I've been reading it as actually _wanting_ a short war, so they can arrange for the outgoing leader to be seen to die defending his people (or at least while defending his people) rather than just because of post-stroke complications. Nuclear threats are a bit far for that though, so my little theory might have just been scuppered.
Not that tiny a distinction. A good performer badly directed (or a good performance badly cut later) can appear quite shitty quite easily. A production is often as poor as its weakest part, but it isn't always easy as a member of the audience to tell where the responsibility lies.
Just wait till the chinese manufacturers start toying with one. Want to sell your used motherboard on craigslist? Sorry, no can do, this luxuriuously ASUS-branded product was sold to YOU and only YOU.
No one like that is going to chase anyone over this - it would simply cost too much to even think about trying even if the company was local never mind having cross-border details for the lawyers to charge you for dealing with. The only companies that will be able to do anything with this change are those that sell real big ticket items, where the cost of a few adds up to something that might be noticeable on the bottom line of some monthly financial report.
But if I have any legal problems, they're required to come to Canada in order for any disputes, according to the law of my land. Especially if they want to keep doing business here.
That might hold water if they chose to raise a dispute with you. The problem there is if *you* have something you want to dispute with *them* (like them selling your info when their own contract said they wouldn't) they would most likely say they aren't coming and offer you a venue in their land instead. Whether you are in the right or not won't make much difference across borders unless you can afford some pretty hot legal support or have available avenues of political influence.
The worth of earnings are relative. How much is $3200 worth against the cost of living where he is located? It could be a small fortune.
Also the market might not bare a larger fee. There could be a lot of developers capable of doing what he did available and that as much and any other factor has a significant effect on the asking price for a job.
Why is there no mechanism in place that demands a new plugin to be confirmed by the end user?
How would Firefox detect a plugin that had not been OKed by the user, if it was installed while Firefox wasn't running in order to be able to capture the event as it happens?
Some file flag? Won't fly - Apple/MS/Google/others will just set those flags as the files are put in place.
Digitally sign the files with a unique signing key (created first time the browser starts) when the user accepts them and check the signatures when the browser starts each time? No joy - the only way to do that would involve the signing key being on the client where other software could read it and use it to fake-sign their files.
Sign the files as above but password/passphrase protect the signing key such that the user must enter their password in order for an addon to get signed? This would work technically speaking (if properly implemented) but would irritate many users so they'd just turn the feature off (or complain loudly that they can't turn it off).
Are you encrypting your emails end to end? If not, losing your phone seems irrelevant.
Even if there are other weak links, that doesn't stop the phone being a weak link. Probably the weakest too: taking a phone is easier than intercepting email in transit (even if being sent plain by the MTAs) and within the ability of a much larger section of the population.
Nothing they did seems unethical or immoral to me.
They setup false companies and false personal identities for financial gain - this organised fraud, plain and simple.
Also systems like this can create an denial of service effect on the target sites, affecting far more than just people wanting that one set of tickets.
So if you could convince me that scalping is fine, I don't see how you can state that this group did absolutely nothing wrong.
This is very much a scam, in fact it is illegal where I live (fortunately I don't live in the land of the free and the brave).
Even if scalping is in itself not illegal in a particular territory, you'd be hard pressed to find somewhere that what these people did is in any way legal. They setup false companies and false personal identities for financial gain - this organised fraud, plain and simple.
You've set your price pretty low there. All it costs to make you go quiet and keep buying $000s worth of their kit it one motherboard that they should have replaced without being threatened anyway. You really taught them a lesson there and I'm sure they'll keep learning from it with every future order you make from dell corporate.
Nothing personal, but I've never understood this sort of reaction. If I get to the point of threatening a company then it is already too late. I don't threaten to take my business elsewhere, I tell them (and anyone else who will listen) that I'm going and I go and I stay away in future where possible.
Don't you alleged iPad jockeys have better news to post than this OLD news?
This is NEW news (or at least new information) relevant to the old news. I have no idea what connection you are trying to make to Apple here.
Perhaps, you might cover the intrusiveness of TSA "security".
