Um...I didn't say anything about connecting to password protected/WEP networks. We all know that's illegal without authorization.
What I said is that I fail to see why it would be illegal to connect to public ones. And, no, it's not the letter of the law. The relevant letter of the law where I am is:
(a) Computer theft. Any person who uses a computer or computer network with knowledge that such use is without authority and with the intention of:
(1) Taking or appropriating any property of another, whether or not with the intention of depriving the owner of possession;
(2) Obtaining property by any deceitful means or artful practice; or
(3) Converting property to such persons use in violation of an agreement or other known legal obligation to make a specified application or disposition of such property shall be guilty of the crime of computer theft.
Now, using an internet connection counts as 1. But the important question is (a). You must know that said use is without authorization, or it's not a crime.* You have no way of knowing that for open access points. Usually, you don't even know who's running them! Ergo, it is legal, unless the access point is named 'private_network' or something.
If you set up a server that hands out web pages on a semi-public network, you can't complain when people connect to it and get said web pages. Likewise, you have even less of a complaint when you set up an open network on the public airways, especially when you start handing out IP addresses to anyone who walks by.
In fact, if they're broadcasting, they talked to your computer first. They said 'Here I am, I'm open', your computer said 'Cool, can I have an IP', and they said 'Sure' and gave you one.
Calling that computer theft is rather akin to putting up a 'Free' sign on a newspaper bin outside a store and trying to have people arrested for theft when they take one, claiming the 'free' only applies to people you've said it does. Nope, doesn't work that way. And, no, it doesn't matter that the bin came with the 'Free' sign on it by default. You might have a lawsuit against the person who sold you it, but not against anyone who believes your sign.
*) Note this isn't the ignorance of the facts I was talking about...it's not an excuse for doing something illegal, it's actually legal to access computers without 'a lack of authorization'. Duh. Otherwise no one could ever use a computer.
No, ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it. Ignorance of the facts, however, is.
I.e., it's legal to speed if the speed limit sign that dropped the speed limit fell over and you couldn't see it.
If your speedometer is broken and you don't know this, you're fine, unless you had some other reason to think you were speeding.
The different definations of 'homocide' are all based on intent, not knowledge. Basically, 'How much did you want to kill this person?'.
All laws require some intent, period. You have to mean to do something, and that something has to break the law. (You do not, however, have to know said law exists.)
However, I have yet to see any definative reason why it would be illegal to knowingly connect to a public wireless network, anymore than it would be illegal to connect to a public webserver and ask for a webpage. If they didn't want you to, presumably they would password protect it.
I don't think you're understanding the logic here.
The grandparent said there was no bias from all those liberals in the media, so what's your problem? It doesn't matter one whit that reporters are liberals, because they're being surprisingly balanced for liberals. As long as we're aware they're all bleeding hard-liberals, it's okay. Didn't you read his message?
It's one of the many right wing tricks. Have some crazy people on your side say things that blatantly aren't true, so that you, also on the right, can deny them, while making insinuations about other things with the denials. And, this is the best bit, you've already built-in insinuations to the word 'liberal'.
When people attack the insinuations, insist you agree with them, that the lies are not true, and you have no idea what their problem is.
Also, the grandparent does not molest cats, despite the large amount of them he lets roam around his house. He's just one of those crazy people with a lot of cats.
Yeah, it's the dropped stories, or the stories that get no followup, that show the bias.
Everything gets reported, and it's entirely possible that the bias is entirely due to the right spewing more gibberish.
Something bad about the right? Report it. Report Republican denials.
Something bad about the left? Report it. Then report what the Republicans said. Then report what the Democrats said. Then some wild accusations from crazy people on the right. Then a measured response from the right. Then some new stuff that isn't true, and then some denials from the left, and then explaining it's not true. And then a response from the right.
The Republicans have an amazing gibberish spewing machine. I don't think that's all there is, but it's certainly part of it.
It's called 'The Big Lie'. Just keep insisting there's a liberal bias in the media. Facts don't matter.
I remember Whitewater. Remember that? The media had a field day with that. The Clintons didn't do a damn thing wrong there. They lost money on that. That dragged on for years. The media just repeated whatever the Republicans said. (To be fair, they would then immediately go and repeat what the Democrats said. But the media is not supposed to be a fucking megaphone.) The investigation was quietly closed in 2000 with no evidence of wrongdoing on their part.
