That the BBC report doesn't mention a database doesn't mean that there isn't a database. It's pretty vague about what testing was done, exactly. You assume that they just profiled the DNA from the two samples and compared them to one another, but the BBC article doesn't actually say that.
TFA is less vague, which you interpret to mean it's wrong but which I interpret to mean perhaps they referred to sources other than just the BBC report.
You parrot the old Google party line about why they stayed in China for so long pretty well.
But Google seems to be changing its line, albeit somewhat grudgingly. One might conclude that they were rationalizing the decision to stay where the money was even though they had to knowingly act against their stated values to do it; later found that you get burned when you shake the devil's hand; and now are trying to reconcile that with the fact that really they do still want access to all that money.
Becoming part of the machinery of oppression is an immoral act. Justifying it by short-term gains you think you're bringing to the oppressed is delusional.
"And I suppose you're not complicit in human rights abuse at all, because you never buy anything made in China?"
First of all, the role a consumer plays by doing business with a company that exploits its labor is not the same as the role Google plays in censoring information. Google's role in human rights violations, so long as they remain in China, is active.
Second, I absolutely believe that for the U.S. to allow businesses and consumers to benefit from the labor of Chinese (or other foreign) workers who are made to work in conditions considered unacceptable in the U.S. itself is rank hypocrisy. I don't believe it should be legal. BUT, as long as it is legal, and as long as it does pervade the U.S. economy to the extent it does - which can only be changed at an institutional level - I do not hold individual consumers to be personally liable for the fact that they can't really avoid goods that exploit foreign workers.
"Even if you don't, I suppose human rights abuses are A-OK as long as you're not involved?"
What an ignorant attitude. Of course human rights abuses are not "A-OK". The first moral responsibility on the matter, though, is to make sure you yourself aren't committing them. Doing what you can to make the world as a whole better - e.g. by opposing those violations you aren't involved with - is important but secondary.
Later in your post you brought up an analogy to a doctor who can't save everyone. In your context, it was a twisted stretch of an analogy; but here it's actually pretty apt, as doctors swear an oath to "first do no harm".
Google staying in China is not like a doctor who can't save everyone; it's like a guy who profits by killing some patients justifying it by pointing to the few he also saves.
Google pulling out of China is like a doctor. He says "first I will do no harm - I will not help China with its censorship efforts even if that means China won't let me operate in its borders"; and then perhaps he tries to save as many as he can. But as you say, he can't save everyone, and we do not hold him morally accountable for the misdeeds of others once he commits to do no harm himself.
No, you just need to work on reading comprehension. Here's a quick grammar lesson: In the sentence you quoted, I refered to the user multiple times in the 2nd person ("you", "your"). It should be clear to anyone literate that a 3rd-person pronoun ("they") is not referring to the same person as a 2nd-person pronoun in the same sentence.
"They" in "if they are up to no good" means MySpace, asshat.
Yes. However, it's pretty clear that wasn't written to mean "it's ok to steal the mail from the post office after it's been delivered", because at that point the post office no longer has the mail for you to steal. In hindsight, knowing that ISP's do still have the message after it's delivered, the wording seems sloppy; but when applied to the technology for which it was written, it means exactly what it was intended to mean.
Sadly, "interpret the law" can mean two things. What should happen (consider the wording of the law in the ocntext it was written to determine the intent), or what does happen (figure out a plausible reading of the words that leads to your preferred conclusion).
As much as that annoys me, there's still a part of me that says: if you think email is a good place for sensitive information, and you're not using encryption, you have nobody else to blame. I include myself in that, BTW; I don't use encryption day-to-day, and if I put something too sensitive in my email and it falls into the wrong hands, shame on me I suppose...
Yes, I see that it includes playlists and crap like that.
So what's the level of detail? Can I see an individual user, or just summaries at some predetermined granularity? If I can see individual users, can I see their name? If I buy a location-based dataset, can I see the exact GPS coordinates of a data point, or just ZIP code clusters, or what?