Because that is never covered here, and the following articles from the last couple of weeks are figments of my deranged imagination:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/1723233/US-Marshals-Saved-35000-Full-Body-Scans
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/13/2229222/National-Opt-Out-Day-Against-Virtual-Strip-Searches
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/158250/EPIC-Files-Lawsuit-To-Suspend-Airport-Body-Scanner-Use
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/03/1215256/Prepare-To-Be-Watched-While-You-Watch-a-Movie
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/31/0234232/TSA-To-Make-Pat-Downs-More-Embarrassing-To-Encourage-Scanner-Use
I doubt there is any fraud prevention going on, at least in the purely legal sense. They don't want the special offers with a noticable amount of credit being used to get a free-for-some-time service (i.e. if someone where to get all their family and friends to pick up the four SIMs permitted and kept them in stock - if you are a small user and didn't mind your number changing you could have run on them for ages). Also I'm pretty sure that they leave the door with a phone number assigned, so they'll deactivate the unused ones after a while if only to be able to reassign the number (as they are not an entirely cost-free resource).
Most pound shops have them for £1, and I once spotted a two-for-£1 offer.
If you can wait for them to be delivered in the post most, probably all, of the operators will send you a pay-as-you-go-SIM or few:
http://freesim.orange.co.uk/
https://www.v-store.co.uk/index.cfm?go=consumercheckoutFreeSims.details
https://www.three.co.uk/Pay_As_You_Go/Free_SIM/Order_a_free_SIM
http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/free-pay-as-you-go-sim-cards/
http://freesim.o2.co.uk/
https://giffgaff.com/orders/free-sim
Sometimes these come with small free amount of credit, but in some cases you have to top-up before the card can be used even to take incoming calls - so check the small print of any offer.
Better deals are sometimes available: I have an Orange SIM or two with £5 on them from a free off a while back (hopefully they've not expired...) - the ones I've used were great loaded into my spare phone and tethered to my netbook last time I was away where there was no decent WiFi access as they worked with the "£1/day for data access (subject to FUP)" offer.
It isn't the "needing to register with an online competitor" bit they don't like. People who are likely to buy online would do anyway and they'd not get a look-in. What they don't like is the fact that Steam stops them reselling games at massive markups, even games bought in physical boxes. This little boycott is intended to try make creators/publishers/distributors rethink going to far down that route as it harms the one good revenue stream they still have.
That would work for me. If their rates were not extortionate I'd happily have somewhere else to go rather than PayPal. Amazon may not be perfect, but they are a company I trust far more than PayPal (who I use because in some cases they are the least bad option, but trust very little and avoid using where possible).
You could, in theory, have a seperate Steam account for each game. Which would allow you to sell each game individually. But it would certainly be a hassle.
Only in theory though, speaking in terms of the license you agree to when signing up.
I've not read Steam's license in detail, but most systems like it make it a rule that you should not maintain multiple accounts and if multiple accounts for one person are detected all are possibly subject to deletion.
Also the terms of most services explicitly state that accounts are not transferable and if an account is detected as having been transferred it will be cancelled. This is required because if you transfer an account to me I would have access to the service without having agreed to the terms and conditions, creating an grey area.
So in short, if you're a harmless Joe Blow, you can stop worrying about securing your digital presence: it only makes you look suspect if your computer or your communications are investigated for any reason. Your place in the Who's Nobody pretty much ensures your security and anonymity on the internet.
People thinking this, or not worrying about password sniffing in other forms, all make one crucial wrong assumption, and it's that protecting your account is often not about protecting the information you chose to publish.
Once someone has access to your account either by password sniffing or session hijacking can act as you, spamming your contacts and perhaps sending them off to sites that perform drive-by malware installs by posting links as if they had come from you.
While you might be right that nobody cares specifically about one person's facebook account, there are certainly people out there who would love to pick up a large number of them for spamming purposes.
Also for people who are daft enough to use the same password for multiple sites (actually I have one password for sites I don't care about, but for anything else I have separate passwords stored in keepass) sniffing their facebook/twitter/what-ever password could be far worse than getting their social networking account hijacked: it could give an attacker access to your webmail account from which they may be able purloin enough data to gain access to your bank account and so forth.