I can see how the same isn't being done to Bush for the insane claptrap he's been spewing since he got into office. I'm not even talking about the election crap he pulled, and the media should have called him on. (They did the same uncritical megaphone crap during the election, though.)
I'm talking about Iraq, mostly, here. Where are the hard questions? Where were the hard questions about the lack of WMDs? Are they too afraid of losing their white house press pass or something?
No kidding. Maybe everyone here is using magical hardware, but in the real word, sometimes a CMOS decides to erase itself or a capacitor on the MB burns out, or, yes, someone upgraded something that was very minor, like ssh and broke the computer's startup, and you have no way of knowing this.
You can run for months with nothing wrong.
Then you have a three day long power outage, and when you boot everything back up, two servers won't boot. Right as you're trying to handle a three day backlog.
It doesn't matter if you don't need to reboot the servers. If you have downtime, or especially if you have load balancing where you can down a server with no one doing so, you do so one a week or so. Or you're fucked when it turns out they weren't willing to boot for months, but stubborn you kept saying 'I don't need to reboot'.
This brings me to a funny story about a somewhat related computer, back in the early 90s. This computer was absolutely vital to the business, it has a mirrored SCSI RAID, on a UPS. They'd never let anyone reboot it, because apparently there were sometimes problems with it coming up. He was the computer repair guy, so never touched it, because, duh, he couldn't turn it off.
Except...at some point, before the guy who told me the story arrived to work there, one of the disks had failed. And someone, no one knows who, had clicked 'Continue' or something and never told anyone.
One day...the other drive failed, and the shit hit the fan. A reboot would have rewarned the person doing it.
If you treat computers as magical black boxes that you can set up and forget, even with good OSes, you'd being a bit silly...what if they got a bad block in the boot sector? Yeah, some backup solutions back that up...and some don't. What if it's just corrupt, and not 'bad', so you can back it up fine, and just not boot?
Part of the proper functioning of a computer is the ability to start up. If you do not test this, you are failing to do your job. And part of this ability is hardware, which you cannot test on another box.
And, yes, it's fun to get in a pissing contest with Windows admin. Don't let that get in the way of doing your job.
And nothing stopping US Air from doing that, except then they'd lose all their emoployees thanks to the unions and that no one would want to work for such a shitty company except you, so they'd immediately fail. Meanwhile, all the strikers would end up working for the other companies that appeared to take up the slack.
You really are a moron, aren't you? Absolutely nothing is legally or contractually stopping US Airways from doing what you said.
It's not piracy when there's no one there, it's salvage. But I was really kidding...the ISS is owned by a large group of countries, and there are explicit treaties controlling it. You can't salvage it, at least no country that's part of it.
And, yes, the unmanned arm of NASA is somewhat okay. It's the shuttle program that's completely FUBAR.
I was hoping that something good would come out of the crash two years ago, that we would reevaluate the shuttle. Well, we did, and inexplicably kept using it. This would have been the perfect time for NASA to stand up to the government and say 'We need to buy the Soyuz plans from the Russians' or something.
But they didn't. I understand how they can get saddled with things they really don't want to do, and the shuttle program was a nice idea at the time.
But they aren't trying to fix the problem.
Yeah, they were out of cash, so had to keep recycling their stuff.
As opposed to us, who keep using the shuttles for no fucking reason at all. And piss in our pants and run away for half a decade when something bad happens to them.
The problem is actually, and the article completely ignored this, is that it is illegal for NASA to pay the Russians in money, because of some law passed in 2000 about trading with Iran.
The Russians agreed, when our shuttle program failed, to carry people for X years to pay off their failure to build and launch certain ISS modules. (Because of extreme lack of funds.) This deal is running out in 2006, and the Russians are saying 'Look, we need cold hard cash then.'.
Yup. The Russians want to claim it, all they have to do is say 'We're not bringing up any more supplies'.
If the Americans there refuse to leave, the Russians leave, come back right before the food runs out, ask again. Hang around until it does run out.
Just to be legally safe, have everyone, Russians and Americans, completely leave, and have another ship wander along and 'discover' this perfectly functional space station without any crew that someone left laying around in international space.
