Re:lawyer: no new law needed (trespass)
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 2
> at the very least, *most* (not all) phone solicitors in the States need to maintain a "don't call" list.
But there is specific legislation that requires this. There is currently no such legislation for email. The courts did not mandate don't call lists, the legislature did.
Re:lawyer: no new law needed (trespass)
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 2
> without at least implied permission
But access to mail servers *is* implied. What's not clear is what legal mechanism exists for denying access someone to your public mail servers.
Re:lawyer: no new law needed (trespass)
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 2
Does this mean that I can sue traditional junk mailers for putting junk in my real mailbox? Can you sue me if I send you an email message that's *not* spam?
This is why I think they do need laws. An activist court *could* try and draw analogies between current laws and the internet, but the internet is completely different.
> I'm actually surprised at how few of these we see; trespass is trhe obvious cause of action for computer intrusion.
I think the reason is that the internet was designed to be trespassed upon. For example, when I send you email, my message goes across many other servers en route.
It's going to be even harder to argue that eBay has the right to refuse access to the indexer when their website is open to the public. How freely can a company refuse entry to its premises? I know most restaraunts have signs that say that they "reserve the right to refuse anyone", but they really don't have that right. They can't, for example, refuse to serve minorities. To what extent *can* they refuse access?
Can they refuse access to comparison shoppers? I seem to recall a case where Best Buy kicked a comparison shopper out of the store on trespass charges. He was aquited and filed suit against Best Buy. I don't know the outcome of that suit, but the judge clearly felt that he had a right to comparison shop at a public store. That's all the auction indexers are doing?
eBay doesn't want competition. These indexing sites index eBay *and* other auction sites. eBay would be happier if you didn't know about other sites, and certainly doesn't want there name to be listed next to any of the "lesser" auction sites.
They want to be number one (and, preferably, the only one). If they weren't already number one, I think they would have a different attitude.
> They were busted for the spam, as well as forging headers.
No, they were only *busted* for the forging. MicroSoft was busted for being a monopoly, not for selling software. Nevertheless, the FoF do indicate that MicroSoft sells software. It may be a fact that Christian Brothers were spamming AOL, but they were busted for infringing on the trademark.
And that makes sense. The rules on copyright and trademark are pretty clear. Spam, on the other hand, is still in a sort of legal limbo. It's still too new to really say what is and is not allowed, which is why so many people are pressing for the legislatures to pass laws. It would be fruitless to expect these decision to be made by the court absent any laws. You'd need to find a truly activist court to find that spam was illegal absent any legislation.
However, no new laws need to be passed and no new court decisions need be made to make it illegal to use another companies trademark to promote your product.
I think the stigma with mental illness has lessened to some degrees in the past few decades. There were clearly mentally ill people before, but they were generally locked away in sanitariums and ignored by most of the population.
I had a great aunt who had Alzheimers disease. Her husband, who grew up during the Great Depression, would never admit that there was anything wrong with her. He did everything he could to hide her condition until they simply couldn't take care of themselves and my parents moved them in with us.
She had severe symptons. She seldom recognized people. She always hid her stuff because she thought people were trying to steal from her. Once hidden, she couldn't find stuff, which just reinforced her feeling that people were stealing from her. Through all this and more, her husband was too ashamed to admit that there was anything wrong with her. We made sure that she got all the help she needed and made her as comfortable as possible. She would have never received any help a generation earlier.
> A sceptical attitude towards this sort of sensationalism is very healthy
Skepticism I can handle. But the whole point is that people aren't getting the help they need (be it drugs, psychoanalysis, or just a shoulder to cry on) because they're afraid of being called nuts./. has shown how prevelant that attitude is.
> The thing is that 1/5th of the population can't be abnormal, purely because they are 1/5th of the population!
I think you've made my point. There is a difference between "abnormal" and experiencing a mental illness. In fact, the article says "Mental disorders are usually not defined by laboratory tests or physiologic abnormalities of the brain..."
But people do suffer from mental illness, just like they can suffer from the common cold. The problem is that everyone knows when they have a cold and they can easily get help for it. They know they need additional rest and fluids and, if the symptoms progress, they can even see a physician without embarrassment.
