I don't have a smart phone so I have no clue where all those little grids are pointing.
Those little grids often point at an opaque, encoded URL. It could be the most useful URL, or it could be a site that will steal your identity. Walk around the town, slap a sticker on things, and enough fools will scan it and go there.
QR codes don't have to be small; a large, finely printed code can contain a lot of information (up to 1852 characters) - enough for a poem, let alone a complete URL to a legitimate site. But large QR codes are rare because it's harder to read them. Small QR codes are just enough for a shortened URL. I never visit shortened links, as matter of policy.
It's a tinfoil-hat point. Why would you do that? Or, rather, why would you do that with Google Glass?
Because they want to? Because they want to record everything? Because Google allows them unlimited streaming? Because tomorrow the battery will be good enough to record all you want? Because you don't expect a noisy, obnoxious group to consist only of model citizens? There is a million reasons to focus on edge cases because that's where the failures of the system will be.
Glass owner or not, I wouldn't spend a dime with the morons who own that place, it is a reflection on the type of people _they_ are.
That is true. The society is already separating into FB addicts and techno-luddites. I guess the former will buy Glasses and will be filming each other, whereas the latter will be fiercely protecting their precious bodily fluids. To each his own. But you can be assured that the techno-luddite will not be talking to a Glass-wearing technophile. If you want to talk to me, please remove the thing and turn it off.
It is sad that Google took a nice wearable display and added a camera to it. Without the camera this would be a great product, and it would have no backlash. But Google just *had* to add the camera and thus open this Pandora's box. Google wouldn't be Google if they didn't toil day and night on finding new, innovative ways to spy upon everyone. With Glasses it is not even enough to stay away from Google services. Glasses are designed to get to you wherever you are, statistically, even if you are not a Google customer. A very evil product, on par with Facebook asking its idiots to recognize and tag other people in private photos.
Your arrogance is staggering. You are saying it's perfectly OK to assault someone simply because you assume they are doing something perfectly legal?
First comes a polite, verbal request to remove the Glass or to leave. If the intruder persists in videotaping you, this can be perceived as an aggressive act. People have right to reasonable and proportional self-defense. In a public street running away, probably, would be the only recourse because the cameraman has right to videotape you - even against your clearly expressed wish to not do so. This is the paparazzi mode - they do have those rights, and they are a-holes because they disregard the requests to stop.
If the undesirable videotaping occurs in a privately owned setting, such as your home or place of business, the owner of the place sets rules about who is welcome and who is not. The owner is not permitted to filter the visitors on some protected grounds (skin color, etc.) but using a camera is not protected. Movie theaters ban cameras, and guns (to attract mass murderers, I suppose.) Their right to ban those items is not questioned. So if you do something that doesn't conform to announced and posted rules, the bouncer (or the police) will be here shortly to escort you out. The owner can also obtain a judgement against you, to forbid you from coming again. This is also common, and stores use that against shoplifters. That's the audience that the Glass owner will find himself among.
Same thing here, the rule writer can be put up for assault and sued now and the courts wont go easy on him because the rule will be seen as premeditated
Not necessarily so. A zoo posts a notice: "Do not jump into the lion's cage, you will be mauled by a lion." A man disregards the notice, jumps in, and gets mauled by a lion. Does he have any leg to stand on, legally speaking, if he wants to sue the zoo?
Warning about a known danger is not criminal. I'm sure an educated lawyer would tell all the necessary elements that would make it criminal. But it is pretty obvious that annoying marginally sober patrons of a bar is not among the wisest things a man can do. A bar owner will do good if he openly warns Glass wearers that his usual clientele is not in love with this particular technology.
Anyhow, WTF? banning tech glasses? Why don't they ban iPhones, see how well that will do.
Slippery slope. Yes, you can already secretly and naturally videotape people with spy equipment. You have to spend some serious money on that equipment, but nobody will suspect you.
Also, you can buy an iPhone or a similar smartphone with video recording capability. Then you can take it into your hand, point at the scene and click some buttons. Then you have to stay like that and keep the iPhone pointed for the entire duration of the recording. If you do that it will be pretty obvious to anyone around what you are doing. It is also known that your video remains your property and you know your responsibility for it. If you record a drunken friend, publish that, and your friend loses his job because of that, the loss of a friend will be trivial, compared to the need for a dozen of new tooth implants.
If you wear these glasses then the obviousness of your recording is further dropped since you wear them all the time, and they are always pointed at what you are looking. The indicator light that is available today may become unavailable - or customer-controlled - tomorrow; besides, it is usually trivial to disable any light, anywhere, if you want to.
Besides, the society does ban iPhones and other recording equipment in some places even today. A movie theater is one obvious example; a classified environment is another. However try to record video in locker rooms, bathrooms, or where children play, or in a biker bar, or of a street gang. I am sure if you survive the experience you will not want to try that again.
I have the absolute natural right to videotape anything my eye can behold, period.