If only the "running a pleasant and reliable rail service" department was half as on the ball as the legal department...
I pay them twice over. Once for the exorbitant fairs when I use the system, and once via my taxes due to government subsidies. Instead of using that money to at least try run a decent service they use it on a legal department to chase down things like this.
DRM is not the (only) issue as far as I can see. IIRC VLC is under GPLv2 which does not have the explicit anti-DRM (tivoisation) clause that v3 of the GPL has. While it can be said that GPLv2 *did* have such an intention, there is no explicit wording in there strong enough to stand up to legal attack.
The problem I see (and AINAL, nor have I read the GPL in any detail for some years, so research this before taking my thoughts as meaningful) is that the GPL forbids removing rights granted by the GPL. This means that once someone agrees to distribute stuff under the terms of the GPL they can not be blocked from doing so in future - the problem here is Apple's kill switch. To comply with the GPL AppStore would have to make an exception to their own rules such that GPL licensed code is never subject to the kill switch, and as Apple are unlikely to make any such exception AppStore is, and is likely to remain, incompatible with software distributed only under the terms of the GPL. Multi-licensed code for which the GPL is one of the available options should be fine though, if at least one of the available licenses is not incompatible with AppStore's rules.
Software updates would be a hassle there. There would need to be a method of getting security fixes into the OS and that vector would be a potential attack route no matter how many confirmation steps you add to it (human engineering works well enough to be where all the malware creators go once technical arrangements really start to get in their way).
The OS is not the only thing that can be attacked either, so could the apps. Of course you could make sure there is only one way to install apps and nothing else can write to the storage space use for executable code and that no data not in that area could ever be executed - Apple would love that (all installs via the store that they get a cut from and where that dictate what gets in) but I doubt it would be a popular approach generally.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many people from elsewhere that read/write on or the other or neither.
I've been reading it as actually _wanting_ a short war, so they can arrange for the outgoing leader to be seen to die defending his people (or at least while defending his people) rather than just because of post-stroke complications. Nuclear threats are a bit far for that though, so my little theory might have just been scuppered.
Not that tiny a distinction. A good performer badly directed (or a good performance badly cut later) can appear quite shitty quite easily. A production is often as poor as its weakest part, but it isn't always easy as a member of the audience to tell where the responsibility lies.
Contractually speaking they do not buy the item. They hold it in stock so somebody else can actually buy it.
Just wait till the chinese manufacturers start toying with one. Want to sell your used motherboard on craigslist? Sorry, no can do, this luxuriuously ASUS-branded product was sold to YOU and only YOU.
No one like that is going to chase anyone over this - it would simply cost too much to even think about trying even if the company was local never mind having cross-border details for the lawyers to charge you for dealing with. The only companies that will be able to do anything with this change are those that sell real big ticket items, where the cost of a few adds up to something that might be noticeable on the bottom line of some monthly financial report.
But if I have any legal problems, they're required to come to Canada in order for any disputes, according to the law of my land. Especially if they want to keep doing business here.
That might hold water if they chose to raise a dispute with you. The problem there is if *you* have something you want to dispute with *them* (like them selling your info when their own contract said they wouldn't) they would most likely say they aren't coming and offer you a venue in their land instead. Whether you are in the right or not won't make much difference across borders unless you can afford some pretty hot legal support or have available avenues of political influence.
The worth of earnings are relative. How much is $3200 worth against the cost of living where he is located? It could be a small fortune.
Also the market might not bare a larger fee. There could be a lot of developers capable of doing what he did available and that as much and any other factor has a significant effect on the asking price for a job.
Relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/7/way-explanation/
And meat is murder. Tasty tasty murder.
Why is there no mechanism in place that demands a new plugin to be confirmed by the end user?
How would Firefox detect a plugin that had not been OKed by the user, if it was installed while Firefox wasn't running in order to be able to capture the event as it happens?
Some file flag? Won't fly - Apple/MS/Google/others will just set those flags as the files are put in place.
Digitally sign the files with a unique signing key (created first time the browser starts) when the user accepts them and check the signatures when the browser starts each time? No joy - the only way to do that would involve the signing key being on the client where other software could read it and use it to fake-sign their files.
