At least the government honestly tried. And don't think these educational programs are useless. I watched a lot of them just for fun, and in fact they were far more intellectually challenging than every other program on every other channel.
They want to start rolling out services that will require full time IP connectivity to EVERY phone.
I am sure they have tons of wireless bandwidth to waste, since every scr1pt k1dd1e will be pinging and portscanning these phones to no end. It is bad enough on wired networks, wait until it spreads to wireless ones. "Zombie Phone" sounds lovely, isn't it?:-) And a phone vulnerability can rack up a real charge on poor SOB's phone bill. Even the traffic alone... who will be paying for those ICMP and TCP packets?
Of course, the phone can have a true IPv6 firewall, and the phone company may have a larger IPv6 firewall... but then what's the point of IPv6 if all the ports are closed? And if some are opened for some use, these will be exploited.
If any phone company is stupid enough to try this IPv6 thing, it will be burned on the first day. Now you can not interfere with Sprint networks from Internet; once this IPv6 feature is in place, though, any script kiddie (or any terr'ist) can DoS phone networks at will. Why again is this needed?
The phone has one use: to be a phone. Anything else, on top of that, can be tolerated only if it is benign. As soon as you start breaking this rule and messing up the voice the customers will move elsewhere, or will demand to turn this service off (as it is not uncommon with SMS.)
But with IPv6 you have to walk an extra mile, throw away all your old routers, upgrade or scrap all those old Win95/Win98/Win2K and Linux 2.0/2.2 boxen and upgrade to IPv6-capable OS, etc. etc.
All that to... get the same functionality! No surprise that there are no takers:-)
(I hear what you say, that NAT... is just a hack which complicates things - but as long as it does not complicate this customer's life he won't upgrade. And every software maker on the market supports IPv4 whatever it takes.)
I would suggest fixing UPnP then, instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Fact is, you may need to run a little server on any of internal computers from time to time. That may be an IM application, or multimedia (A/V), or IRC, or something else. This application listens on some port, sometimes it uses a fixed number and sometimes it picks a random port. SIP, for example, can do it either way, and Grandstream SIP phones have an option for that.
How would you then know which port to open in your firewall, and when? And do you really want to do it by hand? No way, even to me, though I have a bunch of shells open at any time, and can change firewall settings whenever I want. A casual user can't do that even if his life depends on it.
So UPnP has its place on the network. You want your firewall/NAT (whichever it is) to be remotely programmable by authorized programs, and if you want you can make it as secure as necessary. What you don't want is to have permanent holes in the firewall, and you don't want to manually make these holes (especially because they shouldn't stay open any longer than necessary!)
The important point here is that you have to do that UPnP thing regardless of what protocol, IPv4 or IPv6, you have. This is because normally your computers should not be accessible by strangers, even if they have their own IPv6 addresses. (At a time long, long ago idealists thought it desirable. Fools they were:-) So you have to make holes in the "firewall" box regardless of what it is, NAT or a real IPv6 firewall. What difference then does it make to you as the customer which protocol you use?
You never want to SSH into any of your computers, or use remote GUI access programs? Host game servers? Maybe a little web server of file server?
No, I don't want any of that.
Game servers??? In many businesses people get fired for that. If you are at home, any NAT device, such as Linksys, allows you to make a persistent hole in the firewall pointing to any internal box, so you can have your game server - unless your ISP objects, but that's hardly IPv6 issue:-)
Any service that you can use is also a service that an attacker can use. I do not want to secure and harden 10 computers; I can not even harden all computers - some run ancient OSes, like Win98 on one of my slower notebooks, can't upgrade that. I can't even know about all vulnerabilities of 10 different OSes, and I can't keep track of that either. So I want the LAN to be safe; then I have to have an IPv6 firewall anyway, so what's the difference to me if I have to do the same hole in the firewall as I would do in a NAT box?
