As long as they give the user a means to get back online through cleaning their system up, and they don't do something silly like requiring you to use a NAC that only runs on one operating system (like my school tried one year) to connect, it's actually a really great policy not only for the internet as a whole, but for their customers and their own connectivity. It helps the customers because then they have fast and stable computers compared to those with lots of malware. It helps the ISPs because they're less likely to have their IP ranges on DNS block lists somewhere, while freeing up bandwidth used by some of these bots. It then helps the internet as a whole by combating spam.
Yeah it sucks if you can't get online because you have some kind of rootkit that won't go away and can't reinstall the operating system (we are talking about typical users here!), but that computer (a) might not work too well to begin with, and (b) is probably causing quite a nuisance to other people on the internet. If ISPs inform users that their computer has been compromised, and must be cleaned before being allowed back on, the user could then agree to run an anti-virus (or possibly go through some kind of support) or agree not to put the computer online again.
Except x-rays and gamma rays are light, being on the electromagnetic spectrum, and traveling at 299,792,458 m/s. Sound only travels around 340 m/s, depending on its medium. Also, if they were sound they wouldn't travel through space either.
No. Sound is the vibration of air molecules, so when you speak or drop something, it creates compression waves that travel through the air and vibrate your eardrum, which in turn creates waves in the fluid of your cochlea that stimulate hair cells connected to the acoustic nerve. Since outer space has (almost) no air, these waves have no medium on which to travel, and sound as we know it does not happen.
Eh, what good is a MAC address in comparison to other identifiable bits of information? If I were tracking you, unless you're on my network (ok, if I'm Apple I guess you are in this case), I wouldn't care about your MAC address nearly as much as I would care about your device serial numbers, or your subscriber information if I can get that.
For once I hope Microsoft wins a legal battle, and that's the last thing I would ever expect to feel. I must be going crazy or something. Must be spending too much time on these software projects.
Yeah. Just Photoshop a picture of your least favorite co-worker in a very embarrassing position, stick it in a Facebook profile somewhere, wait for it to get tagged, and that employee is gone.
Haven't we been through this before? I think back then it was called... "Data Encryption Standard (DES)". Then there was that alternative where they had backdoors to all encryption schemes, something about an ESCROW key store?
Actually, I think the article said China is hacking into users' accounts, not that Google is giving China access. They're just deploying a sort of end-user level Intrusion Detection System. They're letting users know what the government (not necessarily their government) is doing, but they're not cooperating. It's definitely a step in the right direction, although it would also be nice to add some access control as well, such as "only access from this IP address", "deny access from IP addresses in these countries", etc. even if that would only drive China to access accounts from bots in the same country. Google certainly has the resources, and in light of Chinese attacks over the past year, the motivation, to deploy a pretty secure setup that users could configure, and I can imagine a lot more features like this showing up over the next year.
Question for Google: Do these warnings show up for all active sessions (including the Chinese ones), or only the session where the user appears legitimately logged in?
Ok, so assuming the plaintiff didn't have a reasonable expectation to privacy, how did the defendent actually access the plaintiff's private Facebook information? Merely the lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy in what is publicly posted should not entitle someone to otherwise unauthorized access to your account. If they want the full array of information collected on Facebook, that's what a discovery or subpoena is for.
He probably used one of those loyalty/discount card things, where you get a "sale" in return for letting their advertisers track your purchases in a database. I'm pretty sure they ask your gender on those.
Well, you also have to consider these are for-profit corporations, meaning they probably have a lot more money than some college student, and the cost would be divided up between multiple people. That's kind of an unfair comparison to put a single college-aged girl up to that sort of expectation. Also, it's not like she willfully committed fraud or caused significant lasting damage to many individuals, even if you take the RIAA's estimates of damage.
Eh, but with the amount of money they waste on these lawsuits, and the reckless nature with which they pursue defendants despite the bad press it gets them, and none of that serving as a deterrent, I would be willing to bet they would use the death of their predecessors as leverage for a new law (can we say ACTA?) rather than clean up their act.
What we should be considering is whether the $750-to-200,000-per-file fine is constitutional, more than whether someone knew it was copyright. Seriously, find me another crime (especially civil) that has a heavier penalty, even a punitive one.
Not a bad idea, but it breaks a bunch of things. For example, you can no longer access pandora.com, which a lot of people I know do. I personally let BetterPrivacy clean up whatever I selectively let through NoScript. Then, I can simply have everything from my cache to Flash cookies deleted everytime I restart Firefox. Without any kind of persistent storage, none of those cookies can survive.
Actually, region codes are just so they can control releases. Specifically, they can have multiple "first premiers" for each country, and selectively allow/disallow content in different regions based on how fascist (read "free") their copyright laws or other local legislations are. It also holds governments accountable to them, in some sense, in that they can "boycott" governments who refuse to adopt DMCA-like laws.
Reselling media in other countries as a middle-man would be commercial infringement for any existing international copyright treaties by most reasonable definitions (first-sale aside), but that's not the audience the entertainment industry is after.
Waste Management takes your waste away, so Digital Rights Management takes your digital rights away.