That's not the case with mental illness. Once people realize they have a problem and seek professional help, it's much easier to begin to have a positive attitude and make jokes about being "crazy". It helps to talk about it, and it's a lot easier to talk about with levity.
On the other hand, those that haven't sought treatment aren't so willing to joke about it. They may already feel ashamed and inferior.
Now the major spin that this study has been receiving has been that people aren't getting treatment because of the stigma. And/.'s spin is to heighten that stigma.
In some other context, I wouldn't have a problem with jokes about mental illness, but this is about as tasteful as wearing blackface to an NAACP meeting.
On of the big points the report tries to make is that many people won't seek help because of the negative stigma associated with mental illness. How does/. report on this? By calling people "nuts".
I like that! You could go to Hollywood and write Happy Endings for all those depressing books that would make great movies if they only didn't end so tragically.
> Anyways, if EVERYONE, or at least a large number of people
Everyone will absolutely NOT do this. We can't *all* be non-conformists...
How many is a "large number"? Do you think it's likely to get even half the population to stop walking to their cars and start "casing" parking lots? With an armful of Christmas presents?
When the "authorities" are humans, they can be easily overwhelmed. But the "watchers" are now computers, content to focus on just what happens on their bank of monitors. As someone comes under their surveilance, they do a quick photo ID and check that persons "permanent" file.
Even though the population is pretty large, people tend to frequent the same areas. Most IDs will be found in a local cache and won't take a nanosecond to find. Out-of-towners will need to be looked up on a network which could take a few seconds... Even then, another computer saw them leave the airport another followed them on the highway. By the time they come into your garage, you certainly won't need to call a computer any further than your own backyard.
You'll have to do more than just get a large number of people to walk funny in a parking garage to overwhelm this system. You'll all need to go to a different grocery store and at a different day and time each time. You'll have to buy different stuff each time. You'll have to keep unusual and unpredictable hours at work every day. You'll have to stop talking to the same people.
Acting like you're trying to break into your own car won't work more than once. Besides, the computer saw you come into the garage, so it probably already knew it was your car to begin with. You'll need to frequently change cars. And houses.
Face it, 99% of what everyone does becomes quite routine. All the computer needs to do is watch for a change in your pattern. And unless an enourmous number of people give up their "normal" lives, this system will easily track the small number of trouble makers.
So you have your fun, get the cameras to watch you "pretend" to steal the car. Now, and for the rest of your life, the cameras will be closely watching every move you ever make. When the country-wide network is built, your history will be shared. You're a trouble maker and the computer knows you. Once a non-conformist, always a non-conformist. It will never forget your face and will always watch you. You'll begin to get a little paranoid. Suspicious that someone's watching you. As you walk down the street, the cameras will turn to follow you. The guard at your local bank will nervously feel for his revolver when you enter. The teller will stutter when talking to you. You'll have trouble getting work. Others will notice the cameras turning to watch you and they, too, will be suspicious of you. No one will make eye contact with you. You're not paranoid, you've made the system paranoid of you. You'd better never Jaywalk again...
No, Debian is easier to maintain. It's easier because of the tools (apt), not because you become familiar with it. Deb packages contain a lot more info than RPMs, so meeting dependencies becomes a lot easier and conflicts are virtually impossible.
Debian also tries to do things *right*, which also makes it easier to maintain. You won't find executables in/etc, but you will find all your configuration files there.
Id took data from my computer without asking first. Here's a better analogy: Id sneaked into my house and took a picture of my living room (and I wasn't even in the picture). Comet came into my house and took a picture of me in the shower. While Comet was a lot more malicious and reckless, I have a problem with ANYONE coming into my house uninvited.
It's true that Id did take the time to mention that what they were doing in a form of techie jargon that some people might even understand, but they didn't really ask for consent. It's kind of like if your next Visa bill included a notice in finest legal-font that said that, unless you called them immediately, they would be free to come to your house and have a look around.
Unless people start viewing the contents of their computer as their own property, companies like Comet will be sure to come along and take what you want to keep private.
> Beowulf is one of a family of parallel programming API tools. Programs must use the API to accomplish parallel programming.
