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.

I may fault ICANN on many things, but I don't find myself agreeing with your characterizations of ICANN.

First off, ICANN has been glacial with regard to new top level domains - on average about one per year. That is a long way short of "barely comprehensible" and certainly not even close to "infinite soon".

As for following name conventions - ICANN has been very closely following the hostname conventions and the internationalized name rules established by the IETF. Perhaps the only thing that ICANN has done that differs is that ICANN has been questioning whether single letter top level domains ought to be allocated.

As for Beckstrom - he is unknown to me, but I do fear that his "no central point of control" point may carry him too far into believing that institutions such as ICANN don't need someone firmly in charge and willing to say "no" to expansion and mission creep.

I hope he recognizes that ICANN is supposed to make sure that the domain system works and that ICANN is not to be a policeman doing trademark enforcement for the intellectual property protection industry or enforcing various governments' views about what is acceptable use of the net.

Syn flooding is very old hat - from the 1970's.

I'm talking about attacks in which the attacker connects to the server, sends the protocol hello sequence, but either does not do a TCP ack or does not provide a sufficient receive window. In both cases the sender (the TCP stack of the machine under attack) sits waiting for a TCP state change that never occurs.

Sendmail and other servers are probably vulnerable to this kind of thing. And it is not necessarily the server application itself may not be where the core of the server slowdown occurs. For example, if one were to spread this kind of attack across several different types of TCP-based protocols (SMTP/SMTPS, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), DNS(tcp version), etc then the operating system's TCP engine might start suffer from too many TCP control blocks. (And it isn't just the memory occupied - some silly implementation might do a sequential scan rather than hash lookups when matching incoming packets to TCP connection blocks.)

There is another version of this kind of attack in which rather than sending incomplete data the attacker simply is extremely lazy about sending TCP ACKs - it does so only enough to keep the connection alive. Yet another alternative is that the attacker maintains a TCP receive window that is just a tad too small to contain what the attacked machine is trying to send back.

There is a flip side of this - one can build an email server that is closely integrated with the TCP stack so that incoming mail is validated while the TCP connection is open. Then if the incoming mail is bogus the machine can go into slow ACK/small receive window mode and try to constipate the TCP stack of the spamming machine. Unfortunatly that technique was more useful before hordes of bots were used as spam amplifiers.

I see the "demanded" part, but I don't see any evidence of the "subsequently received" part.

By-the-way, when I asked "who" I was thinking that there will be some institutional thing with the keys locked away in some vault that requires multiple people to agree to open.

But those people will work at the behest of somebody and, after watching president Nixon knock off Attorney General after Attorney General during the Saturday Night Massacre, I tend to wonder about the extreme limiting cases.

Who will be the person who gets to hold the master crypto keys used to sign the root zone?

Somebody, somewhere, has to do this. Who?

Even the Whitehouse.gov website has a 1x1 pixel web bug that is in violation of their own privacy policy, not to mention 5 USC 552a.

The text of the bill does not yet seem to be visible, but the Rockefeller press release suggests that open source means code that does not limit use or distribution. One could argue that GPL2/3 imposes material limitations on use and distribution and thus would not qualify under the bill.

The GPL's position under the bill may not be helped by the use of the words "free" rather than "open source" by many deep in the GPL community.

It is not at all clear that Google is breaking no laws.

Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.

The latest King Kong flick had a note in the credits that the had licensed the image of the Empire State Building.

Architects sometimes try (and succeed) in protecting their creations.

And Google is in it for the money - they use these photos to gain more click data and to sell more ads. Google is not some innocent taking a few snapshots.

So don't jump too quickly to the conclusion that Google isn't violating some of the property owners rights.