However, the statement may still be true depending on how it's phrased: "On her blog, the 15 year old stated that [orgies took place]." True. No libel.
Even British law has other defenses. And ultimately, if you take the view that any statement made by the daughter is effectively made a statement by the parents, the libel also probably even falls apart in the UK: you can't reasonably sue someone for libeling you because they repeat something you publicly said about yourself.
You really can't hold parents responsible for their children doing stupid things online. Kids do stupid things, and today that means stupidly public things. Welcome to the information age.
I have news for you: parents are responsible for what their children do, on-line or off-line. If your kid damages something or libels someone on-line, your ass will be hauled into court for damages. In addition, your kid may face the juvenile justice system.
If you can't deal with the responsibility, don't have kids.
If I publish libel, and you republish MY libel without ensuring its veracity, then you are ALSO liable for libel.
That's true provided I have reason to doubt the information. If I can reasonably assume that the information is true, I'm not libeling you. And if you report the information yourself, I'm not libeling you if I repeat it. So, if you yourself say that you hold orgies at your home, it's not libel if I report that, even if it's not true.
The child was not the one who published the newpapers.
The child published the information initially, and the only way she could do that is with the consent of her parents. Therefore, legally, her parents are responsible for the published information, whether it's true or not.
It is not a defense to the publisher of libel that another party is ALSO guilty.
Nobody is guilty because there is no libel at all. Any harm that's come to the family because of this is due to their own stupidity.
Are you saying every lie on the internet can be reprinted by "authoritative" resources like print newspapers without them being held accountable?
This is defined by libel laws. First, saying that you put something on your blog isn't libel because it's a fact. Second, even if the newspaper reports negative information you yourself put on your blog about your family as fact, it's not libel because they can reasonably assume that you are either telling the truth or don't mind.
So, no, newspapers cannot reprint every lie, but they can reprint lies you make about yourself or your family.
Tricking people into believing that the hash they get from the web site is the correct one is a tiny alteration to Firefox. Any hacker worth their salt would, of course, do that if they tried to take over your machine, and checking the hash from a machine that's potentially compromised is useless.
The only relevant fact that newspapers needed to check was that it was actually the 15-year old daughter that put it up for the world to see. Other than that, as the legal guardian, if the mother didn't want her daughter to post this information, she should have been a better parent.
There might actually be a case others have against the mother for defamation of character, since she is responsible for the actions of her daughter, and her daughter might have defamed them.
I wish parents would stop blaming other people for their own failings. Until their children come off age, what the kids do and what happens to the kids is the parents' sole responsibility.
And how do you know that you can trust your browser to display the correct hashes? The attacker knows where the correct hashes are available and what the correct hashes are and can substitute his hashes for the correct ones.
That's the kind of simplistic black-and-white view of security that is responsible for so many security problems.
Of course it makes it more secure if I verify against multiple sites and over SSL: it protects against many of the attacks described in that paper, so it will be harder for an attacker to mount a successful attack.
That's true, but are you sure that you're getting the keys in a secure way in the first place? Since people generally download the ISO without encryption, the ISO may have been altered as well. And are you sure the commands you display things with haven't been altered either? To really be sure, you probably would need to get a physical CD from a trusted source, including all keys, and then verify your entire system from that.
Still, I think that the larger risk for trojans still comes from people planting them in sources or binaries; any small open source project and any packager could introduce a trojan, and it only takes one.
I think a lot of these risks could be reduced if people downloaded from one site and verified against one or more other sites. Furthermore, if the checksums were verified over SSL, some attacks would be harder.
Right now, verifying packages against a site other than the one they were downloaded from seems cumbersome with apt--or does anybody know of a simple command line to do so?
On the iPhone, if you consider moving to another phone after spending a lot of money on apps you'll have to throw it away and re-purchase everything.
I have thrown away commercial platforms after spending considerable amounts of money when I realized that they were turning into bottomless pits for money. I think people sooner or later just naturally get fed up with DRM and Apple Stores and all that crap, in particular when they get an alternative.
Android is going to be about 6 months too late to intercept the wave of lock-in happening right now with the app store.
Well, I suppose Apple fanboys will get locked in, but they were locked in already.
There are some nice Symbian phones coming out, Symbian is getting more and more POSIX compliant, and it will be open sourced over the next couple of years. That's probably your best bet right now until Android. And Symbian has some nice apps available.