Sign the files as above but password/passphrase protect the signing key such that the user must enter their password in order for an addon to get signed? This would work technically speaking (if properly implemented) but would irritate many users so they'd just turn the feature off (or complain loudly that they can't turn it off).
Are you encrypting your emails end to end? If not, losing your phone seems irrelevant.
Even if there are other weak links, that doesn't stop the phone being a weak link. Probably the weakest too: taking a phone is easier than intercepting email in transit (even if being sent plain by the MTAs) and within the ability of a much larger section of the population.
Nothing they did seems unethical or immoral to me.
They setup false companies and false personal identities for financial gain - this organised fraud, plain and simple.
Also systems like this can create an denial of service effect on the target sites, affecting far more than just people wanting that one set of tickets.
So if you could convince me that scalping is fine, I don't see how you can state that this group did absolutely nothing wrong.
I just don't get what the big deal is here.
They setup false companies and false personal identities for financial gain - this organised fraud, plain and simple, in most territories.
Also systems like this can create an denial of service effect on the target sites. This is considered vandalism or worse in many statutes.
This is very much a scam, in fact it is illegal where I live (fortunately I don't live in the land of the free and the brave).
Even if scalping is in itself not illegal in a particular territory, you'd be hard pressed to find somewhere that what these people did is in any way legal. They setup false companies and false personal identities for financial gain - this organised fraud, plain and simple.
You've set your price pretty low there. All it costs to make you go quiet and keep buying $000s worth of their kit it one motherboard that they should have replaced without being threatened anyway. You really taught them a lesson there and I'm sure they'll keep learning from it with every future order you make from dell corporate.
Nothing personal, but I've never understood this sort of reaction. If I get to the point of threatening a company then it is already too late. I don't threaten to take my business elsewhere, I tell them (and anyone else who will listen) that I'm going and I go and I stay away in future where possible.
Dell hid computer flaws. Oh, the outrage !
Correctly directed outrage.
Don't you alleged iPad jockeys have better news to post than this OLD news?
This is NEW news (or at least new information) relevant to the old news. I have no idea what connection you are trying to make to Apple here.
Perhaps, you might cover the intrusiveness of TSA "security".
Because that is never covered here, and the following articles from the last couple of weeks are figments of my deranged imagination:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/1723233/US-Marshals-Saved-35000-Full-Body-Scans
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/13/2229222/National-Opt-Out-Day-Against-Virtual-Strip-Searches
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/158250/EPIC-Files-Lawsuit-To-Suspend-Airport-Body-Scanner-Use
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/03/1215256/Prepare-To-Be-Watched-While-You-Watch-a-Movie
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/31/0234232/TSA-To-Make-Pat-Downs-More-Embarrassing-To-Encourage-Scanner-Use
I doubt there is any fraud prevention going on, at least in the purely legal sense. They don't want the special offers with a noticable amount of credit being used to get a free-for-some-time service (i.e. if someone where to get all their family and friends to pick up the four SIMs permitted and kept them in stock - if you are a small user and didn't mind your number changing you could have run on them for ages). Also I'm pretty sure that they leave the door with a phone number assigned, so they'll deactivate the unused ones after a while if only to be able to reassign the number (as they are not an entirely cost-free resource).
Most pound shops have them for £1, and I once spotted a two-for-£1 offer.
If you can wait for them to be delivered in the post most, probably all, of the operators will send you a pay-as-you-go-SIM or few:
http://freesim.orange.co.uk/
https://www.v-store.co.uk/index.cfm?go=consumercheckoutFreeSims.details
https://www.three.co.uk/Pay_As_You_Go/Free_SIM/Order_a_free_SIM
http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/free-pay-as-you-go-sim-cards/
http://freesim.o2.co.uk/
https://giffgaff.com/orders/free-sim
Sometimes these come with small free amount of credit, but in some cases you have to top-up before the card can be used even to take incoming calls - so check the small print of any offer.
Better deals are sometimes available: I have an Orange SIM or two with £5 on them from a free off a while back (hopefully they've not expired...) - the ones I've used were great loaded into my spare phone and tethered to my netbook last time I was away where there was no decent WiFi access as they worked with the "£1/day for data access (subject to FUP)" offer.
