So, basically, you're completely wrong, but want to pretend that somehow I'm saying copyright law does exist, so you'll be right.
I haven't said anything of the sort, that's a completely insane strawman you've set up.
All I said was 'receiving stolen property' doesn't apply to illegally copied material, because illegally copied material isn't, in fact, stolen, either in a moral sense or, more important, under the law. So you went off on this weird rampage where things being like other things via some analog makes them the same, legally.
You know, physically, me sticking a knife into someone's car tires is very similar to sticking a knife in someone's chest, but I'm fairly certain they are treated different under the law.
I've actually read copyright law, and I know what it says. You, obviously, have not, and have been tricked by large corperations to think it's legally theft.
You can no more steal software via copying than you can rape a chair, trespass on an illegal drug, or commit treason against a car radio. It's not some semantic argument...theft is a legal term that means 'doing an action with someone else's property with the intent to deny them said property', and it's meant that for millennia, although possibly not with that word.
It would be one thing if the court system itself had changed it, but they have explicitly invented a new term instead, 'copyright infringement'. Infringement is also a legal term, and it means to not recognize someone else's rights. Aka, the government can infringe on the 1st amendment, and I can infringe on Metallica's copyright. Trespass is a form of infringement, I believe.
If I sell you a machine with a copy of Windows 98 on it, and a week later MS knocks down my doors because I've been selling it without actually purchasing it, you get to keep your copy, I'm the one in trouble. See why people complain when it's called 'stealing'?
There's a "knowingly" part is important in this case. You're breaking the law if you know what you've obtained is stolen and you hang on to it, to my understanding.
No, what's impostant is the stolen part of it. The only way to receive stolen software is to purchase some shoplifted junk.
Software is not stolen from the copyright owner and hence it isn't stolen property.
Thus far it seems like there's some kind of semantic distinction between "stealing software" and "stealing everything else" that isn't very clear. I'll certainly read up on this, but I have a feeling the law itself is kind of obfuscated in that regard.
You'd be wrong. It's not semantic. What you're doing is trying to argue that trespassing is 'land theft'. It's not, it doesn't work that way at all. Copyright infringement is not theft, it's not a form of theft (there are actually many forms of theft, normal theft is 'theft by taking'), it's not anywhere near close to theft.
Copyright law doesn't have anything to do with property ownership law
It sure seems to be treated that way at times, even in court. Whether it ought to be, I'm not sure.
No it's not, at all. Companies like to pretend it is, but judges have actually called lawyers on it. The RIAA, when they were suing all those kids, actually had the judge reprimand them for saying 'stolen' repeatedly, because you don't steal music by illegal copying it, just like you don't steal land by trespassing, or steal life by murder.
Laws are not analogies. To commit theft, you have to deprive someone of something else. This can be walking off with it, aka, theft by taking, it can be using it up, like drinking their soda, which is theft by conversion, it can be by destroying it, which I don't recall what it's called.
But legally, all versions of theft require one thing: The intent to deprive someone of their property.
If you did that, it's probably theft in some way. (Unless you hit some legal loophole, like you went back in time before they owned it and destroyed it.) If you didn't, it's certainly not theft.
My offical policy with EULA is to walk away with them on the screen, and while I'm gone the magical EULA fairy comes by and hits 'enter'. At least, that's what I think happens, as I'm never there to see.
If I ever had to talk my way out of an EULA violation situation I'd probably just claim I didn't understand it. Not much of a stretch there, since you'd honestly need a lawyer to be sure what rights the EULA is asking you to give up.
At least we agree on one thing. EULA are just stupid, legally. You can't agree to a contract like that.
My advice is to point out that you've agreed to a bunch of EULAs in your time, and thus you can't remember if you agreed to this one. And then ask them for their copy of the EULA you signed with your signature on it.
Why is my system more insecure than the current system? You're just arguing for the sake of arguing.
In reality, if you let people observe the count, you are going to get people with extreme minority viewpoints. You get observers offically assigned by both parties, and you get the local wackjob who's convinced the CIA is spying on people in the voting booths via alien technology. And the wacko will start screaming when something is wrong. (This actually happens currently, assuming the wacko shows up.)
If a political party is so strong that it composes so much of the population that there isn't anyone who isn't 'on their side' to observe...then what the fuck is the problem? They're going to win anyway.
A political organization that was strong enough to subvert a randomly selected group of ten people, and keep anyone who didn't go along from deciding to watch, isn't going to bother with altering the 99.999% vote for them into 100%.
In fact, why would they bother subverting the counting when they can just subvert the voting? I mean, if they own all the observers and poll workers, they can just throw out all the ballots they don't like. Hell, if they've managed to subvert the all voters doing counting, then why didn't they just get them all to vote for them in the first place?
More observers and vote counters cannot possibly increase the chance of delibrate miscounting, especially if you combine 'drafting' people to count together with anyone who wants to observe being allowed to do so.
The system, as it stands now, has only a few observers, and often all it has are people appointed by the two major parties, so collusion between them is almost undetectable. (The election is filling two seats on the city council, but the libertarian guy might edge the republican out, so they split the seats and pay the democrats with a sheriff.) We're talking maybe six guys coming together and doing this, quite managable, and they can keep doing it year after year.
With groups of voters doing the counting, it's impossible. Sure, a single block of voters might be subvertable, but simply mentioning it to them is risky. And you have to do it again and again to make any real change in the final count.
In fact, this shouldn't just apply to counting. You want to vote, you go fill out your card, you stick it in an envelope, and you do five minutes of work handing out ballots or sweeping the floor or whatever needs doing, and you have to count some ballots. (If there's no work to be done, you just sit there and count ballots the whole time.) Then and only then do you get to turn your vote in.
