JetBrains new user license removes perpetual license

When installing a 2025 upgrade to a JetBrains product you have to accept a new user agreement.

 Biggest change I see is the removal of the right to use an old product indefinitely. 

This is effectively moving the products from a buy and use to a subscription model. Quite a big change to force without any explanation.

more...

Sales conditions: see website.

Typically legal sales conditions are printed on offers and invoices (what happens if the invoice is payed to late, which courts are competent in case of disputes...).
A judgment by the commercial court of Oudenaarde (december 26th, 2011) has decided that a reference to the conditions on the website is sufficient to be legally valid in Belgium.
I wonder if the judge that issued this ruling is sufficiently acquainted with IT.
After all the supplier can change the conditions on the websiteany time, without notification and without leaving a dependable historical change track.
There is no independant party that can verify today what the conditions on the website were at the time the reference was communicated.

IT Users have to explictly agree on conditions

Applications that present "I agree" boxes that are already checked will not have any legal value in the latest draft report of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation act.
Users have to take an explicit action to express their agreement.
Looks like a good idea to me.
Another important element in the act is The right to be forgotten. This allows users to remove content they put online earlier.

More elements in the draft...

Amazon: The e-book library

Amazon advertizes itself as a book shop. That's correct for hard copies.
For e-books it's different: you can only borrow them.
Amazon is an e-book library.
And they can take back your books as they see fit.
Without warning, without explanation, without an independent judge.
Here's the story about a customer who had her kindle e-reader books removed,
because Amazon linked her account to another account that was closed for abuse of policy.
The customer asked:

1. How my account is linked to the blocked account
2. The name/id of the related blocked account
3. What policy that was violated

She never got an answer.

SABAM wants 3% of ISP subscriptions

After getting money out of children creches, computer hard disk, taxi's, company phone waiting tunes and the like, Belgium's author rights association SABAM is now attacking ISP's. They want their fair share of the pie, and ask for 3.4% of your ISP subscription, because it provides access to coyprighted work.
SABAM says this does not mean that the sites that distribute coyrighted material (e.g. YouTube) do not have to pay for the copyright anymore (double pay!).
SABAM does not want to be seen as the bad guy, and expresses the hope ISP's will not charge end users for the money they ask.

Patent war II

Earlier we reported on different types of patent law suits between Microsoft and Motorola.
Here's a global overview of lawsuits in the mobile world from Design Language News, a fine site specializing in visualizing data.

PROTECT IP: new US website blocking bill

The PROTECT IP act, a new US law proposal, will greatly extend last year's COICA internet censorship proposal:

• PROTECT IP is targeted at infringement of rights, so it is targeted at distribution of copyrighted material and counterfeited articles.
• As such there does not seem to be a problem with that, but it remains to be seen how easily this can be stretched. It might be sufficient to find one non compliant item on a site to take action against the entire site. In the past single clips have caused actions against the entire YouTube site.
• PROTECT IP will no longer try to seize domain names, instead it will target intermediate, servicing sites.
• This makes it easier to target sites outside the US.
• Plaintiffs can by simple court order, take direct against revenue sources for these sites (payment clearing and advertisers).
• The site does not have to be notified to be able to defend itself.
• The site is notified when action is taken against them starts, if they have an address in the US.
• There is a procedure to fight the order afterwards.
• If plaintiff completes a procedure at the Department Of Justice that declares that a site is infringing rights, it can also order the site to be removed from search engine results and ISP hosting.
• This is a tactic that is copied from the Great Chinese Firewall.
• PROTECT IP encourages intermediate sites to do self censorship. If Google or Visa stop doing business with a site because they think it is not kosher, they are protected by law
• We have seen such actions by payment providers against WikiLeaks, without any legal order to do so.
• Arbitrary business boycotts will now be legal.
  

Full text and petition against the act.