TFS is definitely worded to spread fear. As much as I dislike companies taking liberties with data they've collected - especially with no accountable opt-out for people who've already handed their data over with no expectation of this sort of behavior - I'd still like to know more about what's actually gonig on before jumping on the FUD bandwagon.
Oh, and seriously... if they are up to no good, do you really think deleting your account is going to make a difference? We're talking about the Internet; once you put something in, you can't take it back out.
No, you misunderstand; lethal has nothing to do with it.
The name originated when two NASA scientists were studying data from a crippled satelite, and one said to the other "Duuuuude, those are some killer electrons!"
Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of a universal DNA database is insane. However, as always, I dislike arguments that are poorly thought out even when I agree with their conslusions, largely because they somehow become the arguments the other side wants to talk about.
So let's get this out of the way:
1) Just because you collect everyone's DNA, doesn't mean that your sample size when running a DNA test is "300,000,000 and growing". In the context of a specific crime, you would do your preliminary work of identifying suspects the same way you do it today. Maybe you get it down to five guys, and run their profiles (exactly the use case you listed as workable); maybe you even get it down to one guy, but the DNA profile is what pushes you over the "reasonable doubt" line.
2) You wouldn't have to do DNA tests in every criminal case to make this idea useful. I can't imagine that anyone's going to argue for use of DNA in every criminal case; in many cases it doesn't even make sense that there would be DNA evidence. But in some cases DNA evidence makes a lot of sense, and in many of those it's used today. Even if you only use DNA in the same cases where it's done today, the fact that you don't have to collect a DNA sample first - and presumably then don't have to worry about "discriminating" in some way against your suspect(s) - is the supposed advantage of this system.
What do you mean "more efficient than just storing the electricity"?
I think you mean "more efficient than chemical energy storage", e.g. lithium batteries and similar. The thing is, chemical batteries are only practical up to a certain volume of energy. Beyond that it's no longer a question of which is "more efficient"; it's a question of which you can actually do.
If your approach to note-taking with pen and paper is to write down everything said, then I suppose you would end up writing without thinking; but in that case you should've learned how to take notes. The difference between pen/paper and computer is that very few people would even try to keep up with verbatim recording of the lecture using pen and paper. (And also that pen/paper is freeform and random access so you can take notes more effectively than with a computer, if you actually know how to take notes.)
Oh, and as for being 'mentally trapped' - you may not be aware of this, but someone is paying on behalf of each student for the opportunity to have that student's attention "trapped" by the professor. It's true that a really good professor will make you "feel" more interested, but ultimately their job isn't to entertain. The student's job is to pay attention.
Do you also believe that ToS violations constitute unauthorized access to a computer? That approach was tried recently by the U.S. prosecutors. Ultimately the court didn't buy that position.
So... why would robots.txt, which advises me of your wishes but to which I never actually agree, carry any more legal authority than a ToS document to which I do supposedly agree as a condition of using your system?
Well, I clicked a lot of links looking for sufficient detail to back the article's claims, but didn't find it. Based on the information I was able to find, I'd say this:
1) There is nothing new in the observation that people tend to favor information that confirms their already-established world view. In decades past terms like "cognitive dissonance" were used to talk about this.
2) That said, it's very hard to take two people with different value systems and distinguish whether they're "rejecting" different subsets of those facts as TFA suggests, or applying different values to those facts and therefore reaching different conclusions at a summary level. A person who oppostes embryonic stem cell reserach isn't necessarily "rejecting" information about how many lives could be saved or how much suffering could be stopped; they are, however, valuing those things less than the moral harm they ascribe to destruction of an embryo. A supporter of such research, meanwhile, isn't necessarily rejecting the premise that embryos get destroyed; but rather puts less value on that loss than on the potential gains.
The people I know who are most prone to outright reject a fact are those who cannot confidently stand by a solid core value system. That makes it very hard to say "I see that there are negatives to the solution I favor, but they are outweighed by the positives"; or to sacrifice convenience if it turns out that the pros and cons really do balance out to favor an inconvenient solution.
