They may expose themselves to liability via shareholder lawsuits which is not "breaking the law". Can you site this law and reference the penal section? Doing something that creates a tort is not "breaking the law" in and of itself. What is your evidence for the "breaking the law" assertion?
It's "against the law" in a similar way that me punching you in the face is "against the law"
No legal actions happen until a lawsuit is pressed. But if I did this, you are guaranteed to win the lawsuit against me!
To me, it seems fair to say me doing that is against the law. Same goes for any other action that opens you up to a guaranteed win of a lawsuit against you.
I imagine the operator, or Verizon itself, could be charged with Obstruction of Justice
You know, a thought occurs...
Sadly, I do believe if Verizon did give the officers any information on this guy, he would win in a lawsuit against Verizon.
On one hand it is good Verizon tries to protect their customers privacy, but firmly on the other hand, priorities!! His privacy will be doing a whole lot less for him if h's dead!
What would be nice, is a little authorization form to fill out and adjust exactly how bad the situation has to be before Verison will do such a thing. That way, the customer can clearly indicate they would want help, or specifically state they do not want to be helped. Then Verizon would always have the information to do the right thing. While I personally would choose more privacy and less giving away of my info in an 'emergency', I also realize I can't presume to make that choice correctly for others, let alone this guy.
A B and C represent up/down, left/right, forward/back D represents the direction of polarization E it seems represents the color polarization (this is the new part to me)
What would have been concidered one bit on the optical medium, although we have no ranges for those indexes, even if it was 2 that is still a lot more data bits in that one 'old bit' space.
Ask anyone who's played the Zelda series, or Final Fantasy, or Wizadry, or Ultama. Excellent story telling.
Or even games like Oblivion, Fallout, and WoW for visually artistic games.
An overreaching statement like yours by that fact alone is bound to be incorrect. But its hard for real gamers to even understand your thinking at all if that is all you can say.
This one is silly -- why not just read the mic directly and apply the relevant digital filtering/transofrmation? RMS at least.
I'm more interested in turning an iPhone / iTouch into a dynomometer for engine performace tuning. Use the accelerometers. You'd need to find some way to enter RPM, probably a passenger hitting the Ks.
I'm not sure if you meant you were interested in a DIY approach or not, but just in case not, such software does already exist.
This is black box testing and if the government never did it, then why is it allowed in court?
I've always wondered why their 'magical' box could say I was guilty and it be acceptable, yet when my equally magical box says I am not, as well as saying I am not guilty beyond any doubt what so ever, they don't believe it...
My evidence is as made up as theirs, yet treated different:{
For the record, I can't drink alcohol due to medical reasons, let alone have been convicted by one of their breathalysers. But I've always been (justifiably) scared one day their 'magic' box will say I am, despite multiple doctors saying that would have killed me...
Oh, yeah, he was being a dick for not apologizing for being told he would be tackled if he left. Thank you for clearing that up.
Uhh.. Well if you want to consider standing up for your rights politely as 'being a dick', i guess you can. It doesn't make you right, but you can.
I of course was speaking of when he told them to go fuck themselves. Again, not illegal, but definitely a dick. Some would say he was being a dick, and rightly so.
It is quite likely that this guy was being more of a dick than he was letting on, and the police and the rent-a-cops were more out of line than they were letting on.
I don't know... From this guys blog, at least how I read it, he was being quite the dick, and wasn't exactly hiding that fact.
I happen to think he should not have been put in the position to have to choose to be a dick or not however, if the rest is accurate at all.
I can fully believe that the rent-a-cops overreacted and came to some silly conclusions about the situation.
But when the police officer arrived, it should have been obvious it wasn't a crime, wasn't threatening, and wasn't an issue. These are the people whos job it is to enforce laws. Isn't Knowing the law a prerequisite?
Why should they provide customer service to someone who they don't have on record as a customer?
It isn't service he wants provided. It's sales.
And you do have to make a sale to end up in said records as a customer.
It also sucks to know that if I was running a repair shop for out of warranty computers, if somebody brought in an Alienware system, I wouldn't be able to purchase any but the most generic parts for its repair, unless I had the customer purchase the parts directly and bring those in as well.
