We have been careful to design experiments that we believe are
both consistent with current U.S. legal doctrine and are fundamen-
tally ethical as well. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to
fully describe the complex legal landscape in which active security
measurements operate, we believe the ethical basis for our work
is far easier to explain: we strictly reduce harm. First, our instru-
mented proxy bots do not create any new harm. That is, absent
our involvement, the same set of users would receive the same set
of spam e-mails sent by the same worker bots. Storm is a large
self-organizing system and when a proxy fails its worker bots au-
tomatically switch to other idle proxies (indeed, when our proxies
fail we see workers quickly switch away). Second, our proxies are
passive actors and do not themselves engage in any behavior that
is intrinsically objectionable; they do not send spam e-mail, they
do not compromise hosts, nor do they even contact worker bots
asynchronously. Indeed, their only function is to provide a conduit
between worker bots making requests and master servers providing
responses. Finally, where we do modify C&C messages in transit,
these actions themselves strictly reduce harm. Users who click on
spam altered by these changes will be directed to one of our innocu-
ous doppelganger Web sites. Unlike the sites normally advertised
by Storm, our sites do not infect users with malware and do not col-
lect user credit card information. Thus, no user should receive more
spam due to our involvement, but some users will receive spam that
is less dangerous that it would otherwise be.
We just need everyone we know to write letters to their congressmen -- Letters written on hundred dollar bills.
Why would politicians care about money? They are only allowed to use campaign contributions for their campaigns. What will their campaigns spend the money on? Publicity!
Who do you think lobbied congress for this law? It was the major media conglomerates that control 95% of all the media we are exposed to. What would happen to a politician that challenged the media? They would be torn apart in the press. This is why politicians always vote in favor of the media.
By the way, this bill went down just like the DMCA. Less than a month before a major election the bill came up for a vote. Virtually everyone in congress blindly voted for it with effectively no debate. The major media companies didn't publish anything on it.
In summary, congress did not vote for this law to get campaign contributions. They voted for it to keep the press from shafting them. Any attempt to persuade congress to create balanced copyrights will have to take that into consideration. This is not about campaign funds!
The problem is that at the time of search, the warrant was not false. It was a real warrant, it just had not been removed yet.
If you check out the actual petition to the court you will see the warrant was removed five months earlier. Mr. Herring lived on the border between three different counties so the police sent the warrant to all three counties. When the warrant was recalled there was a "breakdown...someplace within the Sheriff's department".
From the article:
At issue is the case of Bennie Herring, an Alabama man who drove to the police station in July 2004 to try to retrieve items from an impounded pickup truck. A Coffee County cop recognized him, asked the clerk to check the database for outstanding warrant.
None was found, so the investigator asked the clerk to call the neighboring Dale county clerk to see if it had a warrant for Herring.
The Dale county clerk found a warrant for Herring in their database, so the Coffee County cops set out after Herring after asking the other county to fax the warrant over.
When the clerk went to fetch the paper file she could not find the warrant. The warrant clerk called the officer to inform him of the issue but the officer was already on the scene and had made the arrest (despite Mr. Herring informing the officer that no warrant existed).
I think it's also interesting to note how Anderson (the cop) recognized Mr. Herring. From the footnote on page 4 of the petition (page 13 in the PDF):
Among other things, petitioner had repeatedly alleged to the district attorney that Anderson was involved in the unsolved murder of a local teenager. Shortly before the events leading to petitioner's arrest, Inspector Anderson and another officer had appeared at petitioner's house, pressing him to drop his complaints.
I can't believe no laws were broken in this process. Why can't the EU courts take this up?
Normally, it would be illegal for a bunch of companies to get together and collude like they do at a standards body. But anti-trust laws have exceptions to promote the creation of open standards. You would think such an exception would not apply if participants were paid or otherwise compensated/coerced into voting to benefit an existing monopoly.
Another security researcher claims the sky is falling. There are no details, no proof of concept, nothing to prove the alleged vulnerability even exists. Here's something those researchers should learn: if you can't back up your claims with proof it doesn't exist!
why are you opposed to restructuring Social Security into a system of private accounts, insured and invested very conservatively
15% of your salary is barely enough to retire on. If you want a comfortable retirement you should already be investing in a private retirement account called a 401K.
As to insurance, the only way to get insurance for investments on that scale is through the government. Any other form of insurance would cost more than the expected returns.
The reality is that people would invest their social security money into a sham company that simply hands the funds over to the person who 'invested'. With no money on hand the company will later cry to the government and ask for a bailout--something you would undoubtedly oppose unless it was you who gambled away his life savings.
the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been regularly returning terabytes of high-resolution images and other kinds of data from Mars.