It isn't the "needing to register with an online competitor" bit they don't like. People who are likely to buy online would do anyway and they'd not get a look-in. What they don't like is the fact that Steam stops them reselling games at massive markups, even games bought in physical boxes. This little boycott is intended to try make creators/publishers/distributors rethink going to far down that route as it harms the one good revenue stream they still have.
That would work for me. If their rates were not extortionate I'd happily have somewhere else to go rather than PayPal. Amazon may not be perfect, but they are a company I trust far more than PayPal (who I use because in some cases they are the least bad option, but trust very little and avoid using where possible).
You could, in theory, have a seperate Steam account for each game. Which would allow you to sell each game individually. But it would certainly be a hassle.
Only in theory though, speaking in terms of the license you agree to when signing up.
I've not read Steam's license in detail, but most systems like it make it a rule that you should not maintain multiple accounts and if multiple accounts for one person are detected all are possibly subject to deletion.
Also the terms of most services explicitly state that accounts are not transferable and if an account is detected as having been transferred it will be cancelled. This is required because if you transfer an account to me I would have access to the service without having agreed to the terms and conditions, creating an grey area.
So in short, if you're a harmless Joe Blow, you can stop worrying about securing your digital presence: it only makes you look suspect if your computer or your communications are investigated for any reason. Your place in the Who's Nobody pretty much ensures your security and anonymity on the internet.
People thinking this, or not worrying about password sniffing in other forms, all make one crucial wrong assumption, and it's that protecting your account is often not about protecting the information you chose to publish.
Once someone has access to your account either by password sniffing or session hijacking can act as you, spamming your contacts and perhaps sending them off to sites that perform drive-by malware installs by posting links as if they had come from you.
While you might be right that nobody cares specifically about one person's facebook account, there are certainly people out there who would love to pick up a large number of them for spamming purposes.
Also for people who are daft enough to use the same password for multiple sites (actually I have one password for sites I don't care about, but for anything else I have separate passwords stored in keepass) sniffing their facebook/twitter/what-ever password could be far worse than getting their social networking account hijacked: it could give an attacker access to your webmail account from which they may be able purloin enough data to gain access to your bank account and so forth.
If only the "running a pleasant and reliable rail service" department was half as on the ball as the legal department...
I pay them twice over. Once for the exorbitant fairs when I use the system, and once via my taxes due to government subsidies. Instead of using that money to at least try run a decent service they use it on a legal department to chase down things like this.
DRM is not the (only) issue as far as I can see. IIRC VLC is under GPLv2 which does not have the explicit anti-DRM (tivoisation) clause that v3 of the GPL has. While it can be said that GPLv2 *did* have such an intention, there is no explicit wording in there strong enough to stand up to legal attack.
The problem I see (and AINAL, nor have I read the GPL in any detail for some years, so research this before taking my thoughts as meaningful) is that the GPL forbids removing rights granted by the GPL. This means that once someone agrees to distribute stuff under the terms of the GPL they can not be blocked from doing so in future - the problem here is Apple's kill switch. To comply with the GPL AppStore would have to make an exception to their own rules such that GPL licensed code is never subject to the kill switch, and as Apple are unlikely to make any such exception AppStore is, and is likely to remain, incompatible with software distributed only under the terms of the GPL. Multi-licensed code for which the GPL is one of the available options should be fine though, if at least one of the available licenses is not incompatible with AppStore's rules.
Software updates would be a hassle there. There would need to be a method of getting security fixes into the OS and that vector would be a potential attack route no matter how many confirmation steps you add to it (human engineering works well enough to be where all the malware creators go once technical arrangements really start to get in their way).
The OS is not the only thing that can be attacked either, so could the apps. Of course you could make sure there is only one way to install apps and nothing else can write to the storage space use for executable code and that no data not in that area could ever be executed - Apple would love that (all installs via the store that they get a cut from and where that dictate what gets in) but I doubt it would be a popular approach generally.
Well, thanks for explaining all of that to a random stranger.
I was in the mood for a random rant, and your message give me a part way defendable reason to have one...