Of course, the defense would probably only work once. So be sure you download a LOT of stuff as fast as you can, because I suspect if you got hauled into court a second time, ignorance would no longer be a plea bargain.
It will at least demonstrate to any reasonable court that you made an attempt to indicate that your router was not for public use. Whether that would absolve you of any liability if your connection was used for nefarious purposes depends on your local laws.
Your best bet is to make every reasonable effort to ensure that your connection cannot be used for anything bad. Then you don't have to worry about someone else protecting you, and you never have to face whatever decisions are ever made about the liability of the account holder.
The most reliable way to do that (short of turning off the wireless or restricting the signal to your own property, of course) is to set up the most secure protocol you can and secure it with a reasonably complex key. The more you secure it, the less likely it will be that you ever have to face any liability issues. Use the highest level of encryption that works with all of your gear.
If you need to run it unencrypted for some technical reason (really old piece of network gear that you can't upgrade), then turning off SSID is at least a token effort on your part, though I'd seriously consider adding MAC address filtering to that if you can manage it.
But, if "SSID broadcast = off" is really all you can do (for technical or competence reasons), then I'd urge you to do that, at least.
I've set up secure networks for at least 5 people - they bring their router in, I take it home, flash it with the latest firmware, set up a WPA2/TKIP with a complex password that we've worked out together, set the admin password to something complex that I've also worked out with them, then bring the router back the next day ready to go. I have never, ever had the slightest complaint about anyone connecting to the resulting network.
My going rate is a six-pack of something interesting.;)
See, that's where the "locked door" analogy falls apart, which is why it's a poor analogy.
So let's not use analogies. Let's just talk about what really happened rather than trying to shoehorn in bad analogies (with apologies to BadAnalogyGuy... you know we love you, man!).
This opens a series of liability issues that are not really analogous to anything to do with physical security. If your connection is used for some illegal or infringing purpose, who is liable?
Well, IANAL, but it seems to me that there are several possibilities, and the laws are not yet clear on this.
The basic possibilities I can think of are:
1. The account owner could be held liable unconditionally. They left an open access to the Internet in a public place, and anything that happens on this connection is their fault. Similar to an "accomplice". This seems entirely unreasonable, but it is one possibility.
2. The account owner could be held conditionally or partly liable. If they can demonstrate that someone else used their connection, and demonstrate willingness to give up whatever information they have to help identify the real liable party, they might be absolved of liability or at least be liable for a lesser amount or a lesser crime. Similar to an "accessory".
3. The account owner could be held responsible only for providing the connection, which would be a much lesser fine. This is apparently the position the German government is taking in this case. They want people to secure their access points so they are letting people off with a small fine that is still large enough to encourage them to go home and secure their connections.
4. The account owner could be completely absolved whether they can prove someone else did it or not, at which point all copyright infringement and other activities become unenforceable as soon as you can demonstrate you were running an open access point and anyone else COULD have used it.
Obviously, there is the issue of people not wanting others to use their connections, and asking the law to protect them. But, if you leave a router in a configuration that invites connections and allow that signal to go into a public place, how is another law-abiding citizen going to differentiate you from someone who does allow use of their connection?
If you leave your WiFi unlocked/open with SSID being broadcast, you are leaving it open for others to use. The nature of WiFi is that, if you leave it open, it invites people to use it. If you leave it open and you arrange (or fail to prevent) it in such a way that the signal reaches a public place, that invitation is now being made in a public place. Assuming no one has trespassed on your property to do it, the people who "leech" off your connection are not "hacking" in to your connection, their equipment is responding to an open invitation in a public place.
Many wireless devices autoseek the strongest open connection and use it automatically, so leeching on a neighbor's open account is all too easy in an apartment building or a neighborhood. If I have a secured WiFi access point on one side of my apartment, my neighbor's open access point could very easily be stronger on the other side of my apartment, and since the signal has "intruded" into my apartment and is stronger than my signal, my laptop will automatically switch over to his connection. That's the way 802.11 works.
Frankly, if you don't want people using your access point, turn off SSID broadcast or put some basic security on it, or make sure you aren't leaking the signal into public places or places owned by others. And, really, it takes just a minute or two to turn off SSID broadcast and tell your client equipment to connect to a "hidden" network, and that makes it obvious that you don't WANT connections.