Just don't act surprised if you are denied entry to certain places. Then your eye cannot see the same stuff as your implanted camera.
Society will teach you a lesson the hard way, I think. It's not the other way around because society is far larger than you. Walking into a bar and screaming "I have rights!1!" is one of many excellent ways to have your @ss kicked, hard. The trick is that the people inside the bar are not lawyers; they couldn't care less about your legal rights. But they care a lot about their own, intrinsic rights to be left alone. They will tolerate you and your natural eyes because that's the expected thing to do in public. (Even that has limits; try to stare at a girl, and soon her man will come and ask what is wrong with you.) But your eyes do not make a permanent record, and even if you become a witness the accuracy of your recollection can be questioned. Your camera is intruding because it makes that record, and no law will stop groups of like-minded people to forbid you to come into a privately owned place that posts their own rules of conduct.
Absolutely. You cannot have a discussion in an echo chamber. I do not think, personally, that their content is worth $150 - or even $0.015, since I have entirely forgotten that National Post exists. But to be fair you must accept their right to charge whatever they want for the content that exceeds the fair use. A journalist spent a couple of days of his life writing the article. Then he publishes it on a public web site. That journalist wants to eat. How is he going to be paid, assuming that there is public interest to his article? If you need his material for commercial use, throw a coin in the bowl. If you don't want to pay, just link to the original site. You are not denied the information, it's not a paywall, at least.
The whole point of HTML and JS is that the client can display it any way they like, or even not display it at all and just read it to the user.
News sites are struggling with the business model because the world is so well connected today that I can get all my news from hundreds of sites, and many of them do not depend on my money. BBC charges residents of UK, other countries' national news services are financed by taxes, yet another country's newspapers publish world news for foreigners to attract them to their sites. Newspapers are truly schizophrenic here, trying to be both available to everyone and not available unless you pay. As they are flopping, the subscribers depart for greener pastures; their "local news", the bread and butter of journalism, is having less and less appeal. I personally never cared about local news.
In this case if you're running noscript you don't even see the lock. Would be really a stretch of the imagination to call it "circumvent".
If you cover half of the winshield in your car you will not see speed signs either. Will the police accept that excuse? One difference, of course, is that the law requires you to watch for signs. There is no law that would force you to run all the scripts that the site sends your way. But as other, more knowledgeble people explained, in many cases it is enough that you are offered to read the rules of the game. You may refuse to read them, but that doesn't free you from following them if you continue to play. There are many implicit contracts where you are expected to read the rules all on your own. Those rules are on the door of every hotel room, for example. You are not required to read them; but you are subject to them anyhow.
And you can even just click "quit asking me" the first time you see the popup and you can select and copy text as usual.
I think the intent of this script is to put you on notice, legally. Other posters in this whole thread also state this. The JS is not designed to stop you from accessing the content. This is possible, but they haven't gone that far yet. They just want to make sure you are informed of the terms of this contract, in case you want to accept it. This will be easy to sell in court. The infringer either has to confess that he saw the popup and ignored the terms, or that he took special measures to not see the popup (which is not good for his case either.) No reasonable person would think that you can copy someone's else material without checking for terms of such copying. Fair use rights do exist, but they are specific to country, and here we are talking about a Canadian publication. There may be countries in the world that have no fair use rights in their copyright law, or they exist but are narrowly defined and you are not eligible. You are supposed to do your due diligence.
If you recall, Google News got a judgement against it for exactly that in Europe. Right now Europeans are planning to charge Google for using snippets from online sources. This whole issue is far from being settled.
To bind me to a contract you must show me the contract and condition my receipt of the document on my acceptance of the license.
Yes. But I clicked on the "Terms" link of Slashdot itself, and here it is:
By using the Sites, you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions.
I am not a lawyer, so I don't understand what it means. Either all such Terms and Conditions on the Internet are null and void (since nobody signs them,) or there is something in them that makes them worth the lawyer's time.
Hmm... That is rather interesting. Can you illegally circumvent a digital lock through inaction?
As matter of fact, circumventing of locks, doors, gates, and other access control mechanisms is most commonly done by not going through them. Latin roots of the word mean "go around." Can't be much more obvious.
For example: see a locked gate? Find a hole in the fence. See a locked safe? Find someone who knows the code. Have an encrypted DVD? Point a camera at the screen.
In this case, noscript can be seen as a hacking tool because it modifies the programming that the web site sends to you. The characters of the content are to be seen together with the programming to create the presentation as you are expected to perceive it by the content creator.
You cannot claim inaction because most browsers (and perhaps all that the site is designed for) run JS by default. You did act when you installed NoScript. The fact that you did it ahead of time changes nothing. Perhaps you won't be fined for using Lynx; but if you use FF and then load it with ad-blocking extensions then you acted plenty.