I was going to challenge this but it appears MRO transmits data about ten times faster than other probes. Nevertheless, at 6 Megabits/second it would take 370 hours (over two weeks) to send one Terabyte.
The companies said the US courts and Congress are still working out the correct balance between protecting copyrights and the free exchange of information on the Web
The correct balance would cut copyrights back to 14 years, require disclosure of source code to receive copyright on software, ban business method patents, and ban the use of technologies that prevent a work from entering the public domain. The government is going the opposite direction it should if it's interesting in establishing a proper balance.
We're talking about US law and the US court system here. In US markets the Chinese manufacturers would be bound by US law. If obeying US law somehow interferes with CMI's ability to sell their product in a foreign market, it's tough luck for them. That does not justify violating the fifth and sixth amendments. CMI will just have to adjust their pricing model to compensate for sales lost in foreign markets.
Once the source code gets out into the world - and of course it will be leaked somewhere on the Internet - they no longer have anything at all. No product. Why? Because their product can then be replicated for 1/10th the price in China.
The Chinese vendors would have to disclose the source code as well. As soon as that happens it will be obvious the code was copied which means they can file a copyright infringement suit and shut down the Chinese vendor.
Also, the police department will buy American if they can. The prosecutor doesn't want to deal with a jury that hears crucial evidence is based on some shoddy Chinese product.
They will have to reveal their code eventually or go bankrupt
If a bug is revealed in their code there is likely to be a class action lawsuit against them on behalf of everyone that was ever convicted of driving while intoxicated on account of their device. The costs associated with a single conviction far exceed the cost of one of these machines. The company would go bankrupt if that were to happen.
As long as my wife doesn't know where I am then who cares about the government.
I suspect you will when the government threatens to tell your wife! Now, you don't really want to show up in court and counter that cop's testimony, do you?
What would be the motivation for *real-time* tracking of millions of people? How many watchers do you need to watch a million people?
You don't watch them. You just keep a log.
After a leak occurs, you cross-reference the reporter's path with the paths of everyone that had access to the information. When you find one person who was in the same place as the reporter for a half hour the day before the story broke, chances are you've identified the whistleblower to retaliate against.
Or you pick out whoever your most vocal critic is for the day and find out where their dirty little secrets are. Use whatever you learn to discredit them.
If you need something done, find a random person's secrets and blackmail them.
You need to blackmail someone in particular? They live a perfectly clean life? Find their associates and use (blackmail) them to pressure your target.
But I fail to see how you can leverage this to gain privs.
I suppose it would be possible to populate the clipboard with corrupted contents, perhaps a string of XML that another app would try to consume. If that other app, designed strictly for desktop use, has a vulnerability in the way it processes said XML an attacker may be able to gain privileges. It's possible such an app will examine the clipboard contents just to determine if it should enable the Paste menu. Which means you could be vulnerable even though you never paste from the clipboard.
China spent $40 billion* over six years getting ready for the Olympics. The US spends less than half of that on the Iraq war every six months. If we had the will we could do the same thing China did.
The Beijing Olympics are a huge matter of national pride in China. As others have mentioned the United States has had its moments of national pride. That's what drove us to the moon over the course of eight years. The moon landings cost us over three times what China spent preparing for the Olympics.
The US, UK, and Canada managed to develop nuclear weapons over the course of five years at a cost of $28 billion in today's dollars. We built the Panama Canal in ten years. We developed a cure for polio in 40 years. It's not so hard to imagine building an airport or even sprucing up an entire city from airport to subway to stadiums if there were a factor driving us to do so.
*China reportedly budgeted $2 billion for the event itself and over $100 million just on fireworks.
At the postal museum in Washington, D.C. a sign reads:
At the beginning of the new America, nearly all the news came by mail. When the Constitution was signed, it was rushed by post riders to every town that had a printing press. And that's how the newspapers were able to bring the resounding news of how we were to govern ourselves. The newspapers knew of it first by mail.
In England, for centuries, the mail was frequently scrutinized by agents of the Crown or of the Parliament. It could be worth your life to write a letter that might be seen as having the seeds of treason. This did not happen here. From the beginning, by and large, the U.S. mails have been free of eyes other than our own and those of the sender.
To the framers of the Constitution, the mail made the engine of democracy run--along with the newspapers. And newspapers then printed a good deal of correspondence. Rufus Putnam, a key military figure in the Revolutionary War, said, "The knowledge diffused among the people by newspapers, by correspondence between friends" was crucial to the future of the nation. "Nothing can be more fatal to a republican government than ignorance among its citizens."
As a journalist, I have sometimes been asked where my leads for stories come from. Much of the time, they come from opening the mail. Readers from all over the country send personal stories, newspaper clippings, local court decisions, and student newspaper editorials arguing for the First Amendment rights of students. There is no other way I would have known about these stories except through the mail. It is through letters that I often receive highly confidential stories about unfairness in the justice system from people who would not trust any other form of communication.
