I don't think it's that so much as the fact that it was constant for 18 days. 18 days of 1 record per 3 seconds works out to something like 500,000 records... If they're PDFs, that could easily amount a constant MBps transfer rate. I don't know about you, but that would eat through my transfer quota pretty fast.
I can think of a few examples off the top of my head. Imagine health records are public:
- Resourceful Apple fanboys find new reports on Steve Jobs' cancer - it's getting worse. Apple stocks plummet. - Someone finds a prominent community leader was treated for an STD - and his wife was not. Bad Things Happen. (I'm not condoning adultery, but it's none of our business.) - Angry teenagers look up the health records of $HATED_PERSON and find that $HATED_PERSON is deathly allergic to some relatively uncommon, but easily obtainable (and legal), substance. Deaths follow.
I'm not trying to fear-monger. I believe we need a national health record repository - I'm tired of doctors in one hospital requiring me to bring them my own copies of results from tests done at the clinic down the street. But I don't think those health records should be publicly accessible.
If you want help, just tell people you're sick. It works all the time. Communities rally. People set up AIDS walks. Michael J Fox pushes Parkinson's research. We don't need health records to be public to get that benefit.
from a location where it was free to access them at that time.
Nope. The FBI document indicates that the accesses were from two Amazon EC2 instances, which were apparently running scripts that represented themselves to PACER as if they were authorized (using cookies obtained from library computers).
I don't think that this was strictly illegal (though IANAL), but it was definitely rude to the PACER system admins. One PDF every three seconds could easily get into the MB/sec range.
Reminds me of the middle-school I attended. The administration decided that rather than buy, say, new textbooks, or new computers for the already outdated computer lab, they'd upgrade the air conditioning in the office. (Mind you, they weren't adding A/C, they were upgrading it.)
No, but if you leave the keys in the ignition, and post a sign saying "feel free to use the radio", you shouldn't be surprised when someone drives off with your vehicle.
The FBI documents specifically state that the scripts were running on computers outside of the library, using library credentials. Either Swartz is lying (and Wired is misled), or the FBI is wrong. If the FBI were wrong, why would Swartz post the FBI document without pointing out the inaccuracy?
Come to think of it, why would Swartz lie in the first place?
THANK YOU. It's sad that I had to read 2/3 of the way through the comments before finding anyone else that noticed that discrepancy between Swartz's claim and the FBI's document.
While I don't really thing Swartz should be charged with anything (i.e. I'm glad he wasn't), I think it's kind of ridiculous to claim one thing while providing FBI documents on his site that contradict his own claim, especially if he isn't going to challenge the contradiction.
Did he really expect the FBI not to take an interest in him after he installed his own code on a Government computer? Frankly I'd be worried if they didn't take an interest when some IT person notices a script running on a Government computer that's uploading hundreds of thousands of documents.
According to the FBI document, the scripts were not running on a library computer, they were merely using library login credentials to PACER.
My gut feeling is that while Swartz may have broken some rule or other, he didn't technically break any federal laws, so the FBI wouldn't have anything to charge him with. They were probably just making sure he wasn't trying to take down PACER by doing eighteen straight days of downloading.
Am I the only one noticing a discrepancy between the slashdot summary and the FBI document?
Specifically, the summary claims Swartz ran the scripts from a library computer. The FBI document claims this (I'm quoting the rest of the sentence you quoted first):
Between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008, PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library utilizing login information from two libraries participating in the pilot project.
If he merely wrote a script on a library computer, as the article summary claims, then the FBI document must be wrong. I can't say my confidence in Slashdot's summaries is high enough to outweigh the FBI's investigation...
Imagine I go to a public library that happens to be running some variant of *nix.
I open a new text file, and enter the following, then make it executable and run it:
#!/bin/bash echo "Hello!"
(That was my impression of what he did, though mine is far simpler than his. I could be wrong, of course.) Is what I just did considered "installing" software? Why or why not? Is mere complexity a distinguishing factor?
I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's kind of sad that we can't find out whether we've been investigated without risking causing an investigation just for finding out...
I didn't mind the flashbacks themselves so much as the incompetent attempts to distinguish between flashback and present which were almost always confusing. Most of the time the flashbacks made me wonder if my TV's color settings had gotten messed up somehow (i.e. it looked washed out) instead of looking... flashback-ish.