But I guess if Alienware considers their hardware to be of a luxury quality, they would assume no one would want anybody except them to service their systems, and for customers to constantly purchase updated hardware from them again.
But there's no reason you have to use the knowledge you gained at your former employer. After all, if they're your FORMER employer, chances are good that there are at least a few thing you'd do differently, given the chance. Why would you want to repeat what you consider mistakes?
If I at my last job learned MySQL. There is nothing in your argument above that follows my FORMER employer owns all that is IP regarding MySQL, nor can you convince me learning MySQL is a mistake.
At my current job I had to learn MSsql (Yea, I know), and if/when I leave there, you still won't be able to convince me that company owns all that is IP about MSSQL.
Anything specific to the company is fine. Sadly almost none of those contracts are worded that way.
My contract was worded with my past employer as so they own PHP, and Linux 2.6, oh and active directory. I learned all of those things while employed there. And this is OK with you? You consider learning those things a mistake? (Minding I already admitted learning MSSQL was)
You should be careful before defending something you clearly don't grasp the full ramifications of.
Suppose I am a publisher. Suppose I take a job from the mafia, to print and put up a bunch of fliers offering $10,000 for your nut sack, JordanL? And suppose your nut sack is delivered to the mafia, should I be partially liable for your loss?
First, my answer: Yes. At least in this one specific case, yes. Any time not involving genitals however, no.
By definition, if cosmic rays passed "too close" to a black hole it would enter the event horizon, from which it could not be accelerated away. Did you mean "close, but not too close", perhaps?
That is just a figure of speech.
Like saying "Wow that was a near miss!" when in fact a near miss means they hit, and the proper term is a 'near hit' since they nearly did but did not.
Can it continue to download torrents and such while the computer is powered-down/in stand-by?
Sorry for the double reply. But it seems I was incorrect. There is no mention anywhere on their website about remaining active when the OS isn't. The PDF spec sheet, and their technical details page both don't even mention that as a feature.
I didn't bother digging through their forums, but I'd prefer to hear from someone who has gotten this device to actually function in that way (and ideally a HOWTO)
Can it continue to download torrents and such while the computer is powered-down/in stand-by?
It is supposed to work while in sleep mode, but for some reason it doesn't work while shut down. I'd guess not enough power is sent to the PCI slots in that state, and the thing does suck down a bit of wattage. I'm sure Some part of the card is active while shut down, even if just for wake on lan functions. But no bittorrent while off, only asleep.
The judge is a member of copyright organizations. So? Isn't copyright the law? Knowing copyright law is probably why he's on the case.
But that is exactly the point! Copyright is law. He should have judged the case based off that law. If he knew his own countries copyright law, the trial would clearly have turned out different. Judges don't MAKE laws, the interpret existing laws.
He decided on his own that the law needs changed to reflect the desires of the organizations he is a director of, and instead of going the legal route to get laws changed to make what was done illegal, so he could easily interpret what the pirate bay did was illegal, instead all he did was claim it was illegal when the fact still remains it is not.
It is perfectly OK to want change in the law. It is not OK for a judge to single handedly ignore the current law and just throw out a sentence that matches what he THINKS or WANTS the law to be, which is exactly what happened.
Technically speaking what the judge did would still be illegal even if he wasn't a member of any copyright organizations. It would just be effectively impossible to prove what he did was illegal then.
It's already getting hard to find any moderately powerful desktop or laptop rig that doesn't have a CPU that supports hardware virtualization.
Define 'find' in this case.
Do you mean find at the consumer PC store? That is no doubt true for most of them. Do you mean find at dell.com or hp.com or the like? That is probably completely true.
In any other sense of the term however, not only is it false but very very false.
Look at most medium to small businesses. Unless they were just formed in the past couple years, chances are ALL of their workstations are the same or very similar hardware. If they were purchased and not leased (Thus no cheap yearly upgrades) then you will probably find more older hardware than not.
Look at any very small business, or home user. If they got their systems before a couple years ago, or bought them used at all, chances are very good those CPUs are older and don't support hw virt.
Look in any computer geeks home, and you will find a lot of both. In fact, expendable income will match the percentage of their machines that DO support it, and while I won't presume numbers here, a lot of geeks, myself included, have a metric shit ton of older hardware that we upgraded from at some point but didn't want to throw away a perfectly functional computer. They sit in a pile until the use for a low end system for some specific tasks comes to being, then they are reused.
