So, they are offically asking to violate the Terms of Service of all of these services?
I'm sure that each one has a policy about not sharing login information for your personal accounts.
Ah, but let's follow this to its logical conclusion. Violating the ToS of an Internet website is now a federal crime (don't believe me? See http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/30/2014248&tid=123), so they're urging you to commit a federal crime. That's conspiracy, my friend, and the federal slammer for them. Do that a few times, with a few other job applicants, the RICO statutes might apply. I hope Bozeman, Montana has a lot of money in their budget to defend against federal criminal indictments and charges...
Second, one thing that confuses me about these sorts of statements is this - presumably, you think religion is just some nonsense that stupid people latch on to. But even if you get rid of religion, people are still going to be stupid. What makes you think that these stupid people won't find something else to latch on to that has the same sort of negative effects as religion? In fact, getting rid of religion might leave a vacuum that could be filled by something worse...
That's a rather simplistic view. Is the stupidity of people a constant, or a variable? I think the major knock on religion is not that it is only a magnet for irrevocably stupid people, but that it attracts stupid people and then keeps them stupid indefinitely by making them think that their "faith" is a valid substitute for wisdom, understanding and/or independent thought.
Take away religion, those same stupid people would pursue other avenues of human endeavor, most of which offer opportunities for intellectual growth and enrichment, and at least the hope of becoming less stupid over time.
Hear, hear! Glad to see that I'm not the only one who gets sick and tired of this fairy tale about a mystical connection between "flesh and blood" parents and their "flesh and blood" children, and how being "flesh and blood" related, somehow guarantees that you're going to be better parent, or even a competent one.
This "flesh and blood" nonsense is insulting to the whole institution of adoption, and it corrupts and perverts the whole area of Family Law to such an extent that the wrong people routinely get custody of children, in total defiance of the claimed guiding principle of "best interests of the child", and I would hypothesize that this is a large part of the reason for all of these horror stories about neglected, abused, in some cases even murdered children.
The favorite whipping-boy is, of course, the Social Service agencies that didn't constantly and meticulously check on every bad home environment to try and detect problems before they develop into tragedies, but no-one seems to question whether this "flesh and blood" collective delusion is what's feeding all of this pain and suffering in the first place. The Social Service agencies can only do so much, in the face of bad custody-granting decisions and as long as something as irrelevant as "flesh and blood" is the primary factor in custody-granting, we're going to continue to have these problems...
Actually, inbreeding isn't as bad as once thought, as long as certain genetic traits are recognized as being "dangerous" and thus certain pairings avoided. Perhaps you should pick another example, since "inbreeding is bad" is one is one of those "common sense" things which actually isn't so sensical in the light of modern genetic understanding.
The net community did not only oppose the governments plans, but also made constructive suggestions how to deal with the problem of child pornography without introducing a censorship architecture and circumcising constitutional freedoms.
I'm imagining a whole life-cycle loop, with a farm of these things churning out chairs, and Ballmer at the other end of the life-cycle wrecking them. They just need a way to recycle the broken pieces back into chairs again.
I assumed they were doing this with packets without the AUTH bit set.
What's an AUTH bit? There's the AA (Authoritative Answer) bit, but that is only set in responses, and the allegation is that Comcast is/was redirecting query packets, not response packets. So I don't understand your assumption.
If you ask for an authoritatiove answer from.com you can't get it from comcast.
Well, DNS clients have no way in the protocol to tell their resolvers they only want an authoritative answer. The only ways I can think of, offhand, to guarantee that an answer comes from an authoritative source is either a) bypass intermediate resolvers by identifying and querying the authoritative nameservers for the relevant zone, or b) for every resolver in the resolution path to disable caching, but that would be a performance disaster. Feel free to ask Comcast to turn off caching on their nameservers; if they're running anything based on BIND, they can't just "turn off" caching; they'd either have to replace the software with something more akin to a "DNS proxy", or perhaps simulate "no caching" with some extremely aggressive early-expiration-and-cleaning parameters.
But it appears now they either aren't doing it or have stopped doing it.
True, but it's still an interesting academic exercise nonethless.
Did anyone say that Comcast was only hijacking queries for the root?
The claim is that Comcast is hijacking all DNS queries, so your "solution" only works for the tiny percentage of queries that are for the root zone, and probably doesn't even have any effect on those, since Comcast is probably leaving TLD delegations alone (what reason would they have to mess with those?)
Or, were you suggesting that folks stuff everything they would ever want to look up into a ginormous private root zone? Good luck with that.