Exactly - Manage: to handle, direct, govern, or control in action or use: She managed the boat efficiently.
I believe by "manage" they mean to "keep in check" or "keep under control". Specifically, the philosophy is that copyright is a powerful tool to "protect" content (and I say that both loosely and bitterly), while the Digital Rights Management takes care (a.k.a. "manages") of all those pesky rights consumers would otherwise be entitled to under copyright law. By "managing" users' rights to your content, you ensure they only have what you explicitly allow, and not what the law entitles them to.
Also, by not using terms with a negative connotation (i.e. restrictions), content producers can accurately describe the procedure by which they systematically remove consumers' rights and control spin at the same time, both in laws passed to congress and EULAs. Thus, the term "Digital Rights Management" was born.
and have issued email warnings to all licensees in the state...
Didn't they learn anything? So they still fell back to e-mail as the official line of communication? With people like that running regulatory agencies, it's no wonder our world is so screwed up.
Basically, just make the test in a way that looking something up on the internet won't do any good. No need to jam/disable the wireless signal or restrict use of electronic devices to specific models.
I had an instructor who gave tests online and made it very difficult to cheat. For vocabulary, she either gave the definition or a contextual example, which wasn't something someone can just look up in Google. For extended response questions, I hear it is pretty easy to catch students who cheated after the fact; their work is inconsistent with what they submitted in the past and sometimes there are clues you can use to your advantage. For example, I had a Spanish teacher in high school who would call out students who used grammar structures not yet covered (such as past-subjunctive tense) in their take-home papers, a sign that someone else wrote the paper for them. He would politely ask the student a few questions about the grammar used in their paper. If they were able to explain "normally when referring to multiple subjects, you combine the last two with the conjunction 'y', but if the first letter of the word immediately following it is 'i' or 'y', you change 'y' to 'e'," but if they clearly didn't understand why it was used in their paper, it was a sign they cheated, and those students couldn't usually explain anything in their paper (in English).
Needless to say, don't make multiple choice tests identical, and if you proctor an exam at multiple times don't give the same version. If you think they're getting answers from an unethical "tutor", then I'm not really sure what you could do but I'd would be willing to bet there isn't a lot of "reasonable expectation to privacy" if you look over their shoulder for instant messages as long as you don't get the IT department to route their traffic through a squid proxy or something.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as they give the user a means to get back online through cleaning their system up, and they don't do something silly like requiring you to use a NAC that only runs on one operating system (like my school tried one year) to connect, it's actually a really great policy not only for the internet as a whole, but for their customers and their own connectivity. It helps the customers because then they have fast and stable computers compared to those with lots of malware. It helps the ISPs because they're less likely to have their IP ranges on DNS block lists somewhere, while freeing up bandwidth used by some of these bots. It then helps the internet as a whole by combating spam.
Yeah it sucks if you can't get online because you have some kind of rootkit that won't go away and can't reinstall the operating system (we are talking about typical users here!), but that computer (a) might not work too well to begin with, and (b) is probably causing quite a nuisance to other people on the internet. If ISPs inform users that their computer has been compromised, and must be cleaned before being allowed back on, the user could then agree to run an anti-virus (or possibly go through some kind of support) or agree not to put the computer online again.
See parent comment.
Except x-rays and gamma rays are light, being on the electromagnetic spectrum, and traveling at 299,792,458 m/s. Sound only travels around 340 m/s, depending on its medium. Also, if they were sound they wouldn't travel through space either.
No. Sound is the vibration of air molecules, so when you speak or drop something, it creates compression waves that travel through the air and vibrate your eardrum, which in turn creates waves in the fluid of your cochlea that stimulate hair cells connected to the acoustic nerve. Since outer space has (almost) no air, these waves have no medium on which to travel, and sound as we know it does not happen.
Oops, only saw one of the links.
Since apparently nobody linked to the original video as far as I can tell, here it is:
http://vimeo.com/15091562
Eh, what good is a MAC address in comparison to other identifiable bits of information? If I were tracking you, unless you're on my network (ok, if I'm Apple I guess you are in this case), I wouldn't care about your MAC address nearly as much as I would care about your device serial numbers, or your subscriber information if I can get that.
Meh, I thought the ending was rather sad. If it had a happier ending, I'd have liked it a lot more. Graphics weren't bad though.
For once I hope Microsoft wins a legal battle, and that's the last thing I would ever expect to feel. I must be going crazy or something. Must be spending too much time on these software projects.
Yeah. Just Photoshop a picture of your least favorite co-worker in a very embarrassing position, stick it in a Facebook profile somewhere, wait for it to get tagged, and that employee is gone.
Haven't we been through this before? I think back then it was called... "Data Encryption Standard (DES)". Then there was that alternative where they had backdoors to all encryption schemes, something about an ESCROW key store?
Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in.
Does anyone else think now might be a good time to get a good, reflective pair sunglasses to try an avoid getting flagged?