Slightly off topic, but when I first started at my current job, one of the tasks left by the previous IT manager was to retake inventory of unused hardware. There was quite a few older p3 and p4 systems that were all under 1ghz, which believe it or not they had flagged to throw into the trash! Almost all of those systems have been re-purposed now. Obviously not as servers or critical infrastructure, but for test/lab systems, testing machines, a second desktop to run Linux natively as to not steal CPU/Ram by emulating it on their main workstation, etc. Even the older p2 systems I upgraded enough to become embedded systems (Swap spinning HD with flash, underclock if there is a CPU fan to remove that, replace PSU with a physically smaller yet more efficient, quiet, and powerful one, generally put the parts in a more industrial based case, etc) and they now operate as hardware controllers for very dedicated purposes for around $200 for the mentioned updates, which is cheaper than buying a new dedicated single-board-computer or wasting a 3ghz workstation based system on.
In conclusion, it is VERY easy to find older machines without hardware virtulization support, and it easily engulfs the hardware that does support it. Granted those machines are probably not used as desktops, and no one would conciser running Windows 7 on them (or even XP for that matter), but they are easy to find all over the place.
The only way around it that I can see is if there is some sort of asymmetrical information involved, such as the invisible form honeypot mentioned in TFA--the website's creator (and thus the bot-detection script) knows that there is an invisible form present, but it's difficult for a script to see without rendering the site in standards compliant CSS.
The one website I had to make where the signup page (Thus the bot attacked form) had quite a few text input boxes at the owners request.
To handle the auto-tag reading bots, which will either look for standard text element names like 'username', or the human bot owner will pull one copy of the page to see what you personally named that field and program the bot accordingly, i setup a season system with happy randomness in it.
Basically the only one single tag that is the same on every load of the page is a hidden form element named USID (Unique season ID) which was randomly generated, linked in SQL to the other real form tags, and expires after a set time.
It then each page load generates random 8 char alphanumeric 'names' for all the other form elements, and adds those names with the USID in the database. IE for your load it might be 'jHy698as' for username, '9saf7aA3' for password, etc. The next page load will have different names, but also random.
If the USID sent back is valid and not expired, then it will match 1:1 those tags, and if Any tag not listed is sent back with data, it is flagged as a possible bot. Two of those in a row with different SUIDs, or 5 in a row on the same SUID, the SUID is expired and the IP is added to a block list for 15 minutes.
With some random other data that basically wastes a kb or two of bandwidth, the html is different enough hopefully for a bot to be unable to parse out form element positions enough to auto detect the random names for it to form the same match-up table. And since they are different on each page load, even a human writing down the text element names wouldn't make it too far.
If things don't match up in a way that could possibly be a season timeout, then it doesn't get counted against the host/ip, Just In Case(tm) There is a bit more logic to help identify if a user hits back and the form is loaded different but some elements may be cached, it won't flag as a bot then either.
Sadly, the website was never all that high in popularity so chances are it was overkill, but it was at the site owners request so we did just that. Not being a high profile site its hard to compare directly how effective this method is or would be, but the bots that brute force accounts all have failed so far. His only issues seem to be humans making multiple accounts, which of course none of these solutions are designed to even address.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll create a BLACK HOLE that ENGULFS THE EARTH! Just like the LHC!
So *THAT'S* what happened! I've been wondering why my clothes felt tighter these past few weeks...
and painting your corporation as a bunch of dickweeds that'll just up and leave over some legislation is just idiotic.
It hasn't hurt their bottom line for the past 15 years... Why change now?
They may expose themselves to liability via shareholder lawsuits which is not "breaking the law". Can you site this law and reference the penal section? Doing something that creates a tort is not "breaking the law" in and of itself. What is your evidence for the "breaking the law" assertion?
It's "against the law" in a similar way that me punching you in the face is "against the law"
No legal actions happen until a lawsuit is pressed.
But if I did this, you are guaranteed to win the lawsuit against me!
To me, it seems fair to say me doing that is against the law. Same goes for any other action that opens you up to a guaranteed win of a lawsuit against you.