So what you do is, right before you try sending the email, you make them look up a domain name you control. (Many mail servers will do that when youconnect and say 'helo example.com'.) Then you know the next number, and just hand out packets with the next forty numbers
But, you're right, I'd forgotten about the ID number, that makes it rather harder. And, yeah, it's supposed to be random.
Ah well, there's still cache poisoning. And cache poisoning TXT records isn't something that's really been worth worrying about before not, so just because you can no longer slip in CNAMEs and As doesn't help.
And, of course, I missed that you ignored my big point, namely, there is no copyright violation going on at all if someone downloads a programs from the author's website (Where, obviously, it's the author making copies, which they can do.) and installs it, and puts in a made-up serial number with the intent of installing it against the wishes of the author.
It doesn't matter what copyright violation=theft exmaples you try to throw out, because if you check every single action in that against copyright law, they're all legal. No copyright violation occurred at all.
The only way it might possibly be illegal is contract law, with the EULA. If you agreed not to put in a fake number, and did, you may have violated the contract you supposedly signed.
However, like I said...EULAs are nonsense. You can't possibly prove that it was I who agreed to any specific one. You can't have some sort of absurd generalized contract that got signed by 'someone', you don't know who, but that's exactly what EULAs are.
All you can prove with an EULA is that someone (unless the program was buggy and didn't show the right text, or the person installing it figured out a way to install without agreeing to the EULA) probably agreed to the terms in the EULA, (unless they weren't paying attention to the screen and just clicking next, in which case it doesn't count, or they were a minor or a monkey or a computer program, in which case it doesn't count), and you still haven't shown it was any specific person. (It does you no good if I agreed to the EULA and my brother punched in the invalid number.) EULAs are complete gibberish, legally, so trying to base anything on them is just silly.
My offical policy with EULA is to walk away with them on the screen, and while I'm gone the magical EULA fairy comes by and hits 'enter'. At least, that's what I think happens, as I'm never there to see.
Um, no. I said it wasn't illegal to use illegally copied software, you said it's been illegal to copy it for quite some time. See the difference there? If you violate copyright and give me a copy, which I then install and use, it is you who have broken the law, I have not done a single thing illegal.
I did say 'distribute' and that was perhaps confusing. I said that because copying for your own purposes is usually legal. A copy is legal if it's for backup, or if it's needed to use the program on a computer. Tha said, you can violate copyright law without distribution, for example, installing onto a dozen computers. It is just distribution that carries criminal charges, though, as far as I know.
But I think it was clear enough what I meant. Copyright protects copying, period. If I don't copy the program, I'm legal, no matter what the source. (And, no, copying it to install it on a computer is allowed under copyright law.)
As for 'receiving stolen goods', this is exactly the kind of fuzzy thinking that results when people talking about 'stealing' software. Well, guess what? It doesn't work that way with copyright. If I sell you a machine with a copy of Windows 98 on it, and a week later MS knocks down my doors because I've been selling it without actually purchasing it, you get to keep your copy, I'm the one in trouble. See why people complain when it's called 'stealing'?
Copyright does not confer ownership of bits, it confers the abilities to restrict copying of those bits, and punish people who do in violation of that ability. That's all. Software is not stolen from the copyright owner and hence it isn't stolen property. (Software, can, obviously, be stolen from the possessor, but that's entirely orthagontal to copyright violation. It's illegal for me to steal a CD containing warez, even if I wrote the program that was illegally copied onto the CD, and it's legal for me to install a program I shoplifted from a store, even while it's illegal for someone to knowingly purchase that from me.)
Copyright law doesn't have anything to do with property ownership law, and you cannot be charged with anything for 'receiving illegally copied stuff'.
Right, there obviously was a reason to call it a 'mantrap'. The intent is to hold people inside until they can be verified and let out at one end or another. (I think a better term might be 'manlock', by analogy with 'airlock'. But whatever.)
Regardless of that, it wasn't used as a mantrap in this case. He apparently got through it fine, he just tripped a silent alarm that got the police to call.
At the places you were at, I'm willing to bet if at any point there was no one manning the mantrap video feed, both doors would be locked from the outside so no one could get in, because it would be illegal to let someone wander in and just hold them there.
That was the point I was making, which the case didn't address. The only reason he got through was that he was holding a gun on someone with a key. (And then the pressure sensor tripped him up. Good design.) I said it's not legal to delibrately operate an unmanned system with a door that lets people into it but not back out, which this system didn't do.
Of course, what you did 'delibrately' is an interesting question. I've seen buildings where, after everyone left, the doors were bolted shut, and you couldn't get out the windows. It's not impossible to imagine a manner of egress that does not allow you to exit again on such buildings. Or, hell, fences with overhanging trees that people can climb from the outside but not get to from the inside.
It's not kidnapping if people get themselves trapped by being stupid, whereas it is kidnapping if you delibrately set out to trap anyone, stupid or not. (Note it's legal to 'kidnap' someone if you actually know they are breaking into somewhere. It's not legal to leave an automated system to do that for you.)
I read up on this a few years ago when I realized that I could trap people in my car by engaging the 'lock' button...the electromagnet is so strong you can't push the manual release, and the windows are electric also. I thought it would be funny to leave the car unlocked, but rig it where it wouldn't let you out after you climbed in, unless you knew what to do. But I realized it would be illegal.
The big ones for illegal software copying are for distribution, not use.
In fact, all of them are. It's not illegal to use a illegal copy of a program, it's illegal to distribute it. If you give me an illegal copy, it is you who will have to pay for it, and I can, quite happily, keep using it.
So there's no software 'piracy' going on whatsoever. It was copied by the copyright holder (Or, rather, placed on a server that would copy it automatically on request...same thing.), it was downloaded to someone's machine, at which point in time they legally became the owners of that copy, and it was installed to their machine, which copyright law explicitly allows. No one violated copyright law in any way.
