disLEXia

Wednesday, 27. November 2002

American Airlines Website Disclaimer

An anonymous reader writes "American Airlines are nominated for the 'longest website enduser agreement' category with customers requiring to accept this mammoth 'I accept' dialog before using their site. The tale of the tape includes: 181 paragraphs; 3482 words; and 22411 characters. However even mentioning this is probably in violation of the text."
09:17 | #

Monday, 07. October 2002

You Will Read Our Ads, And Like It

over at myciti.com they are asking members to agree to a new set of terms before using the service, including "'..we may display advertisements and promotions of all kinds on our web site(s) and you agree not to disable any technology required or utilized to serve or display such advertising;' Has anyone else noticed pushy Terms and Conditions like this on the web? [Slashdot]
00:00 | #

Sunday, 06. October 2002

BitKeeper's EULA forbids working on the competition

BitKeeper's new EULA forbids working on the competition. Larry McVoy has told Ben Collins that he can't use BK because he works on subversion (a free revision control program). In fact, you can't use BitKeeper if you OR your company have anything to do with competing software. Free Software advocates who were upset when Linus decided to use non-Free software now have the opportunity to say 'I told you so.'
00:00 | #

Monday, 23. September 2002

Censorware Funded By The Japanese Government

sakichan writes "Most readers of /. won't know about the censorware funded by the Japanese Government. Recently I distributed tools to decrypt rating labels, not violating the license. One month after, IAJapan, which represents the Internet industry in Japan and runs the censorware project, changed the license. The new license prohibits not only reverse-engineering, but also "any activities which We consider would interfere with Our Purpose or business, by means of the use of the Software or the Services." Full story is on my web site."[Slashdot]
00:00 | #

Monday, 05. August 2002

Microsoft EULA asks for root rights -- again

Andrew Orlowski in *The Register*, London, 2 Aug 2002

An addition to Microsoft's End User Licensing Agreement has alarmed *Register* readers. Windows XP Service Pack 1 and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 contain a new condition which asks you to allow Windows to go and install future updates. "You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer," is the new bit you'll be interested in. ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26517.html [Monty Solomon via risks-digest Volume 22, Issue 19]
03:03 | #

Sunday, 30. June 2002

Windows Media Player security update EULA gives MS permission to keep- you from using "other software" on your computer

The latest from MS is buried deep in the EULA if you download the Windows Media Player security update:

"You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ('Secure Content'), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update."

"may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer" is an interesting phrase. If you remove one item from the sentence it becomes "may disable your ability to ....................... use other software on your computer".

Wonder what "other software" Bill G. might decide to not let us use at some point in the future?

See http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25435.html

Bill Tolle [Bill Tolle via risks-digest Volume 22, Issue 14]
15:56 | #

Friday, 21. September 2001

MS Front Page 2002 Licence Agreement

Slashdot http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/20/1443226 reports that the latest MS Front Page licence agreement prevents you from any anti-microsoft Web content with it:

"You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services ..."

I always click through licences these days, so I wouldn't have read it (not that I'd install Front Page anyway), but what is the world coming to! Is this legal in _your_ country?

Alistair McDonald Bacchus Consultancy www.bacchusconsultancy.com

[UCITA (RISKS-21.27,45,41) seems to make this legal in those states in which UCITA has passed (at least Virginia and Maryland). Incidentally, The Risks Forum tries to be an equal-disparager forum, but it is worth noting for the record that each issue is prepared using Gnu-emacs on Linux. PGN] [Alistair McDonald via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 68]
00:00 | #

Sunday, 18. June 1995

Prodigy paranoid reaches Tasmania?

The following recent news release from the Wireless Institute of Australia suggests that some people are getting very nervous, following the Prodigy defamation case in the USA:

The name of the gateway is just one of those ironic little twists. :-)

PACKET GATEWAY DEMANDS STAT. DEC. FROM AMATEURS

The Launceston Institute of TAFE [Technical and Further Education] in northern Tasmania, which runs an amateur radio packet-to-Internet gateway known under the acronym of LITGATE, is requiring radio amateur users to file a statutory declaration with them.

The relevant wording of the declaration says: "That I agree to take full personal responsibility for any information or data which is sent from my station, or from a station operating under my callsign.

"That I will not hold the Launceston Institute of TAFE responsible for the content of data received through the LITGATE, whether such data is of an offensive, improper, illegal or other unacceptable nature."

Basically, what the Launceston TAFE requires is that radio amateurs wanting access to LITGATE must say they will accept responsibility for all messages under their callsign, whether pirated or not, and agree they will absolve the Launceston TAFE from responsibility for any material placed on its system.

