jaawn

Indeed, which is why I said a combination is the best solution. The benefits of each can be emphasized, and the issues of each can be more effectively mitigated.

I didn't say they are "unsocialized," I merely said it is more difficult for them to develop peer social skills. Let's not devolve the discussion to black & white thinking.

This sounds like a good model to start with, I hadn't heard of it before.

No, I literally meant homeschooling. Not all types of socializing are the same. The main thing home-schooled kids miss out on is being put in rooms with a diverse set of people, some of which are likely to be very different from them. The friction of dealing with people you disagree with, and the broader worldview gained from exposure to different ideas/cultures/attitudes are what I'm referring to.

Setting up playdates with the other home-schooled kids, or being on the church basketball team, etc... will involve selecting your peers, which is something we rarely get to do in "real" adult life.

That still causes issues. Co-ops are still extremely insular. It isn't an issue of being anti-social, it is an issue of being exposed to a vast and diverse set of different people with different biases, backgrounds, and abilities.

Home-schooled kids aren't permanently crippled and unable to succeed or something, but the range of people they are able to relate to and understand is diminished I think.

Non-academic groups are definitely good, but many of those often involve a great deal of like-mindedness (such as church groups, or groups sponsored by church groups). I don't expect you or other people who were home-schooled to be shut ins, but I do expect some extra difficulty in empathizing with those who are significantly different from you. (Not that it is impossible or something, just more difficult)

I have heard this about India and other countries as well. I think the original article is mainly talking about the United States though, and as others have said, the University you attend here matters very little for most jobs. The main exception is your first job after graduation.

I think probably a better solution is some sort of combination between home schooling and public school. Homeschooling alone makes it hard for children to learn peer social skills, and it makes it more difficult for them to relate later on to the majority of people who have had 13 years of primary/secondary education in a public school environment (in the US at least)

Thank you! Facebook is blocked where I work, so this gives me a chance to read this when I have some time.

If they discovered an issue in Windows, and it led to gag orders, why would they tell people to move to BitLocker (a Microsoft product)?

I would consider that "some version of the source code".

However, this is one of the reasons I disagree with Oracle on the matter. There are tools which actually can and do find issues at this low level (even if there are false positives), and running those tools can be part of many reasonable verification efforts. I think static analysis at the bytecode or assembly code level still counts as analyzing the source code, but I think it makes sense to do that in many scenarios.

The blog post doesn't make me think of license-agreements-as-a-weapon. Oracle's position is probably the strictest I've seen anyone be in favor of software IP protection. They are not adversarial, they are supremely protectionist (presumably because they think their software is so great that other people want to copy it). That protection (possibly over-protection) is the core of the disagreement, and the source of the article's tone and inherent frustration on both sides.

Oracle thinks it is self-evident that protection of their source code is paramount (i.e. as closed source as possible), other people disagree both with their priorities and the very idea of absolutely forbidding any deep analysis of any kind outside of Oracle itself. It still seems like a debate about the degree to which the source code is "closed." For Oracle, it is absolutely closed, while many of their competitors are more lenient (i.e. slightly less "closed".)

To be clear, I think Oracle is being silly with their over-sanitized and idealistic views regarding their intellectual property. The other companies you mentioned (Microsoft et al) have much more reasonable approaches and agreements.

This isn't entirely accurate. There are restrictions on the legality of decompilation in Europe. The main one being that "...decompilation must be necessary to achieve interoperability with the target program or other programs. Interoperability information should therefore not be readily available, such as through manuals or API documentation."

So, decompilation in order to check for security vulnerabilities or to modify the function of the software for non-interoperability reasons do not appear to be covered.

disclaimer: I don't live in Europe and am not familiar with the most up-to-date software laws there. This is from the following source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler#Legality

I disagree. The author implies several times that the main issue, and the reason for the ban on reverse engineering in the agreement, is protection of intellectual property (source code). People may do other types of vulnerability testing, but the piece that Oracle is concerned about is trying to discover their source code (for example, by using static analysis tools...which analyze some version of source code).