When it comes to safety versus profits, the free market does not appear to move towards safety.
That's probably because laws try to achieve an irrational degree of safety at the expense of everything else. Safety hysteria is depriving people of their civil liberties and represents an enormous drain on the economy, not just in transportation, but also medicine and law enforcement. When a white middle class little girl gets hurt or killed, lawyers, the press, and politicians kick into high gear and milk the story for everything it's worth, no matter what the long term cost is to society. That's why you get irrational efforts like Megan's Law and Amber Alerts.
Leave it up to the market. Put a price on every life lost in aviation and penalize the airlines accordingly. Two hundred passengers at $5M a head? That will be $1b. Leave it up to the insurance agencies and airlines to do the rest, or decide that aviation can't be made safe at that price. Don't make the general tax payer pay for this.
if it wasn't for Ralph Nader, the auto industry appears to have had no pressure to increase safety. And, he didn't give them a lot of bad press and force the industry to innovate safety features (which could have arguably been called free market); he got laws passed forcing them to make changes to promote safety (government control).
And this is good... why? The US used to have a word-class system of passenger trains and subways. All of that got destroyed because government subsidies and regulation of the automobile and airplane distorted the market. The results were almost universally harmful: foreign oil dependency, global warming, bad urban planning, etc. It's not even much fun to travel anymore because the plane has homogenized everything so much.
Another example would be workplace safety (which to a large degree have been gutted by recent administrations). Look at safety in the coal mines of the 19th and 20th century, or factory work at the turn of the 20th century and you can see examples of how capitalism and the market does not seem to generate pressure towards safety for individuals.
That's entirely different. You can choose to go by plane one day and by train the next. You cannot choose to be a coal miner one day and a paper pusher the next.
Actually, it mostly raises the question why Q1 2008 results are on a web page with a date of "October 25, 2007". But given Microsoft's creative accounting, perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.
[From the page] Microsoft's three core divisions grew their combined revenue by more than 20 percent in the 2008 fiscal first quarter. Oh, and Microsoft beat its revenue guidance by more than $1 billion.
Well, apparently investors and the stock market aren't impressed by the results because Microsoft stock is down, not up.
so worry not, MS jobs are secure for quite some time to come.
After the tens of thousands of people whose jobs Microsoft destroyed through its unfair business practices, why do you think anybody would worry about your job?
Let's assume most people in BestBuy that have computers already have Windows. How are they going to use Ubuntu exactly? Last time I checked, most Linux distros can use free space to sit alongside Windows or blitz it completely and sit on top. Most machines don't have any free space....
Don't worry, Ubuntu can move Vista out of the way and make room for itself.
This should fly with geeks, but if too many joe sixpacks end up bombing their partitions accidentally, it could backfire?
It won't bomb unless Vista actively sabotages it. So far, Vista doesn't seem to try to sabotage other operating systems, but given that Microsoft has done it before, who knows. Do you have any more inside information on that, perhaps?
I'll be real interested how many people accidentally pick the latter option without realising the consequences.
You mean the consequences of accidentally installing a more stable system with a better UI and tons more software? I can think of worse things.
In my experience, however, the usual time people switch to Linux is when their Windows machine is totally hosed, which, usually seems to occur after a few months of web browsing. In that case, they tend to want to blow Windows away completely anyway.
Microsoft's stock performance has at best been average compared to the NASDAQ during the last 10 years. IBM has actually been a stronger performer. Microsoft's spectacular growth years were between 1995 and 1998.
Microsoft's 2008 Q1 income sounds kind of impressive (20-25% growth over last year) until one realizes that that is due to exchange rate changes, not new business.
Microsoft Live has about as much mindshare (search volume) as Yahoo's failed Yahoo 360. Clearly, Microsoft is aiming for the very top somewhere, but not in on-line services.
While I generally agree with the direction of your comments, the government has indeed been directly involved in greatly increasing the safety of airline travel. The NTSB/CAA/FAA have been instrumental in determining the causes of accidents and promulgating regulations intended to prevent reoccurrence of those accidents.
Yes, but that's flight safety not flight security. Flight safety is much simpler than flight security.
While the system has many flaws, if you compare the risks of airline flight in the 50s with today, there has been a huge increase in safety. Some would have happened without the intervention of the government, but a lot of it might have been delayed or never happened without government intervention.
Initially, the government put money into aviation because no single company could do the capital investment. But why should the tax payer continue to subsidize aviation?