Uh, "non-authoritative response" is what you always get (according to the RFCs) when the response came from a resolver's cache, as opposed to directly from the authoritative nameservers.
This factoid neither confirms nor denies whether Comcast is hijacking DNS transactions.
As for not being able to reach "*lot's* [sic] of site[sic]", since you haven't specified whether the DNS lookups are failing, this could be a totally separate problem/issue.
How does split-horizon help? Are you going to get the ISP to host a separate "horizon" of DNS on their servers? Please elaborate. If your solution involves repointing the resolver config on the client to something other than the ISP's nameservers, then why not just do that, and skip the "split horizon" mumbo-jumbo? That would be a simpler solution, no?
I've already pointed you to the lines of "bodily integrity" precedents, you chose to remove, without comment, that part of my post, and just continue full-steam-ahead with your diatribe. If you're not going to debate with integrity, why should I extend any courtesy to you?
I agree with you on a purely legal basis. I don't think GPS tracking violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. I personally find the reasoning of the Wisconsin court more persuasive than that of the New York one, and note that the New York court decision was based on its state constitution, and thus sets no precedent for the application of the Fourth Amendment to GPS tracking.
But can't you see what a slippery slope this is? GPS tracking makes it economically and logistically feasible to track any number of individuals 24x7x365. Without any kind of judicial input or oversight, they can do this to anyone, at any time, for any reason. Maybe just because the "suspect" has unpopular views or is disfavored because of their ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation (I don't think the Civil Rights laws apply to mere surveillance, but I could be wrong on that). Perhaps you have such complete trust in law enforcement that you see no potential for abuse; pardon me for being more cynical than that.
So, whereas from a legal perspective, there is currently nothing stopping law enforcement from proceeding down this path, I would hope that the people, and the legislatures that supposedly represent them, would move to ban or at least put strict limits on the practice.
Sigh. If you really truly think that taping a transmitter to someone's car is equivalently intrusive to having someone implant an RFID in your body against your will, then I suppose I can't argue against that kind of thickheadedness. I shouldn't even try. Obviously common sense takes a backseat to whatever overarching principle of personal liberty you're trying to defend here.
There is a long-standing principle that the U.S. Constitution protects "bodily integrity", see Union Pacific Railway Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250 (1891) as well as the whole line of Supreme Court cases involving abortion, forced sterilization, etc.
Implanting RFIDs in people without their consent violates bodily integrity in a way that attaching GPS transmitters to automobiles clearly does not. It's a bad analogy, just admit it already.
I hope you twats are happy about this descision to let a criminal like this go free because you have some unfounded fear of GPS tracking
What part of "the end does not justify the means" do you not understand?
I have no problem with the state investigating, apprehending, charging, convicting and making criminals serve their time. But the methods they use must not reduce us to the level of a totalitarian police state. That's too high a price to pay for our safety and security, particularly when the crime in question -- burglary in this case -- is only about property. If this guy were a violent criminal, a stronger argument could be made, but I would hope that search warrants would be easier to obtain with respect to violent-crime suspects, thus mooting the issue.
Typically they use magnets and/or tape to affix the GPS transmitter, the "modification" of the suspect's property is negligible, and reversible. For that matter, if they're careful about removing the transmitter, they may actually leave that surface of the vehicle cleaner and more intact than it would have been otherwise in the normal course of operating the vehicle on the roads.
This is hardly comparable to a dystopian-nightmare surgical implantation of RFIDs without the victim's consent. Yet another analogy gone awry.
Don't get me wrong: I don't like the idea of police having the power to do this. But, while I think legislatures should outlaw the practice, I don't think there is any solid legal foundation for finding it unconstitutional (after reading the N.Y. decision I was unimpressed with their legal reasoning, they seemed to mostly rely on decisions made in Oregon and Washington; since Wisconsin went the other way, I think it's too early to declare any kind of consensus).
No, the original analogy is far more accurate than yours: if a plant were capable of playing back the contents of a phone conversation, or relaying the conversation to some remote listener, then that method of surveillance would be subject to the same constitutional constraints as wiretapping.
The only differences that come to mind between surreptitiously tailing someone's car, and tracking them via a GPS transmitter, however, are: 1) the economic cost differential (GPS tracking is much cheaper), and 2) you can't effectively tail someone onto private property (e.g. their garage or a private estate). I'm not sure that either of those have any constitutional significance.
