On the other hand, it seems to me that MAPS went overboard in claiming that the failure to use double opt-in creates the status of spam that should be blocked. Who uses double opt-in? It definitely sounds like they're applying a double standard to Harris, and acting out some grudge against the company.
Double opt-in is a name spammers use to refer to the practice of requiring a confirmationg e-mail to confirm that the person who signed up for the list actually receives mail at that address. That is, someone types an e-mail address into a web form, but they are only added to the list once they reply to a confirmation e-mail. This prevents people from signing other people up for e-mail lists.
Yes, but conceptually, you have just spent the cash, on a piece of plastic. If you don't ever exchange the piece of plastic for your spiffy new shirt, will you ever get your cash back? Then, in essence, a sale has already occurred, regardless of the further expected value of what you have purchased. Semantics, I suppose.
It doesn't matter how you think of things conceptually, states will always charge sales tax when you make purchases using things like pieces of plastic or gift certificates, because otherwise people would just buy such things in states with lower or no sales tax, and spend them in their home state. Since there will always be a tax when you make the purchase, you don't want a tax when you buy the card, as well.
I see no reason for AMEX to change it. Yes you could generate fake AMEX cards for a long time, 10 years at least. That is not legal and actively prosecuted.
I've never understood why this is such a big deal. Don't merchants all charge the purchase at the time of sale anyway, to make sure the cards not maxed out or stolen?
This is not going to be an easy accounting task: issuing number, tracking their usage, deactivating, then reactivating them. I can tell you that I'm pretty good with logistics (being a police dispatcher tends to develop those skills ) and it'd be a nightmare for me to track.
That's why they would track them using computers, rather than armies of retrained police dispatchers:)
If we were using the truly anonymous cash card (phonecard machine type), then couldn't the government just tax the purchase of the card itself, and stop worrying about it? But then, how not to re-tax the sale itself, differentiating between a cash card and a credit/debit card...
Because sales tax varies depending on where you spend the cash, not where you obtain the cash.
Much easier than carrying cash, and I don't have to worry thieves getting access to my Debit Card (long since gave up the credit thing...) and depleting my account and waiting the 8 months for my lousy bank to redebit the 2 grand the fuckers stole and charged up 4 days after reporting it stolen.
I had something like this happen to me, but I did my homework. The bank must provisionally credit your account within 10 business days (unless they asked for written notification and you didn't provide it). They must finish their investigation within 45 business days. If they fail to comply with these time limits, they could be liable for actual damages, plus punitive damages of $100 to $1000 dollars, plus attorney's fees if you actually have to sue them (and you win). Also, the damages could be tripled if it was intentional. I never got that far, as my bank capitulated within hours (literally) of being faxed a threatening letter pointing this all out. These facts are mostly useful for saber-rattling, but if your bank actually took 8 months, I seriously suggest checking with a lawyer to see if you have a case to sue them, because that's completely ridiculous.
Taking something apart to see how it works, and describing your findings to others, is not a violation of any legitimate law. (The DMCA is illegitmate and unconstitutional, and its architects and supporters need to be cleansed via the flaying and boiling ritual described above.)
Furthermore, the DMCA is irrelevant in this case anyway. It only matters if you break encryption to gain access to a copyrighted work. I highly doubt that anyone is trying to claim copyright to the bar codes that are intended to be scanned with this thing. Even if they did somehow, the substantial non-infringing use of scanning bar codes you printed yourself should be sufficient to make the Linux CueCat driver legal.
I just "bought" a digital TV set-top box/service this weekend with just this sort of model.
Many, many cable companies in the US have done this for years. That is, their cable service comes with a set-top box for free or nominal cost during the duration of the service. When you cancel your cable service, you must either return the box to them or pay some large fine. However, this is clearly specified in the contract you sign when they install the box. If they just gave away set-top boxes over the counter at RadioShack, or mailed them to subscribers of Forbes, and hoped they'd sign up for cable service, they'd be SOL if people decided to use the boxes as doorstops.
Non-digtal products are not protected by the DMCA. The cuecat software is.
You can take the scanner itself apart all day long with a number 1 screw driver until you get bored, but if you reverse engineer the software the cuecat use, it is illegal since the software is protected by the DMCA.
The CueCat software is not protected by the DMCA, because said software has no access device or encryption preventing a person from examining it. It might be a violation of the terms of the shrink-wrap agreement to examine the software, but that has nothing to do with the DMCA. The only access device or encryption (and I use the word loosely) is applied to the barcode being read in. However, since nobody has copyrighted the bar codes, the DMCA does not apply, since there is no copyright involved.