Most teams aren't teams at all but merely collections of individual relations with the boss. Each individual vying with the other for power, prestige and position

Douglas McGregor

The system being produced will tend to have a structure that mirrors the structure of the group that is producing it. One should take advantage of this fact and then deliberatly design the group structure so as to achieve the desired system structure.

Conway's law

Wikileaks: free speech to the test

As much as I understand that the US wants to protect its confidential information, incidents like these are a good test for democratic values. After all there's a lot of criticism on China. But just how much better are other regimes?

• Wikileaks got bumped from US Amazon cloud servers. A good indication of inherent risks of control one has when running cloud based services.
• Wikileaks was also removed from French servers. Because France does not want confidential diplomatic information of other coutnries to be available. I doubt that France is applying this as a general rule to all diplomatic information from all countires.
• Wikileaks was removed from DNS provider EveryDNS, because it breached the terms of contract. The ongoing denial of service attacks against the site were compromising the service for other clients. Instead of giving good service and protection and going after the attackers, the service provider says the customer is in error? Fun: now botnets can remove all EveryDNS customers by picking them as a DOS target.
• Paypal (a subsidiary of US based eBay) blocks donations for WikiLeaks because they do not transfer money for criminal activities. The strange thing about these actions by US companies is that they are based on private company regulations rather than public law.

The national cloud

Google has launched Google Apps for Government. It is a variant of its cloud application suite (mail, calendar, docs, ...) that is guaranteed to store its data in the US. Similar services for other countries may follow. It is clear that one country does not want to store its data in another country for security reasons.
It is interesting to see if this service will also come to Google App Engine and commercial applications.
It may remove an important legal hurdle: the country where an application's are stored will determine the laws that will be applied to them and under which jurisdiction actions on your data can be ordered.
Note that although Google guarantees where your data are stored, it does not guarantee where your application runs.

Applying UML and patterns: Quotes

Le temps est un gran professeur,
mais malheureusement il tue tous ses élèves.

Hector Berlioz

You should use iterative development only on projects you want to succeed.

Martin Fowler

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

Voltaire

Fast, cheap, good: choose any two.

In theory, there’s no difference between practice and theory.
But, in practice, there is.

Jan van de Snepscheut

Hardware, n: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.

0x2B | ~0x2B

Hamlet

Je n’aime pas ce mot bombe.
Ce n’est pas une bombe mais simplement un appareil qui explose.

Jacques Le Blanc, French ambassador to New Zealand, on France's nuclear testing

Cats are smarter than dogs.
You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through the snow.

Jeff Valdez

To iterare is human,
to recurse divine.

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

Rich Kulawiec

Luck is the residue of design.

Branch Rickey

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

George Bernard Shaw

Error, no keyboard – Press F1 to continue

early PC BIOS message

If you were plowing a field,
which would you rather use?
Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

Seymour Cray

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, us by accident.
That’s where we come in;
we’re computer professionals.
We cause accidents.

Nathaniel Borenstein

internet liability

• A German court ruled someone can be liable if his WIFI connection is unprotected and that connection is used for illegal acts.


• Many end users do not understand a thing about internet security, it seams a bit harsh to punish them for that.
• It is like jailing someone because he left his car open and it was stolen to rob a bank.
• A US court ruled that if you are mailing a link to a website, you are liable for the contents of the page it links to.


• This is similar to an earlier ruling on links to illegal downloads.
• Liability for actual text is a different case all together. 

Stopkinderporno.com blocked

Because kinderporno.com published information that is a violation of privacy regulations, the Belgian department of justice ordered the site to be blocked by Belgian providers.
Internet had the promise of guaranteeing free speech.
Governments that do not allow free speech (China, Iran...) selectively block access to internet sites abroad.
A site is blocked now for a reason on which a majority agrees (74% on an objective site like destandaard.be).
But this is a dangerous precedent for blocking free speech whenever the law(yers) feel like it.
They should fight the sites themselves with legal means, instead of breaking internet communication. Even if that battle is hard.