Perhaps because a citizen of a foreign country, a country that might in all other ways be a friend or neutral to the US, might form a group for the purposes of directing weapons at the United States intended to do physical harm to it's citizens or it's government.
Such is not the case with Assange.
Yet Assange has made it his business to disseminate classified documents to anyone and everyone. Information that can get people killed.
Nothing in this article even says the US is targeting him for death. It's more about letting US Service people know that giving him documents will have some very serious blowback. Which it should.
They still have to back those threats in court. And given that other people and groups with that classification have been targeted for death, there is an implicit threat here for Assange and Wikileaks.
Assange knew he was going to be targeted the day he bought the wikileaks domain name. Not just by the US, but every government in the world wants his head on a plate. Britain is fighting to have him extradited as we sit here.
The USA does what it wants to do and as often as it wants to do it. You don't 'have' to have all the oil in the middle east, but your life is better for it.
That would be more poignant if we actually depended on Middle Eastern oil as much as Europe & China do.
As someone else pointed out, if the US was behaving so reprehensibly one would think the leaders of Europe, Russia and China would get together and form a coalition to make us knock it off. But that isn't going to happen because despite all public posturing to the contrary, they all rely on the relative stability we've maintained for the last 70 odd years.
The chances of a person being killed by a terrorist attack are by far lower than the chances of dying from a traffic accident or a heart attack. Actually they are far less than the chances of an innocent person to die accidentally shot by a police officer..
When the government starts staging drone attacks against drunk drivers that statement might begin to have a purpose. But I suspect it will be hopeless nonetheless.
Taking extreme actions against vaporous threats is the best way of turning a democracy into an authoritarian regimen, and if you feed enough fear to the population you may even have general support in the process, until it is too late.
So we should wait until our citizens are killed by an otherwise preventable terrorist attack to make you feel better in our justifications? No thanks. And frankly screw you.
Taking extreme actions against vaporous threats is the best way of turning a democracy into an authoritarian regimen, and if you feed enough fear to the population you may even have general support in the process, until it is too late.
Perhaps. Hugging it out wasn't ever going to work either though.
You say "vaporous threats" as though it's some magic word. I suppose it helps you sleep at night. 9/11 was not a vaporous threat, and I think my nation is entitled to our period of paranoia due to it. Paranoia doesn't mean the enemies aren't real.
Basically though, Americans are pretty reasonable people. As much as it's in vogue to call us Imperialists or Fascists, we are 180 degrees from either of those things. I hope you never have to see a real Fascist or live under such a regime.
We're that guy that you know you can always go to when you need help, but you hate it because he'll never let you forget it, sure. The guy that runs the neighborhood watch that you like to mock but still kind of happy knowing he's around. But ruling the world? Not our style. We took a big kick to the balls not long ago though, and the guys who did it won't stand up like men, they hide and screw with us from the dark and they've got us swinging wildly. So how about you help us out for a change instead of standing there watching it with that little schadenfreude grin on your faces.
I've never really understood that argument as a response to somebody pointing out an evil: "Well, but others are even worse, so that makes what we're doing OK."
Perhaps it's because certain people will focus solely on actions of the US, while completely ignoring or downplaying similar actions of their own or other governments. It's not so much a "it's fine if we're doing it too" as much as a "shut up and deal with your own hypocrisy first, before you point fingers at us".
We are a nation and a government. Although we began with lofty ideals, we didn't even meet those ideals from the start. Ideals are a guide post, something to strive for, they are not a mandate to ignore reality.
The article claims (and that's TFA not the summary), that technically any military personnel communicating with Wikileaks/Assange may be charged with a crime that goes all the way to death as penalty. That does seem alarming.
Yes, because we all know the military should promote sharing & caring. Why they should tell enemies.. no that's much to harsh.. frenemies! They should tell frenemies a week in advance before dropping a sternly worded scolding on them! Then the world will be so much better.
Idiot
Divulging military information can get people killed. Yes it's a crime that deserves the death penalty.
