> This behavior is unacceptable from companies that have offices in America. That might be how people do business in other places, but they need to leave that shit at the door.
I agree. We have to change it. But it's not just a foreign problem.
This is New Jersey. If you haven't heard a story about something like this happening in New Jersey, you haven't been listening. It's like not hearing a story about questionable behavior by waste contractors in several of the nation's major cities, or not hearing about racism on the part of law enforcement in some towns in the South. Sure, there are lots of legitimate businesspeople, and waste contractors, and helpful law enforcement officers. But the other kinds also exists and even thrives. Sure, sometimes its people bringing in their problems, but we have a lot of our own.
> Try Googling "human trafficking". I think you'll find that many undocumented immigrants live under conditions little better than slavery.
Close. Actually, I think you'll find that many undocumented immigrants live in conditions of slavery. To the extent where the only real distinction is that the law--which they don't know anyway--says that it's illegal.
You'll also find that hundreds of thousands of American teens are at high risk for being kidnapped or tricked into a life of slavery. Sources: The Polaris Project, Terry Lee Wright's River of Innocents, Victor Malarek's The Natashas.
Not that we should care whether it's an immigrant or not. And the difference in the cultures of different immigrant groups make different techniques useful in finding and prosecuting human traffickers. But it's not really an immigrant problem, so much as a human one.
Yes, the summary's misleading; but the article at least is a bit clearer: it refers to windows-based browsers.
"In his advisory, Ormandy said that he notified Sun about the vulnerability but that the vendor didn't believe it was serious enough to warrant an emergency patch," sayeth the article.
Now that it's on slashdot, of course, that is clearly no longer the case, if indeed it was.
It's not free speech in a public forum, and the public doesn't have a right to address the court, at least not without going through certain channels. They need to be able to file an amicus brief under the rules of the jurisdiction if they want to speak to the judge on the issue the court is deciding. But the judge doesn't have to listen; courts aren't democratic. If you want to overturn a court democratically, you're supposed to do it through the legislature.
> Seriously, who calls the cops for spam and expects them to not laugh at you?
It doesn't have to be the same cops who deal with murders and stabbings. In fact, it probably shouldn't be; it takes different skills to hunt down spammers.
Person A says to cops: "I received spam. Here is copy." Cop identifies IP. Cop says to provider "Give me billing info on this IP b/c of spam." Provider gives billing info. If not, does so after quick court order. If still not, gets shut down. Cop contacts business. If hijacked computer, refers to techies. If not hijacked, quick court case by DA. IF spam, gets shut down and pays large statutory damages and prohibited from using net again for X years.
Or something like that.
The problem is having a quick, efficient, and intelligent police response in place, and having people know where they can go to get it. We will never stop spam unless we decide to commit sufficient resources to doing so.
We might use civil causes of action, class actions, and/or private atty general statutes. (But have to be careful to limit abuse.)
Yes. If Amazon went down tomorrow and never came back, society would be fine. If the stock exchange were taken over by malicious but hidden computer software for months, and then finally was taken down, the damage to society would be MUCH more severe. It's not just a way of exchanging everything, it's a way of establishing who owns what. If suddenly nobody knows who really owns every stock that's traded in the last six months, we've got a major frikkin problem. We shouldn't, maybe, but we do because money is an illusion.
> If this were coming from a noted astronomer, a major figure in disaster relief, or GWB, then it would be Slashdot-worthy. But seriously, what value did this Ask Slashdot add?
No, then it might be newsworthy, at least in some news quarters. But one of the nice things about slashdot is that it's a bit more egalitarian. You get modded up or down based on your insights, not your credentials. Sometimes that results in sillyness, but we value it because we're nerds.
We can respect the work that goes into a Ph.D., but we'll never respect someone only because they have a Ph.D. In a community of nerds, an appeal to authority isn't required to make an argument valid.
Yes, but it may make it easier to replace people at tasks where you don't need human-level sentience, like fast food. Just because we're safe for a little while in highly educated professions doesn't mean this can't profoundly change the world.
> Making a robot look and outwardly act like a human is a long way off from making one with human level sentience.
"We saw some amazing actresses for this part. But when Karen came through the door, the game was up - she was funny, clever, gorgeous and sexy. Or Scottish, which is the quick way of saying it. A generation of little girls will want to be her. And a generation of little boys will want them to be her too." -- Steven Moffat
Think about it. They're talking about having it on the market for $110K. How much harder do you think it would be to make it replace an employee?
We've already had the first waves of computers replacing people in employment--computers replacing typists, and people with slide rules, and toll collectors, and more recently check-out people at supermarkets. Computers and Robots are just going to get more capable.
> I actually agree in principle that piracy is wrong. But where I have a problem is with their method of determining guilt. I wish Ray Beckerman or one of the other attorneys here would explain to me how they can *prove* that I, and I alone, am the one responsible for an illegal download with an IP address???
They don't have to, not the way you mean. There are a few things that complicate matters. Don't depend on any of this in court and IANAL, but:
First, it's a civil case, which means they only have to prove it by a preponderance of the evidence.
Second, even proof beyond a reasonable doubt isn't a very rigorous standard of proof in scientific terms, and this is much easier to show.
Third, juries are generally allowed to make reasonable inferences.
If someone uses your internet connection to download a movie, most of the time that someone is you (or perhaps a minor residing in your home). Basically, the plaintiff says "It was you because X" and you say "no it wasn't because Y" or else you say "X doesn't show anything" or else you say "not X." The jury then decides (1) if X or Y are disputed, whether they occurred, and (2) whether it was probably you.
Also, I think providers keep records of IP leases, so the static IP doesn't matter much. Proxies might. (Can someone who works for a provider confirm this?)
Treaties are more complicated than one line in the Constitution. Not only is there international law regarding what constitutes a treaty and how a treaty's to be interpreted (See the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, for example), but most countries, including the United States, have their own jurisprudence on what constitutes a treaty and what legal effect it has.
Regarding sole executive agreements, the President can make them because he is "the sole organ" of the nation in matters of state, which basically just means he's the head of state and speaks for the country. He doesn't have treaty power there, but he has a certain limited power, particularly in areas where executive agreements are historically useful.
For example, unfreezing the contested assets of a foreign country in the United States as part of a diplomatic arrangement. (IIRC, Reagan did this with Iran, unfreezing contested assets to send them to an adjudication process both countries had agreed on.)
Consider, also, that US Law differentiates between self-executing and non-self-executing treaties; the latter require domestic legislation to implement. Sometimes that means states have to implement treaties, and sometimes they don't. For example, Texas doesn't comply with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Medellin v. Texas, and if I'm remembering the right treaty--it's been a while).
Lacking a seat in the UN is not a good indication of the legitimacy of your claim to statehood when you assert your independence from one of the countries with a veto power on the security council.
Claims to statehood, under international law, require (1) a defined (or fairly well-defined) territory, (2) a people, (3) a government, and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. (This was originally based on the Montevideo convention of 1933.)
Taiwan has all four. It is a state, de facto and de jure.
> everything is known to cause cancer in California... I could never figure it out, so I just stay away from California.
Everything says it causes cancer because of Proposition 65. Basically, if something in California is known to cause cancer (even only if ingested by the ton), you have to label it, or lawyers can sue you under a "private attorney general" law. In theory it might be a good idea, but it was implemented so that the defendant has the burden of showing that it's basically impossible to the nth degree that the thing could cause cancer in the quantities you're talking about.
This resulted in a lot of litigation where basically lawyers went around everywhere and said "Oh! You have flame-retardant furniture! Did you know it can cause cancer if you lick it?" "You're a dentist! You use drugs that can cause cancer if you administer them for a week and you didn't post a notice!"
This resulted in a plethora of notices to prevent lawsuits--notices which the public ignores because they're on everything. So in the cases where the warning is actually important, it gets ignored because there are so many.
IIRC, there have been some efforts by the AG (and some courts) to limit abuse.
If it passed by a 93-0 margin, it's conceivable your senate's vote wasn't needed.
Washington operated on a mix of reality, image, and rumor. Occasionally there's some morality thrown in. (To be fair, there is a lot of morality if you look in the right offices, but they usually aren't in the capitol building.) It's not so much because people are immoral as because they're busy and one misstatement costs them their career. It's hard to say anything when that's true, so you get very good at saying nothing.
> If I were Iran, I would be working very hard to build nuclear weapons as a defense, it's only logical.
A lot of the Arab world looks up to Iran as a country willing to defy the US. As for nukes, they sometimes make sense as a deterrent, but almost never as a defense. Setting them off in almost any circumstance is also a violation of international law.
Biggest problem in Iran isn't so much the Iranians as it is the government, AFAICT. (As far as I can tell.) If they could get a government in power which weren't run by a couple of psychopaths, then maybe having a nuclear deterrent would make sense. But as long as the government is threatening to wipe other governments off the face of the earth, NOBODY should let them NEAR a nuke. Same holds true for every other government. You should not get a nuke if you're someone who would seriously consider using it when there were less than a few million lives at stake.
Because laws can be written too narrowly. Realize that several number of people can stop a bad conviction--a police officer, a prosecutor, and sometimes a judge. But sometimes the law is written narrowly, and a judge may think the law shouldn't be what it is, but he still has to follow it as written, in most cases. (Occasionally he gets to write it.) Sometimes he finds a way out of it, and sometimes he gets it wrong. But if he feels his hands are tied by the law, and a jury feels their hands are tied by the law, then you bad convictions until the legislature gets the law changed.
You don't explain the whole tech. You figure out the part that matters and explain it very simply, possibly by analogy. Half the job of a lawyer is writing complex things simply. (The other half is writing simple things complexly.)
The legal system understands anything that someone explains to it. So if you explain something to a judge or a lawyer, he or she is supposed to think about what you've explained and figure out how the law applies to it. A cache isn't something it's hard to explain, so--particularly when it's really important to a case--a judge will understand it.
There was a case, something like "WWW Communications v. INS," where WWW and INS were both news organizations/aggregators in World War I. One was basically scraping the others' content, reading its headlines on the east coast and selling them on the west coast the same day that the information came out. The Court said that the scrapers were "attempting to reap what they did not sow," I think, creating a sort of prepossessory property interest in the information.
The idea is that if a domain scraper can copy all news content on the web, take away the advertisements, and not pay anyone for it, then there won't be an incentive for people to go to the effort to gather the news in the first place. It was obviously more legitimate in the pre-digital age, and doubly so during a world war, when it was MASSIVELY difficult to assemble transcontinental news on a daily basis, but the point still stands to some degree.
The system should be more or less hard-wired so that it notifies you when the microphone activates for any reason. But as a consumer, I might be willing to accept the possibility of listening in for the added level of safety. I'd be a helluvalot MORE likely to do so if they needed a warrant to listen, but even so, it's good to have an added level of redundancy in your safety systems. Keeping a cellphone, being able to get to a cell phone, the cell phone working where you are, and knowing who to call and how to report your position, are all single points of failure. You can work around some of them--e.g. calling 911 instead of the local police--but the more redundancies, the better.
This is doubly true if you have a family, in which case you're buying not for your own safety, but for that of other people. To my mind, that's a greater responsibility.
The real danger, of course, is warrantless recordings, mass recordings, and data-mining.
Slashdot Mirror
> This behavior is unacceptable from companies that have offices in America. That might be how people do business in other places, but they need to leave that shit at the door.
I agree. We have to change it. But it's not just a foreign problem.
This is New Jersey. If you haven't heard a story about something like this happening in New Jersey, you haven't been listening. It's like not hearing a story about questionable behavior by waste contractors in several of the nation's major cities, or not hearing about racism on the part of law enforcement in some towns in the South. Sure, there are lots of legitimate businesspeople, and waste contractors, and helpful law enforcement officers. But the other kinds also exists and even thrives. Sure, sometimes its people bringing in their problems, but we have a lot of our own.
> Try Googling "human trafficking". I think you'll find that many undocumented immigrants live under conditions little better than slavery.
Close. Actually, I think you'll find that many undocumented immigrants live in conditions of slavery. To the extent where the only real distinction is that the law--which they don't know anyway--says that it's illegal.
You'll also find that hundreds of thousands of American teens are at high risk for being kidnapped or tricked into a life of slavery. Sources: The Polaris Project, Terry Lee Wright's River of Innocents, Victor Malarek's The Natashas.
Not that we should care whether it's an immigrant or not. And the difference in the cultures of different immigrant groups make different techniques useful in finding and prosecuting human traffickers. But it's not really an immigrant problem, so much as a human one.
Yes, the summary's misleading; but the article at least is a bit clearer: it refers to windows-based browsers.
"In his advisory, Ormandy said that he notified Sun about the vulnerability but that the vendor didn't believe it was serious enough to warrant an emergency patch," sayeth the article.
Now that it's on slashdot, of course, that is clearly no longer the case, if indeed it was.
It's not free speech in a public forum, and the public doesn't have a right to address the court, at least not without going through certain channels. They need to be able to file an amicus brief under the rules of the jurisdiction if they want to speak to the judge on the issue the court is deciding. But the judge doesn't have to listen; courts aren't democratic. If you want to overturn a court democratically, you're supposed to do it through the legislature.
> Seriously, who calls the cops for spam and expects them to not laugh at you?
It doesn't have to be the same cops who deal with murders and stabbings. In fact, it probably shouldn't be; it takes different skills to hunt down spammers.
Person A says to cops: "I received spam. Here is copy."
Cop identifies IP.
Cop says to provider "Give me billing info on this IP b/c of spam."
Provider gives billing info. If not, does so after quick court order. If still not, gets shut down.
Cop contacts business. If hijacked computer, refers to techies. If not hijacked, quick court case by DA. IF spam, gets shut down and pays large statutory damages and prohibited from using net again for X years.
Or something like that.
The problem is having a quick, efficient, and intelligent police response in place, and having people know where they can go to get it. We will never stop spam unless we decide to commit sufficient resources to doing so.
We might use civil causes of action, class actions, and/or private atty general statutes. (But have to be careful to limit abuse.)
My Last sentence was a reflection of having dinner on the stove and only having a second to write it. =)
Yes. If Amazon went down tomorrow and never came back, society would be fine. If the stock exchange were taken over by malicious but hidden computer software for months, and then finally was taken down, the damage to society would be MUCH more severe. It's not just a way of exchanging everything, it's a way of establishing who owns what. If suddenly nobody knows who really owns every stock that's traded in the last six months, we've got a major frikkin problem. We shouldn't, maybe, but we do because money is an illusion.
I vaguely remember one of the Patents IBM hit SCO with being the use of hierarchical menu systems.
You don't mess with a company that holds the patent on friggin hierarchical menu systems.
Unless you're in it for (1) the fight, or (2) hundreds of millions of dollars.
If (1), you'd better HAVE hundreds of millions of dollars, or be really awesome at patent law.
> If this were coming from a noted astronomer, a major figure in disaster relief, or GWB, then it would be Slashdot-worthy. But seriously, what value did this Ask Slashdot add?
No, then it might be newsworthy, at least in some news quarters. But one of the nice things about slashdot is that it's a bit more egalitarian. You get modded up or down based on your insights, not your credentials. Sometimes that results in sillyness, but we value it because we're nerds.
We can respect the work that goes into a Ph.D., but we'll never respect someone only because they have a Ph.D. In a community of nerds, an appeal to authority isn't required to make an argument valid.
Yes, but it may make it easier to replace people at tasks where you don't need human-level sentience, like fast food. Just because we're safe for a little while in highly educated professions doesn't mean this can't profoundly change the world.
> Making a robot look and outwardly act like a human is a long way off from making one with human level sentience.
