As I understand the case, the issue is whether genetic material is patentable at all. This is generally referred to as patentable utility or just utility for short. Questions of utility deal exclusivly with whether they fall under the statute. The questions are usually answered with a simple "yes, it is" (e.g. For an improved potato peeler) or "no," (e.g. F=ma) so no prior art would be necessary.
That's it. From this point forward when I hear someone waxing beautifically about hwo "great" Apple is, I will be linking to this story. And others. To show them how tyrannical the company has truly become.
Ok, I'm with you on the privacy thing. You know Apple has security cameras at their stores, so there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. But take a minute and think about what this guy did - he wrote literal spyware. Specifically, he wrote a program, secretly installed it on a computer he didn't own and used that program to relay information back to him. If he did that at my office, on my equipment (ok, the company equipment) I'd lose my mind. I'd call the the cops, FBI, and yeah, sure, the secret service.
Wired, you suck. I think this guy did some creepy, messed up stuff and you gave him a free pass because it was in the name of "art" and you can sell magazines by dumping on [Apple/HP/Microsoft]. Let's pick his brain for a moment:
The next week, I got some pings from Apple in Cupertino. I looked through the logs and tried to reconstruct what was happening. I saw a few pings from one computer, a few from another. Sometimes multiple copies of the app were running. I even had a vague sense of when they took their lunch break.
What if this guy wasn't an artist? What if worked for a competitor who was trying to get a headcount at a certain store? Would that change the story? I love art as much as the next man, and sure, it's an interesting idea, but the but the guy has earned what he's received.
Honestly, what's the fantasy here? In most cases (queue anecdotal counterarguements) if the police are looking for something on your machine they are going to have a reason to do it. This little "honeypot" isn't going to make them surrender to your brilliance, it isn't going to expose a dramatic flaw in the legal system and no, you will not eventually be vindicated by the supreme court. It will land you in the same position as this woman - the government believes that you have evidence on your machine and they don't believe that you conveniently forgot the password.
The point of government research is to learn something new, whether it works or not.
FTFY. Commercial research, as you pointed out further down, includes product development. (Of course, it also includes developing things that help you develop the products as well.) Xerox PARC was/is funded by the sale of copy machines. It isn't unreasonable to require researchers to focus on developing products that help fund more research.
You shouldn't expect Xerox to fund projects that are solely designed to learn something new. Sometimes they will and that is great, but at the end of the day, the responsibility for funding high-risk research (the research that commercial labs often build upon) rests solely on the government.
As I understand it (oblig IANAL), if you can pass a state bar exam, you are a lawyer in that state. You don't have to prove your education in law, or have affiliation with any recognized lawyers' associations. You just need to prove you know everything you could have learned in law school, but didn't. As it is, you can represent yourself in a court of law and it's a bonus if you actually know the protocol, so you are, for all purposes, a lawyer for yourself (Yes, I know there's a difference between representing yourself versus someone else.)
You understand it incorrectly. Passing the state bar exam is one barrier to entry (a VERY DIFFICULT barrier), but you also have to pass the MPRE (an ethics exam), possibly take an additional ethics course (if you're in New York, like I am) and finally, submit an application to the court for admission. The application is very thorough - I just sent mine in and had to include reference letters from every attorney I ever worked with and had to list every job and residence I've had for the last ten-odd years. Here's a link to the packet, if you want to look it over. After you have submitted the packet, you get grilled by the character and fitness committee and then, if you make it through that step, you become a lawyer.
I believe that the original poster isn't a great journalist. (Did you see how I qualified that?) He or she didn't bring up the fact that after creating websites like obsidianfinancesucks.com, she offered her services to Obsidian to clear up their "PR Problem" at $2,500 a month. That seems like an important fact that someone might need to shape his or her opinion on the ruling. As I understand the judge's ruling, it doesn't bar all bloggers from being considered journalists, just this one and even then, only as it applies to this case.
I'll go on record with a preemptory "what he/she said" to include all of the previous comments. This is one of those things that nearly every slash dotter has to do at one point or another and in my experience, you'll have to deal with at least one of three bottlenecks: time, money, or bandwidth.
If you are doing this to several hundred machines, sneaker net is likely a faster solution than your network. Take advantage of the higher bandwidth and save the backup images to a portable USB drive. With a large enough drive you can also keep the new image local as well. Using this method you can boot into Your Favorite Backup Solution, take the backup, securely erase the disk, and write the new image in one fell swoop. After the imaging is complete collect your various USB drives and march them back to the server.