Alright. Another question, then - when Sisko purchases lumber from Bajor to build his solar sail ship, what did he use to pay for it? I doubt Bajor would accept Federation credits, since they're not part of the Federation (yet), so one would assume he either traded something for it (but what?), got it as a favor from someone (plausible) or paid in latinum, which leads to my question: where would he get the latinum? Would Star Fleet provide latinum/credit exchanges when necessary?
I know this kind of question probably isn't answerable. I'm just curious:)
warp works by reducing the apparent mass/inertia of stuff in the warp bubble
This is exactly how they moved DS9 from Bajor's orbit to the wormhole using only the station's positioning thrusters... they used some generator or other to create some sort of field similar to a warp field that lowered the inertia of the station. (That's just the most recent episode I've watched where they talk about that sort of thing.)
I won't claim to have even an above-average understanding of Star Trek physics, though, so I won't even hazard a guess at whether the in-bubble matter's interaction with "normal" matter is one-way or two-way...
The last two times I had to call in (last year?), I didn't have to talk to a real person. I just used the automated system and I had it activated in less than five minutes. (Another time, I only had to call because their entire online activation system was down, and they couldn't do it over the phone either, I just had to wait.)
That's better than what Safeway does. They grossly inflate their prices unless you get their store card (they advertise the lower price); when you get the card, they only give you one, so if I go in without it (i.e. if my wife has it) I don't get the lower prices, and although you can supposedly just enter your phone number instead, it has been nearly six months and they still haven't entered anything into their computer systems. One Safeway employee told me that they mail those forms to California once a month (read: once a year?), where they are ever so slowly processed (probably by a drunk, blind monkey).
Eventually, one employee gave me another Safeway card without me having to fill out a second form, so at least I pay the lower prices now, but if I had any other grocery store within a reasonable distance I'd stop going to Safeway.
Take it you didn't bother to actually read the rebate offer or the price tag which both make mention of it being a visa debit card?
I sent in four mail-in rebates for various computer parts after I built my new desktop. None of them mentioned getting the rebate in the form of a Visa.
One (from eVGA) came as a check. Two (from Thermaltake and OCZ) came as Visas. I haven't received my rebate from Samsung yet.
It seems this is an increasingly common practice. (Thermaltake and OCZ both used a third party rebate processing company, Worldwide Rebates, to handle the rebate.) I'm not sure I understand. Surely it's cheaper to mail out checks than to pay a third party to mail out Visas (which is of course a fourth party)?
There are several inconsistencies with transporters that they never really address. One is replicators vs transporters. If they can make transporters duplicate matter flawlessly, why do replicators have flaws? Are they simply cheaper, less accurate transporters? We know replicators can be modified to act as small transporters (it happens in Deep Space Nine, anyway). If transporters work the way they say they do, how could a person "interact" with something in the "matter stream" (as in TNG)? If it is, in fact, simply a method of transmitting matter, how could the transporter be used to change child-Picard into adult-Picard? How could they result in duplicate-Riker, if they're simply a matter-stream? Wouldn't losing part of a matter-stream result in Riker's death, rather than in two copies? Doesn't the computer have to direct the rematerialization process, so the duplicate Riker should not have materialized?
But yes, I agree that the transporters were an underutilized resource.
Unrelated: is there anything that explains the internal economy of the Federation? I only ask because in the episode I just watched, Jake Sisko refers to his father using "transporter credits"... Also, how does that internal economy interface with external economies? Quark accepts latinum for food at his bar, but while Star Fleet officers often eat there, you never see them hand Quark any payment at all... in fact, the only time I can recall seeing any Star Fleet officer with latinum is when Dax beats the Pharengi at that market-like gambling game they play after-hours. (Memory-alpha.org says little more than I've said here.)
Otherwise general debris would be a big problem for the ship navigation even in "empty" space.
Isn't that what the deflector shield is for - to keep space debris from damaging the ship while at warp?
But still, I bet you'd get some fantastic fireworks if you come out of warp inside another ship's engine core...;)
As I recall, there was an episode of Star Trek: TNG where a Federation ship with an experimental cloaking device got itself stuck in an asteroid by decloaking inside the asteroid. I guess it's a good thing the antimatter in the warp core decloaked in a hollow space in the asteroid...
Jumping back and forth with the flashbacks was annoying as hell.
I didn't like it either, but I'm not sure the episode would have been any better in chronological order. They needed to do it to maintain some sort of tension (how'd they get here? who's that guy? why are they angry? etc) and to make it feel different from "just another SG-1 episode". (Though I did feel like most of the characters were being deliberately stupid about the situation.)