If making big aviation safe is so expensive and hard that only the government can do it, then aviation is not a competitive mode of transportation.
Let the free market operate, stop government subsidies of air transportation.
If Google had tried to build their system on relational databases, XDR, and NFS, they would have spent huge amounts of money and spent lots of time trying to shoehorn their software into those constraints. And it's not just Google that did this: Amazon did the same thing, with their SimpleDB, S3, and SQS.
The actual mistakes were relational databases, XML, and distributed POSIX file systems; all of those were systems designed by people with too much time on their hand and no real-world, large scale problems to solve. Finally, those mistakes are getting corrected, at least when it comes to high-end computing. At the low end, I suppose people will continue to tinker around with those toys.
If that that's the level at which you think, it's no surprise that you simply have nothing intelligent to say about public policy or past Microsoft misconduct like "Go".
"Money talks, bullshit walks".
You are so right: Microsoft is really good at talking. Talking is about the only reason you ever manage to sell products at all. Meanwhile, Stallman and FOSS developers walk and deliver.
What I suspect will happen is that this is a trial idea floated to the media and will be explained away as saying
These kinds of proposals aren't random; by making ridiculous suggestions like this, they move the boundaries of what is acceptable. Compared to shock collars, some of the other things they come up with will seem tame now.
What I don't understand is why people go for this bullshit. Why is it the government's responsibility to make air travel safe? Who cares? I've been flying for nearly 40 years, and the same risks we have today existed all that time and were just as obvious. And except for the fact that in 2001, the air planes plowed in a big building in Manhattan, 9/11 seems not much different from any of the numerous other plane hijackings.
People should just not vote for any president or representative supporting such measures.
Slashdot Mirror
How is a pension supposed to turn a bad web developer into a good one?
In the UK I believe she might win.
Oh, right, I hadn't noticed that she was British.
However, the statement may still be true depending on how it's phrased: "On her blog, the 15 year old stated that [orgies took place]." True. No libel.
Even British law has other defenses. And ultimately, if you take the view that any statement made by the daughter is effectively made a statement by the parents, the libel also probably even falls apart in the UK: you can't reasonably sue someone for libeling you because they repeat something you publicly said about yourself.
You really can't hold parents responsible for their children doing stupid things online. Kids do stupid things, and today that means stupidly public things. Welcome to the information age.
I have news for you: parents are responsible for what their children do, on-line or off-line. If your kid damages something or libels someone on-line, your ass will be hauled into court for damages. In addition, your kid may face the juvenile justice system.
If you can't deal with the responsibility, don't have kids.
If I publish libel, and you republish MY libel without ensuring its veracity, then you are ALSO liable for libel.
That's true provided I have reason to doubt the information. If I can reasonably assume that the information is true, I'm not libeling you. And if you report the information yourself, I'm not libeling you if I repeat it. So, if you yourself say that you hold orgies at your home, it's not libel if I report that, even if it's not true.
The child was not the one who published the newpapers.
The child published the information initially, and the only way she could do that is with the consent of her parents. Therefore, legally, her parents are responsible for the published information, whether it's true or not.
It is not a defense to the publisher of libel that another party is ALSO guilty.
Nobody is guilty because there is no libel at all. Any harm that's come to the family because of this is due to their own stupidity.
Are you saying every lie on the internet can be reprinted by "authoritative" resources like print newspapers without them being held accountable?
This is defined by libel laws. First, saying that you put something on your blog isn't libel because it's a fact. Second, even if the newspaper reports negative information you yourself put on your blog about your family as fact, it's not libel because they can reasonably assume that you are either telling the truth or don't mind.
So, no, newspapers cannot reprint every lie, but they can reprint lies you make about yourself or your family.
Tricking people into believing that the hash they get from the web site is the correct one is a tiny alteration to Firefox. Any hacker worth their salt would, of course, do that if they tried to take over your machine, and checking the hash from a machine that's potentially compromised is useless.
The only relevant fact that newspapers needed to check was that it was actually the 15-year old daughter that put it up for the world to see. Other than that, as the legal guardian, if the mother didn't want her daughter to post this information, she should have been a better parent.
There might actually be a case others have against the mother for defamation of character, since she is responsible for the actions of her daughter, and her daughter might have defamed them.
I wish parents would stop blaming other people for their own failings. Until their children come off age, what the kids do and what happens to the kids is the parents' sole responsibility.
