I said "sadly", because wanking off is what is considered to be normal, thus my lack of impulse to do so is intrinsically "abnormal".
It isn't that I hold regret about this, merely that being of a sexuality type that is often considered to be abnormal has certain undesirable social consequences, which is what I find sad.
I simply have no sexual reaction to such imagery. This can lead to akward social situations. That is what is meant by "sadly."
Sadly, as an asexual I don't wank off to anything.. My first reaction? "Wow, she could take an eye out with those." Followed by "actually, it looks like she has a butt on her chest."
Overall, she does pull off the skin tight latex fettish look quite nicely though.
Still, in regards to "Wayland", the other names are all first names, while in this case, it's a last name. As a first name "Wayland" is usually used for males. Hence the reference.
(Also, unlikely that anyone here that isn't really a CEO posting as AC could claim Ms. Wayland as an "ex girlfriend" anyway.;) )
So, in my mind, I saw this:
Wayland (aka, "lola" from the song), with bleach blondes "Jolla" and "Sailfish" doing their original "dance stage sensation" on the stripper pole with dollar bills whirling around, as Wayland does his female impersonator gig as Whitney Houston, and the other two undulate provocatively on the two brass stripper poles on stage, doing backup vocals.
I have a overactive imagination, and it wasn't a particularly attractive mental image.
Wayland is an alternative windowing system for *nix OSes; a counterpart to Xorg, Xfree86, X11, and pals. While the others are all based on the original X windowing system, Wayland is simply different in that respect.
The story is about successfully porting the Wayland windowing system to be able to work with android flavored GPU drivers, presumably because many SoC makers only target Android as a platform.
Why?
Suppose you want to build a custom *nix flavored tablet distro to run on these smexxy new atom and arm cpus hitting the market, and the SoC solutions look attractive. "Oh noez!" You shout in exasperation "they won't gives me duh sourcez codez! I cannuh compile native kernal driverz an shitz!"
With this hybrid mashup, this port of Wayland can use the vendor created android drivers out of the box, making the tight fisted "no, our precious can't be shared! Bad Linuxesss.. Bad!" Behavior coming from nVidia and Broadcom in respect to this issue, much less of a showstopper, and more of just a petty annoyance.
I was actually leaning more toward abstracted conceptions being treated as operators, with serial execution of interaction.
Say we have a generic representation of "fire" as an effect. Alone, it doesn't mean much. How hot is it? What shape is it? Etc. By combining it with other representations in a structured form, (the flowcharting/programmatical aspects) we can create not just a boring old fireball, but spells that do all kinds of fun and neat things with fire, even taking fire as a trigger for activation, or other less obvious uses.
The idea was to give every magic user an empty spellbook, and have them make their own spells. The sharing of spells outside the gameworld on forums and the like is expected, and encouraged. For those that are happy to use collctions others have made and tested, it would work well for that, but for those that love to tinker, and like to be unique, there is always the option of being completely unconventional.
The idea I had for the world was to hold no bars, and allow, (and even encourage) people to be "evil" characters, so that there is innate confict in the world, and thus have no need for scripted events. People being grand douches provide all the villany the world could possibly need, and allowing players to do and be so ensures there is always somebody to go beat up.
Part of the idea was to have all items aside from raw materials be user-created in some fashion, with all enchantments being user created. This makes nearly everything worth carrying a unique item, and the booty of kicking a badguy's ass is getting his stuff. In the case of magic users, that includes their spellbook.:D
A modifiably and persistent world with these dynamics would make a lot of parental groups upset, (oh no! that wizard's tower is shaped like a giant cock! And somebody wrote boobies on the walls of the town! That's aweful! Etc.) But for more mature players, it would be very entertaining, and hilarious.
Think a mashup of 4chan's uncensoredness with second life like sandboxing, and WoW hack and slash fun. Where if you want to go on a rampage and tear up the countryside, YOU CAN, but likewise, people can form a lynch mob and kill your avatar, then parade the body in the street.