With large enough USB disks, you could repeat this process several times before off-loading the images to your server.
There is a back tick key. If you hold your finger on the single quote button, you get a selection of four quote-like characters: ', ’,‘, and `. I'm not saying your network filter didn't work, it just kept people off who don't know how to use their idevices.
(Sent from my iPhone, of course.)
I can't speak for the author, but I think he meant "touch screen" and not just "touch." Steve Jobs (among others) have criticized touch screen desktops because of the "gorilla arm" problem. FWIW, I use a magic trackpad at work and it's good for gesturing - especially if you are already used to it, coming off a laptop or tablet.
I'm not sure how it is done where you work, but this information - location and usage - is not anonymized when you order it from the carriers with a subpoena (at least in New York). In our office, we use this data all the time to defend against auto accident litigants. (Hint: The plaintiff always swears he was not on the phone at the time of the accident.) Regardless, the stuff we get is never anonymized.
But instead of accepting responsibility after a Cisco employee provided his ID and password to ex-Cisco engineer Peter Alfred-Adekeye, the networking giant sic'ed the Feds on Adekeye, who was slapped with a five-count indictment by a Federal grand jury last week.
Can someone explain to me why the company's CEO should be responsible for his employee wrongfully sharing his password? Disregarding the specific employee's fate for a moment (the link is dead at this time), how is "sic[ing] the Feds" an inappropriate response for someone who illegally penetrated their network?
For his five downloads of different versions of Cisco IOS — four of which were launched within a 15-minute period in 2006 — the government is seeking a penalty of 5 years imprisonment for Adekeye, a $250K fine, and 3 years supervised release.
Summary: Man penetrates corporate network with hot credentials, man copies software from illegally penetrated network, man complains when law enforcement gets involved.
It's the latest salvo fired in the war Cisco and US prosecutors have waged against Adekeye since he filed an antitrust suit against Cisco in December 2008.
Private citizens cannot file antitrust suits.
Insert comment about the quality of free slashdot submissions and obligatory lawn reference.
Maybe this will lead to new standards (or maybe, they'll pay better attention to the old ones) but those standards exist to protect people. The GP was right - the summary could have been a little more helpful in describing the extent of the tragedy.
they had no authorization to engage in massive copyright violation, scanning millions of copyrighted books that they had no right to, specifically violating the exact same laws that drove Kinko's to lose massive amount of university campus business in the 1980s.
Google's approach did not involve breaking and entering. Google didn't plug in rogue devices on secured networks, engage in spoofing, unauthorized network access, evade physical security (kudos for masking your face with a bike helmet) and voluntarily circumvent security measures designed to protect the network after admins found him. Google DID scan a bunch of books and they subsequently settled with the copyright holders. Google certainly put themselves on the hook for civil penalties and in the process pissed off a bunch of authors, but they didn't do any of the above.
So to answer your question, this is nothing like what Google did.
That's a more or less correct reading, based upon your exposure. However, there would be no chain of custody here because it went from the defendants, to a third party (Lulzsec) and then (presumably) to the authorities. (Proper chain of custody would be something like: scene of the crime -> lab technician -> detective -> prosecutor.) Instead, a prosecutor can take these emails along with additional evidence to get a warrant for the originals, thereby getting a "clean" set of evidence. The clean set would be admissible and likely devastating at trial.
IT attracts more people that are arrogant and think they are right more than any other industry. They don't want to solve a problem, they want to brag and be an asshole.
What about my industry? I'm a lawyer, you insensitive clod!
Does a plane take off in one state and land in another? If so, it's "commerce among the states" that the Congress has always been allowed to regulate.
The Congress can also regulate air travel for planes that stay within the same state. (In fact, even if you could show that the gas tank would run dry before you hit the border, they could still find interstate commerce.) See Wickard v. Filburn. What they cannot do is restrict interstate travel under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV.
If WebMD gave you a scalpel, they'd probably need a license. If FreeCreditReport audited your books for you, then they'd need to get a CPA. If anything, LegalZoom is more like H & R Block - if you have a straightforward problem, it's fine. However, if you make a mistake on your LZ document or your H & R Block tax return, you are the one on the hook - criminally or civilly- not the provider.