And how do you know that you can trust your browser to display the correct hashes? The attacker knows where the correct hashes are available and what the correct hashes are and can substitute his hashes for the correct ones.
This doesn't really make it more secure.
That's the kind of simplistic black-and-white view of security that is responsible for so many security problems.
Of course it makes it more secure if I verify against multiple sites and over SSL: it protects against many of the attacks described in that paper, so it will be harder for an attacker to mount a successful attack.
That's true, but are you sure that you're getting the keys in a secure way in the first place? Since people generally download the ISO without encryption, the ISO may have been altered as well. And are you sure the commands you display things with haven't been altered either? To really be sure, you probably would need to get a physical CD from a trusted source, including all keys, and then verify your entire system from that.
Still, I think that the larger risk for trojans still comes from people planting them in sources or binaries; any small open source project and any packager could introduce a trojan, and it only takes one.
How does compiling from source help? Trojans can be introduced in source code just as easily as in binaries.
I think a lot of these risks could be reduced if people downloaded from one site and verified against one or more other sites. Furthermore, if the checksums were verified over SSL, some attacks would be harder.
Right now, verifying packages against a site other than the one they were downloaded from seems cumbersome with apt--or does anybody know of a simple command line to do so?
On the iPhone, if you consider moving to another phone after spending a lot of money on apps you'll have to throw it away and re-purchase everything.
I have thrown away commercial platforms after spending considerable amounts of money when I realized that they were turning into bottomless pits for money. I think people sooner or later just naturally get fed up with DRM and Apple Stores and all that crap, in particular when they get an alternative.
Well, in real-world units...
It's like the number of pinheads in a football field, stacked two packs of cigarettes high.
Or it's like the text in the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica when stacked as high as the walnuts filling a swimming pool, laid end-to-end.
I hope that clears THAT up.
Android is going to be about 6 months too late to intercept the wave of lock-in happening right now with the app store.
Well, I suppose Apple fanboys will get locked in, but they were locked in already.
There are some nice Symbian phones coming out, Symbian is getting more and more POSIX compliant, and it will be open sourced over the next couple of years. That's probably your best bet right now until Android. And Symbian has some nice apps available.
When it comes to safety versus profits, the free market does not appear to move towards safety.
That's probably because laws try to achieve an irrational degree of safety at the expense of everything else. Safety hysteria is depriving people of their civil liberties and represents an enormous drain on the economy, not just in transportation, but also medicine and law enforcement. When a white middle class little girl gets hurt or killed, lawyers, the press, and politicians kick into high gear and milk the story for everything it's worth, no matter what the long term cost is to society. That's why you get irrational efforts like Megan's Law and Amber Alerts.
Leave it up to the market. Put a price on every life lost in aviation and penalize the airlines accordingly. Two hundred passengers at $5M a head? That will be $1b. Leave it up to the insurance agencies and airlines to do the rest, or decide that aviation can't be made safe at that price. Don't make the general tax payer pay for this.
if it wasn't for Ralph Nader, the auto industry appears to have had no pressure to increase safety. And, he didn't give them a lot of bad press and force the industry to innovate safety features (which could have arguably been called free market); he got laws passed forcing them to make changes to promote safety (government control).
And this is good... why? The US used to have a word-class system of passenger trains and subways. All of that got destroyed because government subsidies and regulation of the automobile and airplane distorted the market. The results were almost universally harmful: foreign oil dependency, global warming, bad urban planning, etc. It's not even much fun to travel anymore because the plane has homogenized everything so much.
Another example would be workplace safety (which to a large degree have been gutted by recent administrations). Look at safety in the coal mines of the 19th and 20th century, or factory work at the turn of the 20th century and you can see examples of how capitalism and the market does not seem to generate pressure towards safety for individuals.
That's entirely different. You can choose to go by plane one day and by train the next. You cannot choose to be a coal miner one day and a paper pusher the next.
Somehow all the rooms are crowded, and porn has made its way in there already"
You say that as if that's a bad thing.
Oh, right, I forgot: that's actually kind of unusual among tech companies.
This should clear up any queries
Actually, it mostly raises the question why Q1 2008 results are on a web page with a date of "October 25, 2007". But given Microsoft's creative accounting, perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.
[From the page] Microsoft's three core divisions grew their combined revenue by more than 20 percent in the 2008 fiscal first quarter. Oh, and Microsoft beat its revenue guidance by more than $1 billion.
