This allowed you to play Doom by calling a phone number, which connected via a VoIP trunk to an Asterisk server, which read your button presses and translated them into actions in Doom, and then streamed the result back over Twitch - trying to recreate the vibe of 80s/90s TV phone-in games! (These were a thing on Saturday morning TV in the UK.)
I never tested whether it would work with pulse-dial (i.e. rotary) phones - I think that would come down to the VoIP trunk provider!
Well that brings back memories. I recall "Ranger Bob" in Northern New York, Rochester I think, who used to host skits, and other things around cartoons. And they had a TV game where you'd yell 'POW' over and over to shoot things.
As a Canuck I'd watch US TV, and it's neat to know that the UK had such cultural similarities too.
I think the Technic Lego kits that I grew up with (that were more about how things worked rather than looking exactly like the thing) have been rebranded as "Lego Education": https://education.lego.com/en-gb/shop/secondary/
I have to confess I'm not really up to speed on the situation but, from the article...
> However, last month the watchdog said a revised deal that included selling cloud gaming rights outside Europe to Activision Blizzard’s French rival Ubisoft had addressed its concerns, indicating the tie-up would be approved.
Was this as a result of CMA's pressure, or would it have happened anyway?
(If it wouldn't have happened anyway, it doesn't feel like a climb down to me?)
Working a 4 day week isn't mentioned in the article - maybe the position you were approached for was special?
...but I would not be at all surprised if the requirement to be in the office was prorated too.
In other words, if you work 5 days a week (and that's probably the vast majority of employees, so generalising for an article like this is reasonable), you need to be in 3 days, but it you work 4 you might only need to be in 2.
...so I don't think the job you were approached for contradicts the position put forward in the article?
In previous employment (as a software engineer), I've been told to do this too - mainly around inventions we were trying to patent. The reason is slightly less nefarious than you might think - for example, someone might casually say that some aspect of their patent is "obvious" but they're saying that as an expert in their field who may have spent months or years thinking about the problem and alternative solutions. However, if it came to court, "even the inventor said this was obvious" is a pretty hard thing to respond to.
To provide my own anecdote, refusing to take any feedback except orally was how the Sacklers instructed their sales reps to handle issues and concerns about Oxycontin abuse. It was to avoid having any discoverable evidence that they received reports of abuse and did nothing about it.
I agree its usually not good to sprinkle legal landmines in your email history, but FWIW the obviousness standard for US patents is someone "skilled in the art", so an expert working in that field finding it obvious is failing the obviousness test.
OK, but you get what parent post is saying. This particular example might have a technical answer but the overall point is that emails tend to lack context and are composed for brevity / convenience.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
it sounded like the overall point was that, by avoiding retained communications, they could get away with something they otherwise would not be able to get away with, and should not be able to get away with (patenting something obvious)
what sort of context could be added which exonerates that behavior?
if the context exonerates it, why not have a policy of including context?
if it's somehow benign, but cited out of context, why not just provide the context?
and, if such exonerating context doesn't exist, wouldn't society prefer they not get away with patenting something obvious?
It's a hell of a lot easier to not have to defend a statement made out of context than it is to do so. It's the same reason you should never, ever, under any circumstances answer any questions about anything at all coming from the police without your lawyer. Even if you are completely innocent, your words can be presented in such a manner as to call into question your honesty, at which point your rebuttal will be shrouded by distrust.
The quintessential example is an alibi. If the cops accuse me of shooting someone in SF, but I was in Berkeley at the time, I might be tempted to tell them that. But then, when they produce a faulty eye-witness, who says they saw me in SF that evening, suddenly I need to discredit that witness in order to resolve my alibi. Meanwhile, if I hadn't said anything, the witness's claim that I happened to be in the same city on the same day as the murder is nowhere near enough evidence to cause me any problems.
> If the cops accuse me of shooting someone in SF, but I was in Berkeley at the time, I might be tempted to tell them that. But then, when they produce a faulty eye-witness, who says they saw me in SF that evening, suddenly I need to discredit that witness in order to resolve my alibi.
you have an equal need to disprove the claims of a witness regardless of whether you have an alibi
additionally, regardless of whether there's a witness, all you need to do is prove you were in Berkeley to remove yourself as a suspect
so the two things (alibi, witness) seem orthogonal
You don't, because the witness testimony is irrelevant on its own. Without knowing the alibi, there's no reason to think the OP being in SF is an issue at all.
in the example given, the lawyers finding ways to dismiss/challenge it would be a good thing, because the perpetrators in question are trying to patent something obvious, which society has decided we don't want them doing
so, the problem spurring such a policy is that they don't want to be implicated on the record in doing bad things - they want to get away with what society doesn't want them to get away with
In the actual example, I don't think the engineers were trying to patent something obvious - it's just not unusual for engineers to casually throw around the word "obvious" for things that are not, and it's unwise to have that written down.
in the actual example, from the information given, I think the engineers were indeed trying to patent something obvious to them, or else they wouldn't have explicitly said it was obvious to them (speaking as an engineer)
I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)
when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer
> or else they wouldn't have explicitly said it was obvious to them (speaking as an engineer)
I’m sorry but you might consider patenting your mind reading device.
It seems pretty easy to imagine engineers spending week/months/etc. solving a specific problem the solution to which might seem pretty ‘obvious’ to them when they actually manage to arrive at it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually obvious ..
> wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter
Why take the risk? And even if you end up winning at the end having to prove something like that will still result in additional costs and/or delays.
Your reasoning seems to be based on vague assumptions based on a very vaguely described situation. I find it hard to understand how can someone feel so certain about it with close to zero real context.
> Your reasoning seems to be based on vague assumptions based on a very vaguely described situation
indeed, with no detail provided, we're forced to make assumptions, or ask for detail
I chose the latter, that is why I included this in my post:
> I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)
when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer
I would like a response to that part of the post if you feel up to providing it, please
Have you seriously never met an engineer who assumed something was obvious to everyone that was actually only obvious to them? That like, top ten stereotypical engineer behavior.
I agree, and was originally going to downvote the parent comment for the same reason, but then realized I think they were replying to this more general point in the GP's post:
> "Do this only orally" is always to hide evidence from a future court discovery.
That is, I've followed enough court cases and news reports to have seen things taken egregiously out of context to agree there could be valid reasons to limit discoverable communications (though not in Tesla's specific case), especially because so few people seem to argue in good faith anymore. For example, lots of times in long email or slack threads people throw out ideas, even if they're not particularly well thought out, because that's part of what being in an open, healthy organization entails. And then I've seen these communications presented as some sort of official corporate position instead of brainstorming.
What you're describing is still fine because a solid defense is to look at someone taking something out of context and going, "would you mind continuing reading?" where someone else follows up shooting down $controversial_thing because liability etc.
The only reason not to create that record in the first place is because you weren't interested in compliance from the get go, and you were banking on the "naive first violation" defense.
Been there, seen it in action, left because of it. Ethical abandonment, no matter how it is gussied up, is ethical abandonment. There is always time for doing what you should to keep your nose clean.
I think it might have been more about how patent law works. There is a precise window defined for revealing invention to filing for it, same for selling something before patenting it (1 year).
I've seen this used preemptively - have the process ptrace itself on startup (and then do nothing with it) to make it impossible (or at least far-from-trivial) for other interested parties to ptrace it.
Yes. Or if it's using dynamic libraries and not compiled static, you can use LD_PRELOAD and overwrite ptrace() to do nothing. You don't have to patch anything then, which might be easier.
int ptrace(int request, int pid, void *addr, void *data) {
return 0;
}
Thanks, both! This was used in a static build that decrypted and checksummed its binary before execution, which ruled out naive implementations of the attacks above. I agree there are ways round these too, but I believe it was just intended to discourage amateurs rather than protect against serious hacking.
Yes, there are courses on Java and C/C++ (and also LATEX, MATLAB and Prolog!), but these are a few out of 60 courses in total, which include things like algorithms, information theory, distributed systems and optimizing compilers.
...although maybe Cambridge isn't a "standard" CS degree?
Firstly yes, Cambridge isn't "standard". It gets to assume its graduates will likely be employed because hey, Oxbridge degree, and in a STEM subject too, so it needn't care about "employability".
Both Oxford and Cambridge currently begin with an ML as first language (Cambridge chooses Ocaml), for the reasons I was taught an ML first too. These languages have sound fundamentals, their type system is good, they can handle recursion and other natural ways to express software. Also, almost none of the entrants know an ML [this will have started to change somewhat because of Rust] and so the introductory material holds everybody's attention and you don't need to spend as much time breaking bad habits.
Places which begin with just Java need to wrestle with the fact that Java has some very weird assumptions which you need to either mention but move past or else ignore and then they leave a weird hole in the knowledge of your students. (For now) All Java's user defined types live on the heap - that's very weird, do you call it out?. Some of your cohort know this language well, and so they can do your exercises without paying attention and they lose interest right at the start of your course which isn't good. But others are new to programming entirely as well as Java, for them every concept you introduce is a general idea - this isn't "How variables work in Java" for them it's "How variables work". Beware the resulting prejudices you have created.
It seems that it all hinges on what a "modified version" of Ubuntu is. Is redistributing their packages outside of a full disk image a modified version?
Don't have more sources , but my understanding is that Canonical considers that anything other than downloading an Ubuntu disk image from Canonical and hosting that on your own site constitutes a modification.
So, for example, if you take an Ubuntu image, change the default username and password, and re-export it as a new ISO, you have modified the Ubuntu image and can't redistribute it with the *buntu trademarks unless you make an agreement with Canonical. IANAL so don't take my word for it, but this is my honest understanding of what Canonical claims at least.
This does seem to be in agreement with the next item in the FAQ I linked - where they say that using an image that doesn't conform to the IPRights policy from someone else is not recommended since they can't guarantee that it will work with future updates or such - which any modification even of default settings could provoke.
Your previous post said "you can't redistribute Ubuntu binaries or sources as-is, since they contain registered trademarks of Canonical" (emphasis mine), which I think isn't quite true - there has to be some modification involved to fall foul of Ubuntu's IPR.
A few years back, I built TeleDoom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-pje0PpfU) for the TADHack hackathon (http://tadhack.com/).
This allowed you to play Doom by calling a phone number, which connected via a VoIP trunk to an Asterisk server, which read your button presses and translated them into actions in Doom, and then streamed the result back over Twitch - trying to recreate the vibe of 80s/90s TV phone-in games! (These were a thing on Saturday morning TV in the UK.)
I never tested whether it would work with pulse-dial (i.e. rotary) phones - I think that would come down to the VoIP trunk provider!
This involved a VoIP trunk connected ot