So it's questionable if putting in a made up code in a shareware program is illegal at all. The only way it might possibly be illegal is if EULA on downloadable software are valid. They're rather more likely to be valid than commercial EULA, but no one knows yet.
OTOH, there's no proof that the person who's data you delete is the person who agreed to the license, so you're still completely fucked, legally. You don't get to delete my data because someone who shares my computer installed it. Hell, you probably don't get to delete my data anyway.
Because knowingly deleting someone else's data is illegal, full stop, period. It's not some mysterious hard-to-find statue, it's clearly spelt out in your state's legal code, and computer crackers are charged with it all the time.
No, if she'd had some sort of way out, and the criminal remained trapped, then she wouldn't have needed to speak in 'Yes' and 'No' to the police, she would have just walked out of sight from the crook and called them. (That's assuming a transparent door, which is a bit silly anyway.)
In other words, she just delibrately set off a very non-obvious alarm which resulted in the police calling her. There was no 'trapping' done in a kidnapping sense.
As for actually trapping people who break in, I don't think it's legal if you do it automatically. For all you know, they're arsonists who just set a fire and you're going to kill them by trapping them, or they're cops executing a legal search for a criminal who they think ran in there.
OTOH, I'm fairly certain it's legal to build a containment trap (As opposed to an injury trap) that isn't automatically operated. For example, activated by guards who are watching video monitors. You are allowed to detain obvious criminals (or even people who you reasonably mistake as criminals) until the police show up. It's just that automatically doing so is too dangerous for people who might have a legitimate reason they entered, or, even if criminals, have a legitimate need to exit the building, like it being on fire or they're having a heart attack or something.
I mention 'containment' there because I'm pretty certain it's illegal to build a weapon trap even if it's not automatic, aka, it's probably illegal to point a shotgun down your hallway triggered by a remote control in your pocket, with the intent to lure any criminals down the hallway.
Did you have permission to encrypt their data and not decrypt it, yes or no?
If yes, nothing you do is extortion. However, I very seriously doubt that's true, even if it's in the EULA. You can't just write anything you want into a contract and expect it to hold up in court.
If no, anything you do is extortion. Making them send you money is extortion, making them email or call you is extortion, making them solve a puzzle on the screen is extortion, making them say two Hail Marys is extortion.
Extortion has nothing to do with money. Extortion is when you threaten to do something you do not have authority do to, unless someone else does something. (Or, in this case, threaten to not undo something you already did.) If they did not give you permission to hold their data hostage, than you are threating to (continue to) commit a crime unless they do something, and it's flat out illegal.
OTOH, entering, even delibrately, the wrong key into an activation box isn't, by any measure, illegal.
Even if you can make the case that everyone who does that is using an illegal copy (Which isn't true.), it does not then follow that they are all doing something illegal...if I purchase, or download, an illegal copy from someone else I am allowed to keep it. They are the ones who broke the law, not me. They have to pay for all the copies they sold, not me.
Even if I had made the illegal copy myself, and are thus the criminal (And we're really out of a limb here, as that is almost no one who downloads warez.), deleting my stuff doesn't magically get rid of the copy. In other words, it fails the self-defense test...it doesn't stop a crime from being committed, it waits until after a crime has been committed and tries to get retribution for it.
The closest analogy would be some sort of head-mounted auto-aimed gun that shoots anyone who kill or injures you. I'm sorry, but that's patently illegal, as you will find out when you get rear-ended and fill someone talking on a cell phone full of lead, and then get arrested for 1st degree murder. (I'm pretty certain that counts as 1st degree. You were delibrately wearing the hat with the intent to kill people who hurt you.)
The one defense here, the only way it might be legal, is via the EULA. And like I always say...I don't agree to EULAs. I just walk away, leaving them up on the screen, and when I get back they mysteriously have been agreed to.
If any software company thinks otherwise, they're more than welcome to produce their copy of the contract, signed by me. No, a record on my computer that someone agreed to it doesn't count in a court of law.
As does the copy of MS Office that Microsoft mailed to me, out of the blue, that said 'Not for resale'. Really? What was it the post office said about mailing things unsolicted to people, again?
People forget that not only is it legal for government officals to break into your house, it is perfectly legal for me, a normal citizen, to break into your house to stop a bigger crime from being committed.
For example, if some madman is chasing me with a guy, it's perfectly legal for me to break into your house and hide there. (Of course, I need to watch out and make sure you don't shoot me.) Or if they're holding someone hostage and I need a sniper position to kill that person in 'self-defense'. (Yes, it can be self-defense even if it's not you.)
However, deleting someone's file is just absurd. What if someone else installed it, asshat? What if it wasn't me who agreed to your EULA that says you can do that?
I have a list of IP addresses Yahoo sends mail from. To send mail to my server using @yahoo.com, you have to be sending from that address. If not, you get a message informing you to do so. At least, I think I'm doing it with Yahoo. I'm certainly doing it with some freemail providers. (And before you whine that your address isn't freemail because you pay for it, I ask you how the hell anyone's supposed to be able to tell free from paid Yahoo accounts? Congratulations on spending good money on something everyone else will assume is a crappy free account.)
And I'm not the only one who's done this.
Over time, obviously, SPF will replace the process of doing this manually.
As for paid Yahoo accounts, I have no idea what you're talking about. If you have a paid account, you can use their SMTP server, I would assume. Thus you have nothing to worry about with SPF.
You don't need a MitM attack for DNS. DNS uses UDP.
So all you have to do is lookup the DNS server's IP, and send a packet 'from' that IP with the information they're about to lookup. If you time it right, it's trivial. They sent a packet to that IP asking for information, they got a packet 'from' that IP with said information. Everyone's happy.