Well, apparently investors and the stock market aren't impressed by the results because Microsoft stock is down, not up.
so worry not, MS jobs are secure for quite some time to come.
After the tens of thousands of people whose jobs Microsoft destroyed through its unfair business practices, why do you think anybody would worry about your job?
Let's assume most people in BestBuy that have computers already have Windows. How are they going to use Ubuntu exactly? Last time I checked, most Linux distros can use free space to sit alongside Windows or blitz it completely and sit on top. Most machines don't have any free space....
Don't worry, Ubuntu can move Vista out of the way and make room for itself.
This should fly with geeks, but if too many joe sixpacks end up bombing their partitions accidentally, it could backfire?
It won't bomb unless Vista actively sabotages it. So far, Vista doesn't seem to try to sabotage other operating systems, but given that Microsoft has done it before, who knows. Do you have any more inside information on that, perhaps?
I'll be real interested how many people accidentally pick the latter option without realising the consequences.
You mean the consequences of accidentally installing a more stable system with a better UI and tons more software? I can think of worse things.
In my experience, however, the usual time people switch to Linux is when their Windows machine is totally hosed, which, usually seems to occur after a few months of web browsing. In that case, they tend to want to blow Windows away completely anyway.
Microsoft's stock performance has at best been average compared to the NASDAQ during the last 10 years. IBM has actually been a stronger performer. Microsoft's spectacular growth years were between 1995 and 1998.
Microsoft's 2008 Q1 income sounds kind of impressive (20-25% growth over last year) until one realizes that that is due to exchange rate changes, not new business.
Microsoft Live has about as much mindshare (search volume) as Yahoo's failed Yahoo 360. Clearly, Microsoft is aiming for the very top somewhere, but not in on-line services.
http://google.com/trends?q=microsoft+live%2Cyahoo+360&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Blogspot alone trounces Microsoft's entire Live effort.
http://google.com/trends?q=microsoft+live%2Cyahoo+360%2Cblogspot&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Time to look for another job, perhaps? Or can we look forward to another FUD campaign from Steve "200 patents" Ballmer?
While I generally agree with the direction of your comments, the government has indeed been directly involved in greatly increasing the safety of airline travel. The NTSB/CAA/FAA have been instrumental in determining the causes of accidents and promulgating regulations intended to prevent reoccurrence of those accidents.
Yes, but that's flight safety not flight security. Flight safety is much simpler than flight security.
While the system has many flaws, if you compare the risks of airline flight in the 50s with today, there has been a huge increase in safety. Some would have happened without the intervention of the government, but a lot of it might have been delayed or never happened without government intervention.
Initially, the government put money into aviation because no single company could do the capital investment. But why should the tax payer continue to subsidize aviation?
If making big aviation safe is so expensive and hard that only the government can do it, then aviation is not a competitive mode of transportation.
Let the free market operate, stop government subsidies of air transportation.
If Google had tried to build their system on relational databases, XDR, and NFS, they would have spent huge amounts of money and spent lots of time trying to shoehorn their software into those constraints. And it's not just Google that did this: Amazon did the same thing, with their SimpleDB, S3, and SQS.
The actual mistakes were relational databases, XML, and distributed POSIX file systems; all of those were systems designed by people with too much time on their hand and no real-world, large scale problems to solve. Finally, those mistakes are getting corrected, at least when it comes to high-end computing. At the low end, I suppose people will continue to tinker around with those toys.
"OMG! M$ sukz0rs!"
If that that's the level at which you think, it's no surprise that you simply have nothing intelligent to say about public policy or past Microsoft misconduct like "Go".
"Money talks, bullshit walks".
You are so right: Microsoft is really good at talking. Talking is about the only reason you ever manage to sell products at all. Meanwhile, Stallman and FOSS developers walk and deliver.
What I suspect will happen is that this is a trial idea floated to the media and will be explained away as saying
These kinds of proposals aren't random; by making ridiculous suggestions like this, they move the boundaries of what is acceptable. Compared to shock collars, some of the other things they come up with will seem tame now.
What I don't understand is why people go for this bullshit. Why is it the government's responsibility to make air travel safe? Who cares? I've been flying for nearly 40 years, and the same risks we have today existed all that time and were just as obvious. And except for the fact that in 2001, the air planes plowed in a big building in Manhattan, 9/11 seems not much different from any of the numerous other plane hijackings.
People should just not vote for any president or representative supporting such measures.