Actually, I think the article said China is hacking into users' accounts, not that Google is giving China access. They're just deploying a sort of end-user level Intrusion Detection System. They're letting users know what the government (not necessarily their government) is doing, but they're not cooperating. It's definitely a step in the right direction, although it would also be nice to add some access control as well, such as "only access from this IP address", "deny access from IP addresses in these countries", etc. even if that would only drive China to access accounts from bots in the same country. Google certainly has the resources, and in light of Chinese attacks over the past year, the motivation, to deploy a pretty secure setup that users could configure, and I can imagine a lot more features like this showing up over the next year. Question for Google: Do these warnings show up for all active sessions (including the Chinese ones), or only the session where the user appears legitimately logged in?
Ok, so assuming the plaintiff didn't have a reasonable expectation to privacy, how did the defendent actually access the plaintiff's private Facebook information? Merely the lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy in what is publicly posted should not entitle someone to otherwise unauthorized access to your account. If they want the full array of information collected on Facebook, that's what a discovery or subpoena is for.
He probably used one of those loyalty/discount card things, where you get a "sale" in return for letting their advertisers track your purchases in a database. I'm pretty sure they ask your gender on those.
Well, you also have to consider these are for-profit corporations, meaning they probably have a lot more money than some college student, and the cost would be divided up between multiple people. That's kind of an unfair comparison to put a single college-aged girl up to that sort of expectation. Also, it's not like she willfully committed fraud or caused significant lasting damage to many individuals, even if you take the RIAA's estimates of damage.
Eh, but with the amount of money they waste on these lawsuits, and the reckless nature with which they pursue defendants despite the bad press it gets them, and none of that serving as a deterrent, I would be willing to bet they would use the death of their predecessors as leverage for a new law (can we say ACTA?) rather than clean up their act.
You know somebody just as evil will take his place, right? That's not going to accomplish a lot.
What we should be considering is whether the $750-to-200,000-per-file fine is constitutional, more than whether someone knew it was copyright. Seriously, find me another crime (especially civil) that has a heavier penalty, even a punitive one.
Not a bad idea, but it breaks a bunch of things. For example, you can no longer access pandora.com, which a lot of people I know do. I personally let BetterPrivacy clean up whatever I selectively let through NoScript. Then, I can simply have everything from my cache to Flash cookies deleted everytime I restart Firefox. Without any kind of persistent storage, none of those cookies can survive.
Actually, region codes are just so they can control releases. Specifically, they can have multiple "first premiers" for each country, and selectively allow/disallow content in different regions based on how fascist (read "free") their copyright laws or other local legislations are. It also holds governments accountable to them, in some sense, in that they can "boycott" governments who refuse to adopt DMCA-like laws.
Reselling media in other countries as a middle-man would be commercial infringement for any existing international copyright treaties by most reasonable definitions (first-sale aside), but that's not the audience the entertainment industry is after.
Waste Management takes your waste away, so Digital Rights Management takes your digital rights away.
Exactly - Manage: to handle, direct, govern, or control in action or use: She managed the boat efficiently.
I believe by "manage" they mean to "keep in check" or "keep under control". Specifically, the philosophy is that copyright is a powerful tool to "protect" content (and I say that both loosely and bitterly), while the Digital Rights Management takes care (a.k.a. "manages") of all those pesky rights consumers would otherwise be entitled to under copyright law. By "managing" users' rights to your content, you ensure they only have what you explicitly allow, and not what the law entitles them to.
Also, by not using terms with a negative connotation (i.e. restrictions), content producers can accurately describe the procedure by which they systematically remove consumers' rights and control spin at the same time, both in laws passed to congress and EULAs. Thus, the term "Digital Rights Management" was born.
and have issued email warnings to all licensees in the state...
Didn't they learn anything? So they still fell back to e-mail as the official line of communication? With people like that running regulatory agencies, it's no wonder our world is so screwed up.
Basically, just make the test in a way that looking something up on the internet won't do any good. No need to jam/disable the wireless signal or restrict use of electronic devices to specific models.
I had an instructor who gave tests online and made it very difficult to cheat. For vocabulary, she either gave the definition or a contextual example, which wasn't something someone can just look up in Google. For extended response questions, I hear it is pretty easy to catch students who cheated after the fact; their work is inconsistent with what they submitted in the past and sometimes there are clues you can use to your advantage. For example, I had a Spanish teacher in high school who would call out students who used grammar structures not yet covered (such as past-subjunctive tense) in their take-home papers, a sign that someone else wrote the paper for them. He would politely ask the student a few questions about the grammar used in their paper. If they were able to explain "normally when referring to multiple subjects, you combine the last two with the conjunction 'y', but if the first letter of the word immediately following it is 'i' or 'y', you change 'y' to 'e'," but if they clearly didn't understand why it was used in their paper, it was a sign they cheated, and those students couldn't usually explain anything in their paper (in English).
Needless to say, don't make multiple choice tests identical, and if you proctor an exam at multiple times don't give the same version. If you think they're getting answers from an unethical "tutor", then I'm not really sure what you could do but I'd would be willing to bet there isn't a lot of "reasonable expectation to privacy" if you look over their shoulder for instant messages as long as you don't get the IT department to route their traffic through a squid proxy or something.
Neither do I, but I hear only the worst things about Facebook's default privacy settings.