When you send your military forces across an international border to kill people it's an act of war.
What's it called when you give money to a group of extremists, have military personnel train them and then totally do a "What, me?" face when they blow up things in your enemies country because you didn't actually send soldiers there?
Like you're country's never done anything outside of it's borders that would be illegal inside of it. I love how the world has suddenly become innocent angels the last couple of decades, because of course the US is the worst bad guy that's ever existed. We're just tossing jews in ovens and overthrowing countries to grow opium to support our tea habit left and right over here. Yep, that's us, worst assholes history has ever seen. Yep.
Perhaps because a citizen of a foreign country, a country that might in all other ways be a friend or neutral to the US, might form a group for the purposes of directing weapons at the United States intended to do physical harm to it's citizens or it's government.
I do agree that the idea of drone strikes and "enemies of the state" is frightening. But we're not living in 1917, we're not even in 1960. The world, and how wars are fought, has changed drastically.
State or private sponsored terrorism can do significant damage these days with increasingly cheap & available tools. We can't invade the world, so we do what we have to do. I'm sorry that we have yet to build a bomb that can only explode in the presence of undeniable guilt.
What amazes me is that people like you think any of this is new. Oh drone strikes are sloppy, but governments have been assassinating nuisances for all of history. If anything we've shown a great deal of restraint in not having had this guy killed already. Everyone with any bit of sense knows somebody's going to sooner or later. If not us then the Russians or the Chinese.
Nothing in this article even says the US is targeting him for death. It's more about letting US Service people know that giving him documents will have some very serious blowback. Which it should.
Locked in would be if you could only and exclusively read a specific ebook on a Kindle device. The fact that you can read Kindle ebooks on numerous devices with no connection to Amazon is the antithesis of locked in sir. ie The Exact Opposite.
Briefly put, the Kindle ecosystem is a closed garden, the EPUB/Adobe ecosystem is not, and unprotected formats are not a part of either.
I don't think Kindle counts as a closed system either, since their Kindle App runs on any PC Desktop, Macs, iOS & Android. If you had to buy a Kindle device to read MOBI books, then I would agree.
In KDP Select, Amazon is in effect becoming the publisher of the work, not simply the distributor. That means they may do additional marketing or republish in different formats for you, ie paperbacks & hardcovers, if the market shows a demand. It is not unusual for publishers to decide which channels a book is sold through, rather than the author.
Before people get their knickers in a twist about this, it doesn't mean exclusivity ie. Amazon must be the only source for this book, it means exclusivity ie. YOU, the author/publisher must be the only source for the book. They don't want to deal with legal tussles over who owns what and how much of the cut they should get.
Nothing to see here.
(2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option.
Let me fix this for you "For a book that is free in any format YOU MAY NOT ALSO SELL IT FOR PROFIT ON AMAZON.
But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.
Not really dude. Because when someone buys your book for $0.99 on Amazon and then writes a big huge blog about how Amazon scammed them because they just found out the books were free from another website, you're not the one who's on the hook there, Amazon is. You're not the one who has to do damage control, call out the lawyers and the publicity spin-doctors, because your $0.99 book is effecting their entire business.
Frankly there is nothing stopping you from publishing the book in MOBI & EPUB formats (what do you have against Nook?) and setting up a pay what you like website. So no, no violins for you.
However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.
Weird, I could have sworn there were iPods/iPads/iPhones/Nooks/Sony Ereaders/A billion Android devices out there, and that there were about a gazillion web shopping cart systems to setup a retail channel, from hosting your own to we'll do all the work for you setups. I was sure that MOBI & EPUB were published standards that anyone can create ebooks with with software like Calibre.
Amazon is not the only source for ebooks. They're the most well known, possibly, but they are not the only source. Take your hyperbole somewhere else.
One, when someone sells a copy of Shakespeare in Amazon they don't claim to be the author, they're just the publisher. You won't find 50 people all claiming to have written these wicked sonnets yo, misleading customers into buying multiple copies of the same work.
