Kill MS, again, but sideways

Thomas Shaddack shaddack at ns.arachne.cz
Tue Apr 15 14:30:57 PDT 2003


On 14 Apr 2003, Tom Veil wrote:
> If I want to keep secret the details of something I make, it is my right
> to do so.

Then I have the right to appropriately dislike you, and to
reverse-engineer the "product", which is so shoddy that you are ashamed of
documenting its internals, and to publish it.

I am currently HEAVILY pissed, as we built our servers on ASUS
motherboards (otherwise pretty good) with AS99127F chips for health
monitoring. We run Linux on them. When I load the appropriate drivers to
activate the onboard sensor chip, the speaker starts beeping an alarm and
won't stop until hardware reset. So I either have to sacrifice the sensors
(which can be potentially fatal, one of my servers had problems (weird
crashes) because of cooling fan, and because of no sensors support (old
board) it took me several crashes to identify the pattern (it was a
remote, unattended machine)), or I have to unplug the internal squeaker,
which makes it difficult to assess boot-time problems. I met MANY other
problems of this kind.

> Don't like it? Don't fucking buy it.

THERE IS NO CHOICE!

Couple months ago we were shopping for a PABX. The only possibilities
available were Siemens, Nortel, and Bosch. No one of them supplied any
service-level documentation, all three wanted to lock us into an expensive
service contract. We have to wait for hours in case of every little
hiccup, instead of me taking a look at the box and giving it the right
commands, because I DON'T KNOW THE FUCKING COMMANDS AND NOBODY TELLS ME
WHAT THEY ARE!!!

There is of course the choice of doing without the phones, but you can't
run a bigger office without telephones. And the open-source PABX
constructions that are out there aren't mature enough for practical use
yet :(((

And if there is a choice, tell me what brand of a cellphone comes with
full docs, what TV comes with full docs (see lower), what hard drive comes
with full docs (which is especially painful as it makes problems with
secure data overwriting).

> Any communist maggots that murder, or attempt to murder people for merely
> keeping secret the details of the stuff they make and sell should be bound,
> gagged, tortured, then taken out back to have their skulls crushed with a
> sledgehammer until their brains start oozing out their ears.

...and after you kill off all the technicians with a peeve against the
money-hungry corporations (read: everyone who ever tried to do some real
work on a budget), you will pay through your nose for every hiccup, and
not only in money, but also in time loss and in being whined at for not
being able to do something immediately.

I could talk for long about "intellectual property", my pet peeve, but one
paragraph will do. There was no such concept for millenia. Imagine how it
could slow down the progress if eg. alphabet or calculus would be
someone's "property", and the someone would then aggressively enforce the
royalties or "licence conditions". How many people would think reading is
worth of the added expenses? (...and how many would just "steal" the
knowledge without paying? Or maybe decide to "opt out" - the literacy
results of American students are going down... not even talking about
calculating with just a pencil and paper. *sigh*) Besides, the proceedings
rarely go to the inventors themselves - or did you expect that the
inventor of eg.  LED got rich? In way too many cases the "intellectual
property" is a yoke to keep the market share, to deny others the access
there, to slow down the others when the "owner" can't cope by fair play.
Sorry, this isn't the kind of game I want to play. Not by these rules.

I don't even talk about the insecurity factor for the public
infrastructure.  The documentation will leak sooner or later, or the
crucial parts will be acquired and reverse-engineered, and someone who
will want to cause damage will get ahold of the information. A determined
attacker has a choice where he wants to invest the effort, but a
determined defender has no other choice than to be intimately familiar
with ALL parts of their infrastructure - and you can't sanely expect to be
able to reverse-engineer every byte of every firmware of every your
critical device, nor can you expect the vendors to plug all the holes,
especially in older devices. (Especially not in the pace the devices get
obsolete, the artificially fueled march towards unreliability, towards the
promises of better results in next version.  After all, what's better
force to upgrade than a bug in your old device, which you can't repair
because of no docs, and which the vendor won't repair because their
interest is to make you buy something new? With the only thing you can be
confident about being the increasing shoddiness of new electronics, as the
time-to-market takes precedence over testing and debugging! *spit* Phooey!
And then you come and have the balls to defend the "right" of the vendors
to not reveal how crappy and unfinished is what they dare to call a
"product".)

Back during the Communism there was a small shop here, where it was
possible to buy schematics and docs for all the consumer devices
manufactured by Tesla, local manufacturer. Their quality was widely
underestimated (or, more accurately, the quality of the Western crap was
overestimated, as not enough people opened the imported equipment to make
the public aware about the cheap material of the circuitboards, usage of
plastic levers and gearwheels where metal would be more suitable, and
mistaking design for quality). With available documentation the followup
came, with hobbyists devising add-ons, repairs, and tweaks, and publishing
them in a widely read magazine. (If Tesla would follow and incorporate the
tweaks into newer submodels, then they could get much better quality. But,
as Communist way of leading the factories was more about careerism and
politics than about technology, it didn't happen. On the other hand,
capitalism is more about money than about technology, so no big difference
either. *sigh*) Now, the users are actively discouraged from understanding
the internals of their appliances, maybe in order to keep the advertising
effective in peddling trivial add-ons (eg, home networking) as
groundbreaking features.

There is an expression to characterize the techno-economical system we're
heading into: CRAPITALISM!


The case of Blackboard security, which recently flashed through Politech
(thanks, Declan!), nicely illustrates the situation - technical
shortcomings addressed by lawyers.

Vendors, who keep crucial informations away from the customers, should be
shot. The ones, who try to sue the reverse engineers, should be boiled in
oil before being shot.





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