It would need to have some "iron man" like rules, such that when an avatar dies, its dead, and you have to start a new one and the like. That would help to prevent spurrious destruction of things others have worked hard for as a natural consequence
Build a custom HAL to be invoked by NTLDR that makes virtual surrogates for win7 to be happy with at kernel init, then proper kernel drivers after that.
Could probably fork and share code with the ReactOS project, actually.
I had a similar idea some time ago, but with an MMORPG setting.
One of the issues that has always rankled me hard was the "cookie cutter" nature of the world events in those games, as well as the limiting gameplay options, so I had this idea for "obfuscated and sigilized" programming syntax as the basis for a game's magic system. Rather than presenting a loop as a nested block of instructions, it would depict it as a "container", with subcomponents inside. Kind of a mix of flowcharting and stylized syntax.
The idea was that the layout of the "enchantment" could be moved and teased to make clever images out of the interconnected containers and symbolic representations, to make the programmatical nature of the system less banal, and much more aesthetically attractive, while simultanously making the kinds of magic and counter magic highly diverse and dynamic.
I never really did much with the idea (ideas aren't worth much, despite what the USPTO and several shell corps may claim. Implementations are far more valuable.), and all the "on paper" mental models I tried kept having non-trivial problems.
I like seeing that somebody had a similar idea, and made a working implementation.
Doing this to a living brain would be "horribly unethical" in just about every way.
This technique makes the brain transparent by gelling up the cytoplasm with a synthetic molecule, then washing out all the lipids.
Lipids are fundementally necessary for proper neural function, and are the primary duty of glial cells to produce and deposit. Mylein is predominantly comprised of lipids. Without it, you would be a quivering and drooling moron. (On a good day.) [Glial cells chaparone the long axons of neural whitematter, and are the cells that wrap the axon in mylein, among other duties.]
Doing this to a living brain would cause unbelievable neural harm.
Since it achieves the transprency the same basic way (washout of the lipids in the bilayers), it should work on neary all soft tissues, not just neuronal tissue.
So, unless you are researching diseases of adipose tissue, this should still be of real value.
Warrants, as defined in the constitution, must cite specific papers, and specific places. You can't get a constitutionally aboveboard warrant to go "fishing".
Since the government is looking for unidentified persons who may be infringing, so that can then identify and prosecute, they really can't get a warrant.
This is intentional. The limitations on how warrants work were *intended* to frustrate magistrates and government agents.
Making it "easier" for them is how you lose your freedoms.
Sadly, the decadent lifestyles often enjoyed by said windbags consumes a substantial quantity of energy, so the overall net production rate of politically powered enegy genration is going to be remarkably poor.
Supernatural patriarch electrodynamos, however, are clearly over unity.
Providing service to another does not make me the owner.
PAYING MONEY IN EXCHANGE FOR A PRODUCT MAKES ME AN OWNER.
What does this mean?
"Somebody activated a cellphone with my identity! Nevermind they paid cash for the phone, and have a reciept! The are using my identity and good name/credit to get service they would otherwise be denied!"
Does this person own *THE PHONE* being serviced?
NO! THEY DON'T! The identity thief paid cash! The theif owns the phone legally, but is getting service illegally.
Does the phone company own the phone in question?
NO! They Don't! The thief paid for it up front, and owns it.
Can either party claim physical rights to that device?
NO! They Can't! The most either can do is demand that service be terminated, and or terminate service.
Did Verizon outstep their authority by serruptitiousy installing malicious firmware on a device that they may not have owned? If the device was not subsidized, then YES. (It can be argued that if the device was not paid for up front, then the identity theft victim owns the handset, having had money exchanged for it. In which case, Verizon should have asked the victim if they wanted to keep the device after being collected [arresting the perp], or if they just want reimbursement. If the victim says the want to keep it, then Verizon needs to ask the legal owner of the device if they can install the firmware. If they say they want reimbursement, then Verizon can do whatever they want with their device.) The issue here is treating the device as Verizon's property by default, which as far as I know, has not been substantiated, and is not a good direction to head down.
So, again:
Things that do NOT make me the owner:
Supplying service to someone to use with the device. (Activating a handsate on the network, providing internet access, etc.)
