The Karma sutra was written by Vatsyayana sometime between the 1st and 6th century AD. If that's not a technical manual, I don't know what is. Oh wait.. this is Slashdot.
Kama Sutra.
Kama == Love (also the god of love, similar to Cupid)
Karma == Action and of course all the other things it means to us now.
It is indeed a technical manual on the art of love. I'm not sure it was the oldest of its type. However, this astrolabe manual describes the use of a technological device. I think this more closely relates to the connotation of a computer manual or man page than any "pillow book," but that is a matter of opinion.
Written in 1391 by Geoffrey Chauncer for his ten year old son Lewis (Lowys), the manual explains in great detail but very rough spelling and grammar,
Actually, the spelling in the manual is correct for the period, unlike slashdot articles, where one cannot even expect proper nouns like Chaucer to be spelt correctly.:P
"USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times. Prepare to be slashdotted."
This sure does look to me like yet another patent without any apparent ingenuity at all.
But before getting ignored by the USPTO,/.ers might like to note first, that the filing date of the application leading to this wretched patent was Nov 23, 1999, so anything done in 2000 can't be relied on as prior art.
Second, the subject of the patent appears to be the coordinated allocation of email addresses and matching web addresses, such as an email address of willrobinson@physicians.org, along with a web address of http://willrobinson.physicians.org.
While I would personally agree that this is a case of 'Eureka - not!', that won't cut any ice at the USPTO. In reality, evidence of relevant prior art would be needed to take this out.
The prior art would include (a) anything that was used in the US or published in print before 23 Nov 1998, (b) anything used in the US or published in print in the period 11/23/98-11/22/99 -- except insofar as the 'inventors' don't prove that they 'invented' it first, and (c) anything 'invented' in the US before the named inventors did it, whenever that was.
-wb-
Firstly, this story is a dupe. Secondly, as was pointed out in the first story, what you (and the patent) describe has been common practice since the beginning of DNS, so it should not be a problem finding prior art. What is a problem is that the USPTO seems so intent on allowing clueless morons make such important decisions about technology patents. They really need to be reviewed by people who are "sufficiently skilled in the art" so that patents on thinsg which are obvious to such people (or known by them to be previously done / common practice ) will no longer be granted.
I am getting really tired of this pattern of
1) Find something a lot of people are already doing
2) File for a patent describing just that
3) Sue everyone
4) ???
5) Profit!
We need to make doing this a federal crime punishable by hundreds of years in pound-me-in-the-ass prison or else we will continue to suffer the consequences.
I was going to write something about using then realised that slashdot strips this. Woo.
Unfortunately this was probably necessary to stop ascii pr0n and penis bird posts on/. Yet another example of crapflooders succeeding in forcing Taco to break things to stop them. Remember, kids; if we have to change our way of life then the terrorists^wtrolls win!:)
Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.
Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.
So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.
Great, so when does GWB go on trial for putting arsenic in our drinking water? Oh, wait...
The fact is corporations knowingly dump toxic chemicals in our drinking water and in other places, and to the extent which they are fined it amounts to a slap on the wrist. They continue to do it. If you or I did that we would be put in jail where we cannot put any more chemicals in people's water, but with corporations we are still arguing today about how much arsenic and mercury is acceptable for them to dump each day, knowing that they will dump more than is acceptable and will be given a break anyway.
As for this bit about criminal offenses, you are wrong. Theft, fraud, and all kinds of other crimes which would be heinous crimes if committed by individuals, are committed by corporations every day. Usually the corporation gets away with these things. If they are punished, what that usually means is the corporation pays a small fine as the cost of doing business and the individuals responsible get a pay raise. The worst thing that can happen in most cases is that the individuals get promoted to a higher paying job elsewhere in the company or retire with a hefty package.
It's the same with government officials. They regularly commit acts which, if done by ordinary citizens, would be prosecuted as horrible crimes and result in long jail terms, but the worst thing which happens to them usually is that they have to "step down" or resign. BFD.
It doesn't matter wether or not media player or ie are bundled or not. It has been my experience that the only reason people use these things is because they don't know any better. Absolutely everybody I have shown Firebird has switched. Some even thank me, almost as if I saved their lives. A single ad campaign for Mozilla Firebird will destroy Internet Explorer. People just have to be told it exists. Same for winamp 5. If you show people that it can do more than media player ever could they'll switch because it is better. I really hope that mplayer for windows actually works soon though. That will be the best.
The problem is not so much that they are bundled. I originally thought this was a good idea, even though I used the bundled IE to pop on the internet and download Netscape immediately. But Microsoft has integrated these apps which are known for their terrible security and viral worminess into the OS, making it impossible to get rid of them and decreasing the security and reliability of the OS considerably. To my mind this is the greatest harm which has come from Microsoft's practices.
