The Summary seems to skirt around the more salacious details. TFA says
"It was beneficial for [Seagate] to have a yield engineer on staff to give the appearance of a complete organization with a project that was further along in development. They were not able to sell or find a partner for the ATG group despite having him on board as the placeholder yield engineer."
The inference was that SeaGate bought Vaidyanathan on as a little corporate theatrics, manipulating appearances while they looked for a partner organization.
He was able to sue under a Minnesota law that makes it illegal for
any... company...doing business in this state...to induce, influence, persuade, or engage any person to change from one place to another in this state, or to change from any place in any state, territory, or country to any place in this state, to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations
Also, it's a story from 9th April 2009 which was then covered on 15th April on said site. The original Guardian piece can be >found here. Hell Reuters posted an article in responce on 20 November 2009 where they added an interesting point
Shipping is slowing climate change by spewing out sunlight-dimming pollution but a clean-up needed to safeguard human health will stoke global warming, experts said Friday.
"So far shipping has caused a cooling effect that has slowed down global warming," Jan Fuglestvedt, of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research Oslo (CICERO), told Reuters....Toxic sulphur dioxide emitted by burning bunker fuel accounted for the deaths of an estimated 60,000 people worldwide in 2001 through cancer and heart and lung disease, according to a previous study. A clean-up would save thousands of lives.
But sulphur pollution from the fast-growing shipping industry also helps create clouds by providing tiny seeds around which droplets form. Clouds have a cooling effect since sunlight bounces off their white tops.
The FTC filed its complaints against Intel on Dec. 16, 2009. It charged the chip maker with illegally using its dominant position to stifle competition for decades. The complaint was filed just a month after Intel had settled antitrust and patent disputes with Advanced Micro Devices for US$1.25 billion.
").(1) Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits "unfair methods of competition," and was amended in 1938 also to prohibit "unfair or deceptive acts or practices.
Seems to have been part of a broader move against Intel at the time, I admit I don't remember it very clearly, but Reuters adds
A wide range of antitrust enforcers have gone up against Intel for its controversial pricing incentives. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo accused Intel in November of threatening computer makers and paying billions of dollars of kickbacks to maintain market supremacy.
The European Commission has fined Intel 1.06 billion euros
($1.44 billion) for illegally shutting out AMD.
In June 2008, South Korea fined Intel some $26 million, finding it offered rebates to PC makers in return for not buying microprocessors made by AMD.
Japan's trade commission concluded in 2005 that Intel had violated the country's anti-monopoly act.
The case before the FTC is "In the Matter of Intel Corporation," docket number 9341.
The summary skips out on the interesting detail there
The mother in question gave birth to not one, but two snake litters of all-female snakes with WW-chromosomes. Male snake cells have two Z chromosomes, while female snakes have a Z and a W. This is the first time a reptile has been seen with two W chromosomes, something thought peculiar to fish and amphibians. The snakes' litters also retained the mother's rare genetic coloring
Also direct links to the study are here and here(pdf). The paper is "Evidence for viable, non-clonal but fatherless Boa constrictors" by Warren Booth, Daniel H. Johnson, Sharon Moore, Coby Schal, and Edward L. Vargo.
"we are primarily concerned with
regulating the processing of personal data by the state, by businesses and by other
organisations."
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that the ICO deals with issues of personal data abuse by organizations that personally gathered it - like the government and tax info, or survey takers and demographics. The idea that was being discussed seems broader than that - permitting people to challenge the spread of personal info' in a wide range of areas. For instance TFA mentioned a Women's Shelter asking a website to deslist their address which had somehow been added to a database.
Thats the great thing about TFA - the minister never mentions ISPs. He uses the Internet Domain Name charity as an example of a funtioning mediation service, thats it. From then on it's all about the internet industry, which includes every single online business out there. TFA claims this is about ISPs but frankly he's going off the exact same lack of info' that I am, only I'm using a little basic common sense and not surrendering to the hysteria. It appears simply that TFA is trying to drum up a little drama.
Yeah because we're completely overwhlemed by all those historic examples of the general public abusing industry via binding arbitration. Anyway this was proposed as mediation, not arbitration. The idea of the thing is to allow your average person to benefit from the legal protections that the rich and/or corporations already have mechanisms to exploit.
I get the impression it was supposed to be a step below those options, a cheaper alternative that allows Joe sixpack the opportunity to gain the same protections online that major corporations with their huge legal departments benefit from.
I love the hyperbole online. The actual quote states that he was interested in
setting up a mediation service for consumers who have legitimate concerns that their privacy has been breached or that online information about them is inaccurate or constitutes a gross invasion of their privacy to discuss whether there is any way to remove access to that information.
.
It's all there. A means by which a LEGITIMATE concern over SPECIFIC kinds of information is removed after a REGULATED PROCESS between parties. He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.
This is a good thing. Aren't we always harping on about Facebook/Google deliberatly violating our privacy? This guy is suggesting a mechanism whereby that kind of privacy violation can be limited, and everyone immediatly leaps to censorship hysteria.
Yup, sentencing guidelines exist and you can browse them to your heart's content. I found one article where they broke down the sentence:
sentencing guidelines suggested 12 weeks in prison, the seriousness of the offences meant that he should serve 26 weeks, dropping to 18 weeks because of his early guilty plea.
So there it is, the guidelines wanted 12 weeks but that was more than doubled by the seriousness of the case and the specific fact-pattern. 8 weeks were then lopped off for making a guilty plea. Bit of math to help the geek cred.