Being the sole distributor of such devices. (Once the money changes hands, you STOP being the owner. The person who gave you money becomes the owner instead. You lose the right to in any way meddle with that property once the sale completes.)
Things that DO make you the owner:
Exchanging currency for the purchase of the item.
As a general rule, vandalism constitutes the damage or defacement of another person's property without their consent. If the FBI decided that I was a person of interest, and that I needed to be located and arrested, I would be livid, and WOULD sue if they forced a OTA firmware onto the device I legally own outright, having paid cash for it outright. If my telecom company did this per the FBI's request, I would sue them as well for illegal access to a private computer system.
Simply because this guy is "a crook" does NOT mean he does not have rights. Your unwillingness to accept that he does disturbs the hell out of me. The law, and protection of due process is for the guilty and the innocent alike. Until the Judge finds guilt, *ALL* persons of interest are innocent, by definition. That means that any process you would not subject a clearly innocent man to, you should not subject a "crook" to either.
Failure t respect and champion for this is the #1 reason why we are racing headfirst into being a police state.
If you ascribe guilt before process, then you have no place to complain when the system you allow comes to eat you too.
Stop undermining *MY* right to ownership of *MY* devices, by turning a blind eye in cases like these. Letting these fucks get away with it without even questioning is howproperty rights are eroded, and vanish. Asserting "this is only for guilty people!" Is a nonsequitor; our system investigates INNOCENT people, to DETERMINE guilt. Only the judge and jury determine guilt. Preemptive condemnation like you are employing leaves innocent people guilty until proven innocent, and the practices you are supporting are ONLY used that way. As far as the police are concerned, *all* people are guilty. Especially the innocent.
That Verizon would do this without even batting an eye worries the hell out of me, and should worry you too.
We have a crook with an "illegally activated" laptop. Maybe he registered the serial number under a false name, whatever. The physical device is owned by the person of interest, and not the ISP, nor the OS maker.
The FBI tasks the ISP of the PoI to install a network worm that alter's the laptop's normal operation, so that they can track its access, and thus locate it.
They do so.
In doing so, they have vandalized that person's private property (the laptop) by illegally installing software on a platform they do not hold legal rights to. This is functionally no different from the FBI telling microsoft to spy on people using their kinects, or any other forced, serrutpitious update that damages something that the person of interest purchased.
Here's a hint, just because verizon holds a monopolistic deathgrip on CDMA doesn't mean that the aircard in question *must* be used on their service. As such, verizon does not have defacto authority to chage the device's firmware without notification. They can say "update, or we won't service", but that is not the same thing.
Verizon owns the service. The person of interest owns the phone. Verizon says the device was illegally activated on their network. Their authority ends on their end; they blacklist the IMEI, and the device no longer gets services. The devie is unaltered.
Here, they pushed an OTA firmware to the device without informing the user or getting consent. They vandalized his property to conduct this operation. Verizon does not own the aircard.
But SHODAN uses fractal data storage technology! She will just regenerate the damaged nodes, then fire the mining laser at earth, just like she promised to!
Fools left its control systems using the default passwords!
And it would appear that many other organizations, and even this court judge are either in agreement with that position, or are willing to consider that position's legitimacy, which is why this case has not been dismissed.
The FBI agreed that it *needed* a warranted (eg, that what they were doing with the stingray needed one), but said that what verizon did for them was authorized by a court order, and did not need one.
This does not say that they in fact obtained such warrant, which they did not.
I was under the impression that verizon complied with the FBI request in "rubber stamp" fashion, and not due to a warrant. (Which was why their use of the stingray had caused judges to get stingy when discovered.)
Pushing firmware to devices without permission/authorization from the downstream user can count as vandalism, if the device is not subsidized by verizon, and is the user's personal property. I don't use verizon, so this does not really impact me except as being a chilling effect, as other providers will be compelled to comply by govt agencies as well.
The above 3 posts fail to take into account that all persons of interest are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, so all tapping and tracing activities need to be seen as if they were performed on people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. Approaching it from the "we helped them catch a dirtbag" angle is not justifiable, unless you operate under the "guilty until proven innocent" model instead.
A warrant has to be issued, it has to be specific in what is to be taken, and specific in the place, time, and person of interest investigated.