3) It's also nothing new that people put more trust in others who they perceive as similar to themselves. Again, this has been observed for decades (often when takling about ethnic bias).
4) The article fails to provide a useful conclusion. It talks about approaches they think won't work for getting people to think open-mindedly, but it doesn't offer any advice on what will work.
'show me a two-body collision in which the direction of travel was not "toward each other"...'
Why would I try to do that? It has nothing to do with what I said.
"Head on collision" means the front of one object runs into the front of the other object. If the object doesn't have a definite front (as GGP was suggesting with the original question), then its leading edge (relative to its direction of travel) is the front. (Sometimes using the direction of travel to define "front" makes sense even if the object does have a definite front in other contexts, but that's beside the point.)
I can certianly show you one object heading north and colliding with another that is heading east. Generally the front of one object will hit the side of the other - not a head-on collision.
I can show you two objects both heading north, but with the leading object moving slower such that the trailing one hits it from behind. Again, not a head-on collision.
But if the objects are heading in opposite directions, then the collision would be described as head-on.
In that less of the relative kinetic energy between the two bodies would be spent breaking them into smaller pieces, I suppose it might be marginally safer. That's a far cry from saying that it would be "safe", though.
I would categorize it more as philosophical difference and less as deliberate scare-mongering.
For the record, I agree with you. The GPL says "you can do X, Y, and Z", but Second Life says "if you do X, Y, and Z in ways we don't like, you can't use our servers"; I see no conflict there. Conflict would be if they tried to use copyright law to enforce their constraints.
But the philosophical stance of a lot of Free Software folks is, freedom to change software is useless if you can't run the changes. So to them, TiVO becomes responsible for providing you a platform for your version of their software even if that's not what they want to sell. And, likewise, Second Life becomes responsible for providing the server environment in which you can use your modified client even if that's incompatible with their goals... hell, even if in some instance that's incompatible with the good of the service and its users.
By contrast, my view is that if you modify your client software in a way the server operator doesn't like, it's up to you to find an enviornment in which to use your software.
Well, if you strip away the self-important tone of TFA, it boils down to this:
A guy with a technical background discovered the rush of trolling a large audience. The major difference between this and a large segment of/. readers is, he did it under a journalistic guise - which makes him an unethical asshat whereas the/. trolls are merely run-of-the-mill asshats.
So then he tried to have his cake and eat it too: he wanted to enjoy the respect of his peers in technical endeavors while still having his fun as an asshat blogger. So, big surprise, it backfired and now he's lost the respect of his peers.
As for the Windows 7 RAM usage data - he may well have reported that in good faith, but it doesn't matter because of who he'd chosen to become. (As much as he tries to sound like he was drawn into his situation, ultimately he chose to be what he was and is; this article really just shows that while he may be resigned to the consequences, he hasn't truly accepted responsibility.) Maybe he really has reason to believe his findings, or maybe the desire to save face is coloring his view. (He certainly wants some measure of justification; I guess it's easier to feel that it's all unfair if the story that gets you caught was a case where you were factually correct.)
Actually, I believe they mean "a factor somewhere between 4:1 and 20:1". It's a much less precise statement, but given the wording it makes a lot more sense than interpreting it as a single ratio.
RTFA. Nobody leaked the URL to reporters. Reporters guessed URL's until they hit on one.
But I guess the moderators are in wishful thinking mode today, so you got an up-mod for a non sequitur.
Also, you should probably learn to do a better job identifying who the enemy is. Jumping down my throat for pointing out unfortunate realities of the current legal landscape isn't helping you.
First of all, define "completely unsecured". I'm pretty sure I know your definition, and if I had to vote I'd support it; but I'm also pretty sure I know their definition and it has a frightening amount of support. They will argue, and the courts might accept, that the non-publication of the URL constitutes "security", or an expectation of privacy, or whatever terms they need to feel good about filing charges.