The framers of the Constitution knew how vital the mail would be when Article I was written to protect privacy of communication through the mail.
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for the Washington Post and the Village Voice, and the author of Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee. How the Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
The problem is, nobody knows how many people downloaded from Ms. Thomas. Nobody. Not even Ms. Thomas. Could be nobody. Could be the entire Internet-using population of the world. Nobody can find out.
We can put an upper bound on it. At the time of the alleged infringement Comcast would have capped her upload rate at 256kbps or 512kbps depending on her subscription level. A typical song is compressed down to a 3MByte MP3. That comes out to 25Mbits. At 512kbps it would take 48 seconds to upload one song. Over a two year period she could upload 1.3 million copies. That assumes her connection is saturated 24/7 with 100% efficiency, no network overhead, no activity for other purposes, and no down time.
Let's take the greenhouse issue with coal power plants in the US. Nuclear removes the atmospheric and climate issues, and replaces them with a much smaller scale radioactivity issue for which we already have numerous viable reprocessing protocols, but no.. it still pollutes a little! omg we must stifle this!
Let's contrast it with windmills. The environmentalist crowd harps about windmills killing birds so we can't have windmills. Trempealeau County in Wisconsin recently banned all windmills more than 150 feet high within a mile of any home because the blades produce pulsating noise and shadows that may be harmful to children!
If copyright is such a fucked-up system, then why is it all the stuff people want to share is produced under that system?
In most countries, anything created today is automatically copyrighted. But really it isn't copyright per se that's messed up. It's just that copyright is out of balance. Back in 1786 copyright was considered a necessary evil. The public should have the right to reproduce artistic works all they want. But it was decided authors should have a short-term monopoly so they would have an incentive to create artistic works in the first place. That limited monopoly was supposed to be just enough to serve its purpose and nothing more.
Today copyright lasts until the author's great-grandchildren are retired. Most works produced today use this system because no one wants to give up their free entitlements.
If you want people to talk about your fine work you do it just before a big holiday. Then families will get together and chat about how great things are. If your work is a shameful disgrace that you don't want people talking about you do it after everyone returns from their gatherings.
Slashdot Mirror
The odds that the person will be violent are minuscule. Ten times that number is still minuscule. That being the case it really is not a useful hint.
Why would politicians care about money? They are only allowed to use campaign contributions for their campaigns. What will their campaigns spend the money on? Publicity!
Who do you think lobbied congress for this law? It was the major media conglomerates that control 95% of all the media we are exposed to. What would happen to a politician that challenged the media? They would be torn apart in the press. This is why politicians always vote in favor of the media.
By the way, this bill went down just like the DMCA. Less than a month before a major election the bill came up for a vote. Virtually everyone in congress blindly voted for it with effectively no debate. The major media companies didn't publish anything on it.
In summary, congress did not vote for this law to get campaign contributions. They voted for it to keep the press from shafting them. Any attempt to persuade congress to create balanced copyrights will have to take that into consideration. This is not about campaign funds!
If you check out the actual petition to the court you will see the warrant was removed five months earlier. Mr. Herring lived on the border between three different counties so the police sent the warrant to all three counties. When the warrant was recalled there was a "breakdown...someplace within the Sheriff's department".
From the article:
When the clerk went to fetch the paper file she could not find the warrant. The warrant clerk called the officer to inform him of the issue but the officer was already on the scene and had made the arrest (despite Mr. Herring informing the officer that no warrant existed).
I think it's also interesting to note how Anderson (the cop) recognized Mr. Herring. From the footnote on page 4 of the petition (page 13 in the PDF):
Normally, it would be illegal for a bunch of companies to get together and collude like they do at a standards body. But anti-trust laws have exceptions to promote the creation of open standards. You would think such an exception would not apply if participants were paid or otherwise compensated/coerced into voting to benefit an existing monopoly.
Another security researcher claims the sky is falling. There are no details, no proof of concept, nothing to prove the alleged vulnerability even exists. Here's something those researchers should learn: if you can't back up your claims with proof it doesn't exist!
15% of your salary is barely enough to retire on. If you want a comfortable retirement you should already be investing in a private retirement account called a 401K.
As to insurance, the only way to get insurance for investments on that scale is through the government. Any other form of insurance would cost more than the expected returns.
The reality is that people would invest their social security money into a sham company that simply hands the funds over to the person who 'invested'. With no money on hand the company will later cry to the government and ask for a bailout--something you would undoubtedly oppose unless it was you who gambled away his life savings.