It was decided under the state constitution, since federal law was deemed to still be undecided on the issue. What I find intriguing is that the judges looked to rulings in other states (Oregon and Washington), but apparently the Wisconsin case was too recent to be included in that survey. I wonder if they would have ruled differently? Recall that the N.Y. decision was 4-3, it would have taken only 1 of the justices to tip the other way...
Well, thanks for reminding me that the "Court of Appeals" is the top court in New York. This isn't the first time that the misnomer has tripped me up (why the heck don't they just call themselves the Supreme Court of New York, like normal states?)
However, I haven't seen anything so far to indicate that the ruling was based on the state constitution. If they ruled based on an application of the federal constitution (presumably the Fourth Amendment), then I would think this could be appealed to the federal courts and overturned. Surely, there must be a way to redress a misapplication of federal jurisprudence by any state court, mustn't there?
Actually, state courts hear federal cases all the time, and interpret federal law. Only certain kinds of cases (e.g. involving foreign countries/citizens, bankruptcies, securities fraud, between states, etc.) must be brought in federal court.
Of course, one or both parties in a state court proceeding involving federal law issues can petition for the case to be "removed" to federal court, and there are sometimes procedural advantages in doing so.
Actually, it's somewhat more complicated than that.
This wasn't a case of a citizen suing the government because his privacy was violated by GPS tracking (which is kind of the way you framed it above). Rather, this was -- as far as one can tell from the poor summaries and extracts currently made available -- a case where the defendant in a criminal action seeks to have evidence excluded under the Exclusionary Rule, because, presumably, GPS tracking is unconstitutional.
Why would it be unconstitutional? It might be because of some specific provision in the New York Constitution. Or, it might be because the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is deemed to be applicable to this case, with that Amendment being made applicable to state action through the Incorporation Doctrine.
If the latter case, then Due Process (of the "substantive" as opposed to the "procedural" variety) would be involved, because that's the basis of the Incorporation Doctrine. But, if the cops simply violated the state constitution, I wouldn't necessarily call that a "due process" issue. That's just simply cops breaking the law they're sword to uphold.
Slashdot Mirror
So, they are offically asking to violate the Terms of Service of all of these services? I'm sure that each one has a policy about not sharing login information for your personal accounts.
Ah, but let's follow this to its logical conclusion. Violating the ToS of an Internet website is now a federal crime (don't believe me? See http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/30/2014248&tid=123), so they're urging you to commit a federal crime. That's conspiracy, my friend, and the federal slammer for them. Do that a few times, with a few other job applicants, the RICO statutes might apply. I hope Bozeman, Montana has a lot of money in their budget to defend against federal criminal indictments and charges...
Second, one thing that confuses me about these sorts of statements is this - presumably, you think religion is just some nonsense that stupid people latch on to. But even if you get rid of religion, people are still going to be stupid. What makes you think that these stupid people won't find something else to latch on to that has the same sort of negative effects as religion? In fact, getting rid of religion might leave a vacuum that could be filled by something worse...
That's a rather simplistic view. Is the stupidity of people a constant, or a variable? I think the major knock on religion is not that it is only a magnet for irrevocably stupid people, but that it attracts stupid people and then keeps them stupid indefinitely by making them think that their "faith" is a valid substitute for wisdom, understanding and/or independent thought.
Take away religion, those same stupid people would pursue other avenues of human endeavor, most of which offer opportunities for intellectual growth and enrichment, and at least the hope of becoming less stupid over time.
Sounds like a really good deal, but I have a better one...
Hear, hear! Glad to see that I'm not the only one who gets sick and tired of this fairy tale about a mystical connection between "flesh and blood" parents and their "flesh and blood" children, and how being "flesh and blood" related, somehow guarantees that you're going to be better parent, or even a competent one.
This "flesh and blood" nonsense is insulting to the whole institution of adoption, and it corrupts and perverts the whole area of Family Law to such an extent that the wrong people routinely get custody of children, in total defiance of the claimed guiding principle of "best interests of the child", and I would hypothesize that this is a large part of the reason for all of these horror stories about neglected, abused, in some cases even murdered children.
The favorite whipping-boy is, of course, the Social Service agencies that didn't constantly and meticulously check on every bad home environment to try and detect problems before they develop into tragedies, but no-one seems to question whether this "flesh and blood" collective delusion is what's feeding all of this pain and suffering in the first place. The Social Service agencies can only do so much, in the face of bad custody-granting decisions and as long as something as irrelevant as "flesh and blood" is the primary factor in custody-granting, we're going to continue to have these problems...