And, given the changing state of the law in terms of liability, it's honestly in your best interests to do so. The law may or may not protect you, so why not just protect yourself and end the debate?
I stand corrected, then. I was thinking chiropractors were back docs, some of whom had gotten uppity and expanded their field of medicine beyond its ken.
So, technically, I did not go to a "chiropractor", though that's what the shingle on his door says. I went to a "back doctor".:)
Unless, of course, he practices the same bullshittery on people who ask him to, and treats folks with injuries like I had as walk-in cash physical therapy patients unless we show signs of buying into the whole energy medicine thing.;)
A qualified chiropractor is really, really good at fixing injury-related back pain. If they stick to that, I'm OK with them in their profession. If they start talking about chi and chakra and energy flows, I'm outta there.
If you prefer to avoid the baggage attached to the term, I went to a "Doctor of Sports Medicine" with training in chiropractic care.
He made no claims to cure anything else that was wrong with me. His equipment appeared to only involve physical therapy gear.
I came to him with an injury, he used his training to figure out what I had done to myself, he fixed it, and he gave me the tools to avoid having to see him again. All for less money than my GP would have even done a referral to a specialist (who would probably have been a physical therapist specializing in back pain, if the word "chiropractor" has so much negative chi for you - grin).
Look, I know the chiropractic field is full of a lot of quacks, asshats, and "energy practitioners" who are either incompetent or make claims about their abilities that just ain't so. Finding a good practitioner is almost as hard as finding an honest politician. That doesn't mean that all of them are bad.
In my case, the problem was simple - I was shoveling gravel, moved wrong with a heavy shovel extended, and shifted a bone ever so slightly out of place. I thought I had pulled a muscle, but the pain got worse and worse over time, not better.
Simple problems do not require complex solutions, and my GP isn't prepared to handle this type of injury. I went to someone who did specialize in it, and he figured out the problem and fixed me up (for about $100 total over the course of two weeks - which is less than the referral visit to my GP), gave me a stern lecture about not being stupid, some good advice on exercises to keep my back strong, thanked me for my business, and that was that. No drugs, no crystals, no payment plan, no ongoing maintenance except a recommendation to keep up with the exercise sheets he gave me for free.
He make pain go away, he tell me how to avoid pain in future, I give him money.
When something is wrong with my teeth, I go to my dentist. When something is wrong with my eyes, I go to my optometrist. When something is wrong with my back, I go to a chiropractor. When I can't figure out what's wrong, I go to my GP and she fixes it or (more often) refers me to a specialist.
Yes, you generally want to find places that mention things like "sports medicine" or have large stacks of photocopied exercise and stretch instructions on the front desk, and avoid places that use words like "holistic", "energy medicine", "chakra", and advertise the use of crystals or magnets.
"Payment Plan Available" basically means they want you to pay rent on your spine forever.
I wrenched my back pretty badly last summer, and it kept getting worse. I finally went to see a chiropractor who spent some time examining the bone positions, used some electric thing to warm up the muscles, did some twisty crunchy stuff, and I walked out of the office upright and nearly pain-free, and armed with some photocopied sheets of appropriate exercises to strengthen the muscles and stretch things back into shape. I went back for a couple of followups, and he fine-tuned the adjustment, and my back felt perfectly normal within a couple of weeks, and we were done.
If the problem is skeletal, a competent chiropractor is an appropriate person to see. There are cases where misalignment of the spine can cause problems elsewhere (nerve issues, breathing issues, etc).
But, yeah, claiming to cure cancer by doing an adjustment is off in oogy-boogy land, and gives the competent bone manipulation folks a bad name.
A company called Unicomp is still making the Model M with the same gear IBM used to use in Lexington Kentucky back when they made the Model M. A few IBM retirees bought up the gear when IBM stopped making them, and have been making keyboards with it ever since. They are located at http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/index.html
Jupiter's a shy planet. He doesn't like changing his undies when being watched, so he waited until he could hide behind the Sun. That also explains why the part missing is brown. Nothing like freshly-laundered underwear for the first time in 20 years...
Are you sure you're not BadAnalogyGuy under a new nickname?
Yes, what you say is absolutely true. So as soon as we can prove that the people who "lost" their phones broke into the finder's homes and placed them on their kitchen tables, and the finder contacted the police, turned in the phone, waited an appropriate period for it to be declared "abandoned property", and asked the police to give it back, your analogy will be perfectly relevant. Based on the news coverage of the "finds", it sounds more like (at least in the first case) the phone was taken when there was every indication that the rightful owner would be back in a matter of minutes to reclaim it.
Until then, discovering that someone has left something behind on a bar in a public place does not mean it's your property if you find it. That goes double if it's sitting on top of a jacket and the owner has just popped off to the john for a minute. Even salvage law requires proof of abandonment (as in your example above), and with anything of any value (which smartphones certainly are) it requires a process where the original owner is identified and agrees to give up rights to the item, or is unable to be found after a reasonable search and declared "abandoned property" and therefore the property of the person who found it.
The first phone was not "abandoned property". It was either intentionally leaked with a fabricated backstory, or it was stolen.
The early prototype for what eventually became the Palm Pre, Blackberry Bold, and Nokia Symbian phones.
Some people still buy them out of nostalgia for the good old days when you weren't bothered with having to tether, were protected from the confusion of too much choice in applications, didn't have to deal with the hassle of replacing batteries, could concentrate on doing only one thing at a time and your phone supported this by not multitasking, and when "(whatever memory is installed in the phone) is enough for everybody".
One of these leaks is "probably" an intentional marketing campaign. Two, in the course of a few short weeks, is falling deeply into "Captain Obvious" territory.
Stevie loves to be in the headlines, but doesn't have any new ohh shiny to show off right now. These prototypes are cheap advertising.
I love it. I've helped a couple of people rid themselves of their WGA problems the easy way. I carry a Linux Mint disc with me almost all the time.
They get legit and save money, and it easily supports what most people want to do with a home computer - surf the web, a little word processing and maybe some spreadsheet work, manage their checkbook, check email, manage a library of digital photos, listen to music, instant messenger, a few games, etc.
You're off by an order of magnitude on the wages for the workers. Either they have to make $1,300 each, or the total has to be $6,500,000,000, in which case the executive bonus budget won't buy full-time attention from a single inbred asshat (sorry! typo - I meant "talented leader").
I dream of a day when piracy is gone. When software vendors, content publishers, authors, etc are free to lock their product down to the point where it cannot be used. I dream this dream, you see, because once we rid our society of time wasting movies and television, brain-rotting terrible music, and fucked-up insecure software, we as a species might actually be able to do something useful with our existences.
So, please, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc. Bring it on. Make your product so locked down no one wants it. Protect your intellectual property to the point where it has no value. Die, so concepts and ideas can flow freely again.
F/OSS will move on, creating product that benefits its users rather than its shareholders, unencumbered with having to fight off patent assholes every 5 minutes who contribute nothing and demand everything. Musicians will still play music. Artists will still create art for its own sake. And the rest of humanity might awaken from our slumber and decide to spend more of our time on useful pursuits.
If we spent 1/10 the effort on science and real life that we spend as a society debating who should have won American Idol, I'd have my goddamned flying car by now. And it would run on a free renewable energy source whose exhaust fumes would be oxygen and fresh-baked muffins.
Please, for the love of (insert_deity_here), RIAA, MPAA, BSA! We're counting on you! Redouble your efforts to make your entire industries irrelevant! Get out of the way so we can evolve as a species!
So piracy solves our population problem, rids us of stray cats, creates jobs in both the physicist and theological fields, prevents alien invasion, protects us from advanced visitors looking to come back and mess with our timeline (in two separate ways, mind you!), and increases the legitimacy of science (astronomy)?
Wow. I've never pirated anything, but it sounds to me like it creates jobs, promotes science, gets us well on the way to world peace, and protects us from terrorist threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
Of course, the defense would probably only work once. So be sure you download a LOT of stuff as fast as you can, because I suspect if you got hauled into court a second time, ignorance would no longer be a plea bargain.
It will at least demonstrate to any reasonable court that you made an attempt to indicate that your router was not for public use. Whether that would absolve you of any liability if your connection was used for nefarious purposes depends on your local laws.
Your best bet is to make every reasonable effort to ensure that your connection cannot be used for anything bad. Then you don't have to worry about someone else protecting you, and you never have to face whatever decisions are ever made about the liability of the account holder.