"Could this be the start of an open source Windows version?"
Probably not. I think that the best we can hope for is MS being required to publish the file (e.g.: Word or Access) formats and make them available, at little or no cost, for interoperability.
That would actually be worse than the current situation. As things are now, reverse engineered MS formats can be used for GPL projects. If Microsoft releases the file formats but charges a license, even $1, for usage of these formats, it will be incompatable with the GPL and we will be unable to use their formats AT ALL. In fact this seems to be what they are doing with the FAT file system.
#1 if you judge by food quality rather than the balance sheet.
Wendy's, Jack in the Box, Sonic, and (in Texas) Whataburger make their food fresh when you order it. This is a key to their quality. McDonald's and Burger King cook the beef beforehand, leave it in a steam cabinet for hours, assemble and nuke your burger in a microwave before putting it under a heat lamp for around thirty minutes.
This is why for the most part I go to the fresh places.
"For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?"
As my husband tells me, "boxen" is the multiple of computer box. It does not apply to any other kind of box.
Sort of like "mouses" are multiple computer pointing devices...
Holy crap. Just when I thought the slashdot pollution of the english language could not get any worse. NO NO NO mice are always mice regardless (notice the lack of the superfluous "ir") of context. "Mouses" is never correct except in parody of illiterates.
Likewise "boxen" is a slashdot invention. Someone somewhere thougt it would sound cool to say that and it has caught on, God help us. But yes it is supposed to mean multiple computers.
That's pronounced Horse Doovers. They are what is left after they turn a colt into a gelding. Now that you know what they are, I'll bet you'll never eat them again!
"All this adds up to prove that the Republicans' vaunted belief in the rule of law is complete bullshit. The party has been taken over by outlaws who seem to think the law does not apply to them. The fact that this kind of cracking can occur at the highest levels of government with NO investigation into prosecution leads directly to a determination of gross negligence on the part of Bush, since he is teh top cop in the country and it is his job to make sure the laws are enforced and obeyed..."
well, what are you going to do about it? nothing. just like everyone else. i hope you feel better now that you have your rant off your chest.
anonymous coward
Actually I am going to do something about it. Besides excercising my 1st amendment rights in criticising the government and hopefully educating a few other voters thereby, I am going to be voting for the non-Bush candidate this time round. In fact it will mark the first time I have voted for a Democrat for President.
If enough people do that, we will get a new sheriff and get to roll the dice again as to whether s/he will be at least more earnest.
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
This is in the last paragraph of the article referenced by the slashdot story. If true, this clearly says there was no "hacking" or "cracking" involved. It was a shared server for both parties. The network share was unprotected and could be mounted by anyone who (essentially) clicked on the drive letter to map it to their box. That is neither hacking nor cracking by any definition.
This may be an ethics violation, but it certainly wasn't computer intrusion. You may use the tired, old analogy that compares this to entering an unlocked house and swiping something. I don't think that comparison fits here(reasons left as an exercise for the reader!).
cr
IANAL, but legally speaking yes it was cracking even if what you say is correct. If you are not supposed to access something and you do, you are guilty of computer crimes. This has been through court time and again. If you log in with a name and password after being fired because your company forgot to delete your account, you are breaking the law. If I use a key to enter my ex-roomate's house or old apartment after being kicked out for not paying my rent, I am trespassing. It all amounts to the same thing. The barriers do not have to be there; it is a matter of whether access was allowed on purpose and you knew whether you were supposed to be there or not.
" All this adds up to prove that the Republicans' vaunted belief in the rule of law is complete bullshit. The party has been taken over by outlaws who seem to think the law does not apply to them."
I think you're swinging a bit too wide here. One or two staffers (read: young, impulsive) stole the memos. I very much doubt anything was cracked unless you call accessing an unprotected pubic share cracking. It's not like the Senators themselves were sitting there performing DES cracks.
Perhaps if this occurred in isolation I would indeed be striking too bold. However, even in the context of this event there is the fact that the Republicans seem to think this is not worthy of criminal investigation. Also, you and several other posters seem to assert that this was an unprotected share. But the article would seem to disagree since it says it was a computer flaw that allowed the access. Granted, it is all very vague. It could have been an unpatched box with a remotely exploitable flaw, or an unprotected share. It seems that the Democrats thought these memos were protected, however.
Now, going back into my assertion that the rule of law is out the window, no administration in the history of this country has displayed more disdain for legal procedures. There are the crusades of Ashcroft who seems to think it is right to arrest people for distributing legal medicine and then suppress evidence at trial because he feels like it, not to mention his classes on abusing the USAPATRIOT Act. There is Bush's continued assertion that he does not need Congress in order to create new laws and dissolve treaties. Then there is the whole bit where international law is completely ignored.
