A person is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy, threaten or alarm another person, he or she:
1. Either (a) communicates with a person, anonymously or otherwise by telephone, or by telegraph, mail or any other form of written communication, in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm; or (b) causes a communication to be initiated by mechanical or electronic means or otherwise, with a person, anonymously or otherwise, by telephone, or by telegraph, mail or any other form of written communication, in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm; or
By this definition, any picket line is classified as "Aggravated harassment in the second degree". There is communication, there is a manner which is likely to cause annoyance and there are generally placards with clearly written arguments.
Having said that, I am glad you brought that to my attention. I often seem to forget just how easy it is to break the law. It is nice to get that reminder kick every now and again.
Is there any proposal of more advanced planned joint actions? I just dont think attacking websites and fax machines is that effective, and from your own home not terribly smart. There has to be some mass coordinated action that is both more efficient, and perhaps less legally punishable.
It certainly does bring attention to their customers about it though. It certainly brings a lot of bad media attention to the companies. Consider it a digital spanking. The idea isn't to knock them off the face of the planet. The idea is to make them think twice about something like this again in the future.
It is the same concept as taking someone to court. You make it more expensive/difficult to do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and FCC rules generally prohibit most unsolicited fax advertisements. In addition, the Junk Fax Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2005, directs the FCC to amend its rules adopted pursuant to the TCPA regarding fax advertising.
A Black Fax doesn't advertise anything or solicit anything and therefore cannot be realistically prosecuted under either act. I did actually read the Junk Fax Prevention Act in quite a bit of detail. It specifically covers advertising of some sort, no matter how it is passed as "Savings, information, value to the customer etc..." it has to be an ad of some sort.
So, Junk Fax Advertising is indeed against the law, but it is NOT against the law to send a fax to someone without prior dealings, or without their permission or without an "Opt out" clause.
It looks like the "hacktivist" (better known to me as "vandals") are going backwards in time. Maybe they finally recruited someone older than 12?
Or maybe it is part of a bigger plan that is slowly escalating - aka: Tell me when to stop...
1) DDoS against your websites - Little damage, little inconvenience, little embarrassment.
2) Wardialing your faxmachines - More annoying, more interruption to actual business, not likely as embarrassing.
3)...
4)...
Actually, the best method would be to use a Black Fax rather than something like stick figures or Goatse. Better yet, not only a simple Black Fax, but one that is looped, so that it endlessly feeds itself through the fax - assuming the originator is a fax machine itself. Otherwise if the fax is originating from a computer or IP address of some sort, then multiple pages of plain monotone black - with the emphasis on MULTIPLE:)
Ahhh, I love links like that about/. I honestly find it amazing how photographic the average memory here seems to be. It's like anyone can drop a comment/topic and a bunch of links to humor just appear - yet they are for the most part very spot on.
Hmm... It sounds like you're saying that wikileaks was the source of the DDoSs at Amazon, Paypal and Visa.
Source? Not at all. Cause? Yup.
To use another analogy. A small kid at a school is getting picked on by a bunch of other kids. His friends step in and try to set things right. Is it the small kid's fault that his friends got into an altercation? No. Is he the cause of it? Yes. Indirectly, he is the cause of the other kids jumping in to save his bacon.
I totally agree with you that WL would be utterly stupid if they a) did anything like this or b) officially supported it - but I also agree with you that behind closed doors, there is likely a few glasses being clinked with smiles on faces when this is mentioned.
The main reason that WWI started though was because the doctrine of mobilization still existed.
Yes, a spark set of a large chain of events. Sort of like a company refusing to deal with a website due to pressure and is now under a continued DDoS? Say what you like, WL has caused pretty much everyone to take a side in this ongoing and developing scenario. If that isn't the first steps to mobilization in a digital world I don't know what is.
How a large chain of treaties, relationships and friends slowly spiraled downwards through a set of "Hey, you said you would help if..." into basically a war of people who weren't even remotely connected to the original event (assassination of a prince from memory) and general chaos for quite a while.
Amazon, Paypal, Visa certainly weren't connected to WL in any way prior to this, but have shown relationships and friends, and of course this means that friends to WL have now escalated the parties. I do wonder where it will all end.
Could that be becuase more people (as in, not us nerds here) don't even know that they are being tracked like crazy or what it can mean to them in the long term when all those little tiny bits of data start getting put together and someone ends up with a perfect picture of that person?