This is a matter of technical knowledge. To a person who only knows how to follow links, limiting circulation of links can seem like "security". You can point out that it's easy to learn the skills to circumvent that, but think how that looks to someone who isn't very computer literate. "Sure, you can learn how to get around it - just like a thief can learn how to bypass a typical 5-pin lock. The skill to bump a lock isn't very hard to learn either."
The point is, as long as the typical level of knowledge doesn't include ways to find a non-published URL, the perceived threat will be in those who have the knowledge - not in those whose idea of "security" allows that knowledge to be used. I've seen Fortune 500 companies ban dsektop search tools rather than tell their employees not to "hide" sensitive documents on unlocked directories of shared drives. You really think the courts and laws are so far ahead of that knowledge curve?
Ultimately what's missing is a universal legal standard that presumes information is public if it is deliberately placed on a web-accessible file system without at least a prescribed level of protection. How strong that prescribed level of protection should be is open to debate. I don't need fool-proof security on my house to charge you with trespassing - a closed door is more than enough.
The exact standard isn't important. What's important is, the standard should exist, should be universal, and should be known to all parties.
So, I periodically get into debates around here about the validity of "intellectual property". I take the position that while the current implementation in the US is deeply flawed, the concept is no less vaild than tangible property.
I'll even stand up for the validity of the term, when used appropriately.
Yet this summary (and non-article) is a perfect example of how to abuse the term "intellectual property" for FUD-based purposes. Without more details (i.e. what exactly was said between the IOC and Uvex) we can't know whether this particular fault is with the lawyers or the submitter, but in a formal context such as pointing to a specific incident and claiming infringement, it is inappropriate to use a vague term like intellectual property.
The point is, there are many types of IP. The things they cover, and the rights the reserve, are wildly different. Anyone in this thread claiming to have an intelligent opinion on the merits of the IOC's position had better know more about this situation than what's in TFS and the links it includes.
If we're to speculate, the most reasonable assumption is that the IOC is claiming trademark rights. If they say "we have the right to Vonn's name as a trademark for the duration of the games", then they might be right - depends on the existance and content of documents we wouldn't have seen. Similarly, commercial use of an individual's likeness is a right that person controls, and could be signed over to the IOC during the games.
Now, holding a trademark doesn't confer as much exclusivity as companies like to claim. Depending on what was said or depicted, in what context, they may or may not have any claim. However, just the fact that the content was apparently hosted on Uvex's commercial website may have created enough of a legal grey area that they didn't want to fight it in court. (Or, they may have just wanted to avoid a public fight with the OIC.)
A proper analogy would be you were selling guns for $0.00 (but still required purchasers to do proper paperwork) and saying "use this to commit a crime" - and of course as soon as you do that, "whatever they did with said guns" is not exclusively "on them".
Again, you're busily looking at the aspects of what they're doing that aren't illegal and trying to use that as proof that they're not doing anything illegal. It's a neat rhetorical trick, but don't expect it to work in court should you ever find yourself there.
Back to the analogy - the Please Rob Me folks don't "change the status" of the information (according to your argument), and likewise in a murder the perpetrator doesn't change the status of his weapon.
The perpetrator does change the status of the victim, in both cases. The location information is not the victim, so your attempt to twist the analogy is nonsense.
Collecting, filtering, indexing, and publishing information in a manner expressely designed to facilitate a crime - and even going so far as to say "commit a crime here" - is definitely grounds for civil liability and may be a criminal act.
And I suppose I could beat a guy to death and claim I was only using my hands; I doubt that would get me acquitted.
Most laws are based on what act was committed, not what tools were used to commit the act. Where laws stray from this (I'm looking at you, DMCA) they are damaging to society.
Slashdot Mirror
That the BBC report doesn't mention a database doesn't mean that there isn't a database. It's pretty vague about what testing was done, exactly. You assume that they just profiled the DNA from the two samples and compared them to one another, but the BBC article doesn't actually say that.
