ATM's manage to not give out erroneous ammounts of money terribly often. They actually have quality control on their software development process. Gaming isn't exactly alow profit industry that would struggle to remain afload if required to invest in their own quality control standards.
Re:
This seems like the only logical response to me. Legislate a requirement that gaming technology errors in favour of the consumer be honoured in full.
Maybe then the vendors will start actually developing quality products.
Wait, so have they ruled against Google yet?
I mean if FTD are criminals then surely Google are freaking Monsters?
Patent Trolling vs Research Organization actually wanting to get paid
There is a difference.
Now see, I agree that patent trolling is bad. Patenting things that are in common usage, or things that are a logical extension of the existing products is stupid.
But the CSIRO owns the patent on a data transformation equation that was developed to solve a previously unsolvable problem. It required very extensive facillities and extensive specialist research and a high degree of specialist insight and creativity to develop.
If the equation had been say... the Formula for a vaccine to prevent a specific type of cancer (which incidentally, they do own a few of, and they're one of the world's leading research groups in the pursuit of others, which they make available much more reasonably then Phizer), Nobody would argue that they owned the patent, no question.
Hell, nobody argued that this was a perfectly reasonable patent to own when It was released under license to parties who agreed to pay licensing feeds and then magically became an industry standard - with no money actually going to the patent holders - even though there was a clear agreement that there should be.
So to clarify - a research company, who do lots of altruistic, nice things because they're a pure research group with a non profit model who use their patents to fund further research, spent a shitload of money on equipment, funded a shitload of expensive researcher time and had a very clever specialist solve a previously unsolvable problem.
They then licensed that solution to some for profit companies who never actually paid them. Despite agreeing to do so before gaining access to the research in the first place.
After 10 years of polite reminders and 5 years of lawsuits - they finally actually got paid. Hooray. For once, scientists actually got funding as a result of major contributions to the betterment of technology. There's no motive of shareholders trying to keep dividends and share prices high and restricting innovation.
Now, they're looking to recover some money (which to re-iterate, will go to a non-profit, pure research group who works extensively on developing cheap medicines and making communication tools available to the very poor and releasing cheap information to try and help reduce obesity and cuddly hippy shit like that) from other companies who took the patented results of their very extensive investment that lead to solving an otherwise unsolvable problem and made a shitload of money from it.
Still not patent trolling.
CSIRO is a really, genuinely good organization who do a bunch of really genuinely good work and don't get nearly enough funding. Being angry at them actually expecting to get paid in this circumstance is ridiculous. Lumping them in with Patent Troll's is just offensive.
On behalf of all Australians, I'd like to Appologise for Conroy. He's an idiot and we're not sure how he became a state official, much less how he ended up in charge of telecommunications.
We're really sorry.
Am I the only person more annoyed about the claims that the Navi are based on Native Americans than the idea that Cameron might have ripped someone off?
The story of the Navi, being screwed by (almost entirely caucasian) mining groups, and the Navi culture seems to be almost entirely derived from African history rather than North American.
And cue the claims that Cameron ripped off 'Blood Diamond' and 'The Power of One'.
Shennanigans I say
Shennanigans. They over played their hand by "claiming that 75% of ISPs have "cooperated fully." Shennanigans I say. I think this is an entirely fictious event intended to scare people away from downloading the movie. ISP's only ever cooperate with this sort of nonsense when they're under court order or when they've got an executive with crossed interests. It's bad for their business.
But I bet if this move gets media traction and hits CNN.com's front page - a pretty hefty number of people who would have downloaded it will avoid the torrents now just to be safe.
Depending on how much consumer backlash actually occurs - it might even play out. I think honestly, most of the people I know who wanted to watch Hurt Locker, will still want to watch it, even after hearing about this.