Probably there are treaties to stop that, and it's a shame. We're complete incompetants at running a space program, and we need a wakeup call like that. The fact we can afford to build most of the space station because we're incredibly rich is good, because our space program would be the laughingstock of the world if we couldn't burn money to reach orbit. (And, sadly, we've recently become to unable to do just that.)
I'm going to start punching everyone who says 'reusable' in relation to space travel.
I mean it. Who the hell cares about reusable? The Russians don't. Their space program seems be running along smoothly with almost no funds without reusable space vehicles. They have a budget of only a quarter billion.
Granted, NASA does a lot besides get people to orbit...wait a minute, NASA doesn't get people to orbit, does it?
I can't blame the Russians either. They're completely out of cash. Not the space program, the country.
Whereas we're a bunch of idiots who don't know how to run a space program. We're spending all our money on the insane shuttles, which are 1970s technology and very crappy. Because of that our launches cost way too much. Oh, wait, they don't cost too much, because we've stopped doing them at all.
The Russians are driving a shitty car around, held together with duct tape, and we're operating a fucking hovercraft. Ooo, it can drive on water! Ooo, it's reusable!
Lucky for us, the gas money the Russians are asking for is still a good deal less than it takes to operate our hovercraft.
Somedays I think the best bet for the US space program would be to dismantle NASA and start over.
The cheapest thing, of course, would be to build what the Russians use, instead of our dumb-ass shuttles.
Hell, if they're that broke, let's buy some of theirs.
How did we end up with such an expensive system, and how did Communists build such a cheap one? Wasn't their society supposed to be extremely wasteful, and ours the efficient one? What the hell happened?
I something think James P. Hogan was right in 'Leapfrog'.
The wobble isn't just in the direction of the tilt, it's at a right angle to that direction also. And I'm at a near complete loss as how to describe that direction.
I think of it more as the axis moving in random directions.
Um, actually, it does cost them. It cost them credit card transaction fees.
Which seems pointless, but the Red Cross would be paying those if people donated individually to them with credit cards. This way, they just get one big check, and Amazon eats the fees.
Linux has a feature, although it might still require a patch, where you can load libraries at random addresses, and thus you can't just check what libc that distribution was using and call a function in it. Like the obvious 'system("echo blah>temp")' 'system("sh temp")'. Buffer overflows have to use pointers, they can't use function names, and thus if you move the libraries around in memory before linking them (at runtime) into the application, pointers will not work.
Of course, if it's a precompiled binary, that helps only a little, because, you could always call a function within that program.
For example, say there's an FTP program with a buffer overflow at the login. With relocatable libraries, you can't call system() because you have no idea where libc is at, but say it has a 'postlogin()' function that sets up the variables and whatnot after you logged in. If it's a precompiled binary, you can just call that function via the buffer overflow, and, boom, you're logged in.
I thought baffles were a cool idea the last time this was on/., but now I have weirder one.
Let's build a huge dike around where the mountain is going to slide and drain it. We can call up the Netherlands, they know how to do this kind of stuff.
Combine that with some baffles, and we can break off a piece at a time and drop it, with limited risk if the whole thing breaks lose.
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What I said is that I fail to see why it would be illegal to connect to public ones. And, no, it's not the letter of the law. The relevant letter of the law where I am is:
(a) Computer theft. Any person who uses a computer or computer network with knowledge that such use is without authority and with the intention of:
(1) Taking or appropriating any property of another, whether or not with the intention of depriving the owner of possession;
(2) Obtaining property by any deceitful means or artful practice; or
(3) Converting property to such persons use in violation of an agreement or other known legal obligation to make a specified application or disposition of such property shall be guilty of the crime of computer theft.
Now, using an internet connection counts as 1. But the important question is (a). You must know that said use is without authorization, or it's not a crime.* You have no way of knowing that for open access points. Usually, you don't even know who's running them! Ergo, it is legal, unless the access point is named 'private_network' or something.
If you set up a server that hands out web pages on a semi-public network, you can't complain when people connect to it and get said web pages. Likewise, you have even less of a complaint when you set up an open network on the public airways, especially when you start handing out IP addresses to anyone who walks by.
In fact, if they're broadcasting, they talked to your computer first. They said 'Here I am, I'm open', your computer said 'Cool, can I have an IP', and they said 'Sure' and gave you one.