When "packagers", I hesitate to even call them publishers and screw the OP for calling this guy an author, try doing this to wiki's you get the problem that the wiki material quickly becomes outdated, and those 50 people from above each claim to be the author of the material. So customers looking for books buy 2 or 3, discover they're all just copies and do you think they demand money back from the 'authors'? Oh no, it's Amazon that scammed them somehow, not these douches. It's Amazon who has to return the money, setup a system to deal with irate customers. It's Amazon that has to deal with one of those 50 authors bringing a suit to make Amazon stop selling the other 49 because it's "unfair" competition with his/her business.
So yeah, I have no issues with anything Amazon's done here.
That's a nice sentiment, how about Amazon redirects all the calls from upset customers who thought they were buying 2 different books only to discover they were the same rewrapped wiki articles from differen't "authors".
That is why Amazon is taking this stance, they don't want 30 different people trying to lay claim to the same public material, claim authorship because they did a few edits and then have to deal with the legal & customer fallout.
The question is a matter of balance of power, and competition.
Will you still feel this is not a problem if Apple decides GMail can't access your Contacts? Will it be a problem for you when Apple inevitable decides you can only use an Apple app for certain tasks?
You know why they're doing this right? To restrict jailbreaking. Not because it's a harm to the phone carriers, but because 70% of their revenue is tied to iOS.
But then I guess you're okay with being told that "your" phone isn't really yours, you're just allowed to press the shiny buttons now and then. No problems here, child, adults are making the decisions for you after all.
Perhaps the judges & prosecutors should stop selectively enforcing laws for the benefit of giant corporations that make more money per minute than this 'criminal' will in his lifetime.
...in a story about how a guy just got convicted of a crime for stealing and reselling an iPhone prototype...
If you're unsure where I got your spin from, maybe you should re-read your comment. You used air quotes around "criminal" to indicate that you disagreed with the court's decision that he had, in fact, broken the law. Then you said that it's selective enforcement, because it happened to be a case involving
[a] giant corporation[s] that make more money per minute [...]
and that this conferred special treatment over
Joe Schmoe
and then threw in a non-sequitur about a "police taskforce" (that would be the police, investigating crime) as if they were on some sort of Batphone link to Apple's HQ.
If you weren't taking a stab at the police being the personal private security of a large fruit-logo-themed company than what exactly *was* your point, because it got missed in your post.
You say they had "dozens" of ways to get the phone back, and then effectively suggest vigilantism - ie, taking the law into their own hands. If the phone is stolen, they did what anyone else would do - they reported it to the police.
Or are you suggesting that if Joe Schmoe loses his phone and finds where it is by GPS that he go over to the thief's house with his lawyer and cuts the guy a cheque?
Talk about selective enforcement! Is Apple not allowed to use the same route that any other person or business can pursue?
I put 'criminal' in quotes be cause honestly I don't feel he committed a crime. Is it a crime on the books? Sure, so's spitting on the sidewalk, carrying an ice cream cone in your pocket and a woman driving while wearing a house coat. My personal feeling is it's one of those laws prosecutors like to pile on, in the hopes maybe one will stick. It's totally up to the prosecutors discretion if they wish to pursue the case.
Where, in your world, is contacting the person in possession of the phone vigilantism? Do you think the only way to resolve a dispute is police in riot gear?
You have a lawyer contact the person in possession of the phone and offer a reward for finding the thing. Minimal fuss or drama. Have them sign some contract so your trade secrets stay secret a little longer and then you walk away.
And no, Apple is not 'any other person'. Apple is not a person, it's a corporate entity with a legal fiction of some person like rights. Like any other corporation they have an interest in minimizing bad press and not presenting themselves to the world as shady. Everything they've done in this case, and in the more recent case of a second lost iPhone, in regards to how they handled the event and their use of, indeed their ability to access the use of, strongarm police tactics, screams shady however.