The most reliable way to do that (short of turning off the wireless or restricting the signal to your own property, of course) is to set up the most secure protocol you can and secure it with a reasonably complex key. The more you secure it, the less likely it will be that you ever have to face any liability issues. Use the highest level of encryption that works with all of your gear.
If you need to run it unencrypted for some technical reason (really old piece of network gear that you can't upgrade), then turning off SSID is at least a token effort on your part, though I'd seriously consider adding MAC address filtering to that if you can manage it.
But, if "SSID broadcast = off" is really all you can do (for technical or competence reasons), then I'd urge you to do that, at least.
I've set up secure networks for at least 5 people - they bring their router in, I take it home, flash it with the latest firmware, set up a WPA2/TKIP with a complex password that we've worked out together, set the admin password to something complex that I've also worked out with them, then bring the router back the next day ready to go. I have never, ever had the slightest complaint about anyone connecting to the resulting network.
My going rate is a six-pack of something interesting. ;)
See, that's where the "locked door" analogy falls apart, which is why it's a poor analogy.
So let's not use analogies. Let's just talk about what really happened rather than trying to shoehorn in bad analogies (with apologies to BadAnalogyGuy... you know we love you, man!).
This opens a series of liability issues that are not really analogous to anything to do with physical security. If your connection is used for some illegal or infringing purpose, who is liable?
Well, IANAL, but it seems to me that there are several possibilities, and the laws are not yet clear on this.
The basic possibilities I can think of are:
1. The account owner could be held liable unconditionally. They left an open access to the Internet in a public place, and anything that happens on this connection is their fault. Similar to an "accomplice". This seems entirely unreasonable, but it is one possibility.
2. The account owner could be held conditionally or partly liable. If they can demonstrate that someone else used their connection, and demonstrate willingness to give up whatever information they have to help identify the real liable party, they might be absolved of liability or at least be liable for a lesser amount or a lesser crime. Similar to an "accessory".
3. The account owner could be held responsible only for providing the connection, which would be a much lesser fine. This is apparently the position the German government is taking in this case. They want people to secure their access points so they are letting people off with a small fine that is still large enough to encourage them to go home and secure their connections.
4. The account owner could be completely absolved whether they can prove someone else did it or not, at which point all copyright infringement and other activities become unenforceable as soon as you can demonstrate you were running an open access point and anyone else COULD have used it.
Obviously, there is the issue of people not wanting others to use their connections, and asking the law to protect them. But, if you leave a router in a configuration that invites connections and allow that signal to go into a public place, how is another law-abiding citizen going to differentiate you from someone who does allow use of their connection?
If you leave your WiFi unlocked/open with SSID being broadcast, you are leaving it open for others to use. The nature of WiFi is that, if you leave it open, it invites people to use it. If you leave it open and you arrange (or fail to prevent) it in such a way that the signal reaches a public place, that invitation is now being made in a public place. Assuming no one has trespassed on your property to do it, the people who "leech" off your connection are not "hacking" in to your connection, their equipment is responding to an open invitation in a public place.
Many wireless devices autoseek the strongest open connection and use it automatically, so leeching on a neighbor's open account is all too easy in an apartment building or a neighborhood. If I have a secured WiFi access point on one side of my apartment, my neighbor's open access point could very easily be stronger on the other side of my apartment, and since the signal has "intruded" into my apartment and is stronger than my signal, my laptop will automatically switch over to his connection. That's the way 802.11 works.
Frankly, if you don't want people using your access point, turn off SSID broadcast or put some basic security on it, or make sure you aren't leaking the signal into public places or places owned by others. And, really, it takes just a minute or two to turn off SSID broadcast and tell your client equipment to connect to a "hidden" network, and that makes it obvious that you don't WANT connections.
And, given the changing state of the law in terms of liability, it's honestly in your best interests to do so. The law may or may not protect you, so why not just protect yourself and end the debate?
I stand corrected, then. I was thinking chiropractors were back docs, some of whom had gotten uppity and expanded their field of medicine beyond its ken.
So, technically, I did not go to a "chiropractor", though that's what the shingle on his door says. I went to a "back doctor". :)
Unless, of course, he practices the same bullshittery on people who ask him to, and treats folks with injuries like I had as walk-in cash physical therapy patients unless we show signs of buying into the whole energy medicine thing. ;)
A qualified chiropractor is really, really good at fixing injury-related back pain. If they stick to that, I'm OK with them in their profession. If they start talking about chi and chakra and energy flows, I'm outta there.