Your "la dee dah" blithe response to this kind of thing is exactly why the USA is turning more and more into a police state every day. Keep that in mind.
Issuing a custom radio firmware for a data only device, so that it responds to a telephone network signal demonstrates that verizon is willing to place nonstandard firmware on devices on their network, for the express purposes of aiding investigations that lack proper warrants.
This is a very bad thing Verizon. A Very Bad Thing.
Don't underestimate the impact that losing public confidence can have on your business. Being so self-conceited as to feel that you don't have to worry because you have cornered the market would only add fuel to the fire.
Plan you PR damage control messages carefully. Smile, you're on candid camera.
Don't be silly! You become a sheodinger's fireball!
Much like the alive and yet also dead cat of infamous repute, our stalwart and jaunty astronaught is in the *perfect* unobserved/unobservable condition!
He is both alive, and dead, at the same time! The schrodinger's cat is also alive, and dead from poisonous gas!
As such, he can simultaneously survive, be burned to a crisp, or be pulled apart like stringcheese, all at the same time!
Take your existing image, and push it to a temporary physical volume. Defragment it and pair it down.
Use something like partition magic to shrink it down to a suitable size.
Use that image for the ramdisk. If you can't shrink it small enough, bite your knuckles, and install win95 pluspack. This will give you drivespace3. (Uninstall desktop themes afterward.) Compress the volume, (it *will* take all day.) Then defragment. Use the drivespace3 managment program to resize the CVF. Make it as small as possible. Shut down, then partition magic it to shrink it up, then use that.
If you are so unfortunate as to have a fat32 volume and not fat16, (and as such can't use drivespace to squash it), you have to MANUALLY build a fat16 bootable volume, copy all the files into it, doctor msdos.sys to be the proper kind, and hope for the best.
These volumes are small, and you want to use drivespace to cram as much into them as you can. Consider using a dos 6.22 diskette image (or boot cd) with the old dos version of drivespace to initially partition and format the base volume you will later image. This will let you create the compressed volume file very early in the setup process, saving you a very lengthly compression operation later. Drivespace and drivespace3 volumes can ONLY be FAT16 for the host. A Dos6.22 partition, format, and drivespace compress cycle ensures a suitable foundation to install on. You DON'T need a full dos 6.22 install.
Boot the dos 6.22 boot disk, partition and format the volume with the/s argument, then drivespace it. Copy any cdrom dos drivers and the dos 6.22 mscdex.exe to the compressed bootable volume.
Make sure the partition type is CHS and not LBA.
Pop in the install CD for whatever flavor of 9x you are going to use. It will happily install onto the dos6.22 drvspace packed volume, and pack as it installs seamlessly.
When it finishes, the install process automatically upgrades the volume to drivespace3 format, and updates the drvspace.bin and dblspace.bin drivers on the root for you. Easy peasy.
Configure the system, install drivers, etc. Set the swap file to either be OFF, or on the spinny disk.
Run compression agent, set to "ultrapack all files", click OK, then go do something else for about an hour or two, while it crushes everything down.
Defragment the system.
Shut it down, then image the partition.
Build the EXT2 boot medium, put memdisk and the image file on, set it all up, and feel good about yourself.
Not unless they have access to fdisk, which you can remove from the image.
Format.com will only work on msdos(fat16/fat32) partitions. Windows 95/98 will not even try to mount a non-DOS partition. HDDs are treated quite differently from unformatted or "other system" formatted floppies or removable disks. Quite literally, the only tool that can touch the ext2 volume is fdisk.
Slashdot Mirror
(Groucho marx voice)
"Ain't nuttin wrong with that tuna, I'l say!"
[Too easy. Sorry.]
You misunderstand,
I said "sadly", because wanking off is what is considered to be normal, thus my lack of impulse to do so is intrinsically "abnormal".
It isn't that I hold regret about this, merely that being of a sexuality type that is often considered to be abnormal has certain undesirable social consequences, which is what I find sad.
I simply have no sexual reaction to such imagery. This can lead to akward social situations. That is what is meant by "sadly."