What you just described agrees with my definition. The ultimate goal of both teams was to end up with usable source code that is likely to be close or identical to the original used to create the binary. There is a slight difference in the IBM BIOS project in that, I think the goal was to create code which could not be claimed to infringe on the patents/copyrights of IBM. That last bit is an extension of reverse engineering, i.e. they reverse-engineered the binary (which took both decompilation and analysis) in order to create code which matched the same specification and wasn't outright "copied".

See the previous reply I made for links to discussion of what is usually meant by (software) "reverse engineering." But, like I said before, there probably is no "universally correct" definition, I am only describing it so that my previous comments can be understood fully.

It is totally fine to be frustrated by humans being stupid, but some humans really do have less cognitive abilities than others. In at least some of those cases it isn't their fault necessarily.

So, I'm just making the point that frustration makes sense, but hate probably doesn't. They certainly aren't intending to be stupid, but it is frustrating that we can't show them the error of their reasoning sometimes.

People have different understandings of words, so I'm not claiming there is one, universal meaning of "software reverse engineering." However, here is the definition some researchers came up with: "Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a subject system to create representations of the system at a higher level of abstraction. It can also be seen as "going backwards through the development cycle." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Reverse_en... , original publication: http://win.ua.ac.be/~lore/Research/Chikofsky1990-Taxonomy.pd... )

edit: I just wanted to explain to you which definition I was using earlier, so that you could understand what I meant better.

Why should you be angry? They are just being stupid. Being stupid is something humans do naturally. Choosing to rely on someone who is verifiably stupid (in your opinion) is significantly worse, I think, than the original stupidity.

edit: And by the way, the very first time you are forbidden from patching a bucket you could patch yourself should be the red flag that tells you to use different buckets. Move on to better things and encourage others to do so too.

I think there may be a language barrier here. So, this should clear it up:

The only definition of "reverse engineering software" that I use is this -- "Using tools and deep binary analysis to take a compiled binary, and convert it back to source code as close to the original as possible".

It is a very specific definition. I do not mean general "analysis" or vulnerability testing or input manipulation, etc... only attempting to discover source code.

I think that is a very reasonable course of action, and that is my point. Rather than complain about the no-reverse-engineering thing, you really should just move everything you can off of Oracle systems if you disagree with them on this.

Oh yes, I agree. That is why I think it makes sense to tell everyone you can about the issue. However, there is only so much anyone can do about it, and technically it isn't Oracle's fault that people won't listen, only the bugs/vulnerabilities in their products.

A crude example: Imagine you're a janitor. Your company only supplies you with buckets from Leaky Bucket, Inc. Their buckets always leak, creating more messes that you have to clean up. Sure, Leaky Bucket, Inc. needs to fix their bucket processes, but I'd be more angry at the company for continuing to use buckets from a shoddy manufacturer.

If you're forced to use their software, and you disagree with their strong closed-source stance, you should share your views with whoever is doing the "forcing" (your employer?). If they don't listen, it's on them.

Oracle has a very specific, clear opinion on the matter and it is valid to have that opinion. I don't agree with them, but I respect that we're allowed to disagree. Instead of hating them, I just don't use any of their stuff if I can help it (except Java).

There's no need to be filled with hate over it. Change what you can change and don't worry about the rest.

Since Oracle has made it clear that they do not want to collaborate with third parties on their code, the most reasonable responses would be either 1) trust them and follow their agreement or 2) don't trust them and use a different solution (probably something open source or based on open source)

Reverse engineering software is completely different from penetration testing, and it is the reverse engineering bit that Oracle has an issue with. They mostly just don't want anyone/everyone trying to recreate their source code because of copyright/intellectual property concerns (note: I do not agree with those, but that is Oracle's stance).