Actually, inbreeding isn't as bad as once thought, as long as certain genetic traits are recognized as being "dangerous" and thus certain pairings avoided. Perhaps you should pick another example, since "inbreeding is bad" is one is one of those "common sense" things which actually isn't so sensical in the light of modern genetic understanding.
The net community did not only oppose the governments plans, but also made constructive suggestions how to deal with the problem of child pornography without introducing a censorship architecture and circumcising constitutional freedoms.
I'm imagining a whole life-cycle loop, with a farm of these things churning out chairs, and Ballmer at the other end of the life-cycle wrecking them. They just need a way to recycle the broken pieces back into chairs again.
I assumed they were doing this with packets without the AUTH bit set.
What's an AUTH bit? There's the AA (Authoritative Answer) bit, but that is only set in responses, and the allegation is that Comcast is/was redirecting query packets, not response packets. So I don't understand your assumption.
If you ask for an authoritatiove answer from .com you can't get it from comcast.
Well, DNS clients have no way in the protocol to tell their resolvers they only want an authoritative answer. The only ways I can think of, offhand, to guarantee that an answer comes from an authoritative source is either a) bypass intermediate resolvers by identifying and querying the authoritative nameservers for the relevant zone, or b) for every resolver in the resolution path to disable caching, but that would be a performance disaster. Feel free to ask Comcast to turn off caching on their nameservers; if they're running anything based on BIND, they can't just "turn off" caching; they'd either have to replace the software with something more akin to a "DNS proxy", or perhaps simulate "no caching" with some extremely aggressive early-expiration-and-cleaning parameters.
But it appears now they either aren't doing it or have stopped doing it.
True, but it's still an interesting academic exercise nonethless.
Did anyone say that Comcast was only hijacking queries for the root?
The claim is that Comcast is hijacking all DNS queries, so your "solution" only works for the tiny percentage of queries that are for the root zone, and probably doesn't even have any effect on those, since Comcast is probably leaving TLD delegations alone (what reason would they have to mess with those?)
Or, were you suggesting that folks stuff everything they would ever want to look up into a ginormous private root zone? Good luck with that.
Uh, "non-authoritative response" is what you always get (according to the RFCs) when the response came from a resolver's cache, as opposed to directly from the authoritative nameservers.
This factoid neither confirms nor denies whether Comcast is hijacking DNS transactions.
As for not being able to reach "*lot's* [sic] of site[sic]", since you haven't specified whether the DNS lookups are failing, this could be a totally separate problem/issue.
"DVD language training"? Shouldn't that be "DVD-based language training"?
"DVD language training" sounds like there is a special language called "DVD", presumably composed of very long strings of 1's and 0's...
How does split-horizon help? Are you going to get the ISP to host a separate "horizon" of DNS on their servers? Please elaborate. If your solution involves repointing the resolver config on the client to something other than the ISP's nameservers, then why not just do that, and skip the "split horizon" mumbo-jumbo? That would be a simpler solution, no?
I've already pointed you to the lines of "bodily integrity" precedents, you chose to remove, without comment, that part of my post, and just continue full-steam-ahead with your diatribe. If you're not going to debate with integrity, why should I extend any courtesy to you?
I agree with you on a purely legal basis. I don't think GPS tracking violates the U.S. Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. I personally find the reasoning of the Wisconsin court more persuasive than that of the New York one, and note that the New York court decision was based on its state constitution, and thus sets no precedent for the application of the Fourth Amendment to GPS tracking.
But can't you see what a slippery slope this is? GPS tracking makes it economically and logistically feasible to track any number of individuals 24x7x365. Without any kind of judicial input or oversight, they can do this to anyone, at any time, for any reason. Maybe just because the "suspect" has unpopular views or is disfavored because of their ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation (I don't think the Civil Rights laws apply to mere surveillance, but I could be wrong on that). Perhaps you have such complete trust in law enforcement that you see no potential for abuse; pardon me for being more cynical than that.
So, whereas from a legal perspective, there is currently nothing stopping law enforcement from proceeding down this path, I would hope that the people, and the legislatures that supposedly represent them, would move to ban or at least put strict limits on the practice.
Sigh. If you really truly think that taping a transmitter to someone's car is equivalently intrusive to having someone implant an RFID in your body against your will, then I suppose I can't argue against that kind of thickheadedness. I shouldn't even try. Obviously common sense takes a backseat to whatever overarching principle of personal liberty you're trying to defend here.
There is a long-standing principle that the U.S. Constitution protects "bodily integrity", see Union Pacific Railway Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250 (1891) as well as the whole line of Supreme Court cases involving abortion, forced sterilization, etc.