Sadly, as an asexual I don't wank off to anything..
My first reaction? "Wow, she could take an eye out with those." Followed by "actually, it looks like she has a butt on her chest."
Overall, she does pull off the skin tight latex fettish look quite nicely though.
Still, in regards to "Wayland", the other names are all first names, while in this case, it's a last name. As a first name "Wayland" is usually used for males. Hence the reference.
(Also, unlikely that anyone here that isn't really a CEO posting as AC could claim Ms. Wayland as an "ex girlfriend" anyway. ;) )
So, in my mind, I saw this:
Wayland (aka, "lola" from the song), with bleach blondes "Jolla" and "Sailfish" doing their original "dance stage sensation" on the stripper pole with dollar bills whirling around, as Wayland does his female impersonator gig as Whitney Houston, and the other two undulate provocatively on the two brass stripper poles on stage, doing backup vocals.
I have a overactive imagination, and it wasn't a particularly attractive mental image.
The latex queen is much better though, thank you.
While the last two clearly sound like stripper/porno names, like "candi", .....
Seriously, you had an ex girlfriend named... Wayland?
Did "she" have stubble too?
Wayland is an alternative windowing system for *nix OSes; a counterpart to Xorg, Xfree86, X11, and pals. While the others are all based on the original X windowing system, Wayland is simply different in that respect.
The story is about successfully porting the Wayland windowing system to be able to work with android flavored GPU drivers, presumably because many SoC makers only target Android as a platform.
Why?
Suppose you want to build a custom *nix flavored tablet distro to run on these smexxy new atom and arm cpus hitting the market, and the SoC solutions look attractive. "Oh noez!" You shout in exasperation "they won't gives me duh sourcez codez! I cannuh compile native kernal driverz an shitz!"
With this hybrid mashup, this port of Wayland can use the vendor created android drivers out of the box, making the tight fisted "no, our precious can't be shared! Bad Linuxesss.. Bad!" Behavior coming from nVidia and Broadcom in respect to this issue, much less of a showstopper, and more of just a petty annoyance.
.....
Just put in an atomic battery in, like that in a pacemaker.
Low power electronics + low power atomic battery == device is always on + lightweight.
Downside is increased cost and regulatory issues.
I was actually leaning more toward abstracted conceptions being treated as operators, with serial execution of interaction.
Say we have a generic representation of "fire" as an effect. Alone, it doesn't mean much. How hot is it? What shape is it? Etc. By combining it with other representations in a structured form, (the flowcharting/programmatical aspects) we can create not just a boring old fireball, but spells that do all kinds of fun and neat things with fire, even taking fire as a trigger for activation, or other less obvious uses.
The idea was to give every magic user an empty spellbook, and have them make their own spells. The sharing of spells outside the gameworld on forums and the like is expected, and encouraged. For those that are happy to use collctions others have made and tested, it would work well for that, but for those that love to tinker, and like to be unique, there is always the option of being completely unconventional.
The idea I had for the world was to hold no bars, and allow, (and even encourage) people to be "evil" characters, so that there is innate confict in the world, and thus have no need for scripted events. People being grand douches provide all the villany the world could possibly need, and allowing players to do and be so ensures there is always somebody to go beat up.
Part of the idea was to have all items aside from raw materials be user-created in some fashion, with all enchantments being user created. This makes nearly everything worth carrying a unique item, and the booty of kicking a badguy's ass is getting his stuff. In the case of magic users, that includes their spellbook. :D
A modifiably and persistent world with these dynamics would make a lot of parental groups upset, (oh no! that wizard's tower is shaped like a giant cock! And somebody wrote boobies on the walls of the town! That's aweful! Etc.) But for more mature players, it would be very entertaining, and hilarious.
Think a mashup of 4chan's uncensoredness with second life like sandboxing, and WoW hack and slash fun. Where if you want to go on a rampage and tear up the countryside, YOU CAN, but likewise, people can form a lynch mob and kill your avatar, then parade the body in the street.