I would guess that the killer app for IPv6 would be instant messaging... Configuring a client to be able to receive files from behind a NAT can be a pain
I thought that AOL, MS and Yahoo and their dog already figured out how to solve this:-) TCP session to the server would be the first, most obvious, place to look for a solution. Direct peer to peer file transfers are not really necessary.
But in case the files are huge, or when you send audio/video between peers, then indeed you need to open some ports. Here you use UPnP to command your NAT box or your IPv6 firewall. There is no real difference to the user, the firewall has to be commanded anyway (you are not going to open persistent holes in your firewall, are you?)
Give it ten years at least. Cell companies can want all they wish, but it won't convince major telecoms (who are a distinct entity from cell companies even if under the same corporate umbrella) to shell out billions of dollars on upgrades for no increase in revenue. TV over IP is in the same boat, they won't pay for the routers. I, as a customer, won't pay either, that's for sure - because neither me, nor any of my friends need IPv6. It has benefits that are of no interest to us, and it has disadvantages (cost of deployment at least) that are of great concern to us. So here we are.
Just as a comment: "some people" probably amounts to 0.01% of paying customers, and is therefore totally insignificant. Even networking professionals - who understand well why IPv6 is better - realize that IPv6 can not happen overnight, and there is really no clear need for it today. Majority of people just buy a $99 wireless router (NAT) from Linksys, and they are all set on their own Class A network. What else is there for them to ask for?
It is also understood that IPv6 shines in a lot of areas (which were mentioned more than once in this discussion.) However none of them are mission-critical, or even noticeable to the average customer. For example, IPv4 NATs are not VoIP friendly - so there are software and hardware solutions already (UPnP, STUN, TCP etc.) and they work on existing networks just fine.
If you want my guess, the star of IPv6 will never rise. It is past its time already. People were concerned about address spaces many years ago, but now it seems everyone is happy, and nobody wants to buy into IPv6.
"But," one says, "the IPv4 address space will be exhausted!" Yes, it will be. A new protocol will replace IPv4. But it may not be IPv6 at all. Who knows? I think IPv4 will be firmly with us for 10 to 20 years from now. Then we shall see. IPv6, after all, is a souped-up IPv4, and it is not all that different from its parent. Maybe something else, something better, will be needed? I'd say so. Maybe they will dump fixed 128-bit addresses, and make them variable length instead, so that new addresses may be allocated where they are needed... Maybe some other crazy scheme will be devised. But IPv6 at this time solves no real problem, and that's why it is not popular.
And if telecoms want IPv6 on their mobile phones... by all means, please do. It's just very likely that the IPv6 will terminate at Verizon's 6->4 proxy, and that's the end of it. This would be practical anyway to cache the data, since I guess majority of users access relatively small number of sites (CNN, Yahoo, MapQuest etc.) and they are mostly cacheable - and the telecom wants to insert their own ads too!
Fall from your bed, hit your head, pretend to get hurt and watch your friends drag you to the doctor. Once there, proclaim that you want to fly more and more and more...
An example of a killer application that requires IPv6 was asked for, and still eagerly expected:-) When answering, please consider that UPnP enabled routers are configurable at run time by the applications that run on the NATed computers.
Anyway, in a civil case, the burden of proof is on you to show that you were not the one who commited the act.
Ok, I say you borrowed $100K from me and refuse to return. When would you like to be sued?:-)
Bottom line, you ought to have some evidence before the court, that's why SCO is flailing so much these days. You may not need a "beyond any doubt" proof, but a reasonable proof; a contract would do, for example, or a bunch of letters.
All they would have to prove is that your negligence aided and abetted in a crime.
Not unless it was his duty to prevent or monitor the unlawful actions. No sysadmin has such a duty, and people who do network policing are not sysadmins, they call themselves "agents":-)
Try UPnP enabled router, they are dime a dozen today, and UPNP stacks are available for Windows and Linux (don't know anything about fruit-based computers, though.)