Not quite. A Beowulf class supercomputer is a high-performance network of workstations built from commodity hardware running on a free operating system like Linux.
Beowulf is *not* a parallel programming API and, in fact, there are several common APIs currently used on Beowulfs: the old standard PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), the up and coming MPI (Message-Passing Interface), and less common AFAPI (Aggregate Function Application Program Interface).
The allies did a lot more than that. They kept moving Patton around because Hitler was sure Patton would lead the invasion. I also saw a show on the History Channel that showed some soldiers single-handedly lifting tanks... they were inflatable decoys that the allies created! They took this decoy thing pretty serious.
I was wondering how the people who *weren't* mad at id can still say id did nothing wrong.
Id secretly monitored people because they hadn't really thought about it at all. It just seemed natural and beneficial and, hey, who expects privacy and we're not matching up names...
It's this lax attitude that leads to another company saying "Hey, why not take this to the next level and completely track the user".
I got spammed recently by Barbes & Noble and they had a hidden img tag in the HTML version of their spam. The hidden image contained a unique number so that B&N new exactly when I looked at their crap. (See Privacy Digest for more).
B&N thinks there's nothing wrong with this. Comet thinks there's nothing wrong. Id thinks there's nothing wrong. They all think they haven't crossed the line yet. If we keep allowing them to push this line, you can bet that people will keep pushing this line.
If you weren't mad at id, then where exactly do you draw the line? Comet isn't tracking names (yet). Sure, kids use Comet's Cursors... but kids also play video games. If you accept what id did, then you set yourself up for Comet.
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> at the very least, *most* (not all) phone solicitors in the States need to maintain a "don't call" list.
But there is specific legislation that requires this. There is currently no such legislation for email. The courts did not mandate don't call lists, the legislature did.
> without at least implied permission
But access to mail servers *is* implied. What's not clear is what legal mechanism exists for denying access someone to your public mail servers.
Does this mean that I can sue traditional junk mailers for putting junk in my real mailbox? Can you sue me if I send you an email message that's *not* spam?
This is why I think they do need laws. An activist court *could* try and draw analogies between current laws and the internet, but the internet is completely different.
> I'm actually surprised at how few of these we see; trespass is trhe obvious cause of action for computer intrusion.
I think the reason is that the internet was designed to be trespassed upon. For example, when I send you email, my message goes across many other servers en route.
It's going to be even harder to argue that eBay has the right to refuse access to the indexer when their website is open to the public. How freely can a company refuse entry to its premises? I know most restaraunts have signs that say that they "reserve the right to refuse anyone", but they really don't have that right. They can't, for example, refuse to serve minorities. To what extent *can* they refuse access?
Can they refuse access to comparison shoppers? I seem to recall a case where Best Buy kicked a comparison shopper out of the store on trespass charges. He was aquited and filed suit against Best Buy. I don't know the outcome of that suit, but the judge clearly felt that he had a right to comparison shop at a public store. That's all the auction indexers are doing?
eBay doesn't want competition. These indexing sites index eBay *and* other auction sites. eBay would be happier if you didn't know about other sites, and certainly doesn't want there name to be listed next to any of the "lesser" auction sites.
They want to be number one (and, preferably, the only one). If they weren't already number one, I think they would have a different attitude.
eBay has made contracts with some other auction sites to allow them to index eBay (on eBay's terms). However, I don't know if sherlock is one of them.
> They were busted for the spam, as well as forging headers.
No, they were only *busted* for the forging. MicroSoft was busted for being a monopoly, not for selling software. Nevertheless, the FoF do indicate that MicroSoft sells software. It may be a fact that Christian Brothers were spamming AOL, but they were busted for infringing on the trademark.
And that makes sense. The rules on copyright and trademark are pretty clear. Spam, on the other hand, is still in a sort of legal limbo. It's still too new to really say what is and is not allowed, which is why so many people are pressing for the legislatures to pass laws. It would be fruitless to expect these decision to be made by the court absent any laws. You'd need to find a truly activist court to find that spam was illegal absent any legislation.
However, no new laws need to be passed and no new court decisions need be made to make it illegal to use another companies trademark to promote your product.