You think the Arab nations will be so glee at the thought of a powerful Iran? In case you haven't been paying attention, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The wikileaks cables show quite clearly that Iran doesn't have much support from their Arab neighbors.
"wikileaks cables show quite clearly "
LOL....
Yes, you are right. The vast majority of Arabs actually are in favor of a strong Iran. Their propped up autocracies aren't in favor of that of course.
A poll recently done in the middle east showed that 80% of folks there thought that Israel was a threat. 77% thought that the US was a threat. Far down the line 10% thought that Iran was a threat. This was the "Common People off the street" type folks.
Be nice though, just because you are right and he has been watching too much Fox News doesn't mean that should be falling off your rocking chair there. Settle down, put the coffee away and maybe listen to some soothing music for a few hours - or wait till you are at least fourteen before you keep posting to/.
but the unintended consequences/downstream effects will be massive and will not be favorable.
Do you think that the unintended consequences/downstream effects of releasing this stuff are going to be greater than the unintended consequences/downstream effects of allowing such a foreign policy by a superpower and blindly accepting that all they do is "for the greater good of all"?
Do I think it is damaging to the credibility of the US? Absolutely. Do I think that in the long run it might change policy for the better? I hope so. Do I think a shift from "Do what we say or else..." to "Lets really be friends here..." in US policy would reap much better long term benefits for not only them, but also the world as a whole? Absolutely.
Also, Wikileaks isn't stealing the information. Folks within the system are the ones stealing it. They are publishing. I don't see the difference between them doing this and the Watergate scandal that was made public knowledge through the publishing of secret documents for example - do you?
Unless your product is catering to developers, your customers don't give a damn what the code that powers your product looks like (and even if your customers ARE developers, they probably still don't care).
With a totally new out of the box idea, I would agree. The coding itself isn't all that important. However, I am in an analysis team (in a multinational, multi-billion dollar company) and part of our job is to provide tools and programs to look at the business in new/innovative/out of the box ways - and this means that a lot of the time we are the ones with the "great idea" as the article suggests. For us, when we develop these tools, doing it in an efficient and well designed way is one of the most important things.
This is because there hasn't been a single time that we haven't given our business managers a new insight into the business that hasn't resulted in those chaps then saying "Great, now that I know [insert reason/cause/problem], I would really like to see how it ties in with [insert potential cause/issue/problem] and see if they are related.". We do really need to design our products/projects in such a way that we have the flexibility to be able to modify them quite drastically. If our solutions were a program stuck together with bits of tape and band-aids we simply wouldn't be able to deliver what was needed.
Not all great ideas that need a programmer are in the same bucket.
You don't have to make a profit when you are too big to fail and your controlling shareholder is the US government.
I am no economist, but from what I see, the US economy is falling apart at each seam, national debt is skyrocketing and the government seems to be interested only in very expensive field trips. I wonder who will bail out the US? It is too big to fail, but what happens when it does?
All this outcry has done little except prove the exceedingly dubious moral fibre of very powerful elected political figures the world over. People who brag openly about transparency one day and murder to prevent it another day. I'm no longer convinced the Russian rules are really that different from our own.
Good god, I had to take another gulp of coffee to process that wonderful insight. This is better than just a +2. Mods! Get to work!
but my guess is that geo-political and fundy-religio restrictions are the only things stopping this sort of activity from greater proliferation.
Quite wrong actually. It took over a hundred attempts before Dolly was cloned successfully. The clones that were produced had significant health problems. The genes aren't entirely methylated the way they ought to be and the telomeres are markedly shorter than they should be. To clone a human being at this point would be incredibly inhumane.
Couldn't they look at merging their efforts here with these efforts where they are: Researchers bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter causing the mice to age prematurely and suffer ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. When the mice were given injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of aging raising hope among scientists that it may be possible to achieve a similar feat in humans – or at least to slow down the aging process."
But to that argument, Gattaca was only bad for the kids who didn't go through the selection process. There wasn't anything remotely bad for the folks who had the I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter genes.
Gattaca showed the disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots". It didn't go so far as to say there was any disparity between the "haves" in their own little circle. One can argue that the difference between the folks in the high end jobs and the bottom end jobs right now is exactly the same thing, except we don't actually have any control over it. It simply is a game of bingo.
It wasn't wrong for Einstein to add it to the math - it just ended up unneeded. It is simply a way to make what we know work, when we are clearly missing something. You can do a lot with an equation that works even if you can't understand all of the details in it - just ask most math students during an exam. They might know how to get the right answer, but not be able to explain why it is the right answer. Same thing here really.