This administration does what they feel like doing, and the law be damned. They do not care about the democratic process or what the law says at all, and it shows.
Haxx0rX has a dial-up account with 'unlimited' access. He uses this account to down the store backend to a large shopping website. The admin of this site contacts the feds after locating the originating IP of the attack. He hands the information over to the feds. The fed contacts the abuse department of Haxx0rX's ISP. The ISP responds "Oh, I am sorry, we have already deleted those logs. But, yep, that is one of our IPs. So sorry!". The company who was hacked no longer has any legal recourse against the hacker because you deleted the logs in an unreasonably short amount of time (30 days?! When I did abuse, we held on to everything for a minimum of 2 years to avoid these situations). The only option left is to file a suit against the ISP for whatever damages you incured. This is simple negligence. The ISP will quickly lose the case due to their log deleting policy, and the hacker is never found.
Common carriers are not responsible for the actions of their users. This principle is enshrined in law and conforms firmly to common sense. If the ISP had a negligent policy that allowed HackerX to continue hacking after they had reason to believe this was the case, or they failed to cooperate with the authorities there might be some room to argue negligence or complicity. Otherwise, no.
"Critical point of failure in your post. It's not your job to "prove you didn't do it". If someone makes an accusation against you or you're charged with a crime, it's THEIR job to prove you DID."
They already have their proof you did it. They have a record indicating that an IP belonging to your business downloaded the pirated material. It then becomes your responsibility, as a business, to prove a particular user did it. Very, very simple stuff, I don't know why all these people miss it.
No, first off they have no proof that anything of the kind occurred. They have evidence which has yet to be admitted into a court of law which they believe suggests a crime occurred, and further evidence which might in their view be used in conjunction with further data which you may or may not have to corroborate their theory. Once a judge has looked at this evidence they may compel by subpoena the disclosure of such evidence as you might reasonably be expected to have.
It is your job, and everyone's job, to faithfully attempt to comply with orders of the court. It is not anyone's job to make other people's civil cases for them (barring of course the retained attorneys for plaintiff). In any case, no case can have a presumed outcome so there is no absolute proof. Also you have things backwards. Downloading copyrighted material is not a crime. Distributing it without the permission of the copyright holder is a civil offense to be determined by the preponderance of the evidence.
"And, IANAL either, but somehow I doubt you could be held responsible for someone else doing bad things in your car just because you loaned it to them."
This is criminal negligence. People are charged with this all the time for letting a drunk friend drive their car.
There you go bringing that straw man to life again. It is criminal negligence to let a person you know to be intoxicated drive ANY car. It is not criminal negligence to lend someone your car, which they then use to rob a bank or get drunk and run over schoolchildren. There is a very basic legal principle here which as a non-lawyer I do not know the name, but essentially there is a certain level of due diligence required for any transaction. This due diligence cannot extend into the realm of omniscience. It is dictated by what is reasonable to expect business owners to do in checking things out and generally very little is required.
The flawed logic I am trying to dis-spell is the "I could start an ISP, then my friends and I can hack sites all day long, not keep logs, and be immune from any prosecution." idea.
How about the "I run an ISP, and I want to spend time running the ISP and serving my customers, not spending it in court" idea. This alone may motivate ISPs to stop holding information about users because they cannot afford to spend time hunting down logs every time some asshole lawyer finds a reaosn to send them a nasty email.
Thats irrelevant. ISPs will know who had what IP and at what times.
Sometimes they will, or will think they will, based on logs. Of course this is going to depend greatly on the accuracy both of the ISPs' logs and the RIAA's information. Both are historically innaccurate and relying on such data have generally yielded many false results. For instance, the RIAA has sued people who were distributing their own or independant mp3s as well as people who clearly had no capability to run the software needed to distribute them (in the case of several Mac users who were sued based on data from Kazaa).
Also the logs are ephemeral as several have pointed out. ISPs do not have to keep these logs for any specific amount of time and may end up following suit on libraries if this keeps up. (Libraries responded to USAPATRIOT Act requirements to divulge information on patrons by not keeping that information anymore).
Which machine are you trying to export the filesystems from? The Linux machine? Or the Mac OS X machine? Read those articles and come back to us if you have questions.
In July I asked a personal friend of mine, who is associated in several capacities with many of the current and ex leadership of Novell, and who is also a recognized scholor of church history, if we should persue a course of action that would lead to Darl's excommunication from the church.
His immediate response was: "Has he done any harm to you personally?"