Once again, /. posts an article without reading it themselves:
> The unsolicited messages, which included fraudulent headers misrepresenting that the messages came from aol.com...
They weren't busted because of the spam, but because the spam appeared to come from AOL.
> AOL was entitled to recover for unjust enrichment, since Christian Brothers unlawfully used the AOL mark...
I think the stigma with mental illness has lessened to some degrees in the past few decades. There were clearly mentally ill people before, but they were generally locked away in sanitariums and ignored by most of the population.
I had a great aunt who had Alzheimers disease. Her husband, who grew up during the Great Depression, would never admit that there was anything wrong with her. He did everything he could to hide her condition until they simply couldn't take care of themselves and my parents moved them in with us.
She had severe symptons. She seldom recognized people. She always hid her stuff because she thought people were trying to steal from her. Once hidden, she couldn't find stuff, which just reinforced her feeling that people were stealing from her. Through all this and more, her husband was too ashamed to admit that there was anything wrong with her. We made sure that she got all the help she needed and made her as comfortable as possible. She would have never received any help a generation earlier.
> A sceptical attitude towards this sort of sensationalism is very healthy
/. has shown how prevelant that attitude is.
Skepticism I can handle. But the whole point is that people aren't getting the help they need (be it drugs, psychoanalysis, or just a shoulder to cry on) because they're afraid of being called nuts.
> Once it had got to a three, why did you moderate it down? ... I am concerned that you just attempted to hide an alternative viewpoint to your own.
Same thing happened to my post with a similar POV as yours. Meanwhile, the guy who didn't read the article got moderated up to 5.
> The thing is that 1/5th of the population can't be abnormal, purely because they are 1/5th of the population!
/.'s spin is to heighten that stigma.
I think you've made my point. There is a difference between "abnormal" and experiencing a mental illness. In fact, the article says "Mental disorders are usually not defined by laboratory tests or physiologic abnormalities of the brain..."
But people do suffer from mental illness, just like they can suffer from the common cold. The problem is that everyone knows when they have a cold and they can easily get help for it. They know they need additional rest and fluids and, if the symptoms progress, they can even see a physician without embarrassment.
That's not the case with mental illness. Once people realize they have a problem and seek professional help, it's much easier to begin to have a positive attitude and make jokes about being "crazy". It helps to talk about it, and it's a lot easier to talk about with levity.
On the other hand, those that haven't sought treatment aren't so willing to joke about it. They may already feel ashamed and inferior.
Now the major spin that this study has been receiving has been that people aren't getting treatment because of the stigma. And
In some other context, I wouldn't have a problem with jokes about mental illness, but this is about as tasteful as wearing blackface to an NAACP meeting.
On of the big points the report tries to make is that many people won't seek help because of the negative stigma associated with mental illness. How does /. report on this? By calling people "nuts".
I like that! You could go to Hollywood and write Happy Endings for all those depressing books that would make great movies if they only didn't end so tragically.
> Anyways, if EVERYONE, or at least a large number of people
Everyone will absolutely NOT do this. We can't *all* be non-conformists...
How many is a "large number"? Do you think it's likely to get even half the population to stop walking to their cars and start "casing" parking lots? With an armful of Christmas presents?
When the "authorities" are humans, they can be easily overwhelmed. But the "watchers" are now computers, content to focus on just what happens on their bank of monitors. As someone comes under their surveilance, they do a quick photo ID and check that persons "permanent" file.
Even though the population is pretty large, people tend to frequent the same areas. Most IDs will be found in a local cache and won't take a nanosecond to find. Out-of-towners will need to be looked up on a network which could take a few seconds... Even then, another computer saw them leave the airport another followed them on the highway. By the time they come into your garage, you certainly won't need to call a computer any further than your own backyard.
You'll have to do more than just get a large number of people to walk funny in a parking garage to overwhelm this system. You'll all need to go to a different grocery store and at a different day and time each time. You'll have to buy different stuff each time. You'll have to keep unusual and unpredictable hours at work every day. You'll have to stop talking to the same people.