Unfortunately, none of these arguments appeal to a regular customer. Even I, who is probably more involved with the network than most normal people (/.ters completely excepted:-) see very little need for IPv6. Everything that I need is already available on IPv4.
Specifically on the point of having 64K addresses: I don't need that, and I don't want that. I have a bunch of computers here, and any of them can access Internet if I so allow, but there is absolutely no need for an external host to access any of those internal computers. So why should I expose my stuff to hackers? The "true" router would be needed, and it will not give me any advantage over NAT setup. And a configuration like mine can be seen everywhere.
With regard to tunneling proxies (4->6 or 6->4), they are insecure since all the traffic through them can be easily logged. Why would I want that? As you can see, there is no compelling need yet for IPv6, and so people don't upgrade.
It's 2004, and we're still using internal-combustion automobiles.
You can buy an electric or hybrid car now if you want. You can also buy a horse, or walk. You don't need an order from the President to junk your gasoline car and get an electric one.
Cathode-ray tubes for data visualization.
In five years they will be replaced with LCDs. Already new desktop computers come with LCDs (and all notebooks:-) CRT manufacturing is expensive, dirty and it will be phased out.
Nearly all elevators still use ordinary cables and breaks.
What's wrong with cables and brakes? Were we supposed to use something else already, like antigravity shafts?
It's true that being new is not enough to displace old. But if the new stuff is better and the price/performance ratio is good, it will displace the old products. Flat panel displays, for example, are light (one person can carry it) and they take less space (you can do more with your desk/room) and they take less energy (power bills and waste heat) and they offer very good contrast and sharpness, and they don't flicker, and they don't emit even the weak beta radiation that comes from CRT tubes. The cost is now about 2x over the CRT - big deal...
Well, the poster asked about the modern terrorism, and so I provided the answer. Five years is a long time in today's politics. I don't know what will happen in a year, or even on Nov. 03 of this year.
With regard to terrorist groups "on ice", that might be so (and I have no reason to doubt your arguments), but the longer they stay out of headlines the more forgotten and unwanted they become. Public apathy is the #1 enemy of any terrorist; a taste of peaceful life is something that may stop him in his tracks, or at least prompt his recent supporters to stop the terrorist just so they can live happily ever after.
And with regard to Moslems, it's just their turn. Previously it was Irish and Basques, and Italians, and Germans, and Serbs (WW I), and Russians (between 1890 to 1914, resulting in many czars scared senseless, and one killed)...
Classical terrorism is a form of political protest, completely amoral and socially unacceptable, but that's what it is. Label Robin Hood as one of earliest terrorists if you wish, since his actions were violent and had a political purpose.
But there are other kinds of terrorism today too; old hasishins / assassins of Himalayas are now reborn as human bombs that explode not for a political demand, but for profit of their masters and propagandists. Many terrorist movements, initially full of wonderful political ideas, deteriorate into private armies who fight just because they always fought, who can't go back because there is no way back, who spilled so much blood that they can't undo it. So this becomes a self-perpetuating death machine, seen in so many countries in 20th century.
One of the best books describing terrorists' state of mind is, IMO, "Demons" of Dostoevsky. Very hard to read (as any of Dostoevsky's books,) but quite a study in psychology.
I'm very disappointed that I live in a country where everyone's first reaction to this seems to be "I'd sue the bastard" or "put him in jail"
What would be your preference, I wonder, if someone publishes your most personal photos for all your friends and coworkers to see? Do you like to be humiliated? Do you really want to expose your life to strangers? Are you sure everyone else who was photographed shares your beliefs?
for a place that is sooo against musicians being able to keep people from copying things
Musicians publish their work, and anyone can get a copy for a small fee. These photos were not published by the owner, and the fee can be up to $30K per one (or $150K), as someone else already commented. There are 200+ photos; do the math.
The cops would just junk it.
That is fine. You lost the card in first place, what is there to complain about? If the photos remain secret, no harm done. The owner may have downloaded them already, in fact, and just kept the copies in the camera (modern flash cards are huge.)