That pretty much ended the discussion.
Unless Darl does something to harm someone personally or commits a felony offense, it would be inapropriate to make a church case against him.
If you do not use and never want to use Linux he has not harmed you personally. If you do not feel harm in paying higher prices for worse software then he has not harmed you personally. If you do not care how many tax dollars are wasted on poorly made expensive software he has not harmed you personally. But it is unlikely all of these things are true of very many people.
Darl has publicly claimed that all linux users are thieves and terrorists and anti-american communists. He has tried to claim that SCO owns Linux and that people will have to pay SCO for Linux. He has written to congress asking that they outlaw GPL software because it is a threat to national security. All of these things, besides his many other adventures, have harmed me personally, and they may have harmed you.
It might cost 50 cents to manufacture, but it certainly didn't cost 50 cents to record, to market, to have the artwork produced, to pay everybody.
Sadly, it probably did. There have been real numbers published that included all that and the poster is not far off. As another poster pointed out, the cost of pressing the actual CD was probably a few cents, and that's being pretty conservative. Even in very small runs you can hit your $0.50 mark for pressing CDs, but the RIAA CDs get pressed in runs of millions, so the cost is much much less and the money spent on promotion is divided that much more.
Not sure I saw much outcry when someone posted internal memos from Diebold?
Cracking Diebold would have been bad, no matter what. However it is possible that the Diebold memos were leaked by concerned whistleblowers who did not want to lose their jobs but did want to fix problems their bosses would not let them fix. Regardless of the reason for the leak, the focus of the stories was generally on the content of the memos themselves and the implications for the country.
It could be argued that leaking information like that from Diebold, where *not* leaking the information would have caused great and possibly irreperable harm, is, if not justified at least a lesser evil than leaving the information confidential. Besides, in the case of Diebold the information shoudl not have been secret. They had an obligation to disclose the information about the potential for expoitation and to fix it.
It could be argued that everything about Diebold's operation should be completely transparent and publically accessable. Whereas I would say that life and our society would be better if the voting system were open source and everything working toward developing and using it should be public (as is the case with paper ballots) and that all government documents should be accessable (as dictated by FOIA) I am willing to concede some privacy to Diebold and the Senate as is allowed by law. Nevertheless Diebold's failure to act appropriately is at best gross negligence and at worst potentially opening the door for another fixed election come 2004 (as promised by Diebold's CEO).
This isn't exactly a remote exploit, It is more like putting something on a public share that should have been on a private share.
Oh, really? So you know the exact nature of the computer glitch for a fact? Would you care to reveal your sources? Because the rest of us are pretty much guessing here. Or are you just pulling this out of your ass?
And I know that I have in bored times browsed around the various public shares at various workplaces and been appalled at the "private" information that was available.
I am sure that this is true. However, you are not supposed to be browsing around looking for unprotected shares to take data from. Even though you do not have to expoit any code flaws, you are exploiting other security flaws. Yes, doing this is illegal and it has been punished before. Yes, it does seem kind of silly. But basically when it comes to computers, or anything else for that matter, you are not suppose dto be browsing around where you do not have a legitemate right to be. To do otherwise is indeed wrong.
Even if this is what happened (perhaps the dems put this data in My Documents folders on public desktops running Windows 95 with those folders shared without a password!) it does not make the Republicans' accessing and use of the information kosher.
The truely disgusting part about all of this is that the "Liberally-biased media" (in the eyes of Fox News and all the Conservative pundits) probably won't even pick up on this -- think we'll be seeing this on CNN or MSNBC anytime soon? I doubt it. Imagine the uproar if the Dems got caught doing something like this....
Actually, the "liberal media" roasted and lambasted the Clinton administration for several similar actions, including TravelGate. Not that anything ever came of it, though. That is the problem. Politicians have been spying on each other forever. In this country, burglary, computer crime, and leaking of confidential information is perfectly alright as long as it is done by politicians to their enemies.
In the history of this country only one president and one staffer ever got into ANY real trouble over something like this, and then only because they made powerful enemies themselves and the public became afraid of the extent to which they had pushed their agenda. At the time, and at many opportunities since (especially seing as the staffer now is a powerful talk radio DJ) they have pointed out that others went even further than they did and with regularity. Until all sides are willing to stop engaging in such shenanighans and therefore opening themselves up to mutual prosecution, and perpetrators start truly being punished, we will continue to have this sort of thing blighting our system of government.
Slashdot Mirror
The Karma sutra was written by Vatsyayana sometime between the 1st and 6th century AD. If that's not a technical manual, I don't know what is. Oh wait.. this is Slashdot.
Kama Sutra.
Kama == Love (also the god of love, similar to Cupid)
Karma == Action and of course all the other things it means to us now.