Calling that computer theft is rather akin to putting up a 'Free' sign on a newspaper bin outside a store and trying to have people arrested for theft when they take one, claiming the 'free' only applies to people you've said it does. Nope, doesn't work that way. And, no, it doesn't matter that the bin came with the 'Free' sign on it by default. You might have a lawsuit against the person who sold you it, but not against anyone who believes your sign.
*) Note this isn't the ignorance of the facts I was talking about...it's not an excuse for doing something illegal, it's actually legal to access computers without 'a lack of authorization'. Duh. Otherwise no one could ever use a computer.
I.e., it's legal to speed if the speed limit sign that dropped the speed limit fell over and you couldn't see it.
If your speedometer is broken and you don't know this, you're fine, unless you had some other reason to think you were speeding.
The different definations of 'homocide' are all based on intent, not knowledge. Basically, 'How much did you want to kill this person?'.
All laws require some intent, period. You have to mean to do something, and that something has to break the law. (You do not, however, have to know said law exists.)
However, I have yet to see any definative reason why it would be illegal to knowingly connect to a public wireless network, anymore than it would be illegal to connect to a public webserver and ask for a webpage. If they didn't want you to, presumably they would password protect it.
The grandparent said there was no bias from all those liberals in the media, so what's your problem? It doesn't matter one whit that reporters are liberals, because they're being surprisingly balanced for liberals. As long as we're aware they're all bleeding hard-liberals, it's okay. Didn't you read his message?
It's one of the many right wing tricks. Have some crazy people on your side say things that blatantly aren't true, so that you, also on the right, can deny them, while making insinuations about other things with the denials. And, this is the best bit, you've already built-in insinuations to the word 'liberal'.
When people attack the insinuations, insist you agree with them, that the lies are not true, and you have no idea what their problem is.
Also, the grandparent does not molest cats, despite the large amount of them he lets roam around his house. He's just one of those crazy people with a lot of cats.
Everything gets reported, and it's entirely possible that the bias is entirely due to the right spewing more gibberish.
Something bad about the right? Report it. Report Republican denials.
Something bad about the left? Report it. Then report what the Republicans said. Then report what the Democrats said. Then some wild accusations from crazy people on the right. Then a measured response from the right. Then some new stuff that isn't true, and then some denials from the left, and then explaining it's not true. And then a response from the right.
The Republicans have an amazing gibberish spewing machine. I don't think that's all there is, but it's certainly part of it.
I remember Whitewater. Remember that? The media had a field day with that. The Clintons didn't do a damn thing wrong there. They lost money on that. That dragged on for years. The media just repeated whatever the Republicans said. (To be fair, they would then immediately go and repeat what the Democrats said. But the media is not supposed to be a fucking megaphone.) The investigation was quietly closed in 2000 with no evidence of wrongdoing on their part.
I can see how the same isn't being done to Bush for the insane claptrap he's been spewing since he got into office. I'm not even talking about the election crap he pulled, and the media should have called him on. (They did the same uncritical megaphone crap during the election, though.)
I'm talking about Iraq, mostly, here. Where are the hard questions? Where were the hard questions about the lack of WMDs? Are they too afraid of losing their white house press pass or something?
You can run for months with nothing wrong.
Then you have a three day long power outage, and when you boot everything back up, two servers won't boot. Right as you're trying to handle a three day backlog.
It doesn't matter if you don't need to reboot the servers. If you have downtime, or especially if you have load balancing where you can down a server with no one doing so, you do so one a week or so. Or you're fucked when it turns out they weren't willing to boot for months, but stubborn you kept saying 'I don't need to reboot'.
This brings me to a funny story about a somewhat related computer, back in the early 90s. This computer was absolutely vital to the business, it has a mirrored SCSI RAID, on a UPS. They'd never let anyone reboot it, because apparently there were sometimes problems with it coming up. He was the computer repair guy, so never touched it, because, duh, he couldn't turn it off.
Except...at some point, before the guy who told me the story arrived to work there, one of the disks had failed. And someone, no one knows who, had clicked 'Continue' or something and never told anyone.
One day...the other drive failed, and the shit hit the fan. A reboot would have rewarned the person doing it.