The Doctor is 900 years old. There are dozens of seasons.
Start with 2005, work forward. THEN go back and watch some of the classics. I like Tom Baker, but an Unearthly child is also worth a look.
Also, if you've seen even one episode, this is priceless.
"We saw some amazing actresses for this part. But when Karen came through the door, the game was up - she was funny, clever, gorgeous and sexy. Or Scottish, which is the quick way of saying it. A generation of little girls will want to be her. And a generation of little boys will want them to be her too." -- Steven Moffat
Think about it. They're talking about having it on the market for $110K. How much harder do you think it would be to make it replace an employee?
We've already had the first waves of computers replacing people in employment--computers replacing typists, and people with slide rules, and toll collectors, and more recently check-out people at supermarkets. Computers and Robots are just going to get more capable.
> I actually agree in principle that piracy is wrong. But where I have a problem is with their method of determining guilt. I wish Ray Beckerman or one of the other attorneys here would explain to me how they can *prove* that I, and I alone, am the one responsible for an illegal download with an IP address???
They don't have to, not the way you mean. There are a few things that complicate matters. Don't depend on any of this in court and IANAL, but:
First, it's a civil case, which means they only have to prove it by a preponderance of the evidence.
Second, even proof beyond a reasonable doubt isn't a very rigorous standard of proof in scientific terms, and this is much easier to show.
Third, juries are generally allowed to make reasonable inferences.
If someone uses your internet connection to download a movie, most of the time that someone is you (or perhaps a minor residing in your home). Basically, the plaintiff says "It was you because X" and you say "no it wasn't because Y" or else you say "X doesn't show anything" or else you say "not X." The jury then decides (1) if X or Y are disputed, whether they occurred, and (2) whether it was probably you.
Also, I think providers keep records of IP leases, so the static IP doesn't matter much. Proxies might. (Can someone who works for a provider confirm this?)
IIRC, NAFTA also isn't a treaty.
> How is a trade agreement not a treaty?
Treaties are more complicated than one line in the Constitution. Not only is there international law regarding what constitutes a treaty and how a treaty's to be interpreted (See the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, for example), but most countries, including the United States, have their own jurisprudence on what constitutes a treaty and what legal effect it has.
Regarding sole executive agreements, the President can make them because he is "the sole organ" of the nation in matters of state, which basically just means he's the head of state and speaks for the country. He doesn't have treaty power there, but he has a certain limited power, particularly in areas where executive agreements are historically useful.
For example, unfreezing the contested assets of a foreign country in the United States as part of a diplomatic arrangement. (IIRC, Reagan did this with Iran, unfreezing contested assets to send them to an adjudication process both countries had agreed on.)
Consider, also, that US Law differentiates between self-executing and non-self-executing treaties; the latter require domestic legislation to implement. Sometimes that means states have to implement treaties, and sometimes they don't. For example, Texas doesn't comply with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Medellin v. Texas, and if I'm remembering the right treaty--it's been a while).
> Taiwan does not have a seat in the UN.
Lacking a seat in the UN is not a good indication of the legitimacy of your claim to statehood when you assert your independence from one of the countries with a veto power on the security council.
Claims to statehood, under international law, require (1) a defined (or fairly well-defined) territory, (2) a people, (3) a government, and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. (This was originally based on the Montevideo convention of 1933.)
Taiwan has all four. It is a state, de facto and de jure.
> everything is known to cause cancer in California... I could never figure it out, so I just stay away from California.
Everything says it causes cancer because of Proposition 65. Basically, if something in California is known to cause cancer (even only if ingested by the ton), you have to label it, or lawyers can sue you under a "private attorney general" law. In theory it might be a good idea, but it was implemented so that the defendant has the burden of showing that it's basically impossible to the nth degree that the thing could cause cancer in the quantities you're talking about.
This resulted in a lot of litigation where basically lawyers went around everywhere and said "Oh! You have flame-retardant furniture! Did you know it can cause cancer if you lick it?" "You're a dentist! You use drugs that can cause cancer if you administer them for a week and you didn't post a notice!"