It is indeed a technical manual on the art of love. I'm not sure it was the oldest of its type. However, this astrolabe manual describes the use of a technological device. I think this more closely relates to the connotation of a computer manual or man page than any "pillow book," but that is a matter of opinion.
Written in 1391 by Geoffrey Chauncer for his ten year old son Lewis (Lowys), the manual explains in great detail but very rough spelling and grammar,
Actually, the spelling in the manual is correct for the period, unlike slashdot articles, where one cannot even expect proper nouns like Chaucer to be spelt correctly. :P
"USPTO, you have pissed us off too many times.
/.ers might like to note first, that the filing date of the application leading to this wretched patent was Nov 23, 1999, so anything done in 2000 can't be relied on as prior art.
Prepare to be slashdotted."
This sure does look to me like yet another patent without any apparent ingenuity at all.
But before getting ignored by the USPTO,
Second, the subject of the patent appears to be the coordinated allocation of email addresses and matching web addresses, such as an email address of willrobinson@physicians.org, along with a web address of http://willrobinson.physicians.org.
While I would personally agree that this is a case of 'Eureka - not!', that won't cut any ice at the USPTO. In reality, evidence of relevant prior art would be needed to take this out.
The prior art would include (a) anything that was used in the US or published in print before 23 Nov 1998, (b) anything used in the US or published in print in the period 11/23/98-11/22/99 -- except insofar as the 'inventors' don't prove that they 'invented' it first, and (c) anything 'invented' in the US before the named inventors did it, whenever that was.
-wb-
Firstly, this story is a dupe. Secondly, as was pointed out in the first story, what you (and the patent) describe has been common practice since the beginning of DNS, so it should not be a problem finding prior art. What is a problem is that the USPTO seems so intent on allowing clueless morons make such important decisions about technology patents. They really need to be reviewed by people who are "sufficiently skilled in the art" so that patents on thinsg which are obvious to such people (or known by them to be previously done / common practice ) will no longer be granted.
I am getting really tired of this pattern of
1) Find something a lot of people are already doing
2) File for a patent describing just that
3) Sue everyone
4) ???
5) Profit!
We need to make doing this a federal crime punishable by hundreds of years in pound-me-in-the-ass prison or else we will continue to suffer the consequences.
I was going to write something about using then realised that slashdot strips this. Woo.
Unfortunately this was probably necessary to stop ascii pr0n and penis bird posts on /. Yet another example of crapflooders succeeding in forcing Taco to break things to stop them. Remember, kids; if we have to change our way of life then the terrorists^wtrolls win! :)
Nonsense. Where do you people get this crap?
Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.
Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.
So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.
Great, so when does GWB go on trial for putting arsenic in our drinking water? Oh, wait...
The fact is corporations knowingly dump toxic chemicals in our drinking water and in other places, and to the extent which they are fined it amounts to a slap on the wrist. They continue to do it. If you or I did that we would be put in jail where we cannot put any more chemicals in people's water, but with corporations we are still arguing today about how much arsenic and mercury is acceptable for them to dump each day, knowing that they will dump more than is acceptable and will be given a break anyway.
As for this bit about criminal offenses, you are wrong. Theft, fraud, and all kinds of other crimes which would be heinous crimes if committed by individuals, are committed by corporations every day. Usually the corporation gets away with these things. If they are punished, what that usually means is the corporation pays a small fine as the cost of doing business and the individuals responsible get a pay raise. The worst thing that can happen in most cases is that the individuals get promoted to a higher paying job elsewhere in the company or retire with a hefty package.
It's the same with government officials. They regularly commit acts which, if done by ordinary citizens, would be prosecuted as horrible crimes and result in long jail terms, but the worst thing which happens to them usually is that they have to "step down" or resign. BFD.
idiot, your parent post is soliciting an an estimation of some actual monetary amount, not some dumbass redundant piece of information.
get a clue, or stfu.
How about you get some coffee. While you are at it, you should look up "rhetorical question" and "humour" for good measure! :)
It doesn't matter wether or not media player or ie are bundled or not. It has been my experience that the only reason people use these things is because they don't know any better. Absolutely everybody I have shown Firebird has switched. Some even thank me, almost as if I saved their lives. A single ad campaign for Mozilla Firebird will destroy Internet Explorer. People just have to be told it exists. Same for winamp 5. If you show people that it can do more than media player ever could they'll switch because it is better. I really hope that mplayer for windows actually works soon though. That will be the best.