Whether such a statutory declaration is legally binding would be a matter of conjecture. (Thanks to Victorian Division President, Jim Linton VK3PC, for details on that item).

[end]

I hope somebody can convince these people of the stupidity of their decision, as they clearly don't understand some of the technical issues. For those not involved in Amateur Radio, we "hams" operate our own computer network, using our radios as the physical layer.

In some places, known as "wormholes" or "gateways", operators transport message over long distances via Internet, replacing the slower chain of short-range VHF or UHF radio links. The traffic leaves the net again at some remote point and rejoins the Amateur packet radio network.

It's important to realise that the wormholes and Internet are merely being used as a medium for conveying this traffic from one part of the Amateur packet network to another; the Amateur traffic is effectively "quarantined" from other Internet traffic because Amateur Radio licence conditions forbid non-Amateurs (e.g. other Internet users) from conveying message by Amateur Radio. So, it would be very hard to argue that LIT is a "publisher" of any Amateur packet radio traffic passing through its gateway.

I might add that it is a trivial matter to "pirate" another Radio Amateur's callsign.

-Richard Murnane (Amateur station VK2SKY) [Richard Murnane via risks-digest Volume 17, Issue 19]
02:56 | #

Tuesday, 03. March 1992

Re: RSA Laboratories announces RSAREF free cryptographic toolkit

Lawyerspeak from hell. Two questions:

>> b. The Program is to be used only in connection with a single computer.

Isn't this kind of stupid in the license of a program which is fundamentally most useful in a networking environment? Or, since licenses are free, should I get a few licenses for myself, in case I happen to want to run it on multiple machines?

>> d. You may not translate the Program into any other computer language.

Including RTL, or assembler? Darn. Can't compile it, then.

RISKS of boilerplate legalese? Marc [Marc Horowitz via risks-digest Volume 13, Issue 23]
20:17 | #

Thursday, 21. February 1991

Warranties

I, too, consider the standard shrinkwrap warranties scandalous, and definitely a RISK to the public. But it's not easy to see how to fix them. Even though the function of hardware is much better specified, computer hardware generally comes with what I call the Kodak Film Warranty: "liability limited to cost of unexposed film."

The current round of discussion has relied too much on strained analogies with automobiles, and not enough on a rational discussion of the issues. Greg Johnson and Gene Spafford separately made two important points in RISKS 11.15. Taken together, they provide a basis for considering what a sensible warrantee should promise.

1) Software isn't a "thing" that can be purchased, it is a design. As Dijkstra has said, "The true subject matter of the programmer is the design of computations." If we pursue the automobile analogy, we need to consider, not defective automobiles, but defective automobile designs (e.g., Pinto gas tanks).

2) Software doesn't wear out, and hence doesn't need "maintenance" to cope with physical wear. Any defects were present at the outset.

I think publishing provides a more natural and enlightening analogy:

- We buy media containing software, just as we buy CD's containing music or books containing words.

- There is a sharp distinction between the medium being defective (lost bits or missing pages) and the contents being defective.

- Most publishers warrantee only the medium, not the contents. However, if a CD was labeled as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the contents turn out to be 2 Live Crew, you can probably get an exchange during the first week after purchase, even if you've broken the shrink wrap.

- The medium is subject to physical wear and decay, not the contents.

- Some publishers of certain kinds of books will, for a fee, provide periodic updates to the contents of their books. Most book buyers don't pay for such services, but they are invaluable for a few. Other publishers will supply errata on request.

- There are few legal restrictions on what purchasers may do with the medium, many more about what they may do with the contents.

Not much software is sold with a specification precise enough to allow a customer to prove it "doesn't perform as specified."

Maybe someone who is outraged at the security hole that started this discussion would post the part of his vendor's specification stating that no such security holes exist? Failing that, maybe someone would post a specification that the vendors "ought to have" based their warrantees on?

After we see these specifications, we can discuss:

- What fraction of the total functionality of the operating system this component of the specification represents. We need some idea of the size of the total specification that a warrantee should be based on.

- What fraction of the outraged customers would have noticed if JUST THIS PIECE of the specification had been omitted by their software vendor. And what fraction of those who noticed would then have refused to buy it.

Until we have ANSI standards (or their equivalents) for complete operating systems and application packages, I'm afraid that the ordinary customer is at the mercy of the competence and goodwill of the software vendors. Jim H. [horning@src.dec.com (Jim Horning) via risks-digest Volume 11, Issue 16]
20:31 | #

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif