ElcomSoft Back For More 82
graveyhead writes "Most everyone here should remember the Dmitri Skylarov fiasco last year. Apparently ElcomSoft, the company Dmitry works for, is not intimidated by Adobe or the DMCA. Wired is running this story that describes ElcomSoft's upcoming products, most of which could be interpreted as a violation of the DMCA. What's particularly interesting is that this announcement comes right at the beginning of the trial which is scheduled to begin on August 26."
Re:I am French and I have a question ! : (Score:1)
Why would anyone want to do that?
They won't ever care (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe that's the reason there are so many financially poor scientists in Russia.
Re:They won't ever care (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They won't ever care (Score:2, Funny)
That's right, it's a little known fact that American scientists were living in poverty prior to the introduction of the DMCA a few years ago. Fortunately this miraculous Act has turned that around which is why you see so few scientists starving on the street these days.
What you might not have realised is that DMCA also washes clothes whiter.
Re:They won't ever care (Score:1, Troll)
but we killed 15,000 people to remove Manuel
Noriega to a U.S. prison.
Re:They won't ever care (Score:2)
Have you been reading the lunatic fringe's El Chorillo nonsense? Too bad that no one can find those thousands of bodies that the far left alleges were killed. You post also ignores the attacks against US servicemen stationed in Panama by Panamaian National Gaurd forces, and Pineapple face's Declration of War against the United States a few days prior to the Invasion.
Re:They won't ever care (Score:2)
" Moron, the bodies were all over the damn place. One primary target was the slum just north of the downtown Panama City area, which was hit with white phosphorous, napalm and high explosive. The bodies were burned in the dump to the west. US Armys own records document at least 11,000 noncombatant casualties in that fiasco. and the number is definitly higher than that"
Hey Pinhead!,
US records show just over 500 Panamanian deaths, The Panamanian goverments are similar. The Far Left Wing Lunatic Fringe and the gulible dweebs that use them as a source are the only ones dumb enough to swallow the thousands of deaths BS.
Re:They won't ever care (Score:1)
No, I don't suppose you can, because you're just blowing hot air. Good day to you.
Re:They won't ever care (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm.. and here i thought it was because russia is an economically devastated country that hasn't completely recovered from 40 years of autocracy in which an absolutely powerful government accountable to no one (and rife with corruption at all levels) purposefully tried to engineer an agrarian culture, while mismanaging funds and the economy and covering up the damage it had done by arresting anyone who dared to speak out about anything that was wrong with the country. I had also thought that the reason the economy hadn't yet gotten back on its feet was a combination of a total lack of basic infrastructure, and the fact that what capitalistic infrastructure there was in russia at the time of the fall of the berlin wall was controlled entirely by organized crime syndicates-- organized crime syndicates who still administer and control significant amounts of the country's economic infrastructure to this day.
But now that i have read your eloquent and intelligent post, i have seen the light. Clearly, as you have shown to us, the fact that russian scientists are poor has nothing to do with the fact the bulk of the country is living on bare subsistence wages to the point that doctors and college professors are making absolutely minimal amounts of money, and the government cannot afford to pay the wages of the troops in its army; it's because Russia's intellectual property laws aren't stringent enough. Thank you for opening my eyes. I understand now that my view of Russia's needs at the moment was misguided; after all, what good would having enough food to go around be, if corporations cannot exercise direct control over the way in which their customers use intellectual property they have purchased?
----
GM: Make a Sarcasm roll, d20.
MCC: I am exercising my "shooting fish in a barrel" feat and adding +5 to this roll.
Not much has changed (Score:1)
*
no DMCA?! (Score:1)
They do not have DMCA?!?! Bomb them into the stone age!!!
Re:no DMCA?! (Score:1)
Interesting? (Score:2)
Why is this interesting?
Trials are expensive. They are going to have to get the money from somewhere.
And Microsoft has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that you can get away with a lot while you drag out the court case. At least for a while.
Re:Interesting? (Score:1, Insightful)
A) It demonstrates that passwords and encryption in commonly used software _cannot_ be trusted with any sensitive data.
B) It gives people in other countries than the U S(for example Russia) the ability to do backups, which they are entitled to by law in the country they bought the software/eBook/pdf.
Re:Corporate America 101 (Score:1)
Taxes cover sewage/waste disposal. You pay taxes on the water bill. You pay tax when you buy a toilet, or a toilet repair kit.
Sorry.
Re:Corporate America 101 (Score:1)
Are they not "The People Too"?
Re:Corporate America 101 (Score:1)
industry-standard levels (Score:2)
Today is a Dilbert mission statement day [dilbert.com], clearly. Alternatively, our IT world is falling into a bubble again.
If that Adobe e-book is protected by industry-standard level cryptography, then that industry is in deep trouble.
Why does everyone have to try to do their own "industry-standard" there would have been many valid INDUSTRY-STANDARD cryptography tools with which these problems would not have never even surfaced.
Re:ElcomSoft sells spam software (Score:2)
I don't protect my e-mail address carefully, so I get a lot of spam. I also don't have HTML turned on in my mail program, and I use a lot of filters, to select out what I want. So I can delete the spam in just a few minutes a day. (Annoying, but not a real problem.) What takes time is all the mailing lists that I subscribe to. I can't read that much, and I know it. But I never know just which one to unsubscribe from.
Spam is a problem for those using poorly designed systems, and poor techniques for handling it. Information overload is a problem for everyone. Don't confuse the two.
That said, I can certainly understand why a system administrator would be more bothered by spam than I am. But they usually use tools like the BHL rather than campaigning for oppresive laws. Except in a monopoly situation, the BHL should be a perfectly appropriate approach. And monopoly situations are so bad that I can't think of any kind of filtering that I would approve of. Sorry sysadmin, but in that case you are working for evil (N.B.: I said nothing about abusive monopoly. Abusive monopolies shouldn't even be allowed to collect their bills. That should be the corporate death penalty, charter revocation, etc.)
Re:Protect your e-mail address? Come on. (Score:2)
Also, I don't like spam, but that doesn't in and of itself mean that any law against it is desireable. Many laws are worse than the evil they seek to prevent, and many of the rest can be so perverted that they become worse. (Legal interpretations can "justify" a lot of things that no sensible person would believe.)
The "postage due" part is an interesting comment, and has some justice. I have previously considered the possibility of charging for bytes sent, but not for bytes received. Then I started considering what this would do to ftp repositories. So perhaps the best solution is to just live with it.
SpamAssassin can be used if you need it. Other tools exist. I, personally feel that this would be a good area for a genetic programming algorithm or a neural network to be inserted, which could filter out the undesired e-mail, and if it could guess accurately enough from the subject, then it wouldn't even need to do the download, just tell the server to delete it.
So far, however, I've found that filtering for what I'm interested in allows me to do a quick scan over the rest, and just delete most of it in jig time. So I haven't bothered with anything fancier. (But, as I said, I'm not a sysadmin
In case you hadn't guessed, I tend to be against government regulation. It so frequently makes things worse, and is always expensive. There are times and places when it is justified, but spam isn't one of them.
corruption imlies violence (Score:4, Interesting)
the benefit of their patronage, the inevitable
result is violence. Injustice is the primary
cause of violence. When injustice is
institutionalized, vigilantism and revolution
are the only recourse.
I know this will bite me in moderation, but
the truth will out.
Re:corruption imlies violence (Score:1)
And Dylan also had a line that went something like...
"people rob you with a fountain pen"
Reminder to self: unplug keyboard before drinking on slashdot.
Re:corruption imlies violence (Score:2)
Comparing Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw who was said to have given to the poor, to (unspecified) business interests, Guthrie wrote:
Well, as through this world I've rambled
I've seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.
But as through this world you ramble
As through this world you roam
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
As for me, I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me being sent to a brig as an illegal combatant.
Re:corruption imlies violence (Score:1)
What the hell does imlies mean? (Score:1)
Re:What the hell does imlies mean? (Score:2)
the majority of slashdot readers.
Re: Corruption implies violence (Score:1)
What are you trying to say? (Score:2)
His surname (Score:3, Informative)
l before y
Re:His surname (Score:1)
Except after c, right?
Isn't this transcribed anyway? (Score:2)
Re:Isn't this transcribed anyway? (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a couple of alternatives, though:
* echo +BBQEPAQ4BEIEQAQ4BDk +BCEEOgQ7BE8EQAQ+BDI | iconv -f utf-7 -t utf-8
(or replace utf-8 with whatever charset your terminal can render. uxterm or xterm -u8 with a decent font (I use -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-
* http://halcyon.bluecherry.net/~rain/dmitry.html [bluecherry.net] -- Let your browser do the work. This is probably the easiest bet if your browser supports UTF-8 (it should) and you have Cyrillic fonts installed.