Despite the common conception, these providers do not give you legal (accounting | medical) advice. "Legal advice," like "medical advice" means "In my professional judgment, you should do X, Y, and Z. If I have been negligent or reckless you can sue me for malpractice." In contrast, the magical docu-tron takes a few input variables, consults a database of canned responses and says "Most people will need to do A, B, and C."
In this case, it is hard to tell if LegalZoom has been billing itself as an on-line legal alternative. If they are, they might be on the hook for unlicensed practice of law.
That's kind of the problem, right? The warrant, which is sealed, probably lists the servers by IP or MAC address and not by model name and number. They might be able to make an educated guess as to which rack is housing the machine, but since there were no employees present to actually identify the servers by IP, it's hard to see how they could do any different.
I'd go with "interesting" over sick. If you made alternators instead of software, indemnification would be a necessary part of your business plan to begin with. Software patent litigation is actually only a small part of the field of patent litigation, and despite what you see on slashdot, it's comparatively rare. You average run-of-the-mill patent dispute is much more likely to be about components in a pea-combiner or an x-ray source than it is going to be about the use of a specific codec.
With that said, if Apple gets in the ring on this one, expect a good fight. Apple, like IBM during the SCO litigation, needs to make an example out of Lodsys. That probably means something a little more spirited than a simple "I'll cover your defense costs." Even money on "an undisclosed settlement" before Lodsys starts writing any more briefs.
That's why any citizen who wants to hire an attorney should automatically have standing to challenge the Constitutionality of any law.
You can already do this, more or less. If you have the money, you can fund a group of brilliant lawyers who will go through the list of every single person charged with this crime, find the perfect sympathetic defendant and then litigate the Hell out of it. Since this is a First Amendment/Technology issue, I'd start here or here.
There's a reason why the Constitution requires an "actual case and controversy" for the courts to find jurisdiction. This law may go into effect and subsequently never get enforced. The founding fathers knew that the judiciary would be so busy solving actual problems, that they didn't want to bother them with philosophical debates that may or may not every actually be resolved.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's bad? I thought it was done by the Pokemon Institute.
As I understand the case, the issue is whether genetic material is patentable at all. This is generally referred to as patentable utility or just utility for short. Questions of utility deal exclusivly with whether they fall under the statute. The questions are usually answered with a simple "yes, it is" (e.g. For an improved potato peeler) or "no," (e.g. F=ma) so no prior art would be necessary.
That's it. From this point forward when I hear someone waxing beautifically about hwo "great" Apple is, I will be linking to this story. And others. To show them how tyrannical the company has truly become.
Ok, I'm with you on the privacy thing. You know Apple has security cameras at their stores, so there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. But take a minute and think about what this guy did - he wrote literal spyware. Specifically, he wrote a program, secretly installed it on a computer he didn't own and used that program to relay information back to him. If he did that at my office, on my equipment (ok, the company equipment) I'd lose my mind. I'd call the the cops, FBI, and yeah, sure, the secret service.
Wired, you suck. I think this guy did some creepy, messed up stuff and you gave him a free pass because it was in the name of "art" and you can sell magazines by dumping on [Apple/HP/Microsoft]. Let's pick his brain for a moment:
The next week, I got some pings from Apple in Cupertino. I looked through the logs and tried to reconstruct what was happening. I saw a few pings from one computer, a few from another. Sometimes multiple copies of the app were running. I even had a vague sense of when they took their lunch break.
What if this guy wasn't an artist? What if worked for a competitor who was trying to get a headcount at a certain store? Would that change the story? I love art as much as the next man, and sure, it's an interesting idea, but the but the guy has earned what he's received.
Honestly, what's the fantasy here? In most cases (queue anecdotal counterarguements) if the police are looking for something on your machine they are going to have a reason to do it. This little "honeypot" isn't going to make them surrender to your brilliance, it isn't going to expose a dramatic flaw in the legal system and no, you will not eventually be vindicated by the supreme court. It will land you in the same position as this woman - the government believes that you have evidence on your machine and they don't believe that you conveniently forgot the password.
Or do what other primates do and fling your stool!
The point of government research is to learn something new, whether it works or not.
FTFY. Commercial research, as you pointed out further down, includes product development. (Of course, it also includes developing things that help you develop the products as well.) Xerox PARC was/is funded by the sale of copy machines. It isn't unreasonable to require researchers to focus on developing products that help fund more research.