If you treat computers as magical black boxes that you can set up and forget, even with good OSes, you'd being a bit silly...what if they got a bad block in the boot sector? Yeah, some backup solutions back that up...and some don't. What if it's just corrupt, and not 'bad', so you can back it up fine, and just not boot?
Part of the proper functioning of a computer is the ability to start up. If you do not test this, you are failing to do your job. And part of this ability is hardware, which you cannot test on another box.
And, yes, it's fun to get in a pissing contest with Windows admin. Don't let that get in the way of doing your job.
Yeah. It's amazing how often everywhere but one place is correct.
Wait a minute....
You really are a moron, aren't you? Absolutely nothing is legally or contractually stopping US Airways from doing what you said.
And, yes, the unmanned arm of NASA is somewhat okay. It's the shuttle program that's completely FUBAR.
I was hoping that something good would come out of the crash two years ago, that we would reevaluate the shuttle. Well, we did, and inexplicably kept using it. This would have been the perfect time for NASA to stand up to the government and say 'We need to buy the Soyuz plans from the Russians' or something.
But they didn't. I understand how they can get saddled with things they really don't want to do, and the shuttle program was a nice idea at the time. But they aren't trying to fix the problem.
As opposed to us, who keep using the shuttles for no fucking reason at all. And piss in our pants and run away for half a decade when something bad happens to them.
The Russians agreed, when our shuttle program failed, to carry people for X years to pay off their failure to build and launch certain ISS modules. (Because of extreme lack of funds.) This deal is running out in 2006, and the Russians are saying 'Look, we need cold hard cash then.'.
You tell them! We'll walk to the damn space station!
If the Americans there refuse to leave, the Russians leave, come back right before the food runs out, ask again. Hang around until it does run out.
Just to be legally safe, have everyone, Russians and Americans, completely leave, and have another ship wander along and 'discover' this perfectly functional space station without any crew that someone left laying around in international space.
Probably there are treaties to stop that, and it's a shame. We're complete incompetants at running a space program, and we need a wakeup call like that. The fact we can afford to build most of the space station because we're incredibly rich is good, because our space program would be the laughingstock of the world if we couldn't burn money to reach orbit. (And, sadly, we've recently become to unable to do just that.)
I mean it. Who the hell cares about reusable? The Russians don't. Their space program seems be running along smoothly with almost no funds without reusable space vehicles. They have a budget of only a quarter billion.
Granted, NASA does a lot besides get people to orbit...wait a minute, NASA doesn't get people to orbit, does it?
Whereas we're a bunch of idiots who don't know how to run a space program. We're spending all our money on the insane shuttles, which are 1970s technology and very crappy. Because of that our launches cost way too much. Oh, wait, they don't cost too much, because we've stopped doing them at all.
The Russians are driving a shitty car around, held together with duct tape, and we're operating a fucking hovercraft. Ooo, it can drive on water! Ooo, it's reusable!
Lucky for us, the gas money the Russians are asking for is still a good deal less than it takes to operate our hovercraft.
Somedays I think the best bet for the US space program would be to dismantle NASA and start over.
Hell, if they're that broke, let's buy some of theirs.
How did we end up with such an expensive system, and how did Communists build such a cheap one? Wasn't their society supposed to be extremely wasteful, and ours the efficient one? What the hell happened?
I something think James P. Hogan was right in 'Leapfrog'.
I think of it more as the axis moving in random directions.
Which seems pointless, but the Red Cross would be paying those if people donated individually to them with credit cards. This way, they just get one big check, and Amazon eats the fees.
That means you can't do any pointer math at all.
Of course, if it's a precompiled binary, that helps only a little, because, you could always call a function within that program.
For example, say there's an FTP program with a buffer overflow at the login. With relocatable libraries, you can't call system() because you have no idea where libc is at, but say it has a 'postlogin()' function that sets up the variables and whatnot after you logged in. If it's a precompiled binary, you can just call that function via the buffer overflow, and, boom, you're logged in.
Um, you're the only person who said 'stupid'.
Let's build a huge dike around where the mountain is going to slide and drain it. We can call up the Netherlands, they know how to do this kind of stuff.
Combine that with some baffles, and we can break off a piece at a time and drop it, with limited risk if the whole thing breaks lose.
I don't think that's possible, period, unless we have personal teleportation units on people's belts.