Implanting RFIDs in people without their consent violates bodily integrity in a way that attaching GPS transmitters to automobiles clearly does not. It's a bad analogy, just admit it already.
I hope you twats are happy about this descision to let a criminal like this go free because you have some unfounded fear of GPS tracking
What part of "the end does not justify the means" do you not understand?
I have no problem with the state investigating, apprehending, charging, convicting and making criminals serve their time. But the methods they use must not reduce us to the level of a totalitarian police state. That's too high a price to pay for our safety and security, particularly when the crime in question -- burglary in this case -- is only about property. If this guy were a violent criminal, a stronger argument could be made, but I would hope that search warrants would be easier to obtain with respect to violent-crime suspects, thus mooting the issue.
The Chicago criminals will eat them for lunch. They'll never make it to Indiana.
Typically they use magnets and/or tape to affix the GPS transmitter, the "modification" of the suspect's property is negligible, and reversible. For that matter, if they're careful about removing the transmitter, they may actually leave that surface of the vehicle cleaner and more intact than it would have been otherwise in the normal course of operating the vehicle on the roads.
This is hardly comparable to a dystopian-nightmare surgical implantation of RFIDs without the victim's consent. Yet another analogy gone awry.
Don't get me wrong: I don't like the idea of police having the power to do this. But, while I think legislatures should outlaw the practice, I don't think there is any solid legal foundation for finding it unconstitutional (after reading the N.Y. decision I was unimpressed with their legal reasoning, they seemed to mostly rely on decisions made in Oregon and Washington; since Wisconsin went the other way, I think it's too early to declare any kind of consensus).
No, the original analogy is far more accurate than yours: if a plant were capable of playing back the contents of a phone conversation, or relaying the conversation to some remote listener, then that method of surveillance would be subject to the same constitutional constraints as wiretapping.
The only differences that come to mind between surreptitiously tailing someone's car, and tracking them via a GPS transmitter, however, are: 1) the economic cost differential (GPS tracking is much cheaper), and 2) you can't effectively tail someone onto private property (e.g. their garage or a private estate). I'm not sure that either of those have any constitutional significance.
UPDATE: it was based on the state constitution.
http://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/decisions/2009/may09/53opn09.pdf
I wish someone had posted this link earlier
Well, since you were too stingy to do so, I dug up this and will provide the link:
http://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/decisions/2009/may09/53opn09.pdf
It was decided under the state constitution, since federal law was deemed to still be undecided on the issue. What I find intriguing is that the judges looked to rulings in other states (Oregon and Washington), but apparently the Wisconsin case was too recent to be included in that survey. I wonder if they would have ruled differently? Recall that the N.Y. decision was 4-3, it would have taken only 1 of the justices to tip the other way...
Well, thanks for reminding me that the "Court of Appeals" is the top court in New York. This isn't the first time that the misnomer has tripped me up (why the heck don't they just call themselves the Supreme Court of New York, like normal states?)
However, I haven't seen anything so far to indicate that the ruling was based on the state constitution. If they ruled based on an application of the federal constitution (presumably the Fourth Amendment), then I would think this could be appealed to the federal courts and overturned. Surely, there must be a way to redress a misapplication of federal jurisprudence by any state court, mustn't there?
Actually, state courts hear federal cases all the time, and interpret federal law. Only certain kinds of cases (e.g. involving foreign countries/citizens, bankruptcies, securities fraud, between states, etc.) must be brought in federal court.
Of course, one or both parties in a state court proceeding involving federal law issues can petition for the case to be "removed" to federal court, and there are sometimes procedural advantages in doing so.
Disclaimer: IANAL
Actually, it's somewhat more complicated than that.
This wasn't a case of a citizen suing the government because his privacy was violated by GPS tracking (which is kind of the way you framed it above). Rather, this was -- as far as one can tell from the poor summaries and extracts currently made available -- a case where the defendant in a criminal action seeks to have evidence excluded under the Exclusionary Rule, because, presumably, GPS tracking is unconstitutional.
Why would it be unconstitutional? It might be because of some specific provision in the New York Constitution. Or, it might be because the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is deemed to be applicable to this case, with that Amendment being made applicable to state action through the Incorporation Doctrine.
If the latter case, then Due Process (of the "substantive" as opposed to the "procedural" variety) would be involved, because that's the basis of the Incorporation Doctrine. But, if the cops simply violated the state constitution, I wouldn't necessarily call that a "due process" issue. That's just simply cops breaking the law they're sword to uphold.