However, this is all a moot point, since no one (to my knowledge) has reverse engineered the software. The decoding process was figured out after a trivial examination of the output produced by the hardware device when scanning known bar codes.
Re:Updating the kernel is like updating the bios..
on
Linux 2.2.17 Released
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· Score: 1
I've been using my custom compiled 2.2.15 kernel for quite some time now.... Unless this kernel patches some major security holes, why should I get this new kernel?
I agree that hardware in exchagne for some code is not wrong.. however, labor law indicates that, if you are performing a service, or giving something of value to the company, they must pay you fairly for it. This means minimum wage.
Actually, a one shot deal like writing a driver in exchange for hardware is about the most clear-cut case of an indepdent contractor relationship that I can imagine under the 20 common law factors. The company would not control when, where, or how you worked, there would not be a continuing relationship, they would not provide training, you would not work on the premises, etc. In fact, I don't think any of the factors would point to an employee relationship in the driver/hardware situation, but IANAL.
Yes, but is it legal? DMCA, EULA, and UCITA make reverse-engineering illegal, and the software would probably detect most common debuggers.
Do you even remember how this thread started?! Someone worried that because distributed processing schemes might be closed source, people could become unwitting participants in Echelon or Carnivore. I disagreed, pointing out that no intelligence agency would let software processing potentially classified data run on untrusted computers. Allow me to clarify: intelligence agencies are paranoid. They assume that they have enemies with skill and resources. They would assume that these enemies would participate in such a distributed scheme to gain access to whatever possibly secret data was being processed. The fact that it might be illegal to reverse engineer the software would be irrelevant. It's illegal to break into cars, but I'm willing to bet that the NSA, et. al., don't leave classified documents sitting around in the trunks of cars on the side of the street. Finally, intelligence agencies assume that they have enemies competent enough to step through the code using a decent debugger, noticing if the code is trying to check for a debugger, rather than just running the app full tilt and then attaching Turbo Debugger, or whatever the hell you're thinking.
THEY FUCKING _VOLUNTEERED_ i'll send them a dictionary for christmas, then they can look up the word!
So? If I volunteer to work in a factory, and the owner decides to give volunteers $1 an hour out of the goodness of his heart, he will be in violation of minimum wage laws. Again, I think minimum wage laws are bad, but there is no reason not to hold AOL to the same standard as the hypothetical factory owner. If voluntariness were a defense to minimum wage law violations, such laws would be meaningless, since violators would presumably not be forcing people to work for them, and even if they were, that would clearly be illegal without minimum wage laws. This whole situation simply demonstrates the flaws of having minimum wage laws.
You're missing the point. I agree that it's unfortunate that AOL will have to pay these people back pay, but that's because I disagree with minimum wage laws in general. However, such laws exist, and AOL's volunteers may thus hold AOL accountable, without there being any degree of frivolity in the lawsuit. Please reread my hypothetical scenarios in the post you replied to, and explain what distinguishes them from what AOL is doing. Remember that, under current law, consenting to work for less than minimum wage does not remove your employer's legal obligation to pay you at least minimum wage. Also, you can generally volunteer at schools and charities without subjecting them to minimum wage laws, but this is not true of for-profit corporations.
It's a bit harder to reverse-engineer binaries when they're digitally signed and 1024-bit elliptic-curve PK encrypted.
Yeah, but if the binary is ever going to actually be executed, at some point it has to decrypt itself and feed the processor some actual instructions. With enough patience, skill, and a good debugger, it is always possible to reverse engineer a binary. It can be difficult, but it could be done, and my point still stands that no intelligence agency would take that risk.
What about real life groups like Habitat for Humanity? I give then a day of my time, and I get a t-shirt and lunch. Those 2 items are less then $40 (8hrs*$5) so they are breaking the law also. But no one would think of dorking with Habitat.
As a non-profit organization, Habitat for Humanity is not under the same level of legal scrutiny as a for-profit corporation with regard to volunteers.
Frankly the lawsuit is the most frivolous lawsuit imaginable. These people volunteered to monitor chat rooms and the like for AOL and one day suddenly realize that they would rather have gotten pay and sue AOL.
I find nothing frivolous about this lawsuit; it's just a problem caused by minimum wage law. Many of these people volunteered 20 hours a week, and received a free AOL account in exchange. What if someone volunteers to work 20 hours a week in a factory in exchange for $21.95 worth of corporate scrip per month? Or simply $21.95 cash per month? These situations would be clear violations of minimum wage law, so why isn't what AOL is doing a violation?