It's quite clear these are just holiday snaps and not the work of a professional photographer who would sell his work.
That is probably true, but you can't set the price on someone's else property. The owner can ask any price he wants, that's why the law limits damages to something sane. The court can further reduce the damages based on judge's opinion, but in any case pilfering of 200+ photographs will cost the blogger all his life savings, past, present and future.
I'd leave this to the lawyers, but as I said "it can be argued", and if it can be argued it probably will be, if the case ever goes to court. I just wanted to comment on all possible aspects.
Defense would lose. If someone walks into a bar and shoots 10 patrons dead, one can't say that it was a single murder. Quite opposite, the blogger digs his own grave by creating a derivative work, arguably for profit, using photos that he has no right to use and adding his narrative which he has no right to add even if he has the right to publish the photos (it's a separate kettle of fish.) The fact that the publication is serialized and clearly designed to attract an audience hurts him even further.
maybe the person who found it did what was legally required.
As I commented already, he stole it from the cab. The card belonged to taxi company because it was lost there, and the taxi company was responsible for the lost item according to its own policy. This policy may involve just keeping the item, or transfer it to the police, or search for the passenger, or immediate destruction... these are all valid ways to deal with lost and unclaimed items.
However I can't imagine that a taxi company would post private pictures on Internet, accompanied with some tasteless narrative. That alone can get the blogger sued to oblivion. The blogger, by stealing the card from the cab, robbed the owner of the chance to reclaim his property, and the taxi company - from the chance of returning it, or at least securing it.
Blogger's act is an obvious theft. He could also claim that he found "a car seat" in the taxi and took it with him. Or he could have found a wallet (which belongs to the driver.) Take any of these items, and you become a thief.
Basically, though IANAL, in most cases you can take something that is not yours only if it is obviously an unclaimed property. For example, a wallet on the sidewalk, with nobody around, or a ship at sea. Salvage rights kick in. But if you are on someone's else property (such as taxi or house) you can't just take things based on your own guess that they don't belong to the property owner!
So as long as he doesn't take it... he could be okay.
I think he should have given the card to the driver, and follow from there.
It's quite clear from looking at the photo album that the person is not a professinal photographer, so they wouldn't have been able to sell anything.
It is not clear at all. My photographs, of my face, are valued at $100,000,000 and I set the price as the owner of the source image. The fact that nobody wants them is irrelevant. If anyone wants to post my photo on Internet, this is the price. Do it for free, by stealing the photos, and get arrested for theft.
The blogger doesn't have to serve 10 years on a 2g planet. Even one week would teach him to respect other people's privacy and property. I'm afraid the blogger is totally insensitive to such matters, and he would blow up your dog if he considers it fun.
He stole it from the cab company who was at the moment in legal posession of the card (and who might have returned the card to the owner by, say, contacting his c/c bank he paid with Visa.)
The proper way to deal with the card would be to give it to the driver. Then it would be up to the cab company to find the owner or just to drop it into the "lost items" box. Either way is fine.
The blogger had a real harm done in this case - the taxi passenger may have realized where the card was lost, and he may have called the taxi company - but the cab driver never held the card in his hands, so they said they don't know. This blogger's actions may have robbed the card owner of his property.
most Taxi companies have a disclaimer that they are not responcible for your stuff.
Nobody blames the taxi company; most likely the cab driver didn't even know about the flash card.
The alleged crime here is all blogger's - he took someone's else property from the taxi (he shouldn't have done that at all), and then he accessed someone's else private documents without permission, and then he distributed the documents for everyone to see.
He violated the implicit copyright and a whole bunch of other laws that regulate who may and may not take pictures of who (some other poster, with better knowledge of these laws, already commented that a "release" is needed from anyone who was photographed.)