Some DNS servers used to be so poorly designed you could send a response to 'where's example.com' with 'here's example.com's name server, and here are some useful A records: example.com, www.example.com, and aol.com', and from then on that server would happily hand out whatever IPs for aol.com. This is called 'cache poisoning'. (Handing you back 'records of interest' is useful because you end up doing less lookups. If I look up the nameserver for example.com, and it's ns1.example.com, I am obviously about to ask 'okay, what's the IP for ns1.example.com?'.)
But nowdays most DNS servers won't let you get away with that, but none of them can protect against a server that happens to send 'from' (Remember, UDP has no connection, and, hence, can be spoofed easily.) the correct IP containing the correct data at the correct moment. There's no way they can know. (Well, except that the real packet gets there a second later.)
This is why all networks need exgress filtering. You shouldn't be able to send packets from addresses that are not on that network. Sadly, lacking an exgress filter only hurts other people, so most networks don't have them.
Specifically, SPF breaks forwarding when someone gets one mail account and forwards everything in it to another account. That account will do SPF lookups, see the mail is forged, and reject it.
There are three solutions here:
1. Stop forging MAIL FROM when you forward mail, you moron. Yes, it's not you, but your MTA, but that's wrong behavior. If that mail were to bounce, no one at the other end would have any idea what address it bounced from! They send to one address, got a bounce back from another! This has lead to silliness like VERP where the email address you're sending to is encoded in the MAIL FROM.
Yes, right now, if you didn't do that, the bounce would go back to the forwarding account, and then reforward it, only to bounce again.
But the point is: SMTP forwarding is already broken. Complaining that this makes is more broken is valid, but not really relevant, considing:
2. It would be trivial to make a option to disregard SPF lookups for certain IP addresses, and give people an interface to set those. For example, if I use hotmail to receive mail forwarded from example.com, I would go into hotmail and type 'example.com' in the 'accounts I have forwarded to here'. hotmail can then turn off the SPF check for any email coming from any IP address example.com sends mail from. (Which, to complete the circle, they can calculate using SPF!)
Or, hell, for bonus points, it can try to parse the header and apply SPF rules to the IP address before the mail hit example.com's mail server. Yes, yes, headers are not reliable, but hopefully the accounts you have forwarded are not trying to fake you out. If SPF info is just added via headers, it's trivail to make a rule to pull out email forwarded from your other account before you do any filtering on it.
So there are at least two solutions, one implimentable on your forwarded account, and one implimentable on your receiving account. But what if you can't change anything?
3. Well, on every webmail I've ever seen, including free ones, you can set up 'POP3 accounts' to pull in mail from. Maybe you should realize SMTP mail forwarding is just broken and just use those to pull your mail in.
This is going to cause a lot of problems for goobers who think that their @yahoo.com that they arre sending from their own machine isn't already blocked to hell and back.
If you're using freemail accounts, you already basically have to send through their servers.
I didn't say they'd count and we'd average them. No vote tabulation method in the world does that, that's just silly. If there's any disagreement, we grab the observers sitting around and we all look at those votes.
And I didn't imply we'd count them in secret, either. No one ever counts ballots in secret, and the whole point of counting them repeatedly is that you catch people trying to skew the vote.
Nonono. Instead of randomly selecting people, just make it a condition of voting. You want to vote, you have to count twenty other ballots first. (With ballot groups being kept together, so they get counted repeatedly.)
This would result in each ballot being counted a dozen times. (Sometimes you'd have to skip...for example, the first 100 or so people wouldn't have any ballots to count.)
I didn't blame 'Republicans'. I blamed people pushing for an abortion ban, and at the same time pushing policies that increase pregnancies. And, although this isn't happening in the political arena, these are the same group of people teaching 'values' that encourage young girls to not admit they are pregnant, which results in a) abortion or b) abandoned babies.
You can argue about how that lowers the level of debate all you want, but that is the truth, period. We could have a society that attempts to keep people who cannot support a child from betting pregnant, and helps and supports them if they do, but we've got people who trying to keep them from having sex (Which is just plain stupid. It's impossible to stop anyone from having sex.), and condemns them as sinners, so they won't ask for any help.
I won't even reply to the last paragraph, because you seem to be under the impression that the Constitution is subject to popular vote. There have been very stupid decisions, Roe v. Wade is the latest (I'd be all for a 'right to medical privacy', but finding one that just covered abortion was nonsensical.), but saying 'No, you can't ban flag burning' or 'Banning gay marriage violates the equal protection clause of the constitution' aren't them.
Your urgent issues are almost identical to my urgent issues.
You know what the problem is? We've started something that I call 'outrage politics'. The right is currently much more guilty of that than the left, but the left does it some also. It's 'Let's find something to outrage the votes about'.
For the past decade, this has been abortion. I don't fucking care about abortion. Clinton was right, safe but seldom. Left's attempt to reduce the causes of abortion. And part of those causes are exactly the same people who are pushing for the ban, because they're restricting birth control, and they're the people preaching about how sex before marriage is evil so prom queens have their babies in the toilet and leave them in a dumpster so people won't think they're evil.
Recently, it's become gay marriage...well, marriage itself is a fairly stupid institution for the government to care about anyway.
Also making appearances have been flag burning, pornography, gun control or lack thereof, music, teenage pregancy, and the president having an affair or two. (And, yes, I'm slightly biased in that list, as most stuff there has been done by the conservatives. Feel free to add some.)
However, there's a common thread through out. NO ONE CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OF THEM. Porn, flag burning, music, are all protected by the first amendment. Abortion, gun control, and gay marriage are constitutional issue. (And, yes, Roe v. Wade was stupid.)
But by pointing and screaming and yelling and hopping up and down made with anger, politicions have almost completely a) divided the parties, b) made everything a moral issue, and thus anyone who votes the other way 'evil', and c) completely avoided any actual issues, like 'should we be the world's policeman'? (And, no, I don't have a ready answer there.)