TFA is less vague, which you interpret to mean it's wrong but which I interpret to mean perhaps they referred to sources other than just the BBC report.
You lost my attention when you claimed the ability to use Google as a "right".
You parrot the old Google party line about why they stayed in China for so long pretty well.
But Google seems to be changing its line, albeit somewhat grudgingly. One might conclude that they were rationalizing the decision to stay where the money was even though they had to knowingly act against their stated values to do it; later found that you get burned when you shake the devil's hand; and now are trying to reconcile that with the fact that really they do still want access to all that money.
Becoming part of the machinery of oppression is an immoral act. Justifying it by short-term gains you think you're bringing to the oppressed is delusional.
"And I suppose you're not complicit in human rights abuse at all, because you never buy anything made in China?"
First of all, the role a consumer plays by doing business with a company that exploits its labor is not the same as the role Google plays in censoring information. Google's role in human rights violations, so long as they remain in China, is active.
Second, I absolutely believe that for the U.S. to allow businesses and consumers to benefit from the labor of Chinese (or other foreign) workers who are made to work in conditions considered unacceptable in the U.S. itself is rank hypocrisy. I don't believe it should be legal. BUT, as long as it is legal, and as long as it does pervade the U.S. economy to the extent it does - which can only be changed at an institutional level - I do not hold individual consumers to be personally liable for the fact that they can't really avoid goods that exploit foreign workers.
"Even if you don't, I suppose human rights abuses are A-OK as long as you're not involved?"
What an ignorant attitude. Of course human rights abuses are not "A-OK". The first moral responsibility on the matter, though, is to make sure you yourself aren't committing them. Doing what you can to make the world as a whole better - e.g. by opposing those violations you aren't involved with - is important but secondary.
Later in your post you brought up an analogy to a doctor who can't save everyone. In your context, it was a twisted stretch of an analogy; but here it's actually pretty apt, as doctors swear an oath to "first do no harm".
Google staying in China is not like a doctor who can't save everyone; it's like a guy who profits by killing some patients justifying it by pointing to the few he also saves.
Google pulling out of China is like a doctor. He says "first I will do no harm - I will not help China with its censorship efforts even if that means China won't let me operate in its borders"; and then perhaps he tries to save as many as he can. But as you say, he can't save everyone, and we do not hold him morally accountable for the misdeeds of others once he commits to do no harm himself.
No, you just need to work on reading comprehension. Here's a quick grammar lesson: In the sentence you quoted, I refered to the user multiple times in the 2nd person ("you", "your"). It should be clear to anyone literate that a 3rd-person pronoun ("they") is not referring to the same person as a 2nd-person pronoun in the same sentence.
"They" in "if they are up to no good" means MySpace, asshat.
Yes. However, it's pretty clear that wasn't written to mean "it's ok to steal the mail from the post office after it's been delivered", because at that point the post office no longer has the mail for you to steal. In hindsight, knowing that ISP's do still have the message after it's delivered, the wording seems sloppy; but when applied to the technology for which it was written, it means exactly what it was intended to mean.
Sadly, "interpret the law" can mean two things. What should happen (consider the wording of the law in the ocntext it was written to determine the intent), or what does happen (figure out a plausible reading of the words that leads to your preferred conclusion).
As much as that annoys me, there's still a part of me that says: if you think email is a good place for sensitive information, and you're not using encryption, you have nobody else to blame. I include myself in that, BTW; I don't use encryption day-to-day, and if I put something too sensitive in my email and it falls into the wrong hands, shame on me I suppose...
Yes, I see that it includes playlists and crap like that.
So what's the level of detail? Can I see an individual user, or just summaries at some predetermined granularity? If I can see individual users, can I see their name? If I buy a location-based dataset, can I see the exact GPS coordinates of a data point, or just ZIP code clusters, or what?