It may be also argued that he used the illegally obtained materials for profit, and then he is really in trouble. Additionally, if any of photographed persons claims any injury from his actions (anything from lost appetite to lost boyfriend) then he is in for a much more severe torture.
Finally, if anyone gets hurt or killed because of his disclosure, he goes to jail. That scenario is not impossible at all if, for example, some of photographed people have more than one {boy,girl}friend who is violent and jealous.
It's clear that the vast majority of the people in the pictures are posing for the pictures
They may be posing, but not for you. They have a very strong case against the blogger.
Additionally, most of the pictures are in public. There probably isn't a whole lot of expectation that your picture won't be taken/distributed if you're posing for a picture in public.
There is a very reasonable expectation if you don't see any unauthorized photographer close to you. We are not talking about spy cameras here, these are decent quality pictures taken either on private property, or with flash in darkness.
Slashdot Mirror
At least the government honestly tried. And don't think these educational programs are useless. I watched a lot of them just for fun, and in fact they were far more intellectually challenging than every other program on every other channel.
Indeed, you misspelled "space terrorism". Diamonds are forever, you know :-)
I am sure they have tons of wireless bandwidth to waste, since every scr1pt k1dd1e will be pinging and portscanning these phones to no end. It is bad enough on wired networks, wait until it spreads to wireless ones. "Zombie Phone" sounds lovely, isn't it? :-) And a phone vulnerability can rack up a real charge on poor SOB's phone bill. Even the traffic alone... who will be paying for those ICMP and TCP packets?
Of course, the phone can have a true IPv6 firewall, and the phone company may have a larger IPv6 firewall... but then what's the point of IPv6 if all the ports are closed? And if some are opened for some use, these will be exploited.
If any phone company is stupid enough to try this IPv6 thing, it will be burned on the first day. Now you can not interfere with Sprint networks from Internet; once this IPv6 feature is in place, though, any script kiddie (or any terr'ist) can DoS phone networks at will. Why again is this needed?
The phone has one use: to be a phone. Anything else, on top of that, can be tolerated only if it is benign. As soon as you start breaking this rule and messing up the voice the customers will move elsewhere, or will demand to turn this service off (as it is not uncommon with SMS.)
All that to ... get the same functionality! No surprise that there are no takers :-)
(I hear what you say, that NAT ... is just a hack which complicates things - but as long as it does not complicate this customer's life he won't upgrade. And every software maker on the market supports IPv4 whatever it takes.)
Fact is, you may need to run a little server on any of internal computers from time to time. That may be an IM application, or multimedia (A/V), or IRC, or something else. This application listens on some port, sometimes it uses a fixed number and sometimes it picks a random port. SIP, for example, can do it either way, and Grandstream SIP phones have an option for that.
How would you then know which port to open in your firewall, and when? And do you really want to do it by hand? No way, even to me, though I have a bunch of shells open at any time, and can change firewall settings whenever I want. A casual user can't do that even if his life depends on it.
So UPnP has its place on the network. You want your firewall/NAT (whichever it is) to be remotely programmable by authorized programs, and if you want you can make it as secure as necessary. What you don't want is to have permanent holes in the firewall, and you don't want to manually make these holes (especially because they shouldn't stay open any longer than necessary!)
The important point here is that you have to do that UPnP thing regardless of what protocol, IPv4 or IPv6, you have. This is because normally your computers should not be accessible by strangers, even if they have their own IPv6 addresses. (At a time long, long ago idealists thought it desirable. Fools they were :-) So you have to make holes in the "firewall" box regardless of what it is, NAT or a real IPv6 firewall. What difference then does it make to you as the customer which protocol you use?
No, I don't want any of that.