As for the site you requested:
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company
Original (PDF): http://www.virginialawbusrev.org/VLBR3-1pdfs/Macey.pdf
No need to quote laws on the books when courts have already decided this way and quoting past case law is all that is needed in courts...
That may not work if the network authenticates against your MAC address.
Of course that would work. All ethernet interfaces require a MAC address to function on an ethernet network.
That should be a 'duh' statement.
They have to get the MAC address SOMEHOW right? either by checking what is plugged in that port, or asking?
Just be sure to give them the correct one!
"connecting cameras to their tongues" WTF?
The original ScienceNews article from 2001 is now subscriber only:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/title/The_Seeing_Tongue
But you can read a copy of it at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_9_160/ai_78681631/
You can simulate incense burning, purification rites and play music to help you meditate wherever you happen to be.
You could, but only once, then you need to buy a new Buddha phone.
Do we have to wait 'til they die?
Woah woah woah now, no need to get offensive.
*no one* was talking about waiting until they died... >:D
I imagine the operator, or Verizon itself, could be charged with Obstruction of Justice
You know, a thought occurs...
Sadly, I do believe if Verizon did give the officers any information on this guy, he would win in a lawsuit against Verizon.
On one hand it is good Verizon tries to protect their customers privacy, but firmly on the other hand, priorities!! His privacy will be doing a whole lot less for him if h's dead!
What would be nice, is a little authorization form to fill out and adjust exactly how bad the situation has to be before Verison will do such a thing. That way, the customer can clearly indicate they would want help, or specifically state they do not want to be helped. Then Verizon would always have the information to do the right thing.
While I personally would choose more privacy and less giving away of my info in an 'emergency', I also realize I can't presume to make that choice correctly for others, let alone this guy.
I've always explained it to programmers this way
array bit[a,b,c,d,e]
A 5 dimensional array!
A B and C represent up/down, left/right, forward/back
D represents the direction of polarization
E it seems represents the color polarization (this is the new part to me)
What would have been concidered one bit on the optical medium, although we have no ranges for those indexes, even if it was 2 that is still a lot more data bits in that one 'old bit' space.
Games are not art
You clearly have not played a lot of games then.
Ask anyone who's played the Zelda series, or Final Fantasy, or Wizadry, or Ultama.
Excellent story telling.
Or even games like Oblivion, Fallout, and WoW for visually artistic games.
An overreaching statement like yours by that fact alone is bound to be incorrect. But its hard for real gamers to even understand your thinking at all if that is all you can say.
This one is silly -- why not just read the mic directly and apply the relevant digital filtering/transofrmation? RMS at least.
I'm more interested in turning an iPhone / iTouch into a dynomometer for engine performace tuning. Use the accelerometers. You'd need to find some way to enter RPM, probably a passenger hitting the Ks.
I'm not sure if you meant you were interested in a DIY approach or not, but just in case not, such software does already exist.
http://www.dynolicious.com/
This is black box testing and if the government never did it, then why is it allowed in court?
I've always wondered why their 'magical' box could say I was guilty and it be acceptable, yet when my equally magical box says I am not, as well as saying I am not guilty beyond any doubt what so ever, they don't believe it...
My evidence is as made up as theirs, yet treated different :{
For the record, I can't drink alcohol due to medical reasons, let alone have been convicted by one of their breathalysers. But I've always been (justifiably) scared one day their 'magic' box will say I am, despite multiple doctors saying that would have killed me...
Evil govt 1 - Humanity 0
Oh, yeah, he was being a dick for not apologizing for being told he would be tackled if he left. Thank you for clearing that up.
Uhh.. Well if you want to consider standing up for your rights politely as 'being a dick', i guess you can. It doesn't make you right, but you can.
I of course was speaking of when he told them to go fuck themselves.
Again, not illegal, but definitely a dick. Some would say he was being a dick, and rightly so.
It is quite likely that this guy was being more of a dick than he was letting on, and the police and the rent-a-cops were more out of line than they were letting on.
I don't know... From this guys blog, at least how I read it, he was being quite the dick, and wasn't exactly hiding that fact.
I happen to think he should not have been put in the position to have to choose to be a dick or not however, if the rest is accurate at all.
I can fully believe that the rent-a-cops overreacted and came to some silly conclusions about the situation.