You shouldn't expect Xerox to fund projects that are solely designed to learn something new. Sometimes they will and that is great, but at the end of the day, the responsibility for funding high-risk research (the research that commercial labs often build upon) rests solely on the government.
I think the question implied "on an original Windows install." In that case the proper answer is to fall off your chair laughing.
As I understand it (oblig IANAL), if you can pass a state bar exam, you are a lawyer in that state. You don't have to prove your education in law, or have affiliation with any recognized lawyers' associations. You just need to prove you know everything you could have learned in law school, but didn't. As it is, you can represent yourself in a court of law and it's a bonus if you actually know the protocol, so you are, for all purposes, a lawyer for yourself (Yes, I know there's a difference between representing yourself versus someone else.)
You understand it incorrectly. Passing the state bar exam is one barrier to entry (a VERY DIFFICULT barrier), but you also have to pass the MPRE (an ethics exam), possibly take an additional ethics course (if you're in New York, like I am) and finally, submit an application to the court for admission. The application is very thorough - I just sent mine in and had to include reference letters from every attorney I ever worked with and had to list every job and residence I've had for the last ten-odd years. Here's a link to the packet, if you want to look it over. After you have submitted the packet, you get grilled by the character and fitness committee and then, if you make it through that step, you become a lawyer.
I believe that the original poster isn't a great journalist. (Did you see how I qualified that?) He or she didn't bring up the fact that after creating websites like obsidianfinancesucks.com, she offered her services to Obsidian to clear up their "PR Problem" at $2,500 a month. That seems like an important fact that someone might need to shape his or her opinion on the ruling. As I understand the judge's ruling, it doesn't bar all bloggers from being considered journalists, just this one and even then, only as it applies to this case.
I'll go on record with a preemptory "what he/she said" to include all of the previous comments. This is one of those things that nearly every slash dotter has to do at one point or another and in my experience, you'll have to deal with at least one of three bottlenecks: time, money, or bandwidth.
If you are doing this to several hundred machines, sneaker net is likely a faster solution than your network. Take advantage of the higher bandwidth and save the backup images to a portable USB drive. With a large enough drive you can also keep the new image local as well. Using this method you can boot into Your Favorite Backup Solution, take the backup, securely erase the disk, and write the new image in one fell swoop. After the imaging is complete collect your various USB drives and march them back to the server.
With large enough USB disks, you could repeat this process several times before off-loading the images to your server.
There is a back tick key. If you hold your finger on the single quote button, you get a selection of four quote-like characters: ', ’,‘, and `. I'm not saying your network filter didn't work, it just kept people off who don't know how to use their idevices. (Sent from my iPhone, of course.)
If memory serves, there was a CarAnalogyGuy somewhere in that lineage as well.
Getting nine lawyers to agree on anything, much less an interpretation of the Constitution, is a self-defeating premise.
I can't speak for the author, but I think he meant "touch screen" and not just "touch." Steve Jobs (among others) have criticized touch screen desktops because of the "gorilla arm" problem. FWIW, I use a magic trackpad at work and it's good for gesturing - especially if you are already used to it, coming off a laptop or tablet.
I'm not sure how it is done where you work, but this information - location and usage - is not anonymized when you order it from the carriers with a subpoena (at least in New York). In our office, we use this data all the time to defend against auto accident litigants. (Hint: The plaintiff always swears he was not on the phone at the time of the accident.) Regardless, the stuff we get is never anonymized.
I stand corrected.
But instead of accepting responsibility after a Cisco employee provided his ID and password to ex-Cisco engineer Peter Alfred-Adekeye, the networking giant sic'ed the Feds on Adekeye, who was slapped with a five-count indictment by a Federal grand jury last week.
Can someone explain to me why the company's CEO should be responsible for his employee wrongfully sharing his password? Disregarding the specific employee's fate for a moment (the link is dead at this time), how is "sic[ing] the Feds" an inappropriate response for someone who illegally penetrated their network?
For his five downloads of different versions of Cisco IOS — four of which were launched within a 15-minute period in 2006 — the government is seeking a penalty of 5 years imprisonment for Adekeye, a $250K fine, and 3 years supervised release.
Summary: Man penetrates corporate network with hot credentials, man copies software from illegally penetrated network, man complains when law enforcement gets involved.
It's the latest salvo fired in the war Cisco and US prosecutors have waged against Adekeye since he filed an antitrust suit against Cisco in December 2008.
Private citizens cannot file antitrust suits.