Game servers??? In many businesses people get fired for that. If you are at home, any NAT device, such as Linksys, allows you to make a persistent hole in the firewall pointing to any internal box, so you can have your game server - unless your ISP objects, but that's hardly IPv6 issue :-)
Any service that you can use is also a service that an attacker can use. I do not want to secure and harden 10 computers; I can not even harden all computers - some run ancient OSes, like Win98 on one of my slower notebooks, can't upgrade that. I can't even know about all vulnerabilities of 10 different OSes, and I can't keep track of that either. So I want the LAN to be safe; then I have to have an IPv6 firewall anyway, so what's the difference to me if I have to do the same hole in the firewall as I would do in a NAT box?
I thought that AOL, MS and Yahoo and their dog already figured out how to solve this :-) TCP session to the server would be the first, most obvious, place to look for a solution. Direct peer to peer file transfers are not really necessary.
But in case the files are huge, or when you send audio/video between peers, then indeed you need to open some ports. Here you use UPnP to command your NAT box or your IPv6 firewall. There is no real difference to the user, the firewall has to be commanded anyway (you are not going to open persistent holes in your firewall, are you?)
Give it ten years at least. Cell companies can want all they wish, but it won't convince major telecoms (who are a distinct entity from cell companies even if under the same corporate umbrella) to shell out billions of dollars on upgrades for no increase in revenue. TV over IP is in the same boat, they won't pay for the routers. I, as a customer, won't pay either, that's for sure - because neither me, nor any of my friends need IPv6. It has benefits that are of no interest to us, and it has disadvantages (cost of deployment at least) that are of great concern to us. So here we are.
Just as a comment: "some people" probably amounts to 0.01% of paying customers, and is therefore totally insignificant. Even networking professionals - who understand well why IPv6 is better - realize that IPv6 can not happen overnight, and there is really no clear need for it today. Majority of people just buy a $99 wireless router (NAT) from Linksys, and they are all set on their own Class A network. What else is there for them to ask for?
It is also understood that IPv6 shines in a lot of areas (which were mentioned more than once in this discussion.) However none of them are mission-critical, or even noticeable to the average customer. For example, IPv4 NATs are not VoIP friendly - so there are software and hardware solutions already (UPnP, STUN, TCP etc.) and they work on existing networks just fine.
If you want my guess, the star of IPv6 will never rise. It is past its time already. People were concerned about address spaces many years ago, but now it seems everyone is happy, and nobody wants to buy into IPv6.
"But," one says, "the IPv4 address space will be exhausted!" Yes, it will be. A new protocol will replace IPv4. But it may not be IPv6 at all. Who knows? I think IPv4 will be firmly with us for 10 to 20 years from now. Then we shall see. IPv6, after all, is a souped-up IPv4, and it is not all that different from its parent. Maybe something else, something better, will be needed? I'd say so. Maybe they will dump fixed 128-bit addresses, and make them variable length instead, so that new addresses may be allocated where they are needed... Maybe some other crazy scheme will be devised. But IPv6 at this time solves no real problem, and that's why it is not popular.
And if telecoms want IPv6 on their mobile phones... by all means, please do. It's just very likely that the IPv6 will terminate at Verizon's 6->4 proxy, and that's the end of it. This would be practical anyway to cache the data, since I guess majority of users access relatively small number of sites (CNN, Yahoo, MapQuest etc.) and they are mostly cacheable - and the telecom wants to insert their own ads too!
Fall from your bed, hit your head, pretend to get hurt and watch your friends drag you to the doctor. Once there, proclaim that you want to fly more and more and more...
An example of a killer application that requires IPv6 was asked for, and still eagerly expected :-) When answering, please consider that UPnP enabled routers are configurable at run time by the applications that run on the NATed computers.
Ok, I say you borrowed $100K from me and refuse to return. When would you like to be sued? :-)
Bottom line, you ought to have some evidence before the court, that's why SCO is flailing so much these days. You may not need a "beyond any doubt" proof, but a reasonable proof; a contract would do, for example, or a bunch of letters.
All they would have to prove is that your negligence aided and abetted in a crime.