It would need to have some "iron man" like rules, such that when an avatar dies, its dead, and you have to start a new one and the like. That would help to prevent spurrious destruction of things others have worked hard for as a natural consequence
Sounds like a good chore for a foss project:
Build a custom HAL to be invoked by NTLDR that makes virtual surrogates for win7 to be happy with at kernel init, then proper kernel drivers after that.
Could probably fork and share code with the ReactOS project, actually.
I had a similar idea some time ago, but with an MMORPG setting.
One of the issues that has always rankled me hard was the "cookie cutter" nature of the world events in those games, as well as the limiting gameplay options, so I had this idea for "obfuscated and sigilized" programming syntax as the basis for a game's magic system. Rather than presenting a loop as a nested block of instructions, it would depict it as a "container", with subcomponents inside. Kind of a mix of flowcharting and stylized syntax.
The idea was that the layout of the "enchantment" could be moved and teased to make clever images out of the interconnected containers and symbolic representations, to make the programmatical nature of the system less banal, and much more aesthetically attractive, while simultanously making the kinds of magic and counter magic highly diverse and dynamic.
I never really did much with the idea (ideas aren't worth much, despite what the USPTO and several shell corps may claim. Implementations are far more valuable.), and all the "on paper" mental models I tried kept having non-trivial problems.
I like seeing that somebody had a similar idea, and made a working implementation.
Doing this to a living brain would be "horribly unethical" in just about every way.
This technique makes the brain transparent by gelling up the cytoplasm with a synthetic molecule, then washing out all the lipids.
Lipids are fundementally necessary for proper neural function, and are the primary duty of glial cells to produce and deposit. Mylein is predominantly comprised of lipids. Without it, you would be a quivering and drooling moron. (On a good day.)
[Glial cells chaparone the long axons of neural whitematter, and are the cells that wrap the axon in mylein, among other duties.]
Doing this to a living brain would cause unbelievable neural harm.
Since it achieves the transprency the same basic way (washout of the lipids in the bilayers), it should work on neary all soft tissues, not just neuronal tissue.
So, unless you are researching diseases of adipose tissue, this should still be of real value.
I'd settle for finding the part of the brain implicated in politicians engaging in cronyism, accepting bribes, and the like.
Then we could demand legislation forcing politicians to medicate.
Warrants, as defined in the constitution, must cite specific papers, and specific places. You can't get a constitutionally aboveboard warrant to go "fishing".
Since the government is looking for unidentified persons who may be infringing, so that can then identify and prosecute, they really can't get a warrant.
This is intentional. The limitations on how warrants work were *intended* to frustrate magistrates and government agents.
Making it "easier" for them is how you lose your freedoms.
Sadly, the decadent lifestyles often enjoyed by said windbags consumes a substantial quantity of energy, so the overall net production rate of politically powered enegy genration is going to be remarkably poor.
Supernatural patriarch electrodynamos, however, are clearly over unity.
Repeat after me:
Activation does not make me the owner.
Providing service to another does not make me the owner.
PAYING MONEY IN EXCHANGE FOR A PRODUCT MAKES ME AN OWNER.
What does this mean?
"Somebody activated a cellphone with my identity! Nevermind they paid cash for the phone, and have a reciept! The are using my identity and good name/credit to get service they would otherwise be denied!"
Does this person own *THE PHONE* being serviced?
NO! THEY DON'T! The identity thief paid cash! The theif owns the phone legally, but is getting service illegally.
Does the phone company own the phone in question?
NO! They Don't! The thief paid for it up front, and owns it.
Can either party claim physical rights to that device?
NO! They Can't! The most either can do is demand that service be terminated, and or terminate service.
Did Verizon outstep their authority by serruptitiousy installing malicious firmware on a device that they may not have owned? If the device was not subsidized, then YES. (It can be argued that if the device was not paid for up front, then the identity theft victim owns the handset, having had money exchanged for it. In which case, Verizon should have asked the victim if they wanted to keep the device after being collected [arresting the perp], or if they just want reimbursement. If the victim says the want to keep it, then Verizon needs to ask the legal owner of the device if they can install the firmware. If they say they want reimbursement, then Verizon can do whatever they want with their device.) The issue here is treating the device as Verizon's property by default, which as far as I know, has not been substantiated, and is not a good direction to head down.