Acting like you're trying to break into your own car won't work more than once. Besides, the computer saw you come into the garage, so it probably already knew it was your car to begin with. You'll need to frequently change cars. And houses.
Face it, 99% of what everyone does becomes quite routine. All the computer needs to do is watch for a change in your pattern. And unless an enourmous number of people give up their "normal" lives, this system will easily track the small number of trouble makers.
You don't have to thank me. If you hadn't decided to give up your non-conformist ways, I'm sure you'd get the Ludivico treatment one day.
New Hampshire's slogan was "Live Free or Die". London's new slogan should be "Live Normal or Die".
So you have your fun, get the cameras to watch you "pretend" to steal the car. Now, and for the rest of your life, the cameras will be closely watching every move you ever make. When the country-wide network is built, your history will be shared. You're a trouble maker and the computer knows you. Once a non-conformist, always a non-conformist. It will never forget your face and will always watch you. You'll begin to get a little paranoid. Suspicious that someone's watching you. As you walk down the street, the cameras will turn to follow you. The guard at your local bank will nervously feel for his revolver when you enter. The teller will stutter when talking to you. You'll have trouble getting work. Others will notice the cameras turning to watch you and they, too, will be suspicious of you. No one will make eye contact with you. You're not paranoid, you've made the system paranoid of you. You'd better never Jaywalk again...
No, Debian is easier to maintain. It's easier because of the tools (apt), not because you become familiar with it. Deb packages contain a lot more info than RPMs, so meeting dependencies becomes a lot easier and conflicts are virtually impossible.
/etc, but you will find all your configuration files there.
Debian also tries to do things *right*, which also makes it easier to maintain. You won't find executables in
Dragon Systems (makers of Naturally Speaking continuous VR) announced a similar product at Comdex. They call it audiomining.
Do you have python installed?
Id took data from my computer without asking first. Here's a better analogy: Id sneaked into my house and took a picture of my living room (and I wasn't even in the picture). Comet came into my house and took a picture of me in the shower. While Comet was a lot more malicious and reckless, I have a problem with ANYONE coming into my house uninvited.
It's true that Id did take the time to mention that what they were doing in a form of techie jargon that some people might even understand, but they didn't really ask for consent. It's kind of like if your next Visa bill included a notice in finest legal-font that said that, unless you called them immediately, they would be free to come to your house and have a look around.
Unless people start viewing the contents of their computer as their own property, companies like Comet will be sure to come along and take what you want to keep private.
> Beowulf is one of a family of parallel programming API tools. Programs must use the API to accomplish parallel programming.
Not quite. A Beowulf class supercomputer is a high-performance network of workstations built from commodity hardware running on a free operating system like Linux.
Beowulf is *not* a parallel programming API and, in fact, there are several common APIs currently used on Beowulfs: the old standard PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), the up and coming MPI (Message-Passing Interface), and less common AFAPI (Aggregate Function Application Program Interface).
The allies did a lot more than that. They kept moving Patton around because Hitler was sure Patton would lead the invasion. I also saw a show on the History Channel that showed some soldiers single-handedly lifting tanks... they were inflatable decoys that the allies created! They took this decoy thing pretty serious.
You not only have to worry about them selling the data, but someone buying their company.
I would not be surprised if the next cracker that gets busted has his Comet Cursor file subpoenaed...
Id secretly monitored people because they hadn't really thought about it at all. It just seemed natural and beneficial and, hey, who expects privacy and we're not matching up names...
It's this lax attitude that leads to another company saying "Hey, why not take this to the next level and completely track the user".
I got spammed recently by Barbes & Noble and they had a hidden img tag in the HTML version of their spam. The hidden image contained a unique number so that B&N new exactly when I looked at their crap. (See Privacy Digest for more).
B&N thinks there's nothing wrong with this. Comet thinks there's nothing wrong. Id thinks there's nothing wrong. They all think they haven't crossed the line yet. If we keep allowing them to push this line, you can bet that people will keep pushing this line.
If you weren't mad at id, then where exactly do you draw the line? Comet isn't tracking names (yet). Sure, kids use Comet's Cursors... but kids also play video games. If you accept what id did, then you set yourself up for Comet.