TFS is definitely worded to spread fear. As much as I dislike companies taking liberties with data they've collected - especially with no accountable opt-out for people who've already handed their data over with no expectation of this sort of behavior - I'd still like to know more about what's actually gonig on before jumping on the FUD bandwagon.
Oh, and seriously... if they are up to no good, do you really think deleting your account is going to make a difference? We're talking about the Internet; once you put something in, you can't take it back out.
No, you misunderstand; lethal has nothing to do with it.
The name originated when two NASA scientists were studying data from a crippled satelite, and one said to the other "Duuuuude, those are some killer electrons!"
Unless I'm lying to you.
Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of a universal DNA database is insane. However, as always, I dislike arguments that are poorly thought out even when I agree with their conslusions, largely because they somehow become the arguments the other side wants to talk about.
So let's get this out of the way:
1) Just because you collect everyone's DNA, doesn't mean that your sample size when running a DNA test is "300,000,000 and growing". In the context of a specific crime, you would do your preliminary work of identifying suspects the same way you do it today. Maybe you get it down to five guys, and run their profiles (exactly the use case you listed as workable); maybe you even get it down to one guy, but the DNA profile is what pushes you over the "reasonable doubt" line.
2) You wouldn't have to do DNA tests in every criminal case to make this idea useful. I can't imagine that anyone's going to argue for use of DNA in every criminal case; in many cases it doesn't even make sense that there would be DNA evidence. But in some cases DNA evidence makes a lot of sense, and in many of those it's used today. Even if you only use DNA in the same cases where it's done today, the fact that you don't have to collect a DNA sample first - and presumably then don't have to worry about "discriminating" in some way against your suspect(s) - is the supposed advantage of this system.
What do you mean "more efficient than just storing the electricity"?
I think you mean "more efficient than chemical energy storage", e.g. lithium batteries and similar. The thing is, chemical batteries are only practical up to a certain volume of energy. Beyond that it's no longer a question of which is "more efficient"; it's a question of which you can actually do.
If your approach to note-taking with pen and paper is to write down everything said, then I suppose you would end up writing without thinking; but in that case you should've learned how to take notes. The difference between pen/paper and computer is that very few people would even try to keep up with verbatim recording of the lecture using pen and paper. (And also that pen/paper is freeform and random access so you can take notes more effectively than with a computer, if you actually know how to take notes.)
Oh, and as for being 'mentally trapped' - you may not be aware of this, but someone is paying on behalf of each student for the opportunity to have that student's attention "trapped" by the professor. It's true that a really good professor will make you "feel" more interested, but ultimately their job isn't to entertain. The student's job is to pay attention.
Really?
Do you also believe that ToS violations constitute unauthorized access to a computer? That approach was tried recently by the U.S. prosecutors. Ultimately the court didn't buy that position.
So... why would robots.txt, which advises me of your wishes but to which I never actually agree, carry any more legal authority than a ToS document to which I do supposedly agree as a condition of using your system?
Well, the headline says "apartment". If it means "apartment" (not "condo") then resale is Someone Else's Problem.
Well, I clicked a lot of links looking for sufficient detail to back the article's claims, but didn't find it. Based on the information I was able to find, I'd say this:
1) There is nothing new in the observation that people tend to favor information that confirms their already-established world view. In decades past terms like "cognitive dissonance" were used to talk about this.
2) That said, it's very hard to take two people with different value systems and distinguish whether they're "rejecting" different subsets of those facts as TFA suggests, or applying different values to those facts and therefore reaching different conclusions at a summary level. A person who oppostes embryonic stem cell reserach isn't necessarily "rejecting" information about how many lives could be saved or how much suffering could be stopped; they are, however, valuing those things less than the moral harm they ascribe to destruction of an embryo. A supporter of such research, meanwhile, isn't necessarily rejecting the premise that embryos get destroyed; but rather puts less value on that loss than on the potential gains.
The people I know who are most prone to outright reject a fact are those who cannot confidently stand by a solid core value system. That makes it very hard to say "I see that there are negatives to the solution I favor, but they are outweighed by the positives"; or to sacrifice convenience if it turns out that the pros and cons really do balance out to favor an inconvenient solution.