I was going to challenge this but it appears MRO transmits data about ten times faster than other probes. Nevertheless, at 6 Megabits/second it would take 370 hours (over two weeks) to send one Terabyte.
The correct balance would cut copyrights back to 14 years, require disclosure of source code to receive copyright on software, ban business method patents, and ban the use of technologies that prevent a work from entering the public domain. The government is going the opposite direction it should if it's interesting in establishing a proper balance.
We're talking about US law and the US court system here. In US markets the Chinese manufacturers would be bound by US law. If obeying US law somehow interferes with CMI's ability to sell their product in a foreign market, it's tough luck for them. That does not justify violating the fifth and sixth amendments. CMI will just have to adjust their pricing model to compensate for sales lost in foreign markets.
The Chinese vendors would have to disclose the source code as well. As soon as that happens it will be obvious the code was copied which means they can file a copyright infringement suit and shut down the Chinese vendor.
Also, the police department will buy American if they can. The prosecutor doesn't want to deal with a jury that hears crucial evidence is based on some shoddy Chinese product.
If a bug is revealed in their code there is likely to be a class action lawsuit against them on behalf of everyone that was ever convicted of driving while intoxicated on account of their device. The costs associated with a single conviction far exceed the cost of one of these machines. The company would go bankrupt if that were to happen.
I suspect you will when the government threatens to tell your wife! Now, you don't really want to show up in court and counter that cop's testimony, do you?
You don't watch them. You just keep a log.
After a leak occurs, you cross-reference the reporter's path with the paths of everyone that had access to the information. When you find one person who was in the same place as the reporter for a half hour the day before the story broke, chances are you've identified the whistleblower to retaliate against.
Or you pick out whoever your most vocal critic is for the day and find out where their dirty little secrets are. Use whatever you learn to discredit them.
If you need something done, find a random person's secrets and blackmail them.
You need to blackmail someone in particular? They live a perfectly clean life? Find their associates and use (blackmail) them to pressure your target.
In other news, USB full speed will still be 12Mbps.
I suppose it would be possible to populate the clipboard with corrupted contents, perhaps a string of XML that another app would try to consume. If that other app, designed strictly for desktop use, has a vulnerability in the way it processes said XML an attacker may be able to gain privileges. It's possible such an app will examine the clipboard contents just to determine if it should enable the Paste menu. Which means you could be vulnerable even though you never paste from the clipboard.
Another reason it didn't melt the internet is because SilverLight isn't supported on all platforms thus many people couldn't even access it.
China spent $40 billion* over six years getting ready for the Olympics. The US spends less than half of that on the Iraq war every six months. If we had the will we could do the same thing China did.
The Beijing Olympics are a huge matter of national pride in China. As others have mentioned the United States has had its moments of national pride. That's what drove us to the moon over the course of eight years. The moon landings cost us over three times what China spent preparing for the Olympics.
The US, UK, and Canada managed to develop nuclear weapons over the course of five years at a cost of $28 billion in today's dollars. We built the Panama Canal in ten years. We developed a cure for polio in 40 years. It's not so hard to imagine building an airport or even sprucing up an entire city from airport to subway to stadiums if there were a factor driving us to do so.
*China reportedly budgeted $2 billion for the event itself and over $100 million just on fireworks.
We can put an upper bound on it. At the time of the alleged infringement Comcast would have capped her upload rate at 256kbps or 512kbps depending on her subscription level. A typical song is compressed down to a 3MByte MP3. That comes out to 25Mbits. At 512kbps it would take 48 seconds to upload one song. Over a two year period she could upload 1.3 million copies. That assumes her connection is saturated 24/7 with 100% efficiency, no network overhead, no activity for other purposes, and no down time.
Let's contrast it with windmills. The environmentalist crowd harps about windmills killing birds so we can't have windmills. Trempealeau County in Wisconsin recently banned all windmills more than 150 feet high within a mile of any home because the blades produce pulsating noise and shadows that may be harmful to children!
Use protocols that ISPs can't examine the contents of?
McCain voted for it the first time around. He also voted for the immunity amendment.
In most countries, anything created today is automatically copyrighted. But really it isn't copyright per se that's messed up. It's just that copyright is out of balance. Back in 1786 copyright was considered a necessary evil. The public should have the right to reproduce artistic works all they want. But it was decided authors should have a short-term monopoly so they would have an incentive to create artistic works in the first place. That limited monopoly was supposed to be just enough to serve its purpose and nothing more.
Today copyright lasts until the author's great-grandchildren are retired. Most works produced today use this system because no one wants to give up their free entitlements.
If you want people to talk about your fine work you do it just before a big holiday. Then families will get together and chat about how great things are. If your work is a shameful disgrace that you don't want people talking about you do it after everyone returns from their gatherings.