If you disagree and claim that the ASCII content can and should be treated apart from the instructions on how to present it, then you will also have to claim that the encrypted DVD bits are to be seen as plaintext and the key - and as long as you have the technical ability to separate them you are in the clear. The DMCA seems to have a differing opinion on that.
As an intermediate step, to muddy the water a bit more, you can imagine an HTML page that consists of the ciphertext of the content and of the JS that locally generates the plaintext. Will extraction of the plaintext be legal under the DMCA, if JS prevents you from right-clicking or selecting? In this case JS is even specially designed to inform you that copying is not free. Any copying you do will be explicitly against the license. And it can be argued that you accepted the license by accessing the site and copying the data. Don't like the license? Read, but you may not copy.
If Yahoo's employee who are allowed to telecommute virtually all refused to comply, THEY COULD NOT FIRE ALL OF THEM
As I explained, such a united front is very unlikely to form because all these employees have differing interests. Unions arose in factory conditions where duties of worker A were exactly the same as duties of worker Z - and therefore they could have a common ground. Unless Yahoo runs a very large farm of identical code monkeys, this is not going to happen. All you need to destroy that union is to suggest that there are prizes to be given to those who stay. Then you just step back and watch them fight for those prizes. Few people want to lose a job in this economy - especially over a perk that is on its way out.
Perhaps a few freethinking and sufficiently independent individuals will choose to quit. They may be even good coders, better than most. This doesn't matter. Most businesses do not depend on individual geniuses to do the work; it is usually done by labor of many less capable workers. It is safer this way, and more predictable. It also creates jobs, because those less capable coders want to eat too. If Yahoo is hoping for a self-initiated layoff, they will get it in just the right size, and they will weed out just the people who are not team players. The rest will obey, and those are the ones you work with.
Wow, my post got butchered by my use of less-than and greater-than signs.
At no time in last fifteen years any of/. codebase maintainers found one minute to check for |</?\w+>| - even though the list of allowed HTML tags is short and specific.
Linus is an example of a good manager who can handle remote workers
Try Linus's style in a business setting and you will be buried in lawsuits. His style works only among volunteers who can take a public whipping when it is deserved (and when it is not.) In a business there are certain rules of conduct that apply to everyone. A manager who screams at his employee can be arrested for verbal threats. Even if the police comes and finds the danger exaggerated, this will certainly ruin your day as a manager. Your own boss will want to know what *you* did to cause all that. (Not the disgruntled employee; YOU.) And he will not be pleased because you, as a manager, have failed at one of the most important duties - to maintain safe and comfortable atmosphere in the office. One hysterical guy is not a concern; when ten other guys are afraid to come to work you have a problem. Or, more likely, you had a problem. Now your current problem is to find a job.
I'm wondering if anyone at a company like Yahoo thinks it is within the realm of possibility for the employees to 'organize' and refuse to comply as a group?
If such a group can be formed then they will be also fired as a group. If I were the CEO I wouldn't want to have a group of workers who tell me what to do, while not being responsible for the end result. Also, CEOs are not the people who look kindly at ultimatums.
But such a group is very unlikely to form. Unions exist only where jobs and duties of workers are largely uniform. However all engineers are different. Additionally, well educated engineers would be likely to play politics for personal advancement; after some eager beavers get fired, the remaining loyalists will be promoted.
I doubt the POTUS is going to go that far off the hook, and if he(and his command) are that crazy, his access to drones is going to be one of the lesser concerns, you know?
Perhaps. But I wouldn't go that far to claim that insanity would be the only reason for them going bananas. There are many natural causes that can trigger the same. Natural disasters are one, if they are followed by major riots. Financial disaster is very likely to be worse than a WMD. So it may well be that the orders will be issued by very sane people, and for reasons that many will find sensible and practical. The Red Terror of 1917-{say, 1953} was also seen by many - even in the West - as practical.
Drones are only one of a multitude of ways to kill people, as you mention with the NKVD.
Yes. The trouble in their willingness to use weapons. A drone is just one weapon that people talk about today.
As for the side I'd be on, well, that depends, you know?
Nobody can even ask until the complete list of warring sides is prepared. There are some homegrown militias that no reasonable person would want to be part of. There are gangs; there are religious fanatics. I would not associate with any of them.
Every bomb dropped in a civil war is destroying the country's own infrastructure and such. It's generally to be avoided.
This is not a concern during civil war. For the current example, look at Syria. Historically, the victor simply forces the defeated people to rebuild what is necessary. World War II is a good example.
Drones are for surgical strikes, if anything.
Drones are also much cheaper than manned bombers, and they can be flown mostly automatically. One pilot can, in theory, operate ten drones that feed imagery to a bunch of computers. The pilot would become involved only with the active phase of a mission. So the concern is the lowering of the threshold of using air power - and military weapons in general. It's not yet as bad as every citizen having a personal "watcher" drone behind his shoulder, but it's getting creepier with every day.