So, again:
Things that do NOT make me the owner:
Supplying service to someone to use with the device. (Activating a handsate on the network, providing internet access, etc.)
Being the sole distributor of such devices. (Once the money changes hands, you STOP being the owner. The person who gave you money becomes the owner instead. You lose the right to in any way meddle with that property once the sale completes.)
Things that DO make you the owner:
Exchanging currency for the purchase of the item.
As a general rule, vandalism constitutes the damage or defacement of another person's property without their consent. If the FBI decided that I was a person of interest, and that I needed to be located and arrested, I would be livid, and WOULD sue if they forced a OTA firmware onto the device I legally own outright, having paid cash for it outright. If my telecom company did this per the FBI's request, I would sue them as well for illegal access to a private computer system.
Simply because this guy is "a crook" does NOT mean he does not have rights. Your unwillingness to accept that he does disturbs the hell out of me. The law, and protection of due process is for the guilty and the innocent alike. Until the Judge finds guilt, *ALL* persons of interest are innocent, by definition. That means that any process you would not subject a clearly innocent man to, you should not subject a "crook" to either.
Failure t respect and champion for this is the #1 reason why we are racing headfirst into being a police state.
If you ascribe guilt before process, then you have no place to complain when the system you allow comes to eat you too.
Stop undermining *MY* right to ownership of *MY* devices, by turning a blind eye in cases like these. Letting these fucks get away with it without even questioning is howproperty rights are eroded, and vanish. Asserting "this is only for guilty people!" Is a nonsequitor; our system investigates INNOCENT people, to DETERMINE guilt. Only the judge and jury determine guilt. Preemptive condemnation like you are employing leaves innocent people guilty until proven innocent, and the practices you are supporting are ONLY used that way. As far as the police are concerned, *all* people are guilty. Especially the innocent.
That Verizon would do this without even batting an eye worries the hell out of me, and should worry you too.
This does not follow. Drop in replacement time:
We have a crook with an "illegally activated" laptop. Maybe he registered the serial number under a false name, whatever. The physical device is owned by the person of interest, and not the ISP, nor the OS maker.
The FBI tasks the ISP of the PoI to install a network worm that alter's the laptop's normal operation, so that they can track its access, and thus locate it.
They do so.
In doing so, they have vandalized that person's private property (the laptop) by illegally installing software on a platform they do not hold legal rights to. This is functionally no different from the FBI telling microsoft to spy on people using their kinects, or any other forced, serrutpitious update that damages something that the person of interest purchased.
Here's a hint, just because verizon holds a monopolistic deathgrip on CDMA doesn't mean that the aircard in question *must* be used on their service. As such, verizon does not have defacto authority to chage the device's firmware without notification. They can say "update, or we won't service", but that is not the same thing.
Verizon owns the service. The person of interest owns the phone. Verizon says the device was illegally activated on their network. Their authority ends on their end; they blacklist the IMEI, and the device no longer gets services. The devie is unaltered.
Here, they pushed an OTA firmware to the device without informing the user or getting consent. They vandalized his property to conduct this operation. Verizon does not own the aircard.
Please stop drinking the industry koolaid.
But SHODAN uses fractal data storage technology! She will just regenerate the damaged nodes, then fire the mining laser at earth, just like she promised to!
Fools left its control systems using the default passwords!
(Giggle)
And it would appear that many other organizations, and even this court judge are either in agreement with that position, or are willing to consider that position's legitimacy, which is why this case has not been dismissed.
Like all things, the devil's in the details.
Reading comprehension fail.
The FBI agreed that it *needed* a warranted (eg, that what they were doing with the stingray needed one), but said that what verizon did for them was authorized by a court order, and did not need one.
This does not say that they in fact obtained such warrant, which they did not.
I was under the impression that verizon complied with the FBI request in "rubber stamp" fashion, and not due to a warrant. (Which was why their use of the stingray had caused judges to get stingy when discovered.)
Pushing firmware to devices without permission/authorization from the downstream user can count as vandalism, if the device is not subsidized by verizon, and is the user's personal property. I don't use verizon, so this does not really impact me except as being a chilling effect, as other providers will be compelled to comply by govt agencies as well.