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Russian.
(But I'm fairly certain this is correct.)
Free Marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sure that I am not the only sale for ElcomSoft that came about in this manner.
Re:Free Marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
They make products for the management of lists of email addresses, and also a fine product that is used to 'harvest' email addresses [mailutilities.com] from web forums like this very site. Note that until recently that mailutilities.com link was prominent in the product lineup on the main Elcomsoft web pages.
They've been termed 'the spammer's mercenary' more than a few times for selling tools that the typical clueless spammer would never be able to come up with on their own.
The people who say 'kill the fucking spammer, die, die' should be working to destroy Elcomsoft, a company of hackers who work for 'the other side' on the spamming issue.
Fishing through their latest main website incarnation, I notice they've 'cleaned up' the site and there's no link to their email harvesting products directly from the elcomsoft.com web page, as there was within the last month. They've put up a firewall between their 'we're just cool hackers with password cracking tools' and their 'we help the spammers get to your mailbox' product lines. They're learning.
About copyrights in Russia (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me note a few important points:
1. You can reverse engineer a program for private purposes.
You can use the results of your "hacks" on a product you distribute/sell if:
The "hack" does not contain parts of the original software.
The "hack" adds a functionality not contained on the original software or allows third party programs to interact with the original software.
The "hack" does not create a situation where the original author suffers a significative material loss.
There are also a few things in Russian laws that concern protection and privacy and which are related to software products. Frankly, in the whole there are some chances to distribute programs that circumvent copy protection mechanisms if these mechanisms are too dumb and made by nerds. No court will hear you if you cannot prove that you did made a good effort to protect your program, system or network.
The case with ElcomSoft is quite interesting. Even under Russian law they are beating the very edge of the law. But if they can prove in court that Adobe's security does not cost a penny, then Adobe has no chance to shut up these guys. The judicial system is not perfect but in some cases, dumb security is no more than dumb security. Besides Russian law is quite rough on what concerns certain things like licenses. If a software publisher brings a license like Microsft's EULA (even old ones), then court session might end just on reading that EULA. As they do not conform to the copyright laws in Russia.
Not long ago, somewhere around here there was a tremendous copyright scandal between two companies. One company accused the other of stealing their proprietary designs on some web application. When in court, the thing ended in a few minutes. Why? Well these two companies had an agreement to produce a common product. However when things went bad the agreement was torned off and the defendent just grabbed the whole product and started to use it somehwere else. The accusant brought the case to court on the grounds that they broke in the their site and stealed the thing. There were lots of mumblings as what part of the work belonged to whom as the two companies didn't make an effort to clarify its authorship on the project. However, when the court discovered that the defendant had a read/write Internet connection offered by the accusant for their work and that account was still open, the judge just replied with a "case closed" declaration. The accusant tried to protest but the judge explained that if you are so dumb to produce a work and not making anything to protect it, then no court in Russia would hear them. After this the accusant retired its claims and even didn't try to appeal.
Re:About copyrights in Russia (Score:1)
DeCSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DeCSS (Score:2)
Skylarov, on the other hand, is a Russian citizen, coded whatever he coded on Russian soil, never attempted to distribute code in the U.S., yet was arrested by U.S. police, and charged in a U.S. court for something completely out of their jurisdiction.
Re:DeCSS (Score:1)
What's even more interesting (Score:2)
Elcomsoft's US Competitor... (Score:2, Interesting)
That doesn't change the fact that their software techinically violates the DMCA.
-bk
Re:Elcomsoft's US Competitor... (Score:2)
Anti-DMCA Candidates (Score:1)
The best way to oppose the DMCA is to give directly to viable political candidates who oppose it.
Tripp Helms is such a candidate, but he isn't a one issue candidate [helmsforcongress.com].
The secret is finding a contested race. Take a look a little deeper on the site (at the articles from Roll Call and local newspapers) and feel free to send the candidate email asking why he can win (hint: North Carolina just went through redistricting. Though Howard Coble is safe, careful hacking of the ArcInfo files put Robin Hayes, a DMCA supporter that Tripp is running against) in a new district that is majority democratic.