If the owner of the computer does not want the alleged offense prosecuted, no prosecution can go ahead.
Not worth the ink on paper.
DOJ: "Sign here that you want him prosecuted."
Server owner: "But I don't want to hurt him."
DOJ: "OK, then I must treat you as a conspirator; you will be arrested in a few minutes. By the way, the English-Arabic dictionary that the guy illegally downloaded may have been used to translate the drawings of a nuclear weapon. You will be charged with terrorism. Or, perhaps, you changed your mind and want to sign this little paper? The choice is all yours." (DOJ starts absently playing with handcuffs.)
Server owner: "But... but... you cannot do that!"
DOJ: "Who is going to stop me? All the police that you see around here are under my command. Their orders are law to all peasants. Any disobedience is a shooting offense. If you didn't have an illegal gun when you attacked an officer, a drop gun will be provided for you. We also have a choice of bags with drugs, maps of subway systems, and some other items that you may like. Do you understand, WORM, that you are still alive only through my kindness? Don't make me angry. Sign here and I will let you live."
I, personally, prefer to read Fantasy. At least the writers are honest, they don't pretend that their books are for real.
In the real world any illusion may kill you. If that's what you want, good luck. Otherwise I'd suggest to always be aware of the reality around you, whether you like it or not. Especially if you want to change that reality.
That's why I sort of agree with Holder. My position at the moment is "While I cannot currently envision a scenario where a drone strike would be the best option against US Citizens on US Soil, I cannot rule out such a scenario occurring. The authorization for such action would have to come from the highest levels and be subject to the strictest scrutiny'.
That "strictest scrutiny" is worth nothing if anyone who questions the edict of the dictator is immediately - and lawfully - killed. Stalin's NKVD also operated under the strictest scrutiny; for example, they were strictly forbidden from arresting fewer victims than planned.
What purpose could a military action have within the US? There is only one purpose: to wage the civil war. Now, the only question to ask is, on which side will *you* be in that war? What is the chance that you will find it profitable to associate with rich and powerful mass murderers who will gladly swat you as a fly if that is convenient to them? But if you don't join their side, then you will have to join the bombed side - and be bombed yourself.
Even though we the people have the power constitutionally speaking...
Do you have any facts to prove this wondrous theory of yours? Can you demonstrate your power in any way? Prove it. Cut the salary of congresscritters by 30% starting April 1, for example. (They are all millionaires anyway, but it would be a nice gesture.)
If you cannot do that, stop repeating the propaganda and admit that you are a peon, a subject of the all-powerful state, and that you have no control over it. Acceptance of truth is an essential step in finding the solution.
Are you saying that if I was shooting up a mall, the police should kill me if they can't reasonably stop me?
The legal system can kill you. Cops are part of it. They don't (or shouldn't) arrest you because they don't like you. They arrest you for violation of a specific law. If you are an obvious threat to life of others then they are authorized by laws and decisions of courts to shoot you until you are no longer a threat. However the police are not free to execute you on your way to the library, even if you intend to read books about murder there. They are required to arrest you and deliver to the judge, who then will decide how to proceed.
The President is not a judge, and most certainly he is not a jury of anyone's peers. He cannot order anyone killed - not without a death sentence that is issued by the court of law after a fair trial, and challenged by the accused, and ultimately confirmed. A missile strike from afar is an execution. Would you like to be executed just because a drone misread the license plate on your car? Would you like the police to force their way into your home at 3am and shoot you? You will never be told what you are accused of; why the police should talk to dead people? You will not have a chance to face your accuser. No man - no problem. SWAT raids at a wrong address are happening every week, and sometimes they lead to death of people who did nothing wrong. Would you like *all* wrongly accused people to be shot on sight? God will know his own, after all.
Perhaps - but it's pretty passive and weak, if you ask me. For example:
Defense: "What did you see the defendant doing? Did he appear to be making chest compressions?"
Witness: "It looked like he was choking the victim, or searching him, or hitting him in the chest. No, I don't know how CPR is done and I have never seen one performed, and I still have no idea who the defendant is. I'm just telling you what I saw from fifty yards away."
As I said, it's a possible defense, but it's just one of many possibilities, and none are better than the other. There is yet another issue here:
Defense: "Were you aware that the defendant is a certified CPR provider?"
Prosecutor: "Objection, Your Honor! Leading the witness." (or "Relevance" - the witnessed facts should not depend on what the witness knew; the meaning of the observed fact is for the lawyers to debate.)
From my position of an armchair lawyer, the proper question would be to ask first if the witness is familiar with CPR procedures and able to recognize them. If not, there is no point in going further. There is also a danger that the witness will reject the theory of CPR, and then the defense cannot build the strategy on that (well, they can, but it would be without direct proof.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a smart phone so I have no clue where all those little grids are pointing.
Those little grids often point at an opaque, encoded URL. It could be the most useful URL, or it could be a site that will steal your identity. Walk around the town, slap a sticker on things, and enough fools will scan it and go there.