The problem is not so much that they are bundled. I originally thought this was a good idea, even though I used the bundled IE to pop on the internet and download Netscape immediately. But Microsoft has integrated these apps which are known for their terrible security and viral worminess into the OS, making it impossible to get rid of them and decreasing the security and reliability of the OS considerably. To my mind this is the greatest harm which has come from Microsoft's practices.
"Could this be the start of an open source Windows version?"
Probably not. I think that the best we can hope for is MS being required to publish the file (e.g.: Word or Access) formats and make them available, at little or no cost, for interoperability.
That would actually be worse than the current situation. As things are now, reverse engineered MS formats can be used for GPL projects. If Microsoft releases the file formats but charges a license, even $1, for usage of these formats, it will be incompatable with the GPL and we will be unable to use their formats AT ALL. In fact this seems to be what they are doing with the FAT file system.
#1 if you judge by food quality rather than the balance sheet.
Wendy's, Jack in the Box, Sonic, and (in Texas) Whataburger make their food fresh when you order it. This is a key to their quality. McDonald's and Burger King cook the beef beforehand, leave it in a steam cabinet for hours, assemble and nuke your burger in a microwave before putting it under a heat lamp for around thirty minutes.
This is why for the most part I go to the fresh places.
I belive the there is a secret HR database out there that keeps track of your job hunting and bridges that you have burned.
But does it run on Linux?
"For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?"
As my husband tells me, "boxen" is the multiple of computer box. It does not apply to any other kind of box.
Sort of like "mouses" are multiple computer pointing devices...
Holy crap. Just when I thought the slashdot pollution of the english language could not get any worse. NO NO NO mice are always mice regardless (notice the lack of the superfluous "ir") of context. "Mouses" is never correct except in parody of illiterates.
Likewise "boxen" is a slashdot invention. Someone somewhere thougt it would sound cool to say that and it has caught on, God help us. But yes it is supposed to mean multiple computers.
That's pronounced Horse Doovers. They are what is left after they turn a colt into a gelding. Now that you know what they are, I'll bet you'll never eat them again!
And here I thought they were Whores d'Ovaries!
"All this adds up to prove that the Republicans' vaunted belief in the rule of law is complete bullshit. The party has been taken over by outlaws who seem to think the law does not apply to them. The fact that this kind of cracking can occur at the highest levels of government with NO investigation into prosecution leads directly to a determination of gross negligence on the part of Bush, since he is teh top cop in the country and it is his job to make sure the laws are enforced and obeyed..."
well, what are you going to do about it? nothing. just like everyone else. i hope you feel better now that you have your rant off your chest.
anonymous coward
Actually I am going to do something about it. Besides excercising my 1st amendment rights in criticising the government and hopefully educating a few other voters thereby, I am going to be voting for the non-Bush candidate this time round. In fact it will mark the first time I have voted for a Democrat for President.
If enough people do that, we will get a new sheriff and get to roll the dice again as to whether s/he will be at least more earnest.
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
This is in the last paragraph of the article referenced by the slashdot story. If true, this clearly says there was no "hacking" or "cracking" involved. It was a shared server for both parties. The network share was unprotected and could be mounted by anyone who (essentially) clicked on the drive letter to map it to their box. That is neither hacking nor cracking by any definition.
This may be an ethics violation, but it certainly wasn't computer intrusion. You may use the tired, old analogy that compares this to entering an unlocked house and swiping something. I don't think that comparison fits here(reasons left as an exercise for the reader!).
cr
IANAL, but legally speaking yes it was cracking even if what you say is correct. If you are not supposed to access something and you do, you are guilty of computer crimes. This has been through court time and again. If you log in with a name and password after being fired because your company forgot to delete your account, you are breaking the law. If I use a key to enter my ex-roomate's house or old apartment after being kicked out for not paying my rent, I am trespassing. It all amounts to the same thing. The barriers do not have to be there; it is a matter of whether access was allowed on purpose and you knew whether you were supposed to be there or not.
" All this adds up to prove that the Republicans' vaunted belief in the rule of law is complete bullshit. The party has been taken over by outlaws who seem to think the law does not apply to them."
I think you're swinging a bit too wide here. One or two staffers (read: young, impulsive) stole the memos. I very much doubt anything was cracked unless you call accessing an unprotected pubic share cracking. It's not like the Senators themselves were sitting there performing DES cracks.
Perhaps if this occurred in isolation I would indeed be striking too bold. However, even in the context of this event there is the fact that the Republicans seem to think this is not worthy of criminal investigation. Also, you and several other posters seem to assert that this was an unprotected share. But the article would seem to disagree since it says it was a computer flaw that allowed the access. Granted, it is all very vague. It could have been an unpatched box with a remotely exploitable flaw, or an unprotected share. It seems that the Democrats thought these memos were protected, however.
Now, going back into my assertion that the rule of law is out the window, no administration in the history of this country has displayed more disdain for legal procedures. There are the crusades of Ashcroft who seems to think it is right to arrest people for distributing legal medicine and then suppress evidence at trial because he feels like it, not to mention his classes on abusing the USAPATRIOT Act. There is Bush's continued assertion that he does not need Congress in order to create new laws and dissolve treaties. Then there is the whole bit where international law is completely ignored.
This administration does what they feel like doing, and the law be damned. They do not care about the democratic process or what the law says at all, and it shows.
Negative. Let's make up a situation:
Haxx0rX has a dial-up account with 'unlimited' access. He uses this account to down the store backend to a large shopping website. The admin of this site contacts the feds after locating the originating IP of the attack. He hands the information over to the feds. The fed contacts the abuse department of Haxx0rX's ISP. The ISP responds "Oh, I am sorry, we have already deleted those logs. But, yep, that is one of our IPs. So sorry!". The company who was hacked no longer has any legal recourse against the hacker because you deleted the logs in an unreasonably short amount of time (30 days?! When I did abuse, we held on to everything for a minimum of 2 years to avoid these situations). The only option left is to file a suit against the ISP for whatever damages you incured. This is simple negligence. The ISP will quickly lose the case due to their log deleting policy, and the hacker is never found.
Common carriers are not responsible for the actions of their users. This principle is enshrined in law and conforms firmly to common sense. If the ISP had a negligent policy that allowed HackerX to continue hacking after they had reason to believe this was the case, or they failed to cooperate with the authorities there might be some room to argue negligence or complicity. Otherwise, no.
"Critical point of failure in your post. It's not your job to "prove you didn't do it". If someone makes an accusation against you or you're charged with a crime, it's THEIR job to prove you DID."
They already have their proof you did it. They have a record indicating that an IP belonging to your business downloaded the pirated material. It then becomes your responsibility, as a business, to prove a particular user did it. Very, very simple stuff, I don't know why all these people miss it.
No, first off they have no proof that anything of the kind occurred. They have evidence which has yet to be admitted into a court of law which they believe suggests a crime occurred, and further evidence which might in their view be used in conjunction with further data which you may or may not have to corroborate their theory. Once a judge has looked at this evidence they may compel by subpoena the disclosure of such evidence as you might reasonably be expected to have.
It is your job, and everyone's job, to faithfully attempt to comply with orders of the court. It is not anyone's job to make other people's civil cases for them (barring of course the retained attorneys for plaintiff). In any case, no case can have a presumed outcome so there is no absolute proof. Also you have things backwards. Downloading copyrighted material is not a crime. Distributing it without the permission of the copyright holder is a civil offense to be determined by the preponderance of the evidence.
"And, IANAL either, but somehow I doubt you could be held responsible for someone else doing bad things in your car just because you loaned it to them."
This is criminal negligence. People are charged with this all the time for letting a drunk friend drive their car.
There you go bringing that straw man to life again. It is criminal negligence to let a person you know to be intoxicated drive ANY car. It is not criminal negligence to lend someone your car, which they then use to rob a bank or get drunk and run over schoolchildren. There is a very basic legal principle here which as a non-lawyer I do not know the name, but essentially there is a certain level of due diligence required for any transaction. This due diligence cannot extend into the realm of omniscience. It is dictated by what is reasonable to expect business owners to do in checking things out and generally very little is required.
The flawed logic I am trying to dis-spell is the "I could start an ISP, then my friends and I can hack sites all day long, not keep logs, and be immune from any prosecution." idea.
How about the "I run an ISP, and I want to spend time running the ISP and serving my customers, not spending it in court" idea. This alone may motivate ISPs to stop holding information about users because they cannot afford to spend time hunting down logs every time some asshole lawyer finds a reaosn to send them a nasty email.
Thats irrelevant. ISPs will know who had what IP and at what times.
Sometimes they will, or will think they will, based on logs. Of course this is going to depend greatly on the accuracy both of the ISPs' logs and the RIAA's information. Both are historically innaccurate and relying on such data have generally yielded many false results. For instance, the RIAA has sued people who were distributing their own or independant mp3s as well as people who clearly had no capability to run the software needed to distribute them (in the case of several Mac users who were sued based on data from Kazaa).
Also the logs are ephemeral as several have pointed out. ISPs do not have to keep these logs for any specific amount of time and may end up following suit on libraries if this keeps up. (Libraries responded to USAPATRIOT Act requirements to divulge information on patrons by not keeping that information anymore).
Which machine are you trying to export the filesystems from? The Linux machine? Or the Mac OS X machine? Read those articles and come back to us if you have questions.