3) It's also nothing new that people put more trust in others who they perceive as similar to themselves. Again, this has been observed for decades (often when takling about ethnic bias).
4) The article fails to provide a useful conclusion. It talks about approaches they think won't work for getting people to think open-mindedly, but it doesn't offer any advice on what will work.
...does it run linux?
'show me a two-body collision in which the direction of travel was not "toward each other"...'
Why would I try to do that? It has nothing to do with what I said.
"Head on collision" means the front of one object runs into the front of the other object. If the object doesn't have a definite front (as GGP was suggesting with the original question), then its leading edge (relative to its direction of travel) is the front. (Sometimes using the direction of travel to define "front" makes sense even if the object does have a definite front in other contexts, but that's beside the point.)
I can certianly show you one object heading north and colliding with another that is heading east. Generally the front of one object will hit the side of the other - not a head-on collision.
I can show you two objects both heading north, but with the leading object moving slower such that the trailing one hits it from behind. Again, not a head-on collision.
But if the objects are heading in opposite directions, then the collision would be described as head-on.
"what exactly counts as a head-on collision?"
Direction of travel, one would imagine.
"Would it be safer if it was side-impact?"
In that less of the relative kinetic energy between the two bodies would be spent breaking them into smaller pieces, I suppose it might be marginally safer. That's a far cry from saying that it would be "safe", though.
I would categorize it more as philosophical difference and less as deliberate scare-mongering.
For the record, I agree with you. The GPL says "you can do X, Y, and Z", but Second Life says "if you do X, Y, and Z in ways we don't like, you can't use our servers"; I see no conflict there. Conflict would be if they tried to use copyright law to enforce their constraints.
But the philosophical stance of a lot of Free Software folks is, freedom to change software is useless if you can't run the changes. So to them, TiVO becomes responsible for providing you a platform for your version of their software even if that's not what they want to sell. And, likewise, Second Life becomes responsible for providing the server environment in which you can use your modified client even if that's incompatible with their goals... hell, even if in some instance that's incompatible with the good of the service and its users.
By contrast, my view is that if you modify your client software in a way the server operator doesn't like, it's up to you to find an enviornment in which to use your software.
Well, if you strip away the self-important tone of TFA, it boils down to this:
A guy with a technical background discovered the rush of trolling a large audience. The major difference between this and a large segment of /. readers is, he did it under a journalistic guise - which makes him an unethical asshat whereas the /. trolls are merely run-of-the-mill asshats.
So then he tried to have his cake and eat it too: he wanted to enjoy the respect of his peers in technical endeavors while still having his fun as an asshat blogger. So, big surprise, it backfired and now he's lost the respect of his peers.
As for the Windows 7 RAM usage data - he may well have reported that in good faith, but it doesn't matter because of who he'd chosen to become. (As much as he tries to sound like he was drawn into his situation, ultimately he chose to be what he was and is; this article really just shows that while he may be resigned to the consequences, he hasn't truly accepted responsibility.) Maybe he really has reason to believe his findings, or maybe the desire to save face is coloring his view. (He certainly wants some measure of justification; I guess it's easier to feel that it's all unfair if the story that gets you caught was a case where you were factually correct.)
Actually, I believe they mean "a factor somewhere between 4:1 and 20:1". It's a much less precise statement, but given the wording it makes a lot more sense than interpreting it as a single ratio.
Sorry, but your argument fails immediately.
RTFA. Nobody leaked the URL to reporters. Reporters guessed URL's until they hit on one.
But I guess the moderators are in wishful thinking mode today, so you got an up-mod for a non sequitur.
Also, you should probably learn to do a better job identifying who the enemy is. Jumping down my throat for pointing out unfortunate realities of the current legal landscape isn't helping you.
Why, yes, yes it is.