QR codes don't have to be small; a large, finely printed code can contain a lot of information (up to 1852 characters) - enough for a poem, let alone a complete URL to a legitimate site. But large QR codes are rare because it's harder to read them. Small QR codes are just enough for a shortened URL. I never visit shortened links, as matter of policy.
It's a tinfoil-hat point. Why would you do that? Or, rather, why would you do that with Google Glass?
Because they want to? Because they want to record everything? Because Google allows them unlimited streaming? Because tomorrow the battery will be good enough to record all you want? Because you don't expect a noisy, obnoxious group to consist only of model citizens? There is a million reasons to focus on edge cases because that's where the failures of the system will be.
Glass owner or not, I wouldn't spend a dime with the morons who own that place, it is a reflection on the type of people _they_ are.
That is true. The society is already separating into FB addicts and techno-luddites. I guess the former will buy Glasses and will be filming each other, whereas the latter will be fiercely protecting their precious bodily fluids. To each his own. But you can be assured that the techno-luddite will not be talking to a Glass-wearing technophile. If you want to talk to me, please remove the thing and turn it off.
It is sad that Google took a nice wearable display and added a camera to it. Without the camera this would be a great product, and it would have no backlash. But Google just *had* to add the camera and thus open this Pandora's box. Google wouldn't be Google if they didn't toil day and night on finding new, innovative ways to spy upon everyone. With Glasses it is not even enough to stay away from Google services. Glasses are designed to get to you wherever you are, statistically, even if you are not a Google customer. A very evil product, on par with Facebook asking its idiots to recognize and tag other people in private photos.
Your arrogance is staggering. You are saying it's perfectly OK to assault someone simply because you assume they are doing something perfectly legal?
First comes a polite, verbal request to remove the Glass or to leave. If the intruder persists in videotaping you, this can be perceived as an aggressive act. People have right to reasonable and proportional self-defense. In a public street running away, probably, would be the only recourse because the cameraman has right to videotape you - even against your clearly expressed wish to not do so. This is the paparazzi mode - they do have those rights, and they are a-holes because they disregard the requests to stop.
If the undesirable videotaping occurs in a privately owned setting, such as your home or place of business, the owner of the place sets rules about who is welcome and who is not. The owner is not permitted to filter the visitors on some protected grounds (skin color, etc.) but using a camera is not protected. Movie theaters ban cameras, and guns (to attract mass murderers, I suppose.) Their right to ban those items is not questioned. So if you do something that doesn't conform to announced and posted rules, the bouncer (or the police) will be here shortly to escort you out. The owner can also obtain a judgement against you, to forbid you from coming again. This is also common, and stores use that against shoplifters. That's the audience that the Glass owner will find himself among.
If you have proof that not only is it always recording and doing something with that data I'd welcome it.
It's a moot point. You can activate recording before entering the bar. Nobody will hear you in your car, for example.
Same thing here, the rule writer can be put up for assault and sued now and the courts wont go easy on him because the rule will be seen as premeditated
Not necessarily so. A zoo posts a notice: "Do not jump into the lion's cage, you will be mauled by a lion." A man disregards the notice, jumps in, and gets mauled by a lion. Does he have any leg to stand on, legally speaking, if he wants to sue the zoo?
Warning about a known danger is not criminal. I'm sure an educated lawyer would tell all the necessary elements that would make it criminal. But it is pretty obvious that annoying marginally sober patrons of a bar is not among the wisest things a man can do. A bar owner will do good if he openly warns Glass wearers that his usual clientele is not in love with this particular technology.
Anyhow, WTF? banning tech glasses? Why don't they ban iPhones, see how well that will do.
Slippery slope. Yes, you can already secretly and naturally videotape people with spy equipment. You have to spend some serious money on that equipment, but nobody will suspect you.
Also, you can buy an iPhone or a similar smartphone with video recording capability. Then you can take it into your hand, point at the scene and click some buttons. Then you have to stay like that and keep the iPhone pointed for the entire duration of the recording. If you do that it will be pretty obvious to anyone around what you are doing. It is also known that your video remains your property and you know your responsibility for it. If you record a drunken friend, publish that, and your friend loses his job because of that, the loss of a friend will be trivial, compared to the need for a dozen of new tooth implants.
If you wear these glasses then the obviousness of your recording is further dropped since you wear them all the time, and they are always pointed at what you are looking. The indicator light that is available today may become unavailable - or customer-controlled - tomorrow; besides, it is usually trivial to disable any light, anywhere, if you want to.
Besides, the society does ban iPhones and other recording equipment in some places even today. A movie theater is one obvious example; a classified environment is another. However try to record video in locker rooms, bathrooms, or where children play, or in a biker bar, or of a street gang. I am sure if you survive the experience you will not want to try that again.
I have the absolute natural right to videotape anything my eye can behold, period.