They could have done a lot to make the flashbacks feel much more different from the "present", though. It was hard to tell which was which. Defying Gravity did the flashback thing very well. (Apparently Lost started the flashback trend, but I don't watch Lost, so I can't compare.)
(Was really getting into Defying Gravity, more so, though.)
Me too. It makes me sad that it got canned. That seems to happen to sci-fi shows a lot. It makes me wonder if sci-fi fans are underrepresented in the rating polls...
I wonder how long the show will be able to keep up a story line that is not way too predictable while also keeping a strong primary line (getting back to earth) in play.
The thing that bugged me most about Voyager was how often they were utter morons about the chances they had to get home. Two times, in particular, where they were stupid: the first episode, and the Slipstream episode. Both times, it would have been relatively trivial to get home quickly. I will elaborate if you can't come up with a solution inside 30 seconds on your own.
Once their location relative to earth is known
It is known though - they looked at a map of the ship's travel route, from where it embarked to current position. The ship knows exactly where it is relative to the Milky Way. The immediate problem (aside from the lack of oxygen) is not that they don't know where they are, it's that the ship doesn't have the power to create a wormhole all the way to the Milky Way (at least, not after such a long time without maintenance). They even know what address they need to dial to get back home - the computer told them.
but was impressed at how quickly I liked the characters. [...] So perhaps the device is not set up as BSG or Voyager where the primary goal is to get home, but rather we have not been shown the primary line yet. I remain hopeful but a little wary.
That's my feeling exactly... though RDA's brief appearance was a little jarring. He's getting fat:(
On a completely unrelated note, was anyone else a little weirded out by the commercials for Sanctuary, in which Amanda Tapping (SG-1's blonde, American Samantha Carter) is a brown-haired Brit? She looked similar enough to be eerie, but different enough that I had to go look it up on IMDB before I'd believe it was her...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's that so much as the fact that it was constant for 18 days. 18 days of 1 record per 3 seconds works out to something like 500,000 records... If they're PDFs, that could easily amount a constant MBps transfer rate. I don't know about you, but that would eat through my transfer quota pretty fast.
I can think of a few examples off the top of my head. Imagine health records are public:
- Resourceful Apple fanboys find new reports on Steve Jobs' cancer - it's getting worse. Apple stocks plummet.
- Someone finds a prominent community leader was treated for an STD - and his wife was not. Bad Things Happen. (I'm not condoning adultery, but it's none of our business.)
- Angry teenagers look up the health records of $HATED_PERSON and find that $HATED_PERSON is deathly allergic to some relatively uncommon, but easily obtainable (and legal), substance. Deaths follow.
I'm not trying to fear-monger. I believe we need a national health record repository - I'm tired of doctors in one hospital requiring me to bring them my own copies of results from tests done at the clinic down the street. But I don't think those health records should be publicly accessible.
If you want help, just tell people you're sick. It works all the time. Communities rally. People set up AIDS walks. Michael J Fox pushes Parkinson's research. We don't need health records to be public to get that benefit.
from a location where it was free to access them at that time.
Nope. The FBI document indicates that the accesses were from two Amazon EC2 instances, which were apparently running scripts that represented themselves to PACER as if they were authorized (using cookies obtained from library computers).
I don't think that this was strictly illegal (though IANAL), but it was definitely rude to the PACER system admins. One PDF every three seconds could easily get into the MB/sec range.
Reminds me of the middle-school I attended. The administration decided that rather than buy, say, new textbooks, or new computers for the already outdated computer lab, they'd upgrade the air conditioning in the office. (Mind you, they weren't adding A/C, they were upgrading it.)
No, but if you leave the keys in the ignition, and post a sign saying "feel free to use the radio", you shouldn't be surprised when someone drives off with your vehicle.
The FBI documents specifically state that the scripts were running on computers outside of the library, using library credentials. Either Swartz is lying (and Wired is misled), or the FBI is wrong. If the FBI were wrong, why would Swartz post the FBI document without pointing out the inaccuracy?
Come to think of it, why would Swartz lie in the first place?
THANK YOU. It's sad that I had to read 2/3 of the way through the comments before finding anyone else that noticed that discrepancy between Swartz's claim and the FBI's document.