This resulted in a plethora of notices to prevent lawsuits--notices which the public ignores because they're on everything. So in the cases where the warning is actually important, it gets ignored because there are so many.
IIRC, there have been some efforts by the AG (and some courts) to limit abuse.
If it passed by a 93-0 margin, it's conceivable your senate's vote wasn't needed.
Washington operated on a mix of reality, image, and rumor. Occasionally there's some morality thrown in. (To be fair, there is a lot of morality if you look in the right offices, but they usually aren't in the capitol building.) It's not so much because people are immoral as because they're busy and one misstatement costs them their career. It's hard to say anything when that's true, so you get very good at saying nothing.
> If I were Iran, I would be working very hard to build nuclear weapons as a defense, it's only logical.
A lot of the Arab world looks up to Iran as a country willing to defy the US. As for nukes, they sometimes make sense as a deterrent, but almost never as a defense. Setting them off in almost any circumstance is also a violation of international law.
Biggest problem in Iran isn't so much the Iranians as it is the government, AFAICT. (As far as I can tell.) If they could get a government in power which weren't run by a couple of psychopaths, then maybe having a nuclear deterrent would make sense. But as long as the government is threatening to wipe other governments off the face of the earth, NOBODY should let them NEAR a nuke. Same holds true for every other government. You should not get a nuke if you're someone who would seriously consider using it when there were less than a few million lives at stake.
Because laws can be written too narrowly. Realize that several number of people can stop a bad conviction--a police officer, a prosecutor, and sometimes a judge. But sometimes the law is written narrowly, and a judge may think the law shouldn't be what it is, but he still has to follow it as written, in most cases. (Occasionally he gets to write it.) Sometimes he finds a way out of it, and sometimes he gets it wrong. But if he feels his hands are tied by the law, and a jury feels their hands are tied by the law, then you bad convictions until the legislature gets the law changed.
You don't explain the whole tech. You figure out the part that matters and explain it very simply, possibly by analogy. Half the job of a lawyer is writing complex things simply. (The other half is writing simple things complexly.)
The legal system understands anything that someone explains to it. So if you explain something to a judge or a lawyer, he or she is supposed to think about what you've explained and figure out how the law applies to it. A cache isn't something it's hard to explain, so--particularly when it's really important to a case--a judge will understand it.
There was a case, something like "WWW Communications v. INS," where WWW and INS were both news organizations/aggregators in World War I. One was basically scraping the others' content, reading its headlines on the east coast and selling them on the west coast the same day that the information came out. The Court said that the scrapers were "attempting to reap what they did not sow," I think, creating a sort of prepossessory property interest in the information.
The idea is that if a domain scraper can copy all news content on the web, take away the advertisements, and not pay anyone for it, then there won't be an incentive for people to go to the effort to gather the news in the first place. It was obviously more legitimate in the pre-digital age, and doubly so during a world war, when it was MASSIVELY difficult to assemble transcontinental news on a daily basis, but the point still stands to some degree.
>> The system should be more or less hard-wired so that it notifies you when the microphone activates for any reason
> Absolutely not true
"Should" need not mean "is." Should refers to things which, according to the value system of the speaker, ought to be.
> Never buy a vehicle with OnStar.
The system should be more or less hard-wired so that it notifies you when the microphone activates for any reason. But as a consumer, I might be willing to accept the possibility of listening in for the added level of safety. I'd be a helluvalot MORE likely to do so if they needed a warrant to listen, but even so, it's good to have an added level of redundancy in your safety systems. Keeping a cellphone, being able to get to a cell phone, the cell phone working where you are, and knowing who to call and how to report your position, are all single points of failure. You can work around some of them--e.g. calling 911 instead of the local police--but the more redundancies, the better.
This is doubly true if you have a family, in which case you're buying not for your own safety, but for that of other people. To my mind, that's a greater responsibility.
The real danger, of course, is warrantless recordings, mass recordings, and data-mining.