Care is not at issue; there is simply no such thing as "finders keepers" in any nation observing modern property laws. This guy was punished like the thief he was, end of story. If you had "lost" a $5000 phone that someone found and immediately hocked instead of returning it, would you really think to yourself "oh well it was his to sell" and just move on with your life?
Well, one, I will probably never own a $5000 phone, and if I could afford one I could afford to replace it.
In all honesty, yes, if through my stupidity I lost my $50000 phone I would not be shocked or surprised if someone else took it. This, btw, is why there are password locks to keep people out of your phone, remote wipe and insurance.
Let me ask you a question. With the limited and dwindling funds that state and federal government has at its disposal, would you rather they spend their time tracking and prosecuting violent offenders or tossing mad-dog phone picker uppers in prison?
Not exactly. The phone was damaged, and rendered non-functional during the process of dis-assembly and reassembly by the Gizmodo staff. Gizmodo knew when they bought the phone that it belonged to an Apple employee (and explicitly mentioned that fact in the first article). In fact, they knew *which* Apple employee it belonged to. We know they got that information from Hogan, because by the time the phone was in their possession, it had been remotely wiped.
Odd, you note that Apple had remotely wiped the phone prior to Gizmodo coming into possession of it, and then claim they rendered it non-functional. How does that sequence of events work?
I put 'criminal' in quotes be cause honestly I don't feel he committed a crime. Is it a crime on the books? Sure, so's spitting on the sidewalk, carrying an ice cream cone in your pocket and a woman driving while wearing a house coat. My personal feeling is it's one of those laws prosecutors like to pile on, in the hopes maybe one will stick. It's totally up to the prosecutors discretion if they wish to pursue the case.
Thats debatable, even on a good day. They're more like a gang of hoodlums who write about their exploits on a blog than a journalistic organization. Most highschool journalism classes are more advanced, more professional, and more useful than the immature douches at Gizmodo.
So, I guess you hate Gizmodo then.
That is not journalism, that is extortion, Google it. You want to call someone spoiled? You might want to look at the extortionists.
Yes, because Steve did not have a well known and publicized history of throwing hissy fits when people reveal well known product details before his big spotlight moments. He's never crushed hobbyist blogs, had a guy fired for showing Woz, the same guy who built the first Apple an iPad for 2 minutes before it's official reveal.. nope, not spoiled there.
Also, interesting that the the same system you cheer for convicting this guy didn't find evidence to support extortion or theft charges against Gizmodo.
When I steal your phone, and you locate it via GPS, what exactly are you going to do other than call the police? Would you not attempt to get your phone back when you know where its being held hostage? You'd just let me have it?
Yes, I'd try to get my phone back. Just they way I stated. Go to the house of the person possessing it, with a lawyer and perhaps an officer if I, being a normal person, could convince one to spend the time on my case, and politely say "Hey, you found my phone, that I lost. Kindly return it, and here's a small reward for finding it. Btw, keeping it is a crime and I'd rather not take it further but I will."
End of drama, minimal cost.
Instead, how many govt. man hours & public tax money were wasted on this, in a cash strapped state with honestly, way more important things to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps because a citizen of a foreign country, a country that might in all other ways be a friend or neutral to the US, might form a group for the purposes of directing weapons at the United States intended to do physical harm to it's citizens or it's government.
Such is not the case with Assange.
Yet Assange has made it his business to disseminate classified documents to anyone and everyone. Information that can get people killed.
Nothing in this article even says the US is targeting him for death. It's more about letting US Service people know that giving him documents will have some very serious blowback. Which it should.
They still have to back those threats in court. And given that other people and groups with that classification have been targeted for death, there is an implicit threat here for Assange and Wikileaks.
Assange knew he was going to be targeted the day he bought the wikileaks domain name. Not just by the US, but every government in the world wants his head on a plate. Britain is fighting to have him extradited as we sit here.
The USA does what it wants to do and as often as it wants to do it. You don't 'have' to have all the oil in the middle east, but your life is better for it.