While I don't really thing Swartz should be charged with anything (i.e. I'm glad he wasn't), I think it's kind of ridiculous to claim one thing while providing FBI documents on his site that contradict his own claim, especially if he isn't going to challenge the contradiction.
Did he really expect the FBI not to take an interest in him after he installed his own code on a Government computer? Frankly I'd be worried if they didn't take an interest when some IT person notices a script running on a Government computer that's uploading hundreds of thousands of documents.
According to the FBI document, the scripts were not running on a library computer, they were merely using library login credentials to PACER.
My gut feeling is that while Swartz may have broken some rule or other, he didn't technically break any federal laws, so the FBI wouldn't have anything to charge him with. They were probably just making sure he wasn't trying to take down PACER by doing eighteen straight days of downloading.
Am I the only one noticing a discrepancy between the slashdot summary and the FBI document?
Specifically, the summary claims Swartz ran the scripts from a library computer. The FBI document claims this (I'm quoting the rest of the sentence you quoted first):
Between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008, PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library utilizing login information from two libraries participating in the pilot project.
If he merely wrote a script on a library computer, as the article summary claims, then the FBI document must be wrong. I can't say my confidence in Slashdot's summaries is high enough to outweigh the FBI's investigation...
Imagine I go to a public library that happens to be running some variant of *nix.
I open a new text file, and enter the following, then make it executable and run it:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Hello!"
(That was my impression of what he did, though mine is far simpler than his. I could be wrong, of course.) Is what I just did considered "installing" software? Why or why not? Is mere complexity a distinguishing factor?
I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's kind of sad that we can't find out whether we've been investigated without risking causing an investigation just for finding out...
I didn't mind the flashbacks themselves so much as the incompetent attempts to distinguish between flashback and present which were almost always confusing. Most of the time the flashbacks made me wonder if my TV's color settings had gotten messed up somehow (i.e. it looked washed out) instead of looking... flashback-ish.
Alright. Another question, then - when Sisko purchases lumber from Bajor to build his solar sail ship, what did he use to pay for it? I doubt Bajor would accept Federation credits, since they're not part of the Federation (yet), so one would assume he either traded something for it (but what?), got it as a favor from someone (plausible) or paid in latinum, which leads to my question: where would he get the latinum? Would Star Fleet provide latinum/credit exchanges when necessary?
I know this kind of question probably isn't answerable. I'm just curious :)
warp works by reducing the apparent mass/inertia of stuff in the warp bubble
This is exactly how they moved DS9 from Bajor's orbit to the wormhole using only the station's positioning thrusters... they used some generator or other to create some sort of field similar to a warp field that lowered the inertia of the station. (That's just the most recent episode I've watched where they talk about that sort of thing.)
I won't claim to have even an above-average understanding of Star Trek physics, though, so I won't even hazard a guess at whether the in-bubble matter's interaction with "normal" matter is one-way or two-way...
The last two times I had to call in (last year?), I didn't have to talk to a real person. I just used the automated system and I had it activated in less than five minutes. (Another time, I only had to call because their entire online activation system was down, and they couldn't do it over the phone either, I just had to wait.)
That's better than what Safeway does. They grossly inflate their prices unless you get their store card (they advertise the lower price); when you get the card, they only give you one, so if I go in without it (i.e. if my wife has it) I don't get the lower prices, and although you can supposedly just enter your phone number instead, it has been nearly six months and they still haven't entered anything into their computer systems. One Safeway employee told me that they mail those forms to California once a month (read: once a year?), where they are ever so slowly processed (probably by a drunk, blind monkey).
Eventually, one employee gave me another Safeway card without me having to fill out a second form, so at least I pay the lower prices now, but if I had any other grocery store within a reasonable distance I'd stop going to Safeway.
Take it you didn't bother to actually read the rebate offer or the price tag which both make mention of it being a visa debit card?
I sent in four mail-in rebates for various computer parts after I built my new desktop. None of them mentioned getting the rebate in the form of a Visa.
One (from eVGA) came as a check.
Two (from Thermaltake and OCZ) came as Visas.
I haven't received my rebate from Samsung yet.
It seems this is an increasingly common practice. (Thermaltake and OCZ both used a third party rebate processing company, Worldwide Rebates, to handle the rebate.) I'm not sure I understand. Surely it's cheaper to mail out checks than to pay a third party to mail out Visas (which is of course a fourth party)?