They can change it by a simple vote. Congress is in charge of its own rules.
The sad thing is, they're considering it. It's like the active duty soldiers at the RNC a few weeks ago. That was just a law, and, hey, they realized they could change the law.
That doesn't mean the whole system isn't going down the crapper. Over the years, Congress has explicitly made rules to limit its own power, and suddenly none of these rules are needed? Of course they're still needed, but the neocons are in full-speed-ahead-damn-the-torpedos mode, and removing any sorts of checks-and-balances they can.
What's next? Removing democrats from committes? There's a hell of a lot of power that the minority part has that is simply Congresional rules, and can, in fact, be taken away.
You know, five seconds in google would find you this. (Ugly text version here.
And I quote the FCC: In addition, questions have arisen about the ability of homeowners associations, landlords, and other third parties to prohibit customer use of small antennas when consumers install and operate them as unlicensed devices.
In response, we reaffirm that, under the Communications Act, the FCC has exclusive authority to resolve matters involving radio frequency interference [RFI] when unlicensed devices are being used, regardless of venue. We also affirm that the rights that consumers have under our rules to install and operate customer antennas one meter or less in size apply to the operation of unlicensed equipment, such as Wi-Fi access points - just as they do to the use of equipment in connection with fixed wireless services licensed by the FCC.
Erm, you've mostly right, but note that unlicensed spectrum means 'You don't need a license to use a device that broadcasts in that spectrum', not 'You can broadcast however you want in that spectrum'. The FCC does regulate the devices that broadcast on that spectrum, and will not give approval to one that's just designed to flood out everyone else with no apparent purpose, and covering the entire campus would require a stronger signal than is allowed anyway.
That said, the school still wouldn't be able to ban such a device. They'd have to complain to the FCC, who would then track you down.
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I haven't said anything of the sort, that's a completely insane strawman you've set up.
All I said was 'receiving stolen property' doesn't apply to illegally copied material, because illegally copied material isn't, in fact, stolen, either in a moral sense or, more important, under the law. So you went off on this weird rampage where things being like other things via some analog makes them the same, legally.
You know, physically, me sticking a knife into someone's car tires is very similar to sticking a knife in someone's chest, but I'm fairly certain they are treated different under the law.
I've actually read copyright law, and I know what it says. You, obviously, have not, and have been tricked by large corperations to think it's legally theft.
You can no more steal software via copying than you can rape a chair, trespass on an illegal drug, or commit treason against a car radio. It's not some semantic argument...theft is a legal term that means 'doing an action with someone else's property with the intent to deny them said property', and it's meant that for millennia, although possibly not with that word.
It would be one thing if the court system itself had changed it, but they have explicitly invented a new term instead, 'copyright infringement'. Infringement is also a legal term, and it means to not recognize someone else's rights. Aka, the government can infringe on the 1st amendment, and I can infringe on Metallica's copyright. Trespass is a form of infringement, I believe.
There's a "knowingly" part is important in this case. You're breaking the law if you know what you've obtained is stolen and you hang on to it, to my understanding.
No, what's impostant is the stolen part of it. The only way to receive stolen software is to purchase some shoplifted junk.
Software is not stolen from the copyright owner and hence it isn't stolen property.
Thus far it seems like there's some kind of semantic distinction between "stealing software" and "stealing everything else" that isn't very clear. I'll certainly read up on this, but I have a feeling the law itself is kind of obfuscated in that regard.
You'd be wrong. It's not semantic. What you're doing is trying to argue that trespassing is 'land theft'. It's not, it doesn't work that way at all. Copyright infringement is not theft, it's not a form of theft (there are actually many forms of theft, normal theft is 'theft by taking'), it's not anywhere near close to theft.
Copyright law doesn't have anything to do with property ownership law
It sure seems to be treated that way at times, even in court. Whether it ought to be, I'm not sure.
No it's not, at all. Companies like to pretend it is, but judges have actually called lawyers on it. The RIAA, when they were suing all those kids, actually had the judge reprimand them for saying 'stolen' repeatedly, because you don't steal music by illegal copying it, just like you don't steal land by trespassing, or steal life by murder.
Laws are not analogies. To commit theft, you have to deprive someone of something else. This can be walking off with it, aka, theft by taking, it can be using it up, like drinking their soda, which is theft by conversion, it can be by destroying it, which I don't recall what it's called.
But legally, all versions of theft require one thing: The intent to deprive someone of their property.
If you did that, it's probably theft in some way. (Unless you hit some legal loophole, like you went back in time before they owned it and destroyed it.) If you didn't, it's certainly not theft.
My offical policy with EULA is to walk away with them on the screen, and while I'm gone the magical EULA fairy comes by and hits 'enter'. At least, that's what I think happens, as I'm never there to see.
If I ever had to talk my way out of an EULA violation situation I'd probably just claim I didn't understand it. Not much of a stretch there, since you'd honestly need a lawyer to be sure what rights the EULA is asking you to give up.
At least we agree on one thing. EULA are just stupid, legally. You can't agree to a contract like that.
My advice is to point out that you've agreed to a bunch of EULAs in your time, and thus you can't remember if you agreed to this one. And then ask them for their copy of the EULA you signed with your signature on it.
In reality, if you let people observe the count, you are going to get people with extreme minority viewpoints. You get observers offically assigned by both parties, and you get the local wackjob who's convinced the CIA is spying on people in the voting booths via alien technology. And the wacko will start screaming when something is wrong. (This actually happens currently, assuming the wacko shows up.)
If a political party is so strong that it composes so much of the population that there isn't anyone who isn't 'on their side' to observe...then what the fuck is the problem? They're going to win anyway.
A political organization that was strong enough to subvert a randomly selected group of ten people, and keep anyone who didn't go along from deciding to watch, isn't going to bother with altering the 99.999% vote for them into 100%.