That would be more poignant if we actually depended on Middle Eastern oil as much as Europe & China do.
As someone else pointed out, if the US was behaving so reprehensibly one would think the leaders of Europe, Russia and China would get together and form a coalition to make us knock it off. But that isn't going to happen because despite all public posturing to the contrary, they all rely on the relative stability we've maintained for the last 70 odd years.
The chances of a person being killed by a terrorist attack are by far lower than the chances of dying from a traffic accident or a heart attack. Actually they are far less than the chances of an innocent person to die accidentally shot by a police officer..
When the government starts staging drone attacks against drunk drivers that statement might begin to have a purpose. But I suspect it will be hopeless nonetheless.
Taking extreme actions against vaporous threats is the best way of turning a democracy into an authoritarian regimen, and if you feed enough fear to the population you may even have general support in the process, until it is too late.
So we should wait until our citizens are killed by an otherwise preventable terrorist attack to make you feel better in our justifications? No thanks. And frankly screw you.
Taking extreme actions against vaporous threats is the best way of turning a democracy into an authoritarian regimen, and if you feed enough fear to the population you may even have general support in the process, until it is too late.
Perhaps. Hugging it out wasn't ever going to work either though.
You say "vaporous threats" as though it's some magic word. I suppose it helps you sleep at night. 9/11 was not a vaporous threat, and I think my nation is entitled to our period of paranoia due to it. Paranoia doesn't mean the enemies aren't real.
Basically though, Americans are pretty reasonable people. As much as it's in vogue to call us Imperialists or Fascists, we are 180 degrees from either of those things. I hope you never have to see a real Fascist or live under such a regime.
We're that guy that you know you can always go to when you need help, but you hate it because he'll never let you forget it, sure. The guy that runs the neighborhood watch that you like to mock but still kind of happy knowing he's around. But ruling the world? Not our style. We took a big kick to the balls not long ago though, and the guys who did it won't stand up like men, they hide and screw with us from the dark and they've got us swinging wildly. So how about you help us out for a change instead of standing there watching it with that little schadenfreude grin on your faces.
I've never really understood that argument as a response to somebody pointing out an evil: "Well, but others are even worse, so that makes what we're doing OK."
Perhaps it's because certain people will focus solely on actions of the US, while completely ignoring or downplaying similar actions of their own or other governments. It's not so much a "it's fine if we're doing it too" as much as a "shut up and deal with your own hypocrisy first, before you point fingers at us".
We are a nation and a government. Although we began with lofty ideals, we didn't even meet those ideals from the start. Ideals are a guide post, something to strive for, they are not a mandate to ignore reality.
The article claims (and that's TFA not the summary), that technically any military personnel communicating with Wikileaks/Assange may be charged with a crime that goes all the way to death as penalty. That does seem alarming.
Yes, because we all know the military should promote sharing & caring. Why they should tell enemies.. no that's much to harsh.. frenemies! They should tell frenemies a week in advance before dropping a sternly worded scolding on them! Then the world will be so much better.
Idiot
Divulging military information can get people killed. Yes it's a crime that deserves the death penalty.
When you send your military forces across an international border to kill people it's an act of war.
What's it called when you give money to a group of extremists, have military personnel train them and then totally do a "What, me?" face when they blow up things in your enemies country because you didn't actually send soldiers there?
Like you're country's never done anything outside of it's borders that would be illegal inside of it. I love how the world has suddenly become innocent angels the last couple of decades, because of course the US is the worst bad guy that's ever existed. We're just tossing jews in ovens and overthrowing countries to grow opium to support our tea habit left and right over here. Yep, that's us, worst assholes history has ever seen. Yep.
And this is different from any other government how?
Perhaps because a citizen of a foreign country, a country that might in all other ways be a friend or neutral to the US, might form a group for the purposes of directing weapons at the United States intended to do physical harm to it's citizens or it's government.
I do agree that the idea of drone strikes and "enemies of the state" is frightening. But we're not living in 1917, we're not even in 1960. The world, and how wars are fought, has changed drastically.