Insert comment about the quality of free slashdot submissions and obligatory lawn reference.
Yes, it was. In fact, at least one slashdotter was nearby when the bomb went off.
Maybe this will lead to new standards (or maybe, they'll pay better attention to the old ones) but those standards exist to protect people. The GP was right - the summary could have been a little more helpful in describing the extent of the tragedy.
they had no authorization to engage in massive copyright violation, scanning millions of copyrighted books that they had no right to, specifically violating the exact same laws that drove Kinko's to lose massive amount of university campus business in the 1980s.
Google's approach did not involve breaking and entering. Google didn't plug in rogue devices on secured networks, engage in spoofing, unauthorized network access, evade physical security (kudos for masking your face with a bike helmet) and voluntarily circumvent security measures designed to protect the network after admins found him. Google DID scan a bunch of books and they subsequently settled with the copyright holders. Google certainly put themselves on the hook for civil penalties and in the process pissed off a bunch of authors, but they didn't do any of the above.
So to answer your question, this is nothing like what Google did.
That's a more or less correct reading, based upon your exposure. However, there would be no chain of custody here because it went from the defendants, to a third party (Lulzsec) and then (presumably) to the authorities. (Proper chain of custody would be something like: scene of the crime -> lab technician -> detective -> prosecutor.) Instead, a prosecutor can take these emails along with additional evidence to get a warrant for the originals, thereby getting a "clean" set of evidence. The clean set would be admissible and likely devastating at trial.
IT attracts more people that are arrogant and think they are right more than any other industry. They don't want to solve a problem, they want to brag and be an asshole.
What about my industry? I'm a lawyer, you insensitive clod!
Does a plane take off in one state and land in another? If so, it's "commerce among the states" that the Congress has always been allowed to regulate.
The Congress can also regulate air travel for planes that stay within the same state. (In fact, even if you could show that the gas tank would run dry before you hit the border, they could still find interstate commerce.) See Wickard v. Filburn. What they cannot do is restrict interstate travel under the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV.
Of course, that doesn't mean they won't try...
If WebMD gave you a scalpel, they'd probably need a license. If FreeCreditReport audited your books for you, then they'd need to get a CPA. If anything, LegalZoom is more like H & R Block - if you have a straightforward problem, it's fine. However, if you make a mistake on your LZ document or your H & R Block tax return, you are the one on the hook - criminally or civilly- not the provider. Despite the common conception, these providers do not give you legal (accounting | medical) advice. "Legal advice," like "medical advice" means "In my professional judgment, you should do X, Y, and Z. If I have been negligent or reckless you can sue me for malpractice." In contrast, the magical docu-tron takes a few input variables, consults a database of canned responses and says "Most people will need to do A, B, and C." In this case, it is hard to tell if LegalZoom has been billing itself as an on-line legal alternative. If they are, they might be on the hook for unlicensed practice of law.
That's kind of the problem, right? The warrant, which is sealed, probably lists the servers by IP or MAC address and not by model name and number. They might be able to make an educated guess as to which rack is housing the machine, but since there were no employees present to actually identify the servers by IP, it's hard to see how they could do any different.
I'd go with "interesting" over sick. If you made alternators instead of software, indemnification would be a necessary part of your business plan to begin with. Software patent litigation is actually only a small part of the field of patent litigation, and despite what you see on slashdot, it's comparatively rare. You average run-of-the-mill patent dispute is much more likely to be about components in a pea-combiner or an x-ray source than it is going to be about the use of a specific codec.
With that said, if Apple gets in the ring on this one, expect a good fight. Apple, like IBM during the SCO litigation, needs to make an example out of Lodsys. That probably means something a little more spirited than a simple "I'll cover your defense costs." Even money on "an undisclosed settlement" before Lodsys starts writing any more briefs.
That's why any citizen who wants to hire an attorney should automatically have standing to challenge the Constitutionality of any law.
You can already do this, more or less. If you have the money, you can fund a group of brilliant lawyers who will go through the list of every single person charged with this crime, find the perfect sympathetic defendant and then litigate the Hell out of it. Since this is a First Amendment/Technology issue, I'd start here or here.
There's a reason why the Constitution requires an "actual case and controversy" for the courts to find jurisdiction. This law may go into effect and subsequently never get enforced. The founding fathers knew that the judiciary would be so busy solving actual problems, that they didn't want to bother them with philosophical debates that may or may not every actually be resolved.