The reason we think think it is non-baryonic is because we simply haven't found it yet. The masses of the suns and planets are easy enough to calculate, but all the mass we can account for doesn't equate with the spin rate of galaxies that we find. They are simply moving much too fast. If they were moving at the speed they are moving with only the matter we can account for, they would stop orbiting their respective centers and fly out of their orbits. You can read all about it here on Wikipedia.
It is something more along the lines of this:
We have a good number of formulas and calculations that work properly with the things we can measure - planets, the sun, cars, planes, kitchen scales.
One of these might be:
y + 3 = 5
Nice and simple for this example. Lets say that the "y" here represents gravity and the formula has been proven in every experiment we have done.
We therefore assume that this calculation is correct and true. BUT when we try to use this calculation when looking at things like galaxies, we seem to find the wrong answer:
y + 3 = 7.2
This is clearly not correct, but as we don't want to throw out all the formulas and understanding we have about how things work, we add another variable to the formula like so:
y + 3 + x = 5
The "y" still represents gravity, but now we add the "x" which represents something we don't understand and we don't know where it came from. We call it Dark Matter because we can't see it, don't seem to be able to interact with it and have no real idea of what it is - but with this new addition to the formula, the answer once again comes out at what we know (think) to be true. We just now need to find what this x variable is.
THAT is why finding/understanding Dark Matter (and on that note, Dark Energy) is so important. We know (think we know) the right answers, but our formulas just don't seem to fit so well when applied to certain really, really, really big things (like clusters, superclusters etc). When we find this "x" in the formula, it will once again work perfectly for all our calculations.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't a misprint, but that comment has been remotely removed from their servers.
Air Force, meet Streisand Effect.
You to are about to get to know each other quite well I think.
Aggravated harassment in the second degree.
A person is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree when, with intent to harass, annoy, threaten or alarm another person, he or she:
1. Either (a) communicates with a person, anonymously or otherwise by telephone, or by telegraph, mail or any other form of written communication, in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm; or (b) causes a communication to be initiated by mechanical or electronic means or otherwise, with a person, anonymously or otherwise, by telephone, or by telegraph, mail or any other form of written communication, in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm; or
By this definition, any picket line is classified as "Aggravated harassment in the second degree". There is communication, there is a manner which is likely to cause annoyance and there are generally placards with clearly written arguments.
Having said that, I am glad you brought that to my attention. I often seem to forget just how easy it is to break the law. It is nice to get that reminder kick every now and again.
Is there any proposal of more advanced planned joint actions? I just dont think attacking websites and fax machines is that effective, and from your own home not terribly smart. There has to be some mass coordinated action that is both more efficient, and perhaps less legally punishable.
It certainly does bring attention to their customers about it though. It certainly brings a lot of bad media attention to the companies. Consider it a digital spanking. The idea isn't to knock them off the face of the planet. The idea is to make them think twice about something like this again in the future.
It is the same concept as taking someone to court. You make it more expensive/difficult to do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and FCC rules generally prohibit most unsolicited fax advertisements. In addition, the Junk Fax Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2005, directs the FCC to amend its rules adopted pursuant to the TCPA regarding fax advertising.
A Black Fax doesn't advertise anything or solicit anything and therefore cannot be realistically prosecuted under either act. I did actually read the Junk Fax Prevention Act in quite a bit of detail. It specifically covers advertising of some sort, no matter how it is passed as "Savings, information, value to the customer etc..." it has to be an ad of some sort.
So, Junk Fax Advertising is indeed against the law, but it is NOT against the law to send a fax to someone without prior dealings, or without their permission or without an "Opt out" clause.
It looks like the "hacktivist" (better known to me as "vandals") are going backwards in time. Maybe they finally recruited someone older than 12?
Or maybe it is part of a bigger plan that is slowly escalating - aka: Tell me when to stop...
... ...
1) DDoS against your websites - Little damage, little inconvenience, little embarrassment.
2) Wardialing your faxmachines - More annoying, more interruption to actual business, not likely as embarrassing.
3)
4)
Sooner or later, someone calls uncle.
hahahahaha faxed goatse
Actually, the best method would be to use a Black Fax rather than something like stick figures or Goatse. Better yet, not only a simple Black Fax, but one that is looped, so that it endlessly feeds itself through the fax - assuming the originator is a fax machine itself. Otherwise if the fax is originating from a computer or IP address of some sort, then multiple pages of plain monotone black - with the emphasis on MULTIPLE :)
Perhaps he should be tested?