Example: say Bill is looking for a job. He wants $5.25 an hour. But all the employers will only give him $4/hr.
Bill can't do shit about this. If all the employers lower their wages, he has to either take the job, or go unemployed. Add in the fact that there is almost always somebody who will take the job, even at a low price, and suddenly Bill is unemployable. That, or he'll need 2 or 3 jobs just to live.
And why do you think that there is always someone willing to take the job at a lower price? Could it be because no one is willing to pay them hire them at $5.25 an hour, and they prefer $4 an hour to $0 an hour?
Example: Joe is looking for a job, but he is highly unskilled. He wants to take a job at a low training wage so he can learn some skills and eventually find a better job. However, no one will hire him, because it's not worth it to pay him to legally mandated minimum. Instead, the government skims money off the paychecks of Bill and others, and gives it to Joe.
Using your example, a hardware manufacturer produces a new device that needs a driver for your favorite operating system. You write the driver and give it to them, they give you a shiny new device as 'a reward.' The question then comes down to what they do with it. If they deliver the driver freely, they've gained no real value from your effort.
No, they do receive value from your effort. By creating a driver for an OS for which no driver yet exists, you increase the market for their device. Think about it. AOL wasn't directly gaining money from the actions of their CLs, either, but they may still lose the case. It's nonsenical to assert that minimum wage only applies if the worker is tangibly creating value. If a company assigns an employee to a useless task, minimum wage law would still apply, so it applies to the AOL situation whether or not the CLs actually created value.
How will we know with confidence that we're not signing up to be a part of Echelon or Carnivore or something similar?
Because no intelligenece agency in its right mind would allow its data to be processed on untrusted computers whose owners could, closed source or not, reverse engineer the software and gain access to presumably valuable information.
but when the stockholders see that they just lost
out on $1M, they will be upset. and probably the stock price will drop. costing the company a lot more money.
The stockholders aren't stupid; they know that $1 million is nothing. If they decide to sell it can only be due to the fear of future, larger damages.
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On the other hand, it seems to me that MAPS went overboard in claiming that the failure to use double opt-in creates the status of spam that should be blocked. Who uses double opt-in? It definitely sounds like they're applying a double standard to Harris, and acting out some grudge against the company.
Double opt-in is a name spammers use to refer to the practice of requiring a confirmationg e-mail to confirm that the person who signed up for the list actually receives mail at that address. That is, someone types an e-mail address into a web form, but they are only added to the list once they reply to a confirmation e-mail. This prevents people from signing other people up for e-mail lists.
Yes, but conceptually, you have just spent the cash, on a piece of plastic. If you don't ever exchange the piece of plastic for your spiffy new shirt, will you ever get your cash back? Then, in essence, a sale has already occurred, regardless of the further expected value of what you have purchased. Semantics, I suppose.
It doesn't matter how you think of things conceptually, states will always charge sales tax when you make purchases using things like pieces of plastic or gift certificates, because otherwise people would just buy such things in states with lower or no sales tax, and spend them in their home state. Since there will always be a tax when you make the purchase, you don't want a tax when you buy the card, as well.
I see no reason for AMEX to change it. Yes you could generate fake AMEX cards for a long time, 10 years at least. That is not legal and actively prosecuted.
I've never understood why this is such a big deal. Don't merchants all charge the purchase at the time of sale anyway, to make sure the cards not maxed out or stolen?
This is not going to be an easy accounting task: issuing number, tracking their usage, deactivating, then reactivating them. I can tell you that I'm pretty good with logistics (being a police dispatcher tends to develop those skills ) and it'd be a nightmare for me to track.
That's why they would track them using computers, rather than armies of retrained police dispatchers :)
If we were using the truly anonymous cash card (phonecard machine type), then couldn't the government just tax the purchase of the card itself, and stop worrying about it? But then, how not to re-tax the sale itself, differentiating between a cash card and a credit/debit card...
Because sales tax varies depending on where you spend the cash, not where you obtain the cash.
Much easier than carrying cash, and I don't have to worry thieves getting access to my Debit Card (long since gave up the credit thing...) and depleting my account and waiting the 8 months for my lousy bank to redebit the 2 grand the fuckers stole and charged up 4 days after reporting it stolen.