It doesn't make sense for it to be illegal to forbid reverse engineering in a license agreement, where is that the case? If that is the legal environment anywhere, it would make more sense to just forbid closed source software. It would save a ton of time and effort and achieve the same goal.

And by the way, it has everything to do with open source. If the code was open, you wouldn't need to reverse engineer it. Every security analyst could just review the code directly and search for vulnerabilities. The whole disagreement stems from Oracle (and the author) deciding that they want protected, closed source because they view it as intellectual property, while some of their customers feel they can't depend on that software unless they verify it themselves. Well...you can't fully verify closed source software yourself.

It is really a very simple and fundamental disagreement on this one topic that creates the whole issue. It is completely valid to disagree with Oracle on this, and to tell Oracle you disagree with them. However, rather than violating their agreement, it would make more sense to decide to use an open source solution instead.

That's a fair point, but it is a blog post, which implies that the tone will be more personal and informal. The author stated a few times that these were her personal views. I took it more as frustrated rather than condescending. I don't agree with what she said, but I recognize that the disagreement stems from one fundamental thing: open source vs. closed source.

I don't really see how a lot of the responses here match with the original blog post. People seem to be airing a lot of long-standing grievances about Oracle rather than responding to the specific post on its own. Viewed on its own, the post can basically be summarized as "Please stop treating our products like they are open source. They're not, and it is against the license agreement to reverse engineer our stuff to find the source code."

A lot of people think open source software is a much better methodology than proprietary, highly-protected source code. That's fine, there are a lot of good arguments there. However, it doesn't make sense to throw a bunch of other, barely related insults at a company when really, all you're upset about is that their code is not open source. Criticize that...that is what you're upset about (at least so far as this specific blog post is concerned)

This is a very reasonable point. By the same logic, there should not be a single European action taken against Google either. The people behind all of the political resistance to Google in EU countries seem to all be from, or tied to, EU corporations who want to take some of the market from Google by force. They are trying to push through regulations that are good for their company with little regard to what is good for the people of all the different EU nations.

I have seen several comments that basically say "Google puts customers first, but this goes against the EU's strong preference to protect local workers."

It is not "customers over workers" it is "customers over local corporations with less developed products". Google has offices in 40 different countries (https://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/). Workers could easily go work for Google without moving to America...and Google offers some of the best, most competitive career prospects of any company. Until this changes, there is no reason to presume that Google's behavior in Europe is somehow hurting "workers."

Sure, if Google was providing inferior products, and paying its workers lower-than-market salaries and abusing its dominance to keep better products out of the market, then all of this fuss would make sense. Fear of this happening at some point is not, in my opinion, a good justification for such heavy resistance to Google's activities.

We shouldn't confuse the interests of local (i.e. European) corporations with the interests of the people. It being harder for a Danish company, for example, to enter the online search, mapping, or shopping market doesn't mean it is harder for Danish people to work in online search, mapping, or shopping. It also does not mean it is harder for Danish people use high-quality products in these industries. I don't see how Google's actions so far constitute "abuse of dominance" even if you take a protection-of-workers stance...only if you take a "protection of the local corporate CEO" stance.

And those systems all have humans operating in conjunction with them, none of those things are (currently) autonomous. The success thus far of life-critical code usually depends partially on the assistance of humans.

I agree with this letter, and I'm glad it was created.

Some commenters are skeptical that we can realistically ban fully automated weapons, but I disagree. A practical approach could be to ban them, and invest in R&D on effective counter measures. That way, the vast majority of nations will not pursue them, and in the case that someone does, we'll have a way to remove the threat.

The bubble is clearly visible here: http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SHSZ300:IND (change time frame to 5Y)

Based on my completely non-expert analysis, it looks like the index is likely to drop down to around 2,800-3,000 or lower...unless there is some realistic explanation for an index which was on a slight downward, long-term trend to suddenly jump up by 130% in ~9 months.