In fact, why would they bother subverting the counting when they can just subvert the voting? I mean, if they own all the observers and poll workers, they can just throw out all the ballots they don't like. Hell, if they've managed to subvert the all voters doing counting, then why didn't they just get them all to vote for them in the first place?
More observers and vote counters cannot possibly increase the chance of delibrate miscounting, especially if you combine 'drafting' people to count together with anyone who wants to observe being allowed to do so.
The system, as it stands now, has only a few observers, and often all it has are people appointed by the two major parties, so collusion between them is almost undetectable. (The election is filling two seats on the city council, but the libertarian guy might edge the republican out, so they split the seats and pay the democrats with a sheriff.) We're talking maybe six guys coming together and doing this, quite managable, and they can keep doing it year after year.
With groups of voters doing the counting, it's impossible. Sure, a single block of voters might be subvertable, but simply mentioning it to them is risky. And you have to do it again and again to make any real change in the final count.
In fact, this shouldn't just apply to counting. You want to vote, you go fill out your card, you stick it in an envelope, and you do five minutes of work handing out ballots or sweeping the floor or whatever needs doing, and you have to count some ballots. (If there's no work to be done, you just sit there and count ballots the whole time.) Then and only then do you get to turn your vote in.
But, you're right, I'd forgotten about the ID number, that makes it rather harder. And, yeah, it's supposed to be random.
Ah well, there's still cache poisoning. And cache poisoning TXT records isn't something that's really been worth worrying about before not, so just because you can no longer slip in CNAMEs and As doesn't help.
It doesn't matter what copyright violation=theft exmaples you try to throw out, because if you check every single action in that against copyright law, they're all legal. No copyright violation occurred at all.
The only way it might possibly be illegal is contract law, with the EULA. If you agreed not to put in a fake number, and did, you may have violated the contract you supposedly signed.
However, like I said...EULAs are nonsense. You can't possibly prove that it was I who agreed to any specific one. You can't have some sort of absurd generalized contract that got signed by 'someone', you don't know who, but that's exactly what EULAs are.
All you can prove with an EULA is that someone (unless the program was buggy and didn't show the right text, or the person installing it figured out a way to install without agreeing to the EULA) probably agreed to the terms in the EULA, (unless they weren't paying attention to the screen and just clicking next, in which case it doesn't count, or they were a minor or a monkey or a computer program, in which case it doesn't count), and you still haven't shown it was any specific person. (It does you no good if I agreed to the EULA and my brother punched in the invalid number.) EULAs are complete gibberish, legally, so trying to base anything on them is just silly.
My offical policy with EULA is to walk away with them on the screen, and while I'm gone the magical EULA fairy comes by and hits 'enter'. At least, that's what I think happens, as I'm never there to see.
Um, no. I said it wasn't illegal to use illegally copied software, you said it's been illegal to copy it for quite some time. See the difference there? If you violate copyright and give me a copy, which I then install and use, it is you who have broken the law, I have not done a single thing illegal.
I did say 'distribute' and that was perhaps confusing. I said that because copying for your own purposes is usually legal. A copy is legal if it's for backup, or if it's needed to use the program on a computer. Tha said, you can violate copyright law without distribution, for example, installing onto a dozen computers. It is just distribution that carries criminal charges, though, as far as I know.
But I think it was clear enough what I meant. Copyright protects copying, period. If I don't copy the program, I'm legal, no matter what the source. (And, no, copying it to install it on a computer is allowed under copyright law.)
As for 'receiving stolen goods', this is exactly the kind of fuzzy thinking that results when people talking about 'stealing' software. Well, guess what? It doesn't work that way with copyright. If I sell you a machine with a copy of Windows 98 on it, and a week later MS knocks down my doors because I've been selling it without actually purchasing it, you get to keep your copy, I'm the one in trouble. See why people complain when it's called 'stealing'?
Copyright does not confer ownership of bits, it confers the abilities to restrict copying of those bits, and punish people who do in violation of that ability. That's all. Software is not stolen from the copyright owner and hence it isn't stolen property. (Software, can, obviously, be stolen from the possessor, but that's entirely orthagontal to copyright violation. It's illegal for me to steal a CD containing warez, even if I wrote the program that was illegally copied onto the CD, and it's legal for me to install a program I shoplifted from a store, even while it's illegal for someone to knowingly purchase that from me.)
Copyright law doesn't have anything to do with property ownership law, and you cannot be charged with anything for 'receiving illegally copied stuff'.
Regardless of that, it wasn't used as a mantrap in this case. He apparently got through it fine, he just tripped a silent alarm that got the police to call.
At the places you were at, I'm willing to bet if at any point there was no one manning the mantrap video feed, both doors would be locked from the outside so no one could get in, because it would be illegal to let someone wander in and just hold them there.
That was the point I was making, which the case didn't address. The only reason he got through was that he was holding a gun on someone with a key. (And then the pressure sensor tripped him up. Good design.) I said it's not legal to delibrately operate an unmanned system with a door that lets people into it but not back out, which this system didn't do.
Of course, what you did 'delibrately' is an interesting question. I've seen buildings where, after everyone left, the doors were bolted shut, and you couldn't get out the windows. It's not impossible to imagine a manner of egress that does not allow you to exit again on such buildings. Or, hell, fences with overhanging trees that people can climb from the outside but not get to from the inside.
It's not kidnapping if people get themselves trapped by being stupid, whereas it is kidnapping if you delibrately set out to trap anyone, stupid or not. (Note it's legal to 'kidnap' someone if you actually know they are breaking into somewhere. It's not legal to leave an automated system to do that for you.)
I read up on this a few years ago when I realized that I could trap people in my car by engaging the 'lock' button...the electromagnet is so strong you can't push the manual release, and the windows are electric also. I thought it would be funny to leave the car unlocked, but rig it where it wouldn't let you out after you climbed in, unless you knew what to do. But I realized it would be illegal.