In July I asked a personal friend of mine, who is associated in several capacities with many of the current and ex leadership of Novell, and who is also a recognized scholor of church history, if we should persue a course of action that would lead to Darl's excommunication from the church.
His immediate response was: "Has he done any harm to you personally?"
That pretty much ended the discussion.
Unless Darl does something to harm someone personally or commits a felony offense, it would be inapropriate to make a church case against him.
If you do not use and never want to use Linux he has not harmed you personally. If you do not feel harm in paying higher prices for worse software then he has not harmed you personally. If you do not care how many tax dollars are wasted on poorly made expensive software he has not harmed you personally. But it is unlikely all of these things are true of very many people.
Darl has publicly claimed that all linux users are thieves and terrorists and anti-american communists. He has tried to claim that SCO owns Linux and that people will have to pay SCO for Linux. He has written to congress asking that they outlaw GPL software because it is a threat to national security. All of these things, besides his many other adventures, have harmed me personally, and they may have harmed you.
It might cost 50 cents to manufacture, but it certainly didn't cost 50 cents to record, to market, to have the artwork produced, to pay everybody.
Sadly, it probably did. There have been real numbers published that included all that and the poster is not far off. As another poster pointed out, the cost of pressing the actual CD was probably a few cents, and that's being pretty conservative. Even in very small runs you can hit your $0.50 mark for pressing CDs, but the RIAA CDs get pressed in runs of millions, so the cost is much much less and the money spent on promotion is divided that much more.
Not sure I saw much outcry when someone posted internal memos from Diebold?
Cracking Diebold would have been bad, no matter what. However it is possible that the Diebold memos were leaked by concerned whistleblowers who did not want to lose their jobs but did want to fix problems their bosses would not let them fix. Regardless of the reason for the leak, the focus of the stories was generally on the content of the memos themselves and the implications for the country.
It could be argued that leaking information like that from Diebold, where *not* leaking the information would have caused great and possibly irreperable harm, is, if not justified at least a lesser evil than leaving the information confidential. Besides, in the case of Diebold the information shoudl not have been secret. They had an obligation to disclose the information about the potential for expoitation and to fix it.
It could be argued that everything about Diebold's operation should be completely transparent and publically accessable. Whereas I would say that life and our society would be better if the voting system were open source and everything working toward developing and using it should be public (as is the case with paper ballots) and that all government documents should be accessable (as dictated by FOIA) I am willing to concede some privacy to Diebold and the Senate as is allowed by law. Nevertheless Diebold's failure to act appropriately is at best gross negligence and at worst potentially opening the door for another fixed election come 2004 (as promised by Diebold's CEO).
This isn't exactly a remote exploit, It is more like putting something on a public share that should have been on a private share.
Oh, really? So you know the exact nature of the computer glitch for a fact? Would you care to reveal your sources? Because the rest of us are pretty much guessing here. Or are you just pulling this out of your ass?
And I know that I have in bored times browsed around the various public shares at various workplaces and been appalled at the "private" information that was available.
I am sure that this is true. However, you are not supposed to be browsing around looking for unprotected shares to take data from. Even though you do not have to expoit any code flaws, you are exploiting other security flaws. Yes, doing this is illegal and it has been punished before. Yes, it does seem kind of silly. But basically when it comes to computers, or anything else for that matter, you are not suppose dto be browsing around where you do not have a legitemate right to be. To do otherwise is indeed wrong.
Even if this is what happened (perhaps the dems put this data in My Documents folders on public desktops running Windows 95 with those folders shared without a password!) it does not make the Republicans' accessing and use of the information kosher.
The truely disgusting part about all of this is that the "Liberally-biased media" (in the eyes of Fox News and all the Conservative pundits) probably won't even pick up on this -- think we'll be seeing this on CNN or MSNBC anytime soon? I doubt it. Imagine the uproar if the Dems got caught doing something like this....
Actually, the "liberal media" roasted and lambasted the Clinton administration for several similar actions, including TravelGate. Not that anything ever came of it, though. That is the problem. Politicians have been spying on each other forever. In this country, burglary, computer crime, and leaking of confidential information is perfectly alright as long as it is done by politicians to their enemies.
In the history of this country only one president and one staffer ever got into ANY real trouble over something like this, and then only because they made powerful enemies themselves and the public became afraid of the extent to which they had pushed their agenda. At the time, and at many opportunities since (especially seing as the staffer now is a powerful talk radio DJ) they have pointed out that others went even further than they did and with regularity. Until all sides are willing to stop engaging in such shenanighans and therefore opening themselves up to mutual prosecution, and perpetrators start truly being punished, we will continue to have this sort of thing blighting our system of government.