There are several inconsistencies with transporters that they never really address. One is replicators vs transporters. If they can make transporters duplicate matter flawlessly, why do replicators have flaws? Are they simply cheaper, less accurate transporters? We know replicators can be modified to act as small transporters (it happens in Deep Space Nine, anyway). If transporters work the way they say they do, how could a person "interact" with something in the "matter stream" (as in TNG)? If it is, in fact, simply a method of transmitting matter, how could the transporter be used to change child-Picard into adult-Picard? How could they result in duplicate-Riker, if they're simply a matter-stream? Wouldn't losing part of a matter-stream result in Riker's death, rather than in two copies? Doesn't the computer have to direct the rematerialization process, so the duplicate Riker should not have materialized?
But yes, I agree that the transporters were an underutilized resource.
Unrelated: is there anything that explains the internal economy of the Federation? I only ask because in the episode I just watched, Jake Sisko refers to his father using "transporter credits"... Also, how does that internal economy interface with external economies? Quark accepts latinum for food at his bar, but while Star Fleet officers often eat there, you never see them hand Quark any payment at all... in fact, the only time I can recall seeing any Star Fleet officer with latinum is when Dax beats the Pharengi at that market-like gambling game they play after-hours. (Memory-alpha.org says little more than I've said here.)
Otherwise general debris would be a big problem for the ship navigation even in "empty" space.
Isn't that what the deflector shield is for - to keep space debris from damaging the ship while at warp?
But still, I bet you'd get some fantastic fireworks if you come out of warp inside another ship's engine core... ;)
As I recall, there was an episode of Star Trek: TNG where a Federation ship with an experimental cloaking device got itself stuck in an asteroid by decloaking inside the asteroid. I guess it's a good thing the antimatter in the warp core decloaked in a hollow space in the asteroid...
In SG, the ships actually do exit "normal" space-time and travel through objects (shields, planets, whatever). At least... this is MY understanding.
Come to think of it, they used that property to keep some asteroid or other from hitting Earth.
The ancients build a ship that can run on autopilot for 10,000 years - you think they'd forget to close the door?
I got the impression that it had been a lot longer than 10,000 years. Do I need to rewatch the episode?
Stargate and Star Trek both talk about plotting courses to destinations; one would assume that they're doing this to avoid obstacles.
Remember, just because they don't talk about it doesn't mean it isn't happening ;)
Jumping back and forth with the flashbacks was annoying as hell.
I didn't like it either, but I'm not sure the episode would have been any better in chronological order. They needed to do it to maintain some sort of tension (how'd they get here? who's that guy? why are they angry? etc) and to make it feel different from "just another SG-1 episode". (Though I did feel like most of the characters were being deliberately stupid about the situation.)
They could have done a lot to make the flashbacks feel much more different from the "present", though. It was hard to tell which was which. Defying Gravity did the flashback thing very well. (Apparently Lost started the flashback trend, but I don't watch Lost, so I can't compare.)
(Was really getting into Defying Gravity, more so, though.)
Me too. It makes me sad that it got canned. That seems to happen to sci-fi shows a lot. It makes me wonder if sci-fi fans are underrepresented in the rating polls...
I wonder how long the show will be able to keep up a story line that is not way too predictable while also keeping a strong primary line (getting back to earth) in play.
The thing that bugged me most about Voyager was how often they were utter morons about the chances they had to get home. Two times, in particular, where they were stupid: the first episode, and the Slipstream episode. Both times, it would have been relatively trivial to get home quickly. I will elaborate if you can't come up with a solution inside 30 seconds on your own.
Once their location relative to earth is known
It is known though - they looked at a map of the ship's travel route, from where it embarked to current position. The ship knows exactly where it is relative to the Milky Way. The immediate problem (aside from the lack of oxygen) is not that they don't know where they are, it's that the ship doesn't have the power to create a wormhole all the way to the Milky Way (at least, not after such a long time without maintenance). They even know what address they need to dial to get back home - the computer told them.
but was impressed at how quickly I liked the characters. [...] So perhaps the device is not set up as BSG or Voyager where the primary goal is to get home, but rather we have not been shown the primary line yet. I remain hopeful but a little wary.
That's my feeling exactly... though RDA's brief appearance was a little jarring. He's getting fat :(
On a completely unrelated note, was anyone else a little weirded out by the commercials for Sanctuary, in which Amanda Tapping (SG-1's blonde, American Samantha Carter) is a brown-haired Brit? She looked similar enough to be eerie, but different enough that I had to go look it up on IMDB before I'd believe it was her...