In fact, all of them are. It's not illegal to use a illegal copy of a program, it's illegal to distribute it. If you give me an illegal copy, it is you who will have to pay for it, and I can, quite happily, keep using it.
So there's no software 'piracy' going on whatsoever. It was copied by the copyright holder (Or, rather, placed on a server that would copy it automatically on request...same thing.), it was downloaded to someone's machine, at which point in time they legally became the owners of that copy, and it was installed to their machine, which copyright law explicitly allows. No one violated copyright law in any way.
So it's questionable if putting in a made up code in a shareware program is illegal at all. The only way it might possibly be illegal is if EULA on downloadable software are valid. They're rather more likely to be valid than commercial EULA, but no one knows yet.
OTOH, there's no proof that the person who's data you delete is the person who agreed to the license, so you're still completely fucked, legally. You don't get to delete my data because someone who shares my computer installed it. Hell, you probably don't get to delete my data anyway.
Because knowingly deleting someone else's data is illegal, full stop, period. It's not some mysterious hard-to-find statue, it's clearly spelt out in your state's legal code, and computer crackers are charged with it all the time.
In other words, she just delibrately set off a very non-obvious alarm which resulted in the police calling her. There was no 'trapping' done in a kidnapping sense.
As for actually trapping people who break in, I don't think it's legal if you do it automatically. For all you know, they're arsonists who just set a fire and you're going to kill them by trapping them, or they're cops executing a legal search for a criminal who they think ran in there.
OTOH, I'm fairly certain it's legal to build a containment trap (As opposed to an injury trap) that isn't automatically operated. For example, activated by guards who are watching video monitors. You are allowed to detain obvious criminals (or even people who you reasonably mistake as criminals) until the police show up. It's just that automatically doing so is too dangerous for people who might have a legitimate reason they entered, or, even if criminals, have a legitimate need to exit the building, like it being on fire or they're having a heart attack or something.
I mention 'containment' there because I'm pretty certain it's illegal to build a weapon trap even if it's not automatic, aka, it's probably illegal to point a shotgun down your hallway triggered by a remote control in your pocket, with the intent to lure any criminals down the hallway.
If yes, nothing you do is extortion. However, I very seriously doubt that's true, even if it's in the EULA. You can't just write anything you want into a contract and expect it to hold up in court.
If no, anything you do is extortion. Making them send you money is extortion, making them email or call you is extortion, making them solve a puzzle on the screen is extortion, making them say two Hail Marys is extortion.
Extortion has nothing to do with money. Extortion is when you threaten to do something you do not have authority do to, unless someone else does something. (Or, in this case, threaten to not undo something you already did.) If they did not give you permission to hold their data hostage, than you are threating to (continue to) commit a crime unless they do something, and it's flat out illegal.
Even if you can make the case that everyone who does that is using an illegal copy (Which isn't true.), it does not then follow that they are all doing something illegal...if I purchase, or download, an illegal copy from someone else I am allowed to keep it. They are the ones who broke the law, not me. They have to pay for all the copies they sold, not me.
Even if I had made the illegal copy myself, and are thus the criminal (And we're really out of a limb here, as that is almost no one who downloads warez.), deleting my stuff doesn't magically get rid of the copy. In other words, it fails the self-defense test...it doesn't stop a crime from being committed, it waits until after a crime has been committed and tries to get retribution for it.
The closest analogy would be some sort of head-mounted auto-aimed gun that shoots anyone who kill or injures you. I'm sorry, but that's patently illegal, as you will find out when you get rear-ended and fill someone talking on a cell phone full of lead, and then get arrested for 1st degree murder. (I'm pretty certain that counts as 1st degree. You were delibrately wearing the hat with the intent to kill people who hurt you.)
The one defense here, the only way it might be legal, is via the EULA. And like I always say...I don't agree to EULAs. I just walk away, leaving them up on the screen, and when I get back they mysteriously have been agreed to.
If any software company thinks otherwise, they're more than welcome to produce their copy of the contract, signed by me. No, a record on my computer that someone agreed to it doesn't count in a court of law.
As does the copy of MS Office that Microsoft mailed to me, out of the blue, that said 'Not for resale'. Really? What was it the post office said about mailing things unsolicted to people, again?
For example, if some madman is chasing me with a guy, it's perfectly legal for me to break into your house and hide there. (Of course, I need to watch out and make sure you don't shoot me.) Or if they're holding someone hostage and I need a sniper position to kill that person in 'self-defense'. (Yes, it can be self-defense even if it's not you.)
However, deleting someone's file is just absurd. What if someone else installed it, asshat? What if it wasn't me who agreed to your EULA that says you can do that?
And I'm not the only one who's done this.
Over time, obviously, SPF will replace the process of doing this manually.
As for paid Yahoo accounts, I have no idea what you're talking about. If you have a paid account, you can use their SMTP server, I would assume. Thus you have nothing to worry about with SPF.
So all you have to do is lookup the DNS server's IP, and send a packet 'from' that IP with the information they're about to lookup. If you time it right, it's trivial. They sent a packet to that IP asking for information, they got a packet 'from' that IP with said information. Everyone's happy.
Some DNS servers used to be so poorly designed you could send a response to 'where's example.com' with 'here's example.com's name server, and here are some useful A records: example.com, www.example.com, and aol.com', and from then on that server would happily hand out whatever IPs for aol.com. This is called 'cache poisoning'. (Handing you back 'records of interest' is useful because you end up doing less lookups. If I look up the nameserver for example.com, and it's ns1.example.com, I am obviously about to ask 'okay, what's the IP for ns1.example.com?'.)