I had something like this happen to me, but I did my homework. The bank must provisionally credit your account within 10 business days (unless they asked for written notification and you didn't provide it). They must finish their investigation within 45 business days. If they fail to comply with these time limits, they could be liable for actual damages, plus punitive damages of $100 to $1000 dollars, plus attorney's fees if you actually have to sue them (and you win). Also, the damages could be tripled if it was intentional. I never got that far, as my bank capitulated within hours (literally) of being faxed a threatening letter pointing this all out. These facts are mostly useful for saber-rattling, but if your bank actually took 8 months, I seriously suggest checking with a lawyer to see if you have a case to sue them, because that's completely ridiculous.
Does anybody even read the articles?
Taking something apart to see how it works, and describing your findings to others, is not a violation of any legitimate law. (The DMCA is illegitmate and unconstitutional, and its architects and supporters need to be cleansed via the flaying and boiling ritual described above.)
Furthermore, the DMCA is irrelevant in this case anyway. It only matters if you break encryption to gain access to a copyrighted work. I highly doubt that anyone is trying to claim copyright to the bar codes that are intended to be scanned with this thing. Even if they did somehow, the substantial non-infringing use of scanning bar codes you printed yourself should be sufficient to make the Linux CueCat driver legal.
I just "bought" a digital TV set-top box/service this weekend with just this sort of model.
Many, many cable companies in the US have done this for years. That is, their cable service comes with a set-top box for free or nominal cost during the duration of the service. When you cancel your cable service, you must either return the box to them or pay some large fine. However, this is clearly specified in the contract you sign when they install the box. If they just gave away set-top boxes over the counter at RadioShack, or mailed them to subscribers of Forbes, and hoped they'd sign up for cable service, they'd be SOL if people decided to use the boxes as doorstops.
Non-digtal products are not protected by the DMCA. The cuecat software is.
You can take the scanner itself apart all day long with a number 1 screw driver until you get bored, but if you reverse engineer the software the cuecat use, it is illegal since the software is protected by the DMCA.
The CueCat software is not protected by the DMCA, because said software has no access device or encryption preventing a person from examining it. It might be a violation of the terms of the shrink-wrap agreement to examine the software, but that has nothing to do with the DMCA. The only access device or encryption (and I use the word loosely) is applied to the barcode being read in. However, since nobody has copyrighted the bar codes, the DMCA does not apply, since there is no copyright involved.
However, this is all a moot point, since no one (to my knowledge) has reverse engineered the software. The decoding process was figured out after a trivial examination of the output produced by the hardware device when scanning known bar codes.
I've been using my custom compiled 2.2.15 kernel for quite some time now. ... Unless this kernel patches some major security holes, why should I get this new kernel?
IIRC, 2.2.16 patched some sort of security hole.
I agree that hardware in exchagne for some code is not wrong.. however, labor law indicates that, if you are performing a service, or giving something of value to the company, they must pay you fairly for it. This means minimum wage.
Actually, a one shot deal like writing a driver in exchange for hardware is about the most clear-cut case of an indepdent contractor relationship that I can imagine under the 20 common law factors. The company would not control when, where, or how you worked, there would not be a continuing relationship, they would not provide training, you would not work on the premises, etc. In fact, I don't think any of the factors would point to an employee relationship in the driver/hardware situation, but IANAL.
The armed forces pay *far* less than minimum wage to junior enlisted personnel.
It's hardly surprising that the government fails to hold itself accountable to the same laws that it makes private enterprises obey.
Yes, but is it legal? DMCA, EULA, and UCITA make reverse-engineering illegal, and the software would probably detect most common debuggers.
Do you even remember how this thread started?! Someone worried that because distributed processing schemes might be closed source, people could become unwitting participants in Echelon or Carnivore. I disagreed, pointing out that no intelligence agency would let software processing potentially classified data run on untrusted computers. Allow me to clarify: intelligence agencies are paranoid. They assume that they have enemies with skill and resources. They would assume that these enemies would participate in such a distributed scheme to gain access to whatever possibly secret data was being processed. The fact that it might be illegal to reverse engineer the software would be irrelevant. It's illegal to break into cars, but I'm willing to bet that the NSA, et. al., don't leave classified documents sitting around in the trunks of cars on the side of the street. Finally, intelligence agencies assume that they have enemies competent enough to step through the code using a decent debugger, noticing if the code is trying to check for a debugger, rather than just running the app full tilt and then attaching Turbo Debugger, or whatever the hell you're thinking.
If everyone is competing to work for the lowest wage, then everyone's wage ends up as low as the most desperate person's. Hello, sweatshops.
So we're better off if such desperate people can't find work at all?
THEY FUCKING _VOLUNTEERED_ i'll send them a dictionary for christmas, then they can look up the word!
