Unfortunately, it seems the court's decision with regard to the retroactive immunity is correct. The legal basis to challenge the new law simply does not exist. The blame should rest on Congress for passing such a law.

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress." - Mark Twain

Different tools for different goals.

When you need to recreate the functionality of an existing application in a new application, as would be the case if you wanted to create a Facebook competitor, you may want the source code of the existing application.

When you want to integrate your new application with one that already exists, as would be the case if you are creating a complementary or dependent project, you want SDKs/APIs.

Developers do frequently use the APIs published for toolkits (jQuery, for example) and often load those toolkits from a third-party hosting service (like Google's, for example). This does create a dependency that would need to be updated if the hosting service made an incompatible change or discontinued their service, and that is something that developers need to keep in mind.

When developers tie into the APIs of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it would usually do them no good to have access to the source code, as they are usually trying to tie into those existing platforms to connect with their user bases. If the developer chooses to make their application dependent upon a third-party API, that is a strategic decision and the committment is theirs to make. It makes sense if the purpose of the application is dependent upon the third-party platform.

As for published APIs interfering with open source development, I think it is possible that developers may choose to use proprietary products with published APIs rather than implement an open source solution. An example might be a developer choosing to use Google Charts rather than integrating gnuplot into their project. This might have some impact on the momentum of some open source projects, but the examples given in the summary are way off. A developer choosing to use an API published by Facebook for Facebook integration is not taking anything away from open source software.

Yeah... you killed it.

That's the way it used to be. You must be new here.

I am offended by all pictures containing mirrors. I demand that all social networks immediately terminate all profiles featuring photographs with mirrors in them! Or displaying their captive animals they call "pets" (how abusive!) Or holding alcohol - don't they have any respect for the alcoholics they're teasing?! Then there are those photos of people grappling others. They call it hugging and try to make it look all chummy, but I can see their unbridled violence! While they're at it, they can get rid of all of those profiles with pictures of people baring their teeth - there are so many of those! There are also many profiles with pictures that are straining to look at - out of focus, poorly lit or colored, or otherwise difficult to look at. It is so very offensive for people to post such pictures. I'm sure if they remove all of these offending profiles, the social networks would be better, happier places!

Oh, that's simple: it's all a joke... a really bad joke.

...with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the farming and cities!

I thought the first rule of a climate crisis was to not talk about the climate crisis. At least that's the impression I get.

I refer (in jest) to patenting the methods of parsing the hash table, not to the practice of parsing the hash table (which could be seen as an obvious necessity of handling POST data.) This is all just pedantry, however. My point was simply to make fun of the popular issue of software patents by pointing to a potential benefit that would have actually been a cure worse than the disease.

...that is, they must implement a new collision resolution strategy that avoids the problem described in the advisory.

There are also other ways of mitigating this problem in web servers without addressing the root problem.

They don't necessarily have to replace a hash function. They have to implement collision resolution.

That's also giving Microsoft too much credit. They were informed of the vulnerability ("responsible disclosure") last month.

That the DDoS exists is yesterday's news (nevermind that it didn't make the Slashdot front page.) The point of this post is that Microsoft is issuing an out-of-band update. A security-aware and in-touch admin should have already learned of the n.runs advisory yesterday. If they were really on top of things, they may have been aware of the potential danger as far back as 2003.

See, everyone here complains that patents are always causing trouble, forcing each developer to do something a little differently to avoid infringing on another patent. If the techniques used for parsing the hash tables had been patented, forcing each server developer to come up with their own unique implementation that didn't mimic the techniques of the others, then this whole situation might only have impacted one or two server technologies. Now, all of these different server technologies using similar implementations are all affected by this single type of attack. With all of the diversity that patents enforce, they could have prevented a single attack like this from affecting so many implementations at once!

[/sarcasm]

Apple and the Italian government deserve each other.