But when the police officer arrived, it should have been obvious it wasn't a crime, wasn't threatening, and wasn't an issue.
These are the people whos job it is to enforce laws. Isn't Knowing the law a prerequisite?
Slashdot - News for lazy nerds, stuff that.. meh ;}
Why should they provide customer service to someone who they don't have on record as a customer?
It isn't service he wants provided. It's sales.
And you do have to make a sale to end up in said records as a customer.
It also sucks to know that if I was running a repair shop for out of warranty computers, if somebody brought in an Alienware system, I wouldn't be able to purchase any but the most generic parts for its repair, unless I had the customer purchase the parts directly and bring those in as well.
But I guess if Alienware considers their hardware to be of a luxury quality, they would assume no one would want anybody except them to service their systems, and for customers to constantly purchase updated hardware from them again.
But there's no reason you have to use the knowledge you gained at your former employer. After all, if they're your FORMER employer, chances are good that there are at least a few thing you'd do differently, given the chance. Why would you want to repeat what you consider mistakes?
If I at my last job learned MySQL. There is nothing in your argument above that follows my FORMER employer owns all that is IP regarding MySQL, nor can you convince me learning MySQL is a mistake.
At my current job I had to learn MSsql (Yea, I know), and if/when I leave there, you still won't be able to convince me that company owns all that is IP about MSSQL.
Anything specific to the company is fine. Sadly almost none of those contracts are worded that way.
My contract was worded with my past employer as so they own PHP, and Linux 2.6, oh and active directory. I learned all of those things while employed there. And this is OK with you? You consider learning those things a mistake? (Minding I already admitted learning MSSQL was)
You should be careful before defending something you clearly don't grasp the full ramifications of.
Nuclear weapons don't kill people, people do.
I'm pretty sure if you hang around nuclear weapons enough, you could very well get killed with no other humans being involved...
Suppose I am a publisher. Suppose I take a job from the mafia, to print and put up a bunch of fliers offering $10,000 for your nut sack, JordanL? And suppose your nut sack is delivered to the mafia, should I be partially liable for your loss?
First, my answer: Yes. At least in this one specific case, yes. Any time not involving genitals however, no.
Next. my opinion: Wow.. just wow
Finally, get off my sac
By definition, if cosmic rays passed "too close" to a black hole it would enter the event horizon, from which it could not be accelerated away. Did you mean "close, but not too close", perhaps?
That is just a figure of speech.
Like saying "Wow that was a near miss!" when in fact a near miss means they hit, and the proper term is a 'near hit' since they nearly did but did not.
Can it continue to download torrents and such while the computer is powered-down/in stand-by?
Sorry for the double reply. But it seems I was incorrect. There is no mention anywhere on their website about remaining active when the OS isn't. The PDF spec sheet, and their technical details page both don't even mention that as a feature.
I didn't bother digging through their forums, but I'd prefer to hear from someone who has gotten this device to actually function in that way (and ideally a HOWTO)
Can it continue to download torrents and such while the computer is powered-down/in stand-by?
It is supposed to work while in sleep mode, but for some reason it doesn't work while shut down. I'd guess not enough power is sent to the PCI slots in that state, and the thing does suck down a bit of wattage. I'm sure Some part of the card is active while shut down, even if just for wake on lan functions. But no bittorrent while off, only asleep.
The judge is a member of copyright organizations. So? Isn't copyright the law? Knowing copyright law is probably why he's on the case.
But that is exactly the point! Copyright is law. He should have judged the case based off that law.
If he knew his own countries copyright law, the trial would clearly have turned out different.
Judges don't MAKE laws, the interpret existing laws.
He decided on his own that the law needs changed to reflect the desires of the organizations he is a director of, and instead of going the legal route to get laws changed to make what was done illegal, so he could easily interpret what the pirate bay did was illegal, instead all he did was claim it was illegal when the fact still remains it is not.
It is perfectly OK to want change in the law. It is not OK for a judge to single handedly ignore the current law and just throw out a sentence that matches what he THINKS or WANTS the law to be, which is exactly what happened.
Technically speaking what the judge did would still be illegal even if he wasn't a member of any copyright organizations. It would just be effectively impossible to prove what he did was illegal then.