First of all, define "completely unsecured". I'm pretty sure I know your definition, and if I had to vote I'd support it; but I'm also pretty sure I know their definition and it has a frightening amount of support. They will argue, and the courts might accept, that the non-publication of the URL constitutes "security", or an expectation of privacy, or whatever terms they need to feel good about filing charges.
This is a matter of technical knowledge. To a person who only knows how to follow links, limiting circulation of links can seem like "security". You can point out that it's easy to learn the skills to circumvent that, but think how that looks to someone who isn't very computer literate. "Sure, you can learn how to get around it - just like a thief can learn how to bypass a typical 5-pin lock. The skill to bump a lock isn't very hard to learn either."
The point is, as long as the typical level of knowledge doesn't include ways to find a non-published URL, the perceived threat will be in those who have the knowledge - not in those whose idea of "security" allows that knowledge to be used. I've seen Fortune 500 companies ban dsektop search tools rather than tell their employees not to "hide" sensitive documents on unlocked directories of shared drives. You really think the courts and laws are so far ahead of that knowledge curve?
Ultimately what's missing is a universal legal standard that presumes information is public if it is deliberately placed on a web-accessible file system without at least a prescribed level of protection. How strong that prescribed level of protection should be is open to debate. I don't need fool-proof security on my house to charge you with trespassing - a closed door is more than enough.
The exact standard isn't important. What's important is, the standard should exist, should be universal, and should be known to all parties.
So, I periodically get into debates around here about the validity of "intellectual property". I take the position that while the current implementation in the US is deeply flawed, the concept is no less vaild than tangible property.
I'll even stand up for the validity of the term, when used appropriately.
Yet this summary (and non-article) is a perfect example of how to abuse the term "intellectual property" for FUD-based purposes. Without more details (i.e. what exactly was said between the IOC and Uvex) we can't know whether this particular fault is with the lawyers or the submitter, but in a formal context such as pointing to a specific incident and claiming infringement, it is inappropriate to use a vague term like intellectual property.
The point is, there are many types of IP. The things they cover, and the rights the reserve, are wildly different. Anyone in this thread claiming to have an intelligent opinion on the merits of the IOC's position had better know more about this situation than what's in TFS and the links it includes.
If we're to speculate, the most reasonable assumption is that the IOC is claiming trademark rights. If they say "we have the right to Vonn's name as a trademark for the duration of the games", then they might be right - depends on the existance and content of documents we wouldn't have seen. Similarly, commercial use of an individual's likeness is a right that person controls, and could be signed over to the IOC during the games.
Now, holding a trademark doesn't confer as much exclusivity as companies like to claim. Depending on what was said or depicted, in what context, they may or may not have any claim. However, just the fact that the content was apparently hosted on Uvex's commercial website may have created enough of a legal grey area that they didn't want to fight it in court. (Or, they may have just wanted to avoid a public fight with the OIC.)
A proper analogy would be you were selling guns for $0.00 (but still required purchasers to do proper paperwork) and saying "use this to commit a crime" - and of course as soon as you do that, "whatever they did with said guns" is not exclusively "on them".
Fixed that for you.
Again, you're busily looking at the aspects of what they're doing that aren't illegal and trying to use that as proof that they're not doing anything illegal. It's a neat rhetorical trick, but don't expect it to work in court should you ever find yourself there.
Back to the analogy - the Please Rob Me folks don't "change the status" of the information (according to your argument), and likewise in a murder the perpetrator doesn't change the status of his weapon.
The perpetrator does change the status of the victim, in both cases. The location information is not the victim, so your attempt to twist the analogy is nonsense.
Collecting, filtering, indexing, and publishing information in a manner expressely designed to facilitate a crime - and even going so far as to say "commit a crime here" - is definitely grounds for civil liability and may be a criminal act.
And I suppose I could beat a guy to death and claim I was only using my hands; I doubt that would get me acquitted.
Most laws are based on what act was committed, not what tools were used to commit the act. Where laws stray from this (I'm looking at you, DMCA) they are damaging to society.