Not unless it was his duty to prevent or monitor the unlawful actions. No sysadmin has such a duty, and people who do network policing are not sysadmins, they call themselves "agents" :-)
Try UPnP enabled router, they are dime a dozen today, and UPNP stacks are available for Windows and Linux (don't know anything about fruit-based computers, though.)
Specifically on the point of having 64K addresses: I don't need that, and I don't want that. I have a bunch of computers here, and any of them can access Internet if I so allow, but there is absolutely no need for an external host to access any of those internal computers. So why should I expose my stuff to hackers? The "true" router would be needed, and it will not give me any advantage over NAT setup. And a configuration like mine can be seen everywhere.
With regard to tunneling proxies (4->6 or 6->4), they are insecure since all the traffic through them can be easily logged. Why would I want that? As you can see, there is no compelling need yet for IPv6, and so people don't upgrade.
You can buy an electric or hybrid car now if you want. You can also buy a horse, or walk. You don't need an order from the President to junk your gasoline car and get an electric one.
Cathode-ray tubes for data visualization.
In five years they will be replaced with LCDs. Already new desktop computers come with LCDs (and all notebooks :-) CRT manufacturing is expensive, dirty and it will be phased out.
Nearly all elevators still use ordinary cables and breaks.
What's wrong with cables and brakes? Were we supposed to use something else already, like antigravity shafts?
It's true that being new is not enough to displace old. But if the new stuff is better and the price/performance ratio is good, it will displace the old products. Flat panel displays, for example, are light (one person can carry it) and they take less space (you can do more with your desk/room) and they take less energy (power bills and waste heat) and they offer very good contrast and sharpness, and they don't flicker, and they don't emit even the weak beta radiation that comes from CRT tubes. The cost is now about 2x over the CRT - big deal...
With regard to terrorist groups "on ice", that might be so (and I have no reason to doubt your arguments), but the longer they stay out of headlines the more forgotten and unwanted they become. Public apathy is the #1 enemy of any terrorist; a taste of peaceful life is something that may stop him in his tracks, or at least prompt his recent supporters to stop the terrorist just so they can live happily ever after.
And with regard to Moslems, it's just their turn. Previously it was Irish and Basques, and Italians, and Germans, and Serbs (WW I), and Russians (between 1890 to 1914, resulting in many czars scared senseless, and one killed)...
Classical terrorism is a form of political protest, completely amoral and socially unacceptable, but that's what it is. Label Robin Hood as one of earliest terrorists if you wish, since his actions were violent and had a political purpose.
But there are other kinds of terrorism today too; old hasishins / assassins of Himalayas are now reborn as human bombs that explode not for a political demand, but for profit of their masters and propagandists. Many terrorist movements, initially full of wonderful political ideas, deteriorate into private armies who fight just because they always fought, who can't go back because there is no way back, who spilled so much blood that they can't undo it. So this becomes a self-perpetuating death machine, seen in so many countries in 20th century.
One of the best books describing terrorists' state of mind is, IMO, "Demons" of Dostoevsky. Very hard to read (as any of Dostoevsky's books,) but quite a study in psychology.
What would be your preference, I wonder, if someone publishes your most personal photos for all your friends and coworkers to see? Do you like to be humiliated? Do you really want to expose your life to strangers? Are you sure everyone else who was photographed shares your beliefs?
for a place that is sooo against musicians being able to keep people from copying things
Musicians publish their work, and anyone can get a copy for a small fee. These photos were not published by the owner, and the fee can be up to $30K per one (or $150K), as someone else already commented. There are 200+ photos; do the math.
The cops would just junk it.
That is fine. You lost the card in first place, what is there to complain about? If the photos remain secret, no harm done. The owner may have downloaded them already, in fact, and just kept the copies in the camera (modern flash cards are huge.)
That is probably true, but you can't set the price on someone's else property. The owner can ask any price he wants, that's why the law limits damages to something sane. The court can further reduce the damages based on judge's opinion, but in any case pilfering of 200+ photographs will cost the blogger all his life savings, past, present and future.