Just don't act surprised if you are denied entry to certain places. Then your eye cannot see the same stuff as your implanted camera.
Society will teach you a lesson the hard way, I think. It's not the other way around because society is far larger than you. Walking into a bar and screaming "I have rights!1!" is one of many excellent ways to have your @ss kicked, hard. The trick is that the people inside the bar are not lawyers; they couldn't care less about your legal rights. But they care a lot about their own, intrinsic rights to be left alone. They will tolerate you and your natural eyes because that's the expected thing to do in public. (Even that has limits; try to stare at a girl, and soon her man will come and ask what is wrong with you.) But your eyes do not make a permanent record, and even if you become a witness the accuracy of your recollection can be questioned. Your camera is intruding because it makes that record, and no law will stop groups of like-minded people to forbid you to come into a privately owned place that posts their own rules of conduct.
You are dancing on the head of a pin here
Absolutely. You cannot have a discussion in an echo chamber. I do not think, personally, that their content is worth $150 - or even $0.015, since I have entirely forgotten that National Post exists. But to be fair you must accept their right to charge whatever they want for the content that exceeds the fair use. A journalist spent a couple of days of his life writing the article. Then he publishes it on a public web site. That journalist wants to eat. How is he going to be paid, assuming that there is public interest to his article? If you need his material for commercial use, throw a coin in the bowl. If you don't want to pay, just link to the original site. You are not denied the information, it's not a paywall, at least.
The whole point of HTML and JS is that the client can display it any way they like, or even not display it at all and just read it to the user.
News sites are struggling with the business model because the world is so well connected today that I can get all my news from hundreds of sites, and many of them do not depend on my money. BBC charges residents of UK, other countries' national news services are financed by taxes, yet another country's newspapers publish world news for foreigners to attract them to their sites. Newspapers are truly schizophrenic here, trying to be both available to everyone and not available unless you pay. As they are flopping, the subscribers depart for greener pastures; their "local news", the bread and butter of journalism, is having less and less appeal. I personally never cared about local news.
In this case if you're running noscript you don't even see the lock. Would be really a stretch of the imagination to call it "circumvent".
If you cover half of the winshield in your car you will not see speed signs either. Will the police accept that excuse? One difference, of course, is that the law requires you to watch for signs. There is no law that would force you to run all the scripts that the site sends your way. But as other, more knowledgeble people explained, in many cases it is enough that you are offered to read the rules of the game. You may refuse to read them, but that doesn't free you from following them if you continue to play. There are many implicit contracts where you are expected to read the rules all on your own. Those rules are on the door of every hotel room, for example. You are not required to read them; but you are subject to them anyhow.
And you can even just click "quit asking me" the first time you see the popup and you can select and copy text as usual.
I think the intent of this script is to put you on notice, legally. Other posters in this whole thread also state this. The JS is not designed to stop you from accessing the content. This is possible, but they haven't gone that far yet. They just want to make sure you are informed of the terms of this contract, in case you want to accept it. This will be easy to sell in court. The infringer either has to confess that he saw the popup and ignored the terms, or that he took special measures to not see the popup (which is not good for his case either.) No reasonable person would think that you can copy someone's else material without checking for terms of such copying. Fair use rights do exist, but they are specific to country, and here we are talking about a Canadian publication. There may be countries in the world that have no fair use rights in their copyright law, or they exist but are narrowly defined and you are not eligible. You are supposed to do your due diligence.
If you recall, Google News got a judgement against it for exactly that in Europe. Right now Europeans are planning to charge Google for using snippets from online sources. This whole issue is far from being settled.
To bind me to a contract you must show me the contract and condition my receipt of the document on my acceptance of the license.
Yes. But I clicked on the "Terms" link of Slashdot itself, and here it is:
By using the Sites, you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions.
I am not a lawyer, so I don't understand what it means. Either all such Terms and Conditions on the Internet are null and void (since nobody signs them,) or there is something in them that makes them worth the lawyer's time.
Hmm... That is rather interesting. Can you illegally circumvent a digital lock through inaction?
As matter of fact, circumventing of locks, doors, gates, and other access control mechanisms is most commonly done by not going through them. Latin roots of the word mean "go around." Can't be much more obvious.
For example: see a locked gate? Find a hole in the fence. See a locked safe? Find someone who knows the code. Have an encrypted DVD? Point a camera at the screen.
In this case, noscript can be seen as a hacking tool because it modifies the programming that the web site sends to you. The characters of the content are to be seen together with the programming to create the presentation as you are expected to perceive it by the content creator.
You cannot claim inaction because most browsers (and perhaps all that the site is designed for) run JS by default. You did act when you installed NoScript. The fact that you did it ahead of time changes nothing. Perhaps you won't be fined for using Lynx; but if you use FF and then load it with ad-blocking extensions then you acted plenty.
