<Angered Brackets /> » Rants

האם ניהול זכויות קניין (נז”ק) הם עבירה על חוק המחשבים?

Ethan — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:01:14 +0000

לאחר שקראתי באנשים ומחשבים על שינוים המוצעים בחוק המחשבים, חיפשתי את לשון החוק הנוכחי.
פרק ב’ של החוק מגדיר מהם עבירות מחשב, לרבות:
“משבש את פעולתו התקינה של מחשב או מפריע לשימוש בו;
מוחק חומר מחשב, גורם לשינוי בו, משבשו בכל דרך אחרת או מפריע לשימוש בו.”
דינו של העובר עבירות אלה, אגב, הינו מאסר של שלוש שנים.

עכשיו נשאלת השאלה, מה נכלל תחת ההגדרה של שיבוש פעילות תקינה של מחשב או הפרעה לשימוש בו. האם חלונית ה-WGA של חלונות, המזכירה לך ש(אולי) הגרסה המותקנת אצלך של מוצר מיקרוסופט זה או אחר אינו מקורי לא מהווה שיבוש לפעילות של המחשב? מה לגבי מקרים שבהם יכולות מסויימות של מערכת ההפעלה מנוטרלות בשל אבחנה (נכונה או לא) של WGA?

ולגבי מחיקת חומר מחשב, רק לפני שבוע אמאזון מחקה מרחוק ספרים ממחשביהם של לקוחות שרכשו את 1984 וחוות החיות.

אני לא יודע אם חוק זה עמד במבחן בית המשפט למעט במקרה הסוס הטרויאני, אבל אני חושב שבניסוח הנוכחי שלו, החוק הזה אוסר על הרבה מההגבלות המובנות במנגנוני DRM (או נז”ק, בעברית). לדעתי שווה שמישהו שמבין קצת יותר בתחומים האלה יבחן את העניין.

Let There Be Light is a registered trademark of SAP’s Business Objects.

Ethan — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:58:47 +0000

Reading a post on Boingboing pointing out that God is a registered trademark, I was reminded of one of those little bits of information I assimilated along the way, but that was usually of little significance. Namely, that “Let There Be Light” is a registered trademark of Business Objects, which is owned by SAP.

© 2008 Business Objects, an SAP company. All rights reserved. Please refer to the user guide for a list of Business Objects’ patents. Business Objects and its logos, Business Objects, business Process On Demand, BusinessQuery, Crystal Applications, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Reports, Crystal Vision, Desktop Intelligence, Inxight and its logos, Star Tree, Table Lens, ThingFinder, Timewall, Let There Be Light, Metify, NSite, Rapid Marts, RapidMarts, Voyager, Web Intelligence, and Xcelsius are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or other countries of Business Objects and/or affiliated companies. SAP is the trademark or registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

So if you didn’t have a good enough reason not to use god®’s name in vein, now you do.
Goddammit!

Experts-Exchange: We are all now locked out of the garden

Ethan — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:23:57 +0000

Experts-Exchange has always been a more-closed-than-most professional forum. From the start, you’d have to pay a price in order to ask a question on the site, and then give the sum to whomever helped solve your problem. So by helping others out, and answering their questions, would earn you EE points, which were an indicator of your reputation, or whuffie, which you could then use for asking your own questions. The site was nice enough to offer you 5 free points a day, for every day you logged in. (Asking a question would cost between 50 to 200 points).

I stopped frequenting Experts-Exchange at some point, because their Business Objects community was rather small, and I found the way the site works detracted from my day job. I’m sure the site worked great for many people, who’d spend idle hours of their freelancer careers helping others, earning more whuffie, and creating more opportunities for themselves down the road. But it didn’t suit me.

A few months ago I started visiting the site again, because it would come up more frequently in my search queries, and seemed it might help me get my job done. By that point, you could no longer sign up to the site for free – the only type of membership they had was a paid one, and without it, all you got to see was the question someone asked, and tons of ads. If you wanted to find the solution to the problem, you’d have to pay experts-exchange. As a perk for giving them money, they’d stop harassing your subconscious mind with ads. Since I had a membership from days of yore, I could still Sign in and view full threads, answers and all. I guess there’s something to be said for working in the same field for over 5 years…

But all that has changed. I tried signing into Experts-Exchange today, and was greeted by the following message:

Hello ethan1701

Site access is now limited to Premium Service Members. Convert your account in just minutes and stay connected to the #1 resource for solving technology problems on the web.

… Followed by a purchase interface, offering me many options for giving them money. All the links on the site seem to be broken, too: Contact us, Help, Home on the top of the site, as well as Site Map and (get this!) member Agreement on the bottom, all lead back to the same lockedLimitedMember.jsp page. If I want to see any of those, I need to log out of the site. So now a newbie has more access than a user with 5 years on the site.

Does Experts-Exchange have the right to do this – to close off access to parts of their site to paying members only? sure they do. Like any self-respecting porn site, they’re offering you just a taste of what they have to offer – the tip of the iceberg – and you need to pay if you want the stuff you really came to the site for. But what happens when closing off access means cutting people off of information that they contributed? whether it’s questions I asked or answers I offered, I now no longer have access to information I contributed to the site – a droplet of information that increased the site’s reputations just a bit more, toward being able to charge $12.95 a month.

I think the least the decision makers at EE should have done is send out an email to the site’s members, informing them of the change in policy. At the least, it would have allowed me to backup all the data that I contributed to the site. I’d like to keep my whuffie, please.

And the absurd irony is that now, being locked out of all the site’s features, I can’t modify my membership information. So if tomorrow EE decide that all but premium member accounts will be spammed with offers for the latest tech, software, counselling or what-have-you, I can’t even opt out without paying up!

Experts-Exchange is a rather small locked garden from my point of view, but I’m sure for others it’s a more valuable asset. And I’m sure some of those will pay the quart of blood the site is asking for, while others will just have to shrug it off.

But what happens when other sites that have your information on them – especially social networks – start locking out users who are not willing to pay a ransom to get access to their own information?
This is exactly what Richard Stallman was talking about 7 months ago:

Web-based programs… will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time

RMS was talking specifically about web-based services like gmail, but it’s just as true about social networks, blogs and forums. It seems like some executive at EE read that, and decided it wouldn’t at all be a bad business decision.

What do you think about this? Can you think of some solution to this problem? To what point will the market converge?

First rant. Far sooner than expected

Ethan — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:52:08 +0000

Well, I just set up my wordpress based blog (as you can tell by reading it….), and went directly on to setting the blog’s title and subtitle. I got them to show up the way I wanted, but not without some frustration along the way.
See, it seems like wordpress sanitizes the input it receives, and deleted all the text I put between the angle brackets in the title. I didn’t foresee this happening, but was actually pleased when it did. However, in effect, the title was all but deleted. Fine, fair enough. I learned my lesson. So I changed the title from using explicit < and >, to using their HTML equivalents, good ol’ < and >.
Saving that did the job. The title was now displayed with the angle brackets, the way you now see it.
The problem? The input field, where I just typed up <Angered Brackets />, now contained the parsed value of – The value I originally entered, and ended up losing.
So the next time I go about making a change to the blog settings, I will have to remember to replace those two brackets with their HTML counterparts, or risk losing the title.

Total time running this blog: 5 minutes.
Level of bracket anger: >>:-\