If you prefer to avoid the baggage attached to the term, I went to a "Doctor of Sports Medicine" with training in chiropractic care.
He made no claims to cure anything else that was wrong with me. His equipment appeared to only involve physical therapy gear.
I came to him with an injury, he used his training to figure out what I had done to myself, he fixed it, and he gave me the tools to avoid having to see him again. All for less money than my GP would have even done a referral to a specialist (who would probably have been a physical therapist specializing in back pain, if the word "chiropractor" has so much negative chi for you - grin).
Look, I know the chiropractic field is full of a lot of quacks, asshats, and "energy practitioners" who are either incompetent or make claims about their abilities that just ain't so. Finding a good practitioner is almost as hard as finding an honest politician. That doesn't mean that all of them are bad.
In my case, the problem was simple - I was shoveling gravel, moved wrong with a heavy shovel extended, and shifted a bone ever so slightly out of place. I thought I had pulled a muscle, but the pain got worse and worse over time, not better.
Simple problems do not require complex solutions, and my GP isn't prepared to handle this type of injury. I went to someone who did specialize in it, and he figured out the problem and fixed me up (for about $100 total over the course of two weeks - which is less than the referral visit to my GP), gave me a stern lecture about not being stupid, some good advice on exercises to keep my back strong, thanked me for my business, and that was that. No drugs, no crystals, no payment plan, no ongoing maintenance except a recommendation to keep up with the exercise sheets he gave me for free.
He make pain go away, he tell me how to avoid pain in future, I give him money.
When something is wrong with my teeth, I go to my dentist. When something is wrong with my eyes, I go to my optometrist. When something is wrong with my back, I go to a chiropractor. When I can't figure out what's wrong, I go to my GP and she fixes it or (more often) refers me to a specialist.
Yes, you generally want to find places that mention things like "sports medicine" or have large stacks of photocopied exercise and stretch instructions on the front desk, and avoid places that use words like "holistic", "energy medicine", "chakra", and advertise the use of crystals or magnets.
"Payment Plan Available" basically means they want you to pay rent on your spine forever.
Depends on the chiropractor.
I wrenched my back pretty badly last summer, and it kept getting worse. I finally went to see a chiropractor who spent some time examining the bone positions, used some electric thing to warm up the muscles, did some twisty crunchy stuff, and I walked out of the office upright and nearly pain-free, and armed with some photocopied sheets of appropriate exercises to strengthen the muscles and stretch things back into shape. I went back for a couple of followups, and he fine-tuned the adjustment, and my back felt perfectly normal within a couple of weeks, and we were done.
If the problem is skeletal, a competent chiropractor is an appropriate person to see. There are cases where misalignment of the spine can cause problems elsewhere (nerve issues, breathing issues, etc).
But, yeah, claiming to cure cancer by doing an adjustment is off in oogy-boogy land, and gives the competent bone manipulation folks a bad name.
A company called Unicomp is still making the Model M with the same gear IBM used to use in Lexington Kentucky back when they made the Model M. A few IBM retirees bought up the gear when IBM stopped making them, and have been making keyboards with it ever since. They are located at http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/index.html
The "classic" model M is now called the "Customizer", http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html
But they're not just making the old ones, they've been busy reworking the design. You can get one with a titmouse if you want. http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/en104wh.html
They don't only sell buckling spring, so look at the product descriptions carefully before you buy...
Really? They haven't come out with an Ultra version yet? How disappointing. ;)
Jupiter's a shy planet. He doesn't like changing his undies when being watched, so he waited until he could hide behind the Sun. That also explains why the part missing is brown. Nothing like freshly-laundered underwear for the first time in 20 years...
Are you sure you're not BadAnalogyGuy under a new nickname?
Yes, what you say is absolutely true. So as soon as we can prove that the people who "lost" their phones broke into the finder's homes and placed them on their kitchen tables, and the finder contacted the police, turned in the phone, waited an appropriate period for it to be declared "abandoned property", and asked the police to give it back, your analogy will be perfectly relevant. Based on the news coverage of the "finds", it sounds more like (at least in the first case) the phone was taken when there was every indication that the rightful owner would be back in a matter of minutes to reclaim it.