But nowdays most DNS servers won't let you get away with that, but none of them can protect against a server that happens to send 'from' (Remember, UDP has no connection, and, hence, can be spoofed easily.) the correct IP containing the correct data at the correct moment. There's no way they can know. (Well, except that the real packet gets there a second later.)
This is why all networks need exgress filtering. You shouldn't be able to send packets from addresses that are not on that network. Sadly, lacking an exgress filter only hurts other people, so most networks don't have them.
There are three solutions here:
1. Stop forging MAIL FROM when you forward mail, you moron. Yes, it's not you, but your MTA, but that's wrong behavior. If that mail were to bounce, no one at the other end would have any idea what address it bounced from! They send to one address, got a bounce back from another! This has lead to silliness like VERP where the email address you're sending to is encoded in the MAIL FROM.
Yes, right now, if you didn't do that, the bounce would go back to the forwarding account, and then reforward it, only to bounce again.
But the point is: SMTP forwarding is already broken. Complaining that this makes is more broken is valid, but not really relevant, considing:
2. It would be trivial to make a option to disregard SPF lookups for certain IP addresses, and give people an interface to set those. For example, if I use hotmail to receive mail forwarded from example.com, I would go into hotmail and type 'example.com' in the 'accounts I have forwarded to here'. hotmail can then turn off the SPF check for any email coming from any IP address example.com sends mail from. (Which, to complete the circle, they can calculate using SPF!)
Or, hell, for bonus points, it can try to parse the header and apply SPF rules to the IP address before the mail hit example.com's mail server. Yes, yes, headers are not reliable, but hopefully the accounts you have forwarded are not trying to fake you out. If SPF info is just added via headers, it's trivail to make a rule to pull out email forwarded from your other account before you do any filtering on it.
So there are at least two solutions, one implimentable on your forwarded account, and one implimentable on your receiving account. But what if you can't change anything?
3. Well, on every webmail I've ever seen, including free ones, you can set up 'POP3 accounts' to pull in mail from. Maybe you should realize SMTP mail forwarding is just broken and just use those to pull your mail in.
If you're using freemail accounts, you already basically have to send through their servers.
And I didn't imply we'd count them in secret, either. No one ever counts ballots in secret, and the whole point of counting them repeatedly is that you catch people trying to skew the vote.
And it's rather inane to tell a few people to not use a method that doesn't record their vote in any provable way...because others will use that way.
This would result in each ballot being counted a dozen times. (Sometimes you'd have to skip...for example, the first 100 or so people wouldn't have any ballots to count.)
You can argue about how that lowers the level of debate all you want, but that is the truth, period. We could have a society that attempts to keep people who cannot support a child from betting pregnant, and helps and supports them if they do, but we've got people who trying to keep them from having sex (Which is just plain stupid. It's impossible to stop anyone from having sex.), and condemns them as sinners, so they won't ask for any help.
I won't even reply to the last paragraph, because you seem to be under the impression that the Constitution is subject to popular vote. There have been very stupid decisions, Roe v. Wade is the latest (I'd be all for a 'right to medical privacy', but finding one that just covered abortion was nonsensical.), but saying 'No, you can't ban flag burning' or 'Banning gay marriage violates the equal protection clause of the constitution' aren't them.
You know what the problem is? We've started something that I call 'outrage politics'. The right is currently much more guilty of that than the left, but the left does it some also. It's 'Let's find something to outrage the votes about'.
For the past decade, this has been abortion. I don't fucking care about abortion. Clinton was right, safe but seldom. Left's attempt to reduce the causes of abortion. And part of those causes are exactly the same people who are pushing for the ban, because they're restricting birth control, and they're the people preaching about how sex before marriage is evil so prom queens have their babies in the toilet and leave them in a dumpster so people won't think they're evil.
Recently, it's become gay marriage...well, marriage itself is a fairly stupid institution for the government to care about anyway.
Also making appearances have been flag burning, pornography, gun control or lack thereof, music, teenage pregancy, and the president having an affair or two. (And, yes, I'm slightly biased in that list, as most stuff there has been done by the conservatives. Feel free to add some.)
However, there's a common thread through out. NO ONE CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OF THEM. Porn, flag burning, music, are all protected by the first amendment. Abortion, gun control, and gay marriage are constitutional issue. (And, yes, Roe v. Wade was stupid.)
But by pointing and screaming and yelling and hopping up and down made with anger, politicions have almost completely a) divided the parties, b) made everything a moral issue, and thus anyone who votes the other way 'evil', and c) completely avoided any actual issues, like 'should we be the world's policeman'? (And, no, I don't have a ready answer there.)
The sad thing is, they're considering it. It's like the active duty soldiers at the RNC a few weeks ago. That was just a law, and, hey, they realized they could change the law.
That doesn't mean the whole system isn't going down the crapper. Over the years, Congress has explicitly made rules to limit its own power, and suddenly none of these rules are needed? Of course they're still needed, but the neocons are in full-speed-ahead-damn-the-torpedos mode, and removing any sorts of checks-and-balances they can.
What's next? Removing democrats from committes? There's a hell of a lot of power that the minority part has that is simply Congresional rules, and can, in fact, be taken away.
And I quote the FCC: In addition, questions have arisen about the ability of homeowners associations, landlords, and other third parties to prohibit customer use of small antennas when consumers install and operate them as unlicensed devices.
In response, we reaffirm that, under the Communications Act, the FCC has exclusive authority to resolve matters involving radio frequency interference [RFI] when unlicensed devices are being used, regardless of venue. We also affirm that the rights that consumers have under our rules to install and operate customer antennas one meter or less in size apply to the operation of unlicensed equipment, such as Wi-Fi access points - just as they do to the use of equipment in connection with fixed wireless services licensed by the FCC.
However, they've made enemies and basically screwed themselves now.
That said, the school still wouldn't be able to ban such a device. They'd have to complain to the FCC, who would then track you down.