State or private sponsored terrorism can do significant damage these days with increasingly cheap & available tools. We can't invade the world, so we do what we have to do. I'm sorry that we have yet to build a bomb that can only explode in the presence of undeniable guilt.
What amazes me is that people like you think any of this is new. Oh drone strikes are sloppy, but governments have been assassinating nuisances for all of history. If anything we've shown a great deal of restraint in not having had this guy killed already. Everyone with any bit of sense knows somebody's going to sooner or later. If not us then the Russians or the Chinese.
Nothing in this article even says the US is targeting him for death. It's more about letting US Service people know that giving him documents will have some very serious blowback. Which it should.
Do you grasp the concept of "locked in"?
Locked in would be if you could only and exclusively read a specific ebook on a Kindle device. The fact that you can read Kindle ebooks on numerous devices with no connection to Amazon is the antithesis of locked in sir. ie The Exact Opposite.
There are solutions for this, it's called offline reading. Or you can scrape the wiki and convert it to an ebook yourself for free.
Don't let facts stop your warblegarble though.
Briefly put, the Kindle ecosystem is a closed garden, the EPUB/Adobe ecosystem is not, and unprotected formats are not a part of either.
I don't think Kindle counts as a closed system either, since their Kindle App runs on any PC Desktop, Macs, iOS & Android. If you had to buy a Kindle device to read MOBI books, then I would agree.
In KDP Select, Amazon is in effect becoming the publisher of the work, not simply the distributor. That means they may do additional marketing or republish in different formats for you, ie paperbacks & hardcovers, if the market shows a demand. It is not unusual for publishers to decide which channels a book is sold through, rather than the author.
(1) amazon requires exclusivity
Before people get their knickers in a twist about this, it doesn't mean exclusivity ie. Amazon must be the only source for this book, it means exclusivity ie. YOU, the author/publisher must be the only source for the book. They don't want to deal with legal tussles over who owns what and how much of the cut they should get.
Nothing to see here.
(2) this: "You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book." So for a book that is free in any format, amazon is not an option.
Let me fix this for you "For a book that is free in any format YOU MAY NOT ALSO SELL IT FOR PROFIT ON AMAZON.
But slashdotters might find that the facts of my situation evoke a different feeling in their fuzzy little free-information-loving hearts than the facts of the one in TFA.
Not really dude. Because when someone buys your book for $0.99 on Amazon and then writes a big huge blog about how Amazon scammed them because they just found out the books were free from another website, you're not the one who's on the hook there, Amazon is. You're not the one who has to do damage control, call out the lawyers and the publicity spin-doctors, because your $0.99 book is effecting their entire business.
Frankly there is nothing stopping you from publishing the book in MOBI & EPUB formats (what do you have against Nook?) and setting up a pay what you like website. So no, no violins for you.
However, it's worth bearing in mind that amazon is very close to being a monopolist in the ebook business. If someone held a monopoly on paper, we probably would be a little concerned if they started refusing to sell various broad categories of books.
Weird, I could have sworn there were iPods/iPads/iPhones/Nooks/Sony Ereaders/A billion Android devices out there, and that there were about a gazillion web shopping cart systems to setup a retail channel, from hosting your own to we'll do all the work for you setups. I was sure that MOBI & EPUB were published standards that anyone can create ebooks with with software like Calibre.
Amazon is not the only source for ebooks. They're the most well known, possibly, but they are not the only source. Take your hyperbole somewhere else.
One, when someone sells a copy of Shakespeare in Amazon they don't claim to be the author, they're just the publisher. You won't find 50 people all claiming to have written these wicked sonnets yo, misleading customers into buying multiple copies of the same work.
When "packagers", I hesitate to even call them publishers and screw the OP for calling this guy an author, try doing this to wiki's you get the problem that the wiki material quickly becomes outdated, and those 50 people from above each claim to be the author of the material. So customers looking for books buy 2 or 3, discover they're all just copies and do you think they demand money back from the 'authors'? Oh no, it's Amazon that scammed them somehow, not these douches. It's Amazon who has to return the money, setup a system to deal with irate customers. It's Amazon that has to deal with one of those 50 authors bringing a suit to make Amazon stop selling the other 49 because it's "unfair" competition with his/her business.
So yeah, I have no issues with anything Amazon's done here.
Gee, you mean a US company doing business in the US has to obey US laws?? Incredible!!
Or should they flip a coin to see what country's insane legal babble will we obey today approach?
That's a nice sentiment, how about Amazon redirects all the calls from upset customers who thought they were buying 2 different books only to discover they were the same rewrapped wiki articles from differen't "authors".
That is why Amazon is taking this stance, they don't want 30 different people trying to lay claim to the same public material, claim authorship because they did a few edits and then have to deal with the legal & customer fallout.
Here at Orange forums, we're always happy to hear about your experiences and love of Apples.
Wait, this wasn't a commercial for GlobalScale GuruPlugs? But but, so much camera time!!
The question is a matter of balance of power, and competition.
Will you still feel this is not a problem if Apple decides GMail can't access your Contacts? Will it be a problem for you when Apple inevitable decides you can only use an Apple app for certain tasks?
You know why they're doing this right? To restrict jailbreaking. Not because it's a harm to the phone carriers, but because 70% of their revenue is tied to iOS.
But then I guess you're okay with being told that "your" phone isn't really yours, you're just allowed to press the shiny buttons now and then. No problems here, child, adults are making the decisions for you after all.
We needed a balance for the "Evil Libruls are trying to destroy our Army, prisons and secret intelligence agencies!" side.
Perhaps the judges & prosecutors should stop selectively enforcing laws for the benefit of giant corporations that make more money per minute than this 'criminal' will in his lifetime.
...in a story about how a guy just got convicted of a crime for stealing and reselling an iPhone prototype...
If you're unsure where I got your spin from, maybe you should re-read your comment. You used air quotes around "criminal" to indicate that you disagreed with the court's decision that he had, in fact, broken the law. Then you said that it's selective enforcement, because it happened to be a case involving
[a] giant corporation[s] that make more money per minute [...]
and that this conferred special treatment over
Joe Schmoe
and then threw in a non-sequitur about a "police taskforce" (that would be the police, investigating crime) as if they were on some sort of Batphone link to Apple's HQ.
If you weren't taking a stab at the police being the personal private security of a large fruit-logo-themed company than what exactly *was* your point, because it got missed in your post.
You say they had "dozens" of ways to get the phone back, and then effectively suggest vigilantism - ie, taking the law into their own hands. If the phone is stolen, they did what anyone else would do - they reported it to the police.
Or are you suggesting that if Joe Schmoe loses his phone and finds where it is by GPS that he go over to the thief's house with his lawyer and cuts the guy a cheque?
Talk about selective enforcement! Is Apple not allowed to use the same route that any other person or business can pursue?
I put 'criminal' in quotes be cause honestly I don't feel he committed a crime. Is it a crime on the books? Sure, so's spitting on the sidewalk, carrying an ice cream cone in your pocket and a woman driving while wearing a house coat. My personal feeling is it's one of those laws prosecutors like to pile on, in the hopes maybe one will stick. It's totally up to the prosecutors discretion if they wish to pursue the case.
And 'police taskforce' wasn't a non-sequitur, Apple is on the steering committee of the task force that investigated these events and performed the highly unnecessary raid on the house of a Gizmodo writer. http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-04-30/business/20877418_1_iphone-tech-blog-gizmodo-steering
Where, in your world, is contacting the person in possession of the phone vigilantism? Do you think the only way to resolve a dispute is police in riot gear?
You have a lawyer contact the person in possession of the phone and offer a reward for finding the thing. Minimal fuss or drama. Have them sign some contract so your trade secrets stay secret a little longer and then you walk away.
And no, Apple is not 'any other person'. Apple is not a person, it's a corporate entity with a legal fiction of some person like rights. Like any other corporation they have an interest in minimizing bad press and not presenting themselves to the world as shady. Everything they've done in this case, and in the more recent case of a second lost iPhone, in regards to how they handled the event and their use of, indeed their ability to access the use of, strongarm police tactics, screams shady however.
Care is not at issue; there is simply no such thing as "finders keepers" in any nation observing modern property laws. This guy was punished like the thief he was, end of story. If you had "lost" a $5000 phone that someone found and immediately hocked instead of returning it, would you really think to yourself "oh well it was his to sell" and just move on with your life?
Well, one, I will probably never own a $5000 phone, and if I could afford one I could afford to replace it.
In all honesty, yes, if through my stupidity I lost my $50000 phone I would not be shocked or surprised if someone else took it. This, btw, is why there are password locks to keep people out of your phone, remote wipe and insurance.
Let me ask you a question. With the limited and dwindling funds that state and federal government has at its disposal, would you rather they spend their time tracking and prosecuting violent offenders or tossing mad-dog phone picker uppers in prison?
Not exactly. The phone was damaged, and rendered non-functional during the process of dis-assembly and reassembly by the Gizmodo staff. Gizmodo knew when they bought the phone that it belonged to an Apple employee (and explicitly mentioned that fact in the first article). In fact, they knew *which* Apple employee it belonged to. We know they got that information from Hogan, because by the time the phone was in their possession, it had been remotely wiped.
Odd, you note that Apple had remotely wiped the phone prior to Gizmodo coming into possession of it, and then claim they rendered it non-functional. How does that sequence of events work?
BTW, Apple disabled the hardware, they've even got a patent application for it. http://www.iphonehacks.com/2010/08/apple-will-be-able-to-remotely-disable-iphone-after-detecting-unauthorized-activity-such-as-hacking-jailbreaking-unlocking.html
Before you say that this isn't enabled in iPhones, remember this was a prototype.
I put 'criminal' in quotes be cause honestly I don't feel he committed a crime. Is it a crime on the books? Sure, so's spitting on the sidewalk, carrying an ice cream cone in your pocket and a woman driving while wearing a house coat. My personal feeling is it's one of those laws prosecutors like to pile on, in the hopes maybe one will stick. It's totally up to the prosecutors discretion if they wish to pursue the case.
Thats debatable, even on a good day. They're more like a gang of hoodlums who write about their exploits on a blog than a journalistic organization. Most highschool journalism classes are more advanced, more professional, and more useful than the immature douches at Gizmodo.
So, I guess you hate Gizmodo then.
That is not journalism, that is extortion, Google it. You want to call someone spoiled? You might want to look at the extortionists.
Yes, because Steve did not have a well known and publicized history of throwing hissy fits when people reveal well known product details before his big spotlight moments. He's never crushed hobbyist blogs, had a guy fired for showing Woz, the same guy who built the first Apple an iPad for 2 minutes before it's official reveal.. nope, not spoiled there.
Also, interesting that the the same system you cheer for convicting this guy didn't find evidence to support extortion or theft charges against Gizmodo.
When I steal your phone, and you locate it via GPS, what exactly are you going to do other than call the police? Would you not attempt to get your phone back when you know where its being held hostage? You'd just let me have it?
But they didn't just call the police. http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-04-30/business/20877418_1_iphone-tech-blog-gizmodo-steering They went to their special tech task force, which they have a seat on the steering committee of.
Yes, I'd try to get my phone back. Just they way I stated. Go to the house of the person possessing it, with a lawyer and perhaps an officer if I, being a normal person, could convince one to spend the time on my case, and politely say "Hey, you found my phone, that I lost. Kindly return it, and here's a small reward for finding it. Btw, keeping it is a crime and I'd rather not take it further but I will."
End of drama, minimal cost.
Instead, how many govt. man hours & public tax money were wasted on this, in a cash strapped state with honestly, way more important things to deal with.