Until then, discovering that someone has left something behind on a bar in a public place does not mean it's your property if you find it. That goes double if it's sitting on top of a jacket and the owner has just popped off to the john for a minute. Even salvage law requires proof of abandonment (as in your example above), and with anything of any value (which smartphones certainly are) it requires a process where the original owner is identified and agrees to give up rights to the item, or is unable to be found after a reasonable search and declared "abandoned property" and therefore the property of the person who found it.
The first phone was not "abandoned property". It was either intentionally leaked with a fabricated backstory, or it was stolen.
The early prototype for what eventually became the Palm Pre, Blackberry Bold, and Nokia Symbian phones.
Some people still buy them out of nostalgia for the good old days when you weren't bothered with having to tether, were protected from the confusion of too much choice in applications, didn't have to deal with the hassle of replacing batteries, could concentrate on doing only one thing at a time and your phone supported this by not multitasking, and when "(whatever memory is installed in the phone) is enough for everybody".
Ah, memories.
Just a thought. Is water wet? :)
One of these leaks is "probably" an intentional marketing campaign. Two, in the course of a few short weeks, is falling deeply into "Captain Obvious" territory.
Stevie loves to be in the headlines, but doesn't have any new ohh shiny to show off right now. These prototypes are cheap advertising.
No, he's been relocated to Cancun in punishment for instigating such a successful publicity campaign.
Obviously Mint isn't for you. Enjoy your (hopefully legally purchased) copy of Windows!
I love it. I've helped a couple of people rid themselves of their WGA problems the easy way. I carry a Linux Mint disc with me almost all the time.
They get legit and save money, and it easily supports what most people want to do with a home computer - surf the web, a little word processing and maybe some spreadsheet work, manage their checkbook, check email, manage a library of digital photos, listen to music, instant messenger, a few games, etc.
Good point, but...
You're off by an order of magnitude on the wages for the workers. Either they have to make $1,300 each, or the total has to be $6,500,000,000, in which case the executive bonus budget won't buy full-time attention from a single inbred asshat (sorry! typo - I meant "talented leader").
I'd like to see a report from a third party that could attempt to estimate how many of the downloads really happened.
There, shortened that for you.
I dream of a day when piracy is gone. When software vendors, content publishers, authors, etc are free to lock their product down to the point where it cannot be used. I dream this dream, you see, because once we rid our society of time wasting movies and television, brain-rotting terrible music, and fucked-up insecure software, we as a species might actually be able to do something useful with our existences.
So, please, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc. Bring it on. Make your product so locked down no one wants it. Protect your intellectual property to the point where it has no value. Die, so concepts and ideas can flow freely again.
F/OSS will move on, creating product that benefits its users rather than its shareholders, unencumbered with having to fight off patent assholes every 5 minutes who contribute nothing and demand everything. Musicians will still play music. Artists will still create art for its own sake. And the rest of humanity might awaken from our slumber and decide to spend more of our time on useful pursuits.
If we spent 1/10 the effort on science and real life that we spend as a society debating who should have won American Idol, I'd have my goddamned flying car by now. And it would run on a free renewable energy source whose exhaust fumes would be oxygen and fresh-baked muffins.
Please, for the love of (insert_deity_here), RIAA, MPAA, BSA! We're counting on you! Redouble your efforts to make your entire industries irrelevant! Get out of the way so we can evolve as a species!
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
So piracy solves our population problem, rids us of stray cats, creates jobs in both the physicist and theological fields, prevents alien invasion, protects us from advanced visitors looking to come back and mess with our timeline (in two separate ways, mind you!), and increases the legitimacy of science (astronomy)?
Wow. I've never pirated anything, but it sounds to me like it creates jobs, promotes science, gets us well on the way to world peace, and protects us from terrorist threat.
Pirate Bay, Here I Come!
Wow, where'd you hook up with the discount? Are you sure it's legit? That seems cheap.
Are you detecting a slight BullShit Aroma?
Hmmm, funny, I do too.
Doodoo Voodoo. Magic numbers made of bullshit.
BSA discovers way to increase size of anus, so they can pull larger numbers out of it.
It's the Y14b'ak'tun problem. A tad clumsy the first few times you say it, but it grows on you.