If you disagree and claim that the ASCII content can and should be treated apart from the instructions on how to present it, then you will also have to claim that the encrypted DVD bits are to be seen as plaintext and the key - and as long as you have the technical ability to separate them you are in the clear. The DMCA seems to have a differing opinion on that.
As an intermediate step, to muddy the water a bit more, you can imagine an HTML page that consists of the ciphertext of the content and of the JS that locally generates the plaintext. Will extraction of the plaintext be legal under the DMCA, if JS prevents you from right-clicking or selecting? In this case JS is even specially designed to inform you that copying is not free. Any copying you do will be explicitly against the license. And it can be argued that you accepted the license by accessing the site and copying the data. Don't like the license? Read, but you may not copy.
If Yahoo's employee who are allowed to telecommute virtually all refused to comply, THEY COULD NOT FIRE ALL OF THEM
As I explained, such a united front is very unlikely to form because all these employees have differing interests. Unions arose in factory conditions where duties of worker A were exactly the same as duties of worker Z - and therefore they could have a common ground. Unless Yahoo runs a very large farm of identical code monkeys, this is not going to happen. All you need to destroy that union is to suggest that there are prizes to be given to those who stay. Then you just step back and watch them fight for those prizes. Few people want to lose a job in this economy - especially over a perk that is on its way out.
Perhaps a few freethinking and sufficiently independent individuals will choose to quit. They may be even good coders, better than most. This doesn't matter. Most businesses do not depend on individual geniuses to do the work; it is usually done by labor of many less capable workers. It is safer this way, and more predictable. It also creates jobs, because those less capable coders want to eat too. If Yahoo is hoping for a self-initiated layoff, they will get it in just the right size, and they will weed out just the people who are not team players. The rest will obey, and those are the ones you work with.
Wow, my post got butchered by my use of less-than and greater-than signs.
At no time in last fifteen years any of /. codebase maintainers found one minute to check for |</?\w+>| - even though the list of allowed HTML tags is short and specific.
Linus is an example of a good manager who can handle remote workers
Try Linus's style in a business setting and you will be buried in lawsuits. His style works only among volunteers who can take a public whipping when it is deserved (and when it is not.) In a business there are certain rules of conduct that apply to everyone. A manager who screams at his employee can be arrested for verbal threats. Even if the police comes and finds the danger exaggerated, this will certainly ruin your day as a manager. Your own boss will want to know what *you* did to cause all that. (Not the disgruntled employee; YOU.) And he will not be pleased because you, as a manager, have failed at one of the most important duties - to maintain safe and comfortable atmosphere in the office. One hysterical guy is not a concern; when ten other guys are afraid to come to work you have a problem. Or, more likely, you had a problem. Now your current problem is to find a job.
I'm wondering if anyone at a company like Yahoo thinks it is within the realm of possibility for the employees to 'organize' and refuse to comply as a group?
If such a group can be formed then they will be also fired as a group. If I were the CEO I wouldn't want to have a group of workers who tell me what to do, while not being responsible for the end result. Also, CEOs are not the people who look kindly at ultimatums.
But such a group is very unlikely to form. Unions exist only where jobs and duties of workers are largely uniform. However all engineers are different. Additionally, well educated engineers would be likely to play politics for personal advancement; after some eager beavers get fired, the remaining loyalists will be promoted.
I doubt the POTUS is going to go that far off the hook, and if he(and his command) are that crazy, his access to drones is going to be one of the lesser concerns, you know?
Perhaps. But I wouldn't go that far to claim that insanity would be the only reason for them going bananas. There are many natural causes that can trigger the same. Natural disasters are one, if they are followed by major riots. Financial disaster is very likely to be worse than a WMD. So it may well be that the orders will be issued by very sane people, and for reasons that many will find sensible and practical. The Red Terror of 1917-{say, 1953} was also seen by many - even in the West - as practical.
Drones are only one of a multitude of ways to kill people, as you mention with the NKVD.
Yes. The trouble in their willingness to use weapons. A drone is just one weapon that people talk about today.
As for the side I'd be on, well, that depends, you know?
Nobody can even ask until the complete list of warring sides is prepared. There are some homegrown militias that no reasonable person would want to be part of. There are gangs; there are religious fanatics. I would not associate with any of them.
Every bomb dropped in a civil war is destroying the country's own infrastructure and such. It's generally to be avoided.
This is not a concern during civil war. For the current example, look at Syria. Historically, the victor simply forces the defeated people to rebuild what is necessary. World War II is a good example.
Drones are for surgical strikes, if anything.
Drones are also much cheaper than manned bombers, and they can be flown mostly automatically. One pilot can, in theory, operate ten drones that feed imagery to a bunch of computers. The pilot would become involved only with the active phase of a mission. So the concern is the lowering of the threshold of using air power - and military weapons in general. It's not yet as bad as every citizen having a personal "watcher" drone behind his shoulder, but it's getting creepier with every day.