The above 3 posts fail to take into account that all persons of interest are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, so all tapping and tracing activities need to be seen as if they were performed on people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. Approaching it from the "we helped them catch a dirtbag" angle is not justifiable, unless you operate under the "guilty until proven innocent" model instead.
A warrant has to be issued, it has to be specific in what is to be taken, and specific in the place, time, and person of interest investigated.
Your "la dee dah" blithe response to this kind of thing is exactly why the USA is turning more and more into a police state every day. Keep that in mind.
Issuing a custom radio firmware for a data only device, so that it responds to a telephone network signal demonstrates that verizon is willing to place nonstandard firmware on devices on their network, for the express purposes of aiding investigations that lack proper warrants.
This is a very bad thing Verizon. A Very Bad Thing.
Don't underestimate the impact that losing public confidence can have on your business. Being so self-conceited as to feel that you don't have to worry because you have cornered the market would only add fuel to the fire.
Plan you PR damage control messages carefully. Smile, you're on candid camera.
(Joke!)
Don't be silly! You become a sheodinger's fireball!
Much like the alive and yet also dead cat of infamous repute, our stalwart and jaunty astronaught is in the *perfect* unobserved/unobservable condition!
He is both alive, and dead, at the same time! The schrodinger's cat is also alive, and dead from poisonous gas!
As such, he can simultaneously survive, be burned to a crisp, or be pulled apart like stringcheese, all at the same time!
Oh yeah,
For the Xray driving win95 machine:
Take your existing image, and push it to a temporary physical volume. Defragment it and pair it down.
Use something like partition magic to shrink it down to a suitable size.
Use that image for the ramdisk. If you can't shrink it small enough, bite your knuckles, and install win95 pluspack. This will give you drivespace3. (Uninstall desktop themes afterward.) Compress the volume, (it *will* take all day.) Then defragment. Use the drivespace3 managment program to resize the CVF. Make it as small as possible. Shut down, then partition magic it to shrink it up, then use that.
If you are so unfortunate as to have a fat32 volume and not fat16, (and as such can't use drivespace to squash it), you have to MANUALLY build a fat16 bootable volume, copy all the files into it, doctor msdos.sys to be the proper kind, and hope for the best.
Slick!
Here's some advice to help save time.
These volumes are small, and you want to use drivespace to cram as much into them as you can. Consider using a dos 6.22 diskette image (or boot cd) with the old dos version of drivespace to initially partition and format the base volume you will later image. This will let you create the compressed volume file very early in the setup process, saving you a very lengthly compression operation later. Drivespace and drivespace3 volumes can ONLY be FAT16 for the host. A Dos6.22 partition, format, and drivespace compress cycle ensures a suitable foundation to install on. You DON'T need a full dos 6.22 install.
Boot the dos 6.22 boot disk, partition and format the volume with the /s argument, then drivespace it. Copy any cdrom dos drivers and the dos 6.22 mscdex.exe to the compressed bootable volume.
Make sure the partition type is CHS and not LBA.
Pop in the install CD for whatever flavor of 9x you are going to use. It will happily install onto the dos6.22 drvspace packed volume, and pack as it installs seamlessly.
When it finishes, the install process automatically upgrades the volume to drivespace3 format, and updates the drvspace.bin and dblspace.bin drivers on the root for you. Easy peasy.
Configure the system, install drivers, etc. Set the swap file to either be OFF, or on the spinny disk.
Run compression agent, set to "ultrapack all files", click OK, then go do something else for about an hour or two, while it crushes everything down.
Defragment the system.
Shut it down, then image the partition.
Build the EXT2 boot medium, put memdisk and the image file on, set it all up, and feel good about yourself.
Not unless they have access to fdisk, which you can remove from the image.
Format.com will only work on msdos(fat16/fat32) partitions. Windows 95/98 will not even try to mount a non-DOS partition. HDDs are treated quite differently from unformatted or "other system" formatted floppies or removable disks. Quite literally, the only tool that can touch the ext2 volume is fdisk.
Remove it from the image, problem solved.