Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 6:36 UTC (Sat) by cas (guest, #52554)
In reply to: Playing the game automatically concedes defeat by mjg59
Parent article: Signing ELF binaries

Appeal to Authority is a very popular logical fallacy, and you manage to improve upon it by adding the marvellous twist of second-hand, indirect authority.

Well done!

BTW, I note that you didn't comment on my "to get a key signed by MS you have to *explicitly* accept their terms and conditions" paragraph. I take it you have no glib logical fallacy at hand to distract from that so settled on the Ignore It And It Might Go Away technique?

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 6:45 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (4 responses)

Actually knowing something about what you are talking about isn't a logical fallacy "appeal to authority", it's actually knowing something about what you are talking about.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 8:29 UTC (Sat) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link] (3 responses)

Entirely true. Also irrelevant. mj59 doesn't have any more valid an opinion about legal matters than I do.

I expect that any lawyers he has spoken to about secureboot would have been Redhat's lawyers, and their angle on the problem would have been entirely on the topic of Redhat's corporate needs, and how to solve the problem for RH in the most efficiently pragmatic way possible.

Pragmatism doesn't always conflict with idealism but this is one case where it definitely does.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 11:48 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Also, short-term pragmatism can conflict with long-term pragmatism. Idealism may sometimes be long-term pragmatism.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:18 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Red Hat has not always acted only for its own purposes. Take the patent settling cases where Red Hat got all of FOSS a license for the patents in question. So they do have a record for going beyond the (typical) call of duty.

That said, it would be nice to have some clarification of what they think the fallout of Microsoft revoking a Linux key (both for "but h4x" and "because market share[holders]" scenarios) would likely be.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:38 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

I can't speak for Red Hat, but the expected outcome of a revoked signature due to security issues is a staged update of new binaries followed by a blacklist update, with the only user-visible inconvenience being that old media will stop working. The expected outcome of a revoked signature due to any other issue is a series of lawsuits.

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 6:52 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course, we should ignore informed discussion in favour of handwaving because the alternative might possibly be something that could be construed as falling under something in Wikipedia's List Of Logical Fallacies. Good point. Let's move on to arguing about whether heliocentrism is relevant in modern life, because how many of us have actually observed the Earth's motion directly?

"to get a key signed by MS you have to *explicitly* accept their terms and conditions"

Have you read those terms and conditions? Have you consulted a lawyer to determine precisely which rights you're giving up? Or are you just asserting that they're unreasonable without any justification at all?

Playing the game automatically concedes defeat

Posted Jan 26, 2013 8:18 UTC (Sat) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link]

How exciting, another transparent attempt to evade any actual consideration of the issue - far easier to attempt to arrograntly dismiss it with a wikipedia slur. Too bad, i'm not so easily distracted with irrelevance.

My point is that it is entirely unreasonable to have to beg Microsoft's permission to run anything. So unreasonable that the only reasonable response is to refuse to have anything to do with it.

By agreeing to *ANY* conditions, no matter how benign or light-weight they might be, you are conceding that Microsoft does indeed have a right to grant or deny such permission.

You mean well and have good intentions, but you are enabling Microsoft in their aim to be gatekeeper of what software is permitted to execute. Aside from the old adage about the road to hell, the trouble with your work is that it is short-sighted and short-term pragmatism (you have what appears to be a technical problem and want to solve it now) with no regard for the long-term consequences. One day you will realise exactly what you have enabled and come to bitterly regret it. Unfortunately, you won't be the only one to suffer the consequences.