If the owner of the computer does not want the alleged offense prosecuted, no prosecution can go ahead.
Not worth the ink on paper.
DOJ: "Sign here that you want him prosecuted."
Server owner: "But I don't want to hurt him."
DOJ: "OK, then I must treat you as a conspirator; you will be arrested in a few minutes. By the way, the English-Arabic dictionary that the guy illegally downloaded may have been used to translate the drawings of a nuclear weapon. You will be charged with terrorism. Or, perhaps, you changed your mind and want to sign this little paper? The choice is all yours." (DOJ starts absently playing with handcuffs.)
Server owner: "But... but... you cannot do that!"
DOJ: "Who is going to stop me? All the police that you see around here are under my command. Their orders are law to all peasants. Any disobedience is a shooting offense. If you didn't have an illegal gun when you attacked an officer, a drop gun will be provided for you. We also have a choice of bags with drugs, maps of subway systems, and some other items that you may like. Do you understand, WORM, that you are still alive only through my kindness? Don't make me angry. Sign here and I will let you live."
I, personally, prefer to read Fantasy. At least the writers are honest, they don't pretend that their books are for real.
In the real world any illusion may kill you. If that's what you want, good luck. Otherwise I'd suggest to always be aware of the reality around you, whether you like it or not. Especially if you want to change that reality.
A hypothesis: "No fair human government may be ever maintained by humans themselves."
If you go ahead with changes to the Constitution, the final and accepted changes will outdo the worst dictatorships that ever existed on the planet.
That's why I sort of agree with Holder. My position at the moment is "While I cannot currently envision a scenario where a drone strike would be the best option against US Citizens on US Soil, I cannot rule out such a scenario occurring. The authorization for such action would have to come from the highest levels and be subject to the strictest scrutiny'.
That "strictest scrutiny" is worth nothing if anyone who questions the edict of the dictator is immediately - and lawfully - killed. Stalin's NKVD also operated under the strictest scrutiny; for example, they were strictly forbidden from arresting fewer victims than planned.
What purpose could a military action have within the US? There is only one purpose: to wage the civil war. Now, the only question to ask is, on which side will *you* be in that war? What is the chance that you will find it profitable to associate with rich and powerful mass murderers who will gladly swat you as a fly if that is convenient to them? But if you don't join their side, then you will have to join the bombed side - and be bombed yourself.
Even though we the people have the power constitutionally speaking...
Do you have any facts to prove this wondrous theory of yours? Can you demonstrate your power in any way? Prove it. Cut the salary of congresscritters by 30% starting April 1, for example. (They are all millionaires anyway, but it would be a nice gesture.)
If you cannot do that, stop repeating the propaganda and admit that you are a peon, a subject of the all-powerful state, and that you have no control over it. Acceptance of truth is an essential step in finding the solution.
Are you saying that if I was shooting up a mall, the police should kill me if they can't reasonably stop me?
The legal system can kill you. Cops are part of it. They don't (or shouldn't) arrest you because they don't like you. They arrest you for violation of a specific law. If you are an obvious threat to life of others then they are authorized by laws and decisions of courts to shoot you until you are no longer a threat. However the police are not free to execute you on your way to the library, even if you intend to read books about murder there. They are required to arrest you and deliver to the judge, who then will decide how to proceed.
The President is not a judge, and most certainly he is not a jury of anyone's peers. He cannot order anyone killed - not without a death sentence that is issued by the court of law after a fair trial, and challenged by the accused, and ultimately confirmed. A missile strike from afar is an execution. Would you like to be executed just because a drone misread the license plate on your car? Would you like the police to force their way into your home at 3am and shoot you? You will never be told what you are accused of; why the police should talk to dead people? You will not have a chance to face your accuser. No man - no problem. SWAT raids at a wrong address are happening every week, and sometimes they lead to death of people who did nothing wrong. Would you like *all* wrongly accused people to be shot on sight? God will know his own, after all.
Perhaps - but it's pretty passive and weak, if you ask me. For example:
Defense: "What did you see the defendant doing? Did he appear to be making chest compressions?"
Witness: "It looked like he was choking the victim, or searching him, or hitting him in the chest. No, I don't know how CPR is done and I have never seen one performed, and I still have no idea who the defendant is. I'm just telling you what I saw from fifty yards away."
As I said, it's a possible defense, but it's just one of many possibilities, and none are better than the other. There is yet another issue here:
Defense: "Were you aware that the defendant is a certified CPR provider?"
Prosecutor: "Objection, Your Honor! Leading the witness." (or "Relevance" - the witnessed facts should not depend on what the witness knew; the meaning of the observed fact is for the lawyers to debate.)
From my position of an armchair lawyer, the proper question would be to ask first if the witness is familiar with CPR procedures and able to recognize them. If not, there is no point in going further. There is also a danger that the witness will reject the theory of CPR, and then the defense cannot build the strategy on that (well, they can, but it would be without direct proof.)