It's already getting hard to find any moderately powerful desktop or laptop rig that doesn't have a CPU that supports hardware virtualization.
Define 'find' in this case.
Do you mean find at the consumer PC store? That is no doubt true for most of them.
Do you mean find at dell.com or hp.com or the like? That is probably completely true.
In any other sense of the term however, not only is it false but very very false.
Look at most medium to small businesses. Unless they were just formed in the past couple years, chances are ALL of their workstations are the same or very similar hardware. If they were purchased and not leased (Thus no cheap yearly upgrades) then you will probably find more older hardware than not.
Look at any very small business, or home user. If they got their systems before a couple years ago, or bought them used at all, chances are very good those CPUs are older and don't support hw virt.
Look in any computer geeks home, and you will find a lot of both. In fact, expendable income will match the percentage of their machines that DO support it, and while I won't presume numbers here, a lot of geeks, myself included, have a metric shit ton of older hardware that we upgraded from at some point but didn't want to throw away a perfectly functional computer. They sit in a pile until the use for a low end system for some specific tasks comes to being, then they are reused.
Slightly off topic, but when I first started at my current job, one of the tasks left by the previous IT manager was to retake inventory of unused hardware. There was quite a few older p3 and p4 systems that were all under 1ghz, which believe it or not they had flagged to throw into the trash!
Almost all of those systems have been re-purposed now. Obviously not as servers or critical infrastructure, but for test/lab systems, testing machines, a second desktop to run Linux natively as to not steal CPU/Ram by emulating it on their main workstation, etc. Even the older p2 systems I upgraded enough to become embedded systems (Swap spinning HD with flash, underclock if there is a CPU fan to remove that, replace PSU with a physically smaller yet more efficient, quiet, and powerful one, generally put the parts in a more industrial based case, etc) and they now operate as hardware controllers for very dedicated purposes for around $200 for the mentioned updates, which is cheaper than buying a new dedicated single-board-computer or wasting a 3ghz workstation based system on.
In conclusion, it is VERY easy to find older machines without hardware virtulization support, and it easily engulfs the hardware that does support it.
Granted those machines are probably not used as desktops, and no one would conciser running Windows 7 on them (or even XP for that matter), but they are easy to find all over the place.
The only way around it that I can see is if there is some sort of asymmetrical information involved, such as the invisible form honeypot mentioned in TFA--the website's creator (and thus the bot-detection script) knows that there is an invisible form present, but it's difficult for a script to see without rendering the site in standards compliant CSS.
The one website I had to make where the signup page (Thus the bot attacked form) had quite a few text input boxes at the owners request.
To handle the auto-tag reading bots, which will either look for standard text element names like 'username', or the human bot owner will pull one copy of the page to see what you personally named that field and program the bot accordingly, i setup a season system with happy randomness in it.
Basically the only one single tag that is the same on every load of the page is a hidden form element named USID (Unique season ID) which was randomly generated, linked in SQL to the other real form tags, and expires after a set time.
It then each page load generates random 8 char alphanumeric 'names' for all the other form elements, and adds those names with the USID in the database. IE for your load it might be 'jHy698as' for username, '9saf7aA3' for password, etc. The next page load will have different names, but also random.
If the USID sent back is valid and not expired, then it will match 1:1 those tags, and if Any tag not listed is sent back with data, it is flagged as a possible bot. Two of those in a row with different SUIDs, or 5 in a row on the same SUID, the SUID is expired and the IP is added to a block list for 15 minutes.
With some random other data that basically wastes a kb or two of bandwidth, the html is different enough hopefully for a bot to be unable to parse out form element positions enough to auto detect the random names for it to form the same match-up table. And since they are different on each page load, even a human writing down the text element names wouldn't make it too far.
If things don't match up in a way that could possibly be a season timeout, then it doesn't get counted against the host/ip, Just In Case(tm)
There is a bit more logic to help identify if a user hits back and the form is loaded different but some elements may be cached, it won't flag as a bot then either.
Sadly, the website was never all that high in popularity so chances are it was overkill, but it was at the site owners request so we did just that.
Not being a high profile site its hard to compare directly how effective this method is or would be, but the bots that brute force accounts all have failed so far. His only issues seem to be humans making multiple accounts, which of course none of these solutions are designed to even address.