Ahhh, I love links like that about /. I honestly find it amazing how photographic the average memory here seems to be. It's like anyone can drop a comment/topic and a bunch of links to humor just appear - yet they are for the most part very spot on.
Kudos to you sir!
Hmm ... It sounds like you're saying that wikileaks was the source of the DDoSs at Amazon, Paypal and Visa.
Source? Not at all. Cause? Yup.
To use another analogy. A small kid at a school is getting picked on by a bunch of other kids. His friends step in and try to set things right. Is it the small kid's fault that his friends got into an altercation? No. Is he the cause of it? Yes. Indirectly, he is the cause of the other kids jumping in to save his bacon.
I totally agree with you that WL would be utterly stupid if they a) did anything like this or b) officially supported it - but I also agree with you that behind closed doors, there is likely a few glasses being clinked with smiles on faces when this is mentioned.
The main reason that WWI started though was because the doctrine of mobilization still existed.
Yes, a spark set of a large chain of events. Sort of like a company refusing to deal with a website due to pressure and is now under a continued DDoS? Say what you like, WL has caused pretty much everyone to take a side in this ongoing and developing scenario. If that isn't the first steps to mobilization in a digital world I don't know what is.
How a large chain of treaties, relationships and friends slowly spiraled downwards through a set of "Hey, you said you would help if..." into basically a war of people who weren't even remotely connected to the original event (assassination of a prince from memory) and general chaos for quite a while.
Amazon, Paypal, Visa certainly weren't connected to WL in any way prior to this, but have shown relationships and friends, and of course this means that friends to WL have now escalated the parties. I do wonder where it will all end.
Could that be becuase more people (as in, not us nerds here) don't even know that they are being tracked like crazy or what it can mean to them in the long term when all those little tiny bits of data start getting put together and someone ends up with a perfect picture of that person?
You think the Arab nations will be so glee at the thought of a powerful Iran? In case you haven't been paying attention, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The wikileaks cables show quite clearly that Iran doesn't have much support from their Arab neighbors.
"wikileaks cables show quite clearly "
LOL....
Yes, you are right. The vast majority of Arabs actually are in favor of a strong Iran. Their propped up autocracies aren't in favor of that of course.
/.
A poll recently done in the middle east showed that 80% of folks there thought that Israel was a threat. 77% thought that the US was a threat. Far down the line 10% thought that Iran was a threat. This was the "Common People off the street" type folks.
Be nice though, just because you are right and he has been watching too much Fox News doesn't mean that should be falling off your rocking chair there. Settle down, put the coffee away and maybe listen to some soothing music for a few hours - or wait till you are at least fourteen before you keep posting to
but the unintended consequences/downstream effects will be massive and will not be favorable.
Do you think that the unintended consequences/downstream effects of releasing this stuff are going to be greater than the unintended consequences/downstream effects of allowing such a foreign policy by a superpower and blindly accepting that all they do is "for the greater good of all"?
Do I think it is damaging to the credibility of the US? Absolutely. Do I think that in the long run it might change policy for the better? I hope so. Do I think a shift from "Do what we say or else..." to "Lets really be friends here..." in US policy would reap much better long term benefits for not only them, but also the world as a whole? Absolutely.
Also, Wikileaks isn't stealing the information. Folks within the system are the ones stealing it. They are publishing. I don't see the difference between them doing this and the Watergate scandal that was made public knowledge through the publishing of secret documents for example - do you?
If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.
If the state said this to you, it would be an egregious sin. Why is it a good if someone else says it to you?
*picks up sarcasm*
I don't think you caught this one. Did you want another go?
Unless your product is catering to developers, your customers don't give a damn what the code that powers your product looks like (and even if your customers ARE developers, they probably still don't care).
With a totally new out of the box idea, I would agree. The coding itself isn't all that important. However, I am in an analysis team (in a multinational, multi-billion dollar company) and part of our job is to provide tools and programs to look at the business in new/innovative/out of the box ways - and this means that a lot of the time we are the ones with the "great idea" as the article suggests. For us, when we develop these tools, doing it in an efficient and well designed way is one of the most important things.