I'd leave this to the lawyers, but as I said "it can be argued", and if it can be argued it probably will be, if the case ever goes to court. I just wanted to comment on all possible aspects.
Defense would lose. If someone walks into a bar and shoots 10 patrons dead, one can't say that it was a single murder. Quite opposite, the blogger digs his own grave by creating a derivative work, arguably for profit, using photos that he has no right to use and adding his narrative which he has no right to add even if he has the right to publish the photos (it's a separate kettle of fish.) The fact that the publication is serialized and clearly designed to attract an audience hurts him even further.
As I commented already, he stole it from the cab. The card belonged to taxi company because it was lost there, and the taxi company was responsible for the lost item according to its own policy. This policy may involve just keeping the item, or transfer it to the police, or search for the passenger, or immediate destruction... these are all valid ways to deal with lost and unclaimed items.
However I can't imagine that a taxi company would post private pictures on Internet, accompanied with some tasteless narrative. That alone can get the blogger sued to oblivion. The blogger, by stealing the card from the cab, robbed the owner of the chance to reclaim his property, and the taxi company - from the chance of returning it, or at least securing it.
Blogger's act is an obvious theft. He could also claim that he found "a car seat" in the taxi and took it with him. Or he could have found a wallet (which belongs to the driver.) Take any of these items, and you become a thief.
Basically, though IANAL, in most cases you can take something that is not yours only if it is obviously an unclaimed property. For example, a wallet on the sidewalk, with nobody around, or a ship at sea. Salvage rights kick in. But if you are on someone's else property (such as taxi or house) you can't just take things based on your own guess that they don't belong to the property owner!
So as long as he doesn't take it ... he could be okay.
I think he should have given the card to the driver, and follow from there.
It's quite clear from looking at the photo album that the person is not a professinal photographer, so they wouldn't have been able to sell anything.
It is not clear at all. My photographs, of my face, are valued at $100,000,000 and I set the price as the owner of the source image. The fact that nobody wants them is irrelevant. If anyone wants to post my photo on Internet, this is the price. Do it for free, by stealing the photos, and get arrested for theft.
The blogger doesn't have to serve 10 years on a 2g planet. Even one week would teach him to respect other people's privacy and property. I'm afraid the blogger is totally insensitive to such matters, and he would blow up your dog if he considers it fun.
The proper way to deal with the card would be to give it to the driver. Then it would be up to the cab company to find the owner or just to drop it into the "lost items" box. Either way is fine.
The blogger had a real harm done in this case - the taxi passenger may have realized where the card was lost, and he may have called the taxi company - but the cab driver never held the card in his hands, so they said they don't know. This blogger's actions may have robbed the card owner of his property.
Nobody blames the taxi company; most likely the cab driver didn't even know about the flash card.
The alleged crime here is all blogger's - he took someone's else property from the taxi (he shouldn't have done that at all), and then he accessed someone's else private documents without permission, and then he distributed the documents for everyone to see.
He violated the implicit copyright and a whole bunch of other laws that regulate who may and may not take pictures of who (some other poster, with better knowledge of these laws, already commented that a "release" is needed from anyone who was photographed.)
It may be also argued that he used the illegally obtained materials for profit, and then he is really in trouble. Additionally, if any of photographed persons claims any injury from his actions (anything from lost appetite to lost boyfriend) then he is in for a much more severe torture.
Finally, if anyone gets hurt or killed because of his disclosure, he goes to jail. That scenario is not impossible at all if, for example, some of photographed people have more than one {boy,girl}friend who is violent and jealous.
They may be posing, but not for you. They have a very strong case against the blogger.
Additionally, most of the pictures are in public. There probably isn't a whole lot of expectation that your picture won't be taken/distributed if you're posing for a picture in public.
There is a very reasonable expectation if you don't see any unauthorized photographer close to you. We are not talking about spy cameras here, these are decent quality pictures taken either on private property, or with flash in darkness.