Microsoft use open source code, but they only use code with licences that do not have a viral clause. They use some of my open source code in IE. Microsoft also publish open source code, but not under viral licenses. RMS is very definite about his intention to contaminate proprietary code with his own.

Now before folk go off into a slashweenie froth over this. I know RMS, i have argued this point with him. And he is very very clear about his intent that the gpl be viral. He makes no secret at all about this. Go and talk to him if you do not believe me. But dont assume that because the description of his idea sounds nutty that it must be false. Again, you need to talk to him and know him.

We expressly rejected the gpl for licensing the CERN web code because we did not want the ideological baggage. The code was merely a tool to spread the web. Well ok not for Tim, he hadvcode attachment, but not to owning it. We did make a big mistake in making the code public domain, but there was not the selection of licenses we have today. BSD would have been a better choice.

So dont blame Mr softy for taking RMS seriously. There probably isnt a legal risk there. But Gates is merely taking RMS seriously.

they have gone beyond protecting wikileaks and some are looking to replace them and set all information and secrets free.

Both groups belong in jail in my view.

That is why anonymous should be behind bars and so should anyone from Themis who has broken the law as proposed in this document.

the attacks proposed were against wikileaks, not just anonymous. There is no evidence wikileaks has broken us law. So this is not even vigilantism, it is a criminal attack.

The group proposed using disinformation tactics. So why believe their word now? Doing so without question seems naive.

I am at RSA, I was part of a long conversation with Art Coviello last night and he did not mention it. It his his confernce and it is a security conference. If the ckaim was true and had been reported i would have expected it to be mentined.

I think it rather more likely that they did not have the courage to show their faces.

They have been punked for a start. That is an embarrassment. But what would make them pariahs was the proposal to engage in criminal attacks and political misinformation. Many of us are ex law enforcement or ex intelligence. Others work closely with them. You cant do that if you are committing criminal acts yourself.

If i thought there was a chance he might show his face i would have gone to his session earlier. But that was never likely.

Last year he was talking about hacking online games and club penguin.

No, all they want is to be told that they are absolutely right about everything and that they have a complete and infallible system of the world that only morons and the corrupt could possibly disagree with.

So really no different from Communists, Fascists, Moonies, and other cultists.

And the fact that the Tea Partiers talk about freedom all the time means precisely nothing. Karl Marx talked about freedom. So did Lenion, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and pretty much every other demagogue. And before he became Chancellor, most Germans regarded Hitler with pretty much the same disdain as Glenn Beck is considered.

When people talk about 'second amendment solutions' or the 'ammo box', what they are talking about is the murder of their political opponents. I don't draw comparisons with fascists and Stalinists lightly, but talking about murder of opponents crosses that line completely.

Whether or not Loughner's action in Arizona was a consequence of Palin and Beck's rhetoric can never be proved or disproved. But what is beyond dispute is that 1) that type of rhetoric can lead people to murder, 2) there is ample evidence that Palin in particular intended to use that rhetoric in order to intimidate her opponents, 3) no member of the Republican party leadership had the courage or the principles to condemn the rhetoric when it was being used.

So no, I don't think that the consequence of a tea party government would be less regulation or government interference. The people simply don't have the knowledge or experience to form a coherent policy, let alone implement one. What would result would be an increase in regulations that protect the interests of narrow cliques that can manipulate the party and a decrease in regulation that serves the public interest.

People can be totally self-deluding. Back in the 19th century the power elites believed that 'rain follows the plough' despite ample scientific evidence to the contrary. Now they want to believe that free markets are automatically self regulating and that climate change is not occurring.

If I had seen that installation I would not have got as far as working out that it was a router. A plastic bag with wires coming out of it? That would be an immediate call to 911 to report a suspicious device even if it wasn't stuck on top of a gas manifold.

If I had gone as far as to work out it was a router, I would have called the gas board and told them that there was a serious incendiary risk.

After a prosecution that seemed like it quite likely had more to do with Qwest having refused to participate in the Bush administration criminal wiretap program than what he was convicted of.

Who else has nuclear missile capability?

The UK developed their own bomb but gave up on missile delivery. Israel stole their technology from the US. The Soviets and Chinese certainly stole some stuff but had the resources to build missiles regardless. It took the Soviets another decade to build a missile after getting the bomb and they didn't start building a real stockpile until the Kennedy era.

Pakistan and India have the bomb but have not demonstrated the ability to miniaturize it to fit on a delivery system. North Korea's delivery system tests have failed repeatedly.

But Stuxnet was not a typical exploit. It went into areas that had really not been attacked before.

People do attack those Open Source targets. Widely used and reviewed Open Source code is rather less likely to be of help than looking at proprietary code that very few people have seen.

Mitnick certainly went to great lengths to obtain source codes so it is pretty clear that they have a value in that community. Even if the value is to have something that other people do not.

You mean like the Shanghai Cooperation Treaty?

China has been allied with Iran for decades.

It was the best outcome that was available given the circumstances, but it was a national disaster even so.

That is one reason why people like David Brooder show themselves to be senile fools when they advocate starting a war to cure the economy. The US economy only benefitted from WWII due to a massive increase on the input side of the economy: married women started to do paid work.

If you look at every other war that the US has been involved with the result has been a massive increase in debt.

Thats not quite accurate

Large parts of the Iraqi army deserted, but the resistance did not start till much later. The deserters were back at their posts shortly after the shooting finished, they wanted the victor to make good on their promise to pay them.

It was the disbanding of the Iraqi army that was the real tipping point. The soldiers were quite happy working for a different government up to the point where they all lost their jobs.

The original US plan was to go in, decapitate the government and install Ahmed Chalabai, a convicted bank fraudster who led the Iranian backed Iraqi opposition movement. He was pointed out to me as an Iranian agent in the mid 90s, long before the invasion. At the time he was peddling a bogus claim that Iraq had conducted an atomic test.

An actual invasion of Iran would face two major problems: Russia and China. Neither would allow the US to invade a country that provides it with critical resources.

There was a substantial information warfare campaign designed to persuade the Iraqi generals to defect in return for certain guarantees. A significant number did so and there was considerably less fighting than expected.

That strategy worked in Iraq because Saddam was in a much weaker situation politically. The generals were willing to defect because they were not particularly eager to fight for Saddam. A regime change in which they maintained their position and status would suit them rather well.

It is much less likely that the same strategy would work a second time, not least because the Iranians are prepared for it but more importantly because the US went on to break each and every one of the guarantees that they had given to the Iraqi generals. Instead of allowing them to keep their positions, the US abolished the Iraqi army and threw most of the defecting generals in jail. Instead of effecting a quick, relatively bloodless coup, the US created a civil war which claimed the lives of between half a million and a million Iraqis.

It is very clear that a US attack on Iran is not going to be met with support from any segment of the population. It would force the pro-democracy forces to rally behind the regime, they would not attempt to topple it.

The pro-democracy demonstrations occurred in the wake of Obama's presidency because he had ended the policy of confrontation with Iran and made it possible for Iranians to oppose the regime without being disloyal to their country while it was under attack. Compare and contrast the success of that approach with that of Bush and the 'axis of evil' speech promising an imminent attack.