At the risk of being facetious - I guess they will own face to face meetings, saving face, face-offs, face time.

I wonder what Janus (the god with two faces) thinks about this?

I forgot to mention that a lot of work was based on Jerry Popek's UCLA Data Secure Unix.

Data Secure Unix was amazingly slow. We could type the "date" command into the shell and when we got back from lunch it would be done telling us what time it was.

Back in the 1970's at System Development Corporation (SDC) in conjunction with groups at SRI, RSRE (in the UK), and elsewhere we were doing a lot of work on provably correct systems, including operating systems.

(The notion of "correct" was limited to a security criteria - a correct box did not need to work, only that it met the security criteria.)

We used languages such as Ina Jo and Pascal filled with lots and lots of formally shaped assertions about explicit and side effects.

This was moved down into hardware through the use of capability based hardware, such as the Plessy SS 20(?), the IBM Sword (not the newer IBM thing by the same name), the Intel 432, and other hardware that never saw the public light of day. (Those who funded these projects were not fond of the public limelight. and some of this work is not easy to find on the web.)

I did some papers about how one might build a debugging system for this kind of secure software - debugging tends to cut through security walls - but I have never seen those on the public net.

Cartoons showed this sort of thing back in the 1930s - I am sure that with a bit of digging we could find Mickey Mouse of Bugs Bunny flipping through the pages of a book.

And there are more than a few movies from the 1940s and 1950s that have their leading credits done with a visible hand turning pages.

There is nothing novel about this idea and it is something that is rather obvious even beyond the people who build computer graphical interfaces.

The net has huge tides - but unpredictable ones such as the traffic burst that happened when Michael Jackson died.

Those traffic shifts, along with the introduction of new technologies (such as IPv6, cloud computing, and smaller things like the next twitter) will create false positives.

And an attacker, knowing that there are these bursts fairly frequently and that during them there will be false triggers, will time the launch his attack so that it occurs during or shortly after one of those events.

Personally I don't think NSA has the chops to do this monitoring job. Why? Because to do a good job a lot of data needs to be correlated and NSA, if anything, is very unwilling to share its data with others who may also be watching - like ISPs and power companies or just those of us chatting on mailing lists and noticing that weird things are happening.

Photo bans can be even worse, see this one in which photos of the Miami metro were blocked by rent-a-cops:

http://carlosmiller.com/2010/07/01/we-were-permanantly-banned-from-the-miami-dade-metrorail-for-taking-photos/

Phil Karn's KA9Q package has combined amateur radio and the internet since the mid 1980's.

Suppose a corporation - let's call it "Google" - makes more than 3 improper copies. Would it lose its access to the internet in Ireland?

Jobs is partly correct and part incorrect.

When he says "All video codecs are covered by patents" he is incorrect. Patents are limited by their claims and it is completely possible that there is a codec that does not fall under any patents. One such codec, the null codec that simply turns every input bit into itself, is probably free of any patents. Of course that would be a silly codec.

Just because something is open source does not mean that it does not infringe on one or more patents. A lot of folks confuse "copyright", which protects expression, with patent, which protects ideas. Under patent even an independent expression (an implementation), even an open source one, might impinge on a patented idea.

I suspect that pretty much everybody here, including myself, is of the belief that patents have been granted that are overbroad, that live too long, and that are simply reflective of prior or obvious practice that existed at or prior to the time of the patent filing. There is much that is broken in the patent system.

I can readily believe that ogg/theora might impinge on some patent in some country. Then again it might not. And whether that patent is itself valid is a question that would have to be answered once we knew what those putative patents were.

Since proving that something like ogg/theora doesn't infringe is like proving a negative, it is pretty hard to ever say that something is provably and undeniably free of patents.

But it would, in my opinion, be a good thing to have the matter fully debated in the context of a lawsuit. It would create a forum where the H.264 people (and other patent-codec people) could duke it out with the open source codec community in a place where we could get some definitive answers that ratchet and lock into place and thus give guidance to us in the future.

If Ogg/theora (or Google's VP8) violates a patent it is better to know it now so that we can work around the patent or obtain blanket community licenses.

My own guess is that if the Apple or the MPEG people engage in something more than sabre rattling that they will find the open source community a resourceful and dedicated opponent. Most particularly, the open source community is probably a very formidable opponent on the question of whether that patent on which the claim of infringement is based is itself valid.

Apple and the MPEG people could find that at the end of the battle that their own patents have fallen.

Paragraph 31 of the complaint asserts that "Mr. Andersen is, and at all relevant times has been, a copyright owner"

Really? Has there been an assignment by the authors of all of the pieces of busybox? (Wasn't Bruce Perens the original author?)

I've seen the FSF do a good job of getting those assignments, but I don't see any claim of those here.

And without those assignments Paragraph 31 might be construed as incorrect. And without formal registrations of all of the pieces by all of the authors (or a cumulative registration supported by assignments) there could be some weakness in this complaint.

I am curious about those "regulatory requirements" that "guide the unveiling".

Anybody know what that is all about?

There are 40 applicants who paid ICANN $50,000 each in year 2000 who ICANN has strung along all these years, neither granting nor denying. These include IOD's application for .web.

ICANN needs to deal with this leftover business from 9 years ago.

Hewlett Packard did this 15+ years ago for purposes of device discovery and management.

They had a constrained abstract machine environment in some of their products that was intended to be "infected" by one of their worker programs.

Worker code would "infect" a machine, would send back reports about the machine, would serve as a contact point for management, and try to propagate itself to other machines.

We were doing formal proof of correctness of kernels back in the 1970's at System Development Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica.

"Correctness" means correct with regard to a criteria, it doesn't mean that the system didn't have flaws outside of the criteria or that it worked or worked efficiently.

I personally worked with UCLA Data Secure Unix and SRI's PSOS (Provably Secure OS) and a couple of other systems.

One cool aspect was that in those days we had some machine architectures that had hardware support for "capabilities".

Generating the correctness criteria was very, very hard.

As for Haskell - we tended to use Pascal via a Pascal to C compiler.

Modern compilers do a lot of optimization. By analogy to the Wolfram claim could compiler optimized binaries be considered subject to a copyright via the compiler? That would be bad.