This is because there hasn't been a single time that we haven't given our business managers a new insight into the business that hasn't resulted in those chaps then saying "Great, now that I know [insert reason/cause/problem], I would really like to see how it ties in with [insert potential cause/issue/problem] and see if they are related.". We do really need to design our products/projects in such a way that we have the flexibility to be able to modify them quite drastically. If our solutions were a program stuck together with bits of tape and band-aids we simply wouldn't be able to deliver what was needed.
Not all great ideas that need a programmer are in the same bucket.
There is no endgame in just about every mmorpg. The game is paying the creator a monthly subscription.
In life we just live, pay taxes and there is no connecti...
Wait wut?!
You don't have to make a profit when you are too big to fail and your controlling shareholder is the US government.
I am no economist, but from what I see, the US economy is falling apart at each seam, national debt is skyrocketing and the government seems to be interested only in very expensive field trips. I wonder who will bail out the US? It is too big to fail, but what happens when it does?
'The Russianvs play by different rules'
All this outcry has done little except prove the exceedingly dubious moral fibre of very powerful elected political figures the world over. People who brag openly about transparency one day and murder to prevent it another day. I'm no longer convinced the Russian rules are really that different from our own.
Good god, I had to take another gulp of coffee to process that wonderful insight. This is better than just a +2. Mods! Get to work!
The irony is that you need to find another computer to read up on how to fix the issue.
*sniffs air*
What's that smell?
*sniff sniff*
Yes, I think... Yes, it's certainly the stench of... *sniff* Yes, AVGs share price nose diving...
Quite wrong actually. It took over a hundred attempts before Dolly was cloned successfully. The clones that were produced had significant health problems. The genes aren't entirely methylated the way they ought to be and the telomeres are markedly shorter than they should be. To clone a human being at this point would be incredibly inhumane.
Couldn't they look at merging their efforts here with these efforts where they are:
Researchers bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter causing the mice to age prematurely and suffer ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. When the mice were given injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of aging raising hope among scientists that it may be possible to achieve a similar feat in humans – or at least to slow down the aging process."
But to that argument, Gattaca was only bad for the kids who didn't go through the selection process. There wasn't anything remotely bad for the folks who had the I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter genes.
Gattaca showed the disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots". It didn't go so far as to say there was any disparity between the "haves" in their own little circle. One can argue that the difference between the folks in the high end jobs and the bottom end jobs right now is exactly the same thing, except we don't actually have any control over it. It simply is a game of bingo.
It wasn't wrong for Einstein to add it to the math - it just ended up unneeded. It is simply a way to make what we know work, when we are clearly missing something. You can do a lot with an equation that works even if you can't understand all of the details in it - just ask most math students during an exam. They might know how to get the right answer, but not be able to explain why it is the right answer. Same thing here really.
The reason we think think it is non-baryonic is because we simply haven't found it yet. The masses of the suns and planets are easy enough to calculate, but all the mass we can account for doesn't equate with the spin rate of galaxies that we find. They are simply moving much too fast. If they were moving at the speed they are moving with only the matter we can account for, they would stop orbiting their respective centers and fly out of their orbits. You can read all about it here on Wikipedia.
I explained the need for Dark Matter previously here on /. and folks seemed to like the explanation so I am reposting:
It is something more along the lines of this: We have a good number of formulas and calculations that work properly with the things we can measure - planets, the sun, cars, planes, kitchen scales. One of these might be:
y + 3 = 5
Nice and simple for this example. Lets say that the "y" here represents gravity and the formula has been proven in every experiment we have done.
We therefore assume that this calculation is correct and true. BUT when we try to use this calculation when looking at things like galaxies, we seem to find the wrong answer:
y + 3 = 7.2
This is clearly not correct, but as we don't want to throw out all the formulas and understanding we have about how things work, we add another variable to the formula like so:
y + 3 + x = 5
The "y" still represents gravity, but now we add the "x" which represents something we don't understand and we don't know where it came from. We call it Dark Matter because we can't see it, don't seem to be able to interact with it and have no real idea of what it is - but with this new addition to the formula, the answer once again comes out at what we know (think) to be true. We just now need to find what this x variable is.
THAT is why finding/understanding Dark Matter (and on that note, Dark Energy) is so important. We know (think we know) the right answers, but our formulas just don't seem to fit so well when applied to certain really, really, really big things (like clusters, superclusters etc). When we find this "x" in the formula, it will once again work perfectly for all our calculations.
dark matter much?
Apparently less :)