So? If I volunteer to work in a factory, and the owner decides to give volunteers $1 an hour out of the goodness of his heart, he will be in violation of minimum wage laws. Again, I think minimum wage laws are bad, but there is no reason not to hold AOL to the same standard as the hypothetical factory owner. If voluntariness were a defense to minimum wage law violations, such laws would be meaningless, since violators would presumably not be forcing people to work for them, and even if they were, that would clearly be illegal without minimum wage laws. This whole situation simply demonstrates the flaws of having minimum wage laws.
You're missing the point. I agree that it's unfortunate that AOL will have to pay these people back pay, but that's because I disagree with minimum wage laws in general. However, such laws exist, and AOL's volunteers may thus hold AOL accountable, without there being any degree of frivolity in the lawsuit. Please reread my hypothetical scenarios in the post you replied to, and explain what distinguishes them from what AOL is doing. Remember that, under current law, consenting to work for less than minimum wage does not remove your employer's legal obligation to pay you at least minimum wage. Also, you can generally volunteer at schools and charities without subjecting them to minimum wage laws, but this is not true of for-profit corporations.
It's a bit harder to reverse-engineer binaries when they're digitally signed and 1024-bit elliptic-curve PK encrypted.
Yeah, but if the binary is ever going to actually be executed, at some point it has to decrypt itself and feed the processor some actual instructions. With enough patience, skill, and a good debugger, it is always possible to reverse engineer a binary. It can be difficult, but it could be done, and my point still stands that no intelligence agency would take that risk.
What about real life groups like Habitat for Humanity? I give then a day of my time, and I get a t-shirt and lunch. Those 2 items are less then $40 (8hrs*$5) so they are breaking the law also. But no one would think of dorking with Habitat.
As a non-profit organization, Habitat for Humanity is not under the same level of legal scrutiny as a for-profit corporation with regard to volunteers.
I believe interns are a specific exception to minimum wage laws, but I'm not sure of the exact legal definition of an intern, and IANAL.
Frankly the lawsuit is the most frivolous lawsuit imaginable. These people volunteered to monitor chat rooms and the like for AOL and one day suddenly realize that they would rather have gotten pay and sue AOL.
I find nothing frivolous about this lawsuit; it's just a problem caused by minimum wage law. Many of these people volunteered 20 hours a week, and received a free AOL account in exchange. What if someone volunteers to work 20 hours a week in a factory in exchange for $21.95 worth of corporate scrip per month? Or simply $21.95 cash per month? These situations would be clear violations of minimum wage law, so why isn't what AOL is doing a violation?
Example: say Bill is looking for a job. He wants $5.25 an hour. But all the employers will only give him $4/hr.
Bill can't do shit about this. If all the employers lower their wages, he has to either take the job, or go unemployed. Add in the fact that there is almost always somebody who will take the job, even at a low price, and suddenly Bill is unemployable. That, or he'll need 2 or 3 jobs just to live.
And why do you think that there is always someone willing to take the job at a lower price? Could it be because no one is willing to pay them hire them at $5.25 an hour, and they prefer $4 an hour to $0 an hour?
Example: Joe is looking for a job, but he is highly unskilled. He wants to take a job at a low training wage so he can learn some skills and eventually find a better job. However, no one will hire him, because it's not worth it to pay him to legally mandated minimum. Instead, the government skims money off the paychecks of Bill and others, and gives it to Joe.
Using your example, a hardware manufacturer produces a new device that needs a driver for your favorite operating system. You write the driver and give it to them, they give you a shiny new device as 'a reward.' The question then comes down to what they do with it. If they deliver the driver freely, they've gained no real value from your effort.
No, they do receive value from your effort. By creating a driver for an OS for which no driver yet exists, you increase the market for their device. Think about it. AOL wasn't directly gaining money from the actions of their CLs, either, but they may still lose the case. It's nonsenical to assert that minimum wage only applies if the worker is tangibly creating value. If a company assigns an employee to a useless task, minimum wage law would still apply, so it applies to the AOL situation whether or not the CLs actually created value.
How will we know with confidence that we're not signing up to be a part of Echelon or Carnivore or something similar?
Because no intelligenece agency in its right mind would allow its data to be processed on untrusted computers whose owners could, closed source or not, reverse engineer the software and gain access to presumably valuable information.
but when the stockholders see that they just lost out on $1M, they will be upset. and probably the stock price will drop. costing the company a lot more money.
The stockholders aren't stupid; they know that $1 million is nothing. If they decide to sell it can only be due to the fear of future, larger damages.