The impression given by various articles is that this wasn't a one off thing, the guy was deliberately targeting multiple sites and submitting multiple messages designed to upset people. He was, in effect, harassing them. It's mentioned that he enjoyed making people upset, and knew the effect he was having. This isn't just a case of some guy posting an annoying comment and moving on. He deliberately went out of his way to engage with these people and caused as much distress as possible. They didn't have the option of merely not reading it, or blocking the user, it was ongoing and apparently rather severe. It would be handy if there were more information available but from what we have, this guy was harassing people.
I know it’s really easy to assume judicial nannying, especially when the UK is mentioned, but sometimes the courts make the right choices. Hell, when you strip out the media sensationalism and throw in the facts I would imagine the court gets it right most of the time.
Not at all. If he'd used a megaphone he would have been guilty of Breach of The Peace, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, or some other equally relevent law. This is a case of the law catching up with modern technology ie. applying the same rules of conduct we have in everyday life to that which occurs online. Now you may disagree with the law and thats another situation all together, but its wrong to claim this is anything but an adaptation of current laws. Heck look at the development of the language used - the Telecommunications Act of 1984 sees alternations in the terminology used from "telecommunication system" to "electronic communications network" along with changes in what those mean. This is the evolution of law to adapt to the new challenges of online communication.
Any person who sends to another person—
(a)a letter, electronic communication or article of any description] which conveys—
(i)a message which is indecent or grossly offensive;
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
(b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
TFA mentions that his messages included references to having sex with the mentioned corpses.
I wonder if the problem isn't linked to the spread of specific remedy rather than actual understanding. We've all told confused relatives and friends to delete random messages appearing in their accounts, and to avoid clicking on links or buying products that promise some online miracle. That's possibly what those last hold-outs in TFA were reflexivly doing. In effect we're trained people to behave in a way that was understood to improve security, without providing them the context to protect themselves in any other situation. Like teaching a child not to stick their hand into the sitting-room fireplace but failing to mention that stoves, heaters, and engines all get bloody hot too. Hell that's a flawed lesson as well...they should have been taught about heat and burning as concepts. I'm not really sure how to solve the issue though. At the end of the day a large portion of the population lack the skills, time, interest, or motivation to learn about what is becoming the increasingly complicated world of computer security. I'm a proud geek and I couldn't tell you how secure firefox add-ons are, or which virus scanner does the most reliable work, or how the hell to stop random ports blah blah blah
That being said only 5 out of 20 actually ignored the advice. Of those another 1 took a little more effort but finally learned his lesson. That's not bad odds considering.
To find malware-distribution sites, Google uses a huge number of virtual machines running completely unpatched versions of Windows and Internet Explorer that they point at potentially malicious URLs. The company then ties this in with the data that it gathers from its automated crawlers that are tasked with looking for malicious code on legitimate Web sites.
The third link directs to a discussion of the implimentation of the EU Directive in Sweden, not the Directive itself. For that you can just click here (pdf).
It's probably important to note that the EU Directive specifically mandates that
2. No data revealing the content of the communication may be
retained pursuant to this Directive.
If you're wondering what Silver Tail does: TFA provides the following
“Silver Tail Systems solution monitors website traffic and identifies anomalies in real-time. Their unique system creates models of what is normal traffic for a website’s population and uses that to identify threats,” said William Strecker, Executive Vice President of Architecture & Engineering and CTO at IQT. “Our strategic investment in Silver Tail Systems enables us to offer this powerful technology to our customers in the U.S. intelligence Community and further protect our Nation’s assets.”
New ways of combating fraud: The global threat landscape is rapidly changing and evolving. Sophisticated criminals always find ways around traditional fraud protection solutions. Silver Tail Systems has technology which monitors all web traffic and detects what is normal website behavior and what behavior is looking anomalous according to user statistics constantly updated by the hour. This real-time monitoring helps combating fraud as it emerges. Receiving alerts about suspicious web traffic lets the website administrator quickly identify the type of threat occurring and investigate the attempted attack. Once an attack is identified easy rules will divert the bad actors in real-time, protecting the website from being compromised.
Any of the techy people feel like explaining this to the rest of us? Am I exposing my ignorance by assuming it's basically a giant spreadsheet comparing whats happening now with what happened then?
What? Kids willingly walk miles to school every day because it's drilled into their heads that the only way off the farm, out of the slums, or whatever their particular disadvantage happens to be, is through education. There's no magical inspirational African/South American/Chinese teaching model that somehow drives these kids out of their beds before dawn and across miles with hungry bellies and an urge to learn. Hell, most of those kids are walking miles to school every day to learn arbitrary information, out of order, and by rote. Teaching kids to be critical learners, to engage with knowledge? That's a privilege that's only found in the rich western educational model, certainly not in the shanty towns.
That being said, I understand your broader point and agree somewhat. Education has to be relevant, it should be interesting, and it shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. However, if we're honest we have to admit that that kind of system is expensive, demands teaching excellence, is hard to assess, and complicated to run. The US has over 60 million students in primary and secondary schools - that's an enormous population. There are a lot of problems with education in the west - most of them related to broader social issues like violence, poverty, ignorance et al - but it’s not nearly as bad as some of us seem to feel. There is a logic to a lot of the problems you’re complaining about and while matters could possibly be dealt with in better ways it’s going too far to claim the system itself is bullshit hell.
Which is a great point - the articles mentioned that computer literacy certainly increased in the students but at the cost of other academic areas. It's a complicated question and a lot of the decline can probably be linked to unfamiliarity - teachers being unsure of how to include the systems in their lessons, poor parental involvement, a lack of guidelines for use, and inappropriate inclusion. Unfortunately there's no data to support that inference.
Thing is, there's plenty of evidance that the wired-classroom really isn't all that great. Back in 2007 the NYTimes did a report on schools phasing computers back out of the classroom
After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”
we also demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high-speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.
Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.
“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”
Professors are also banning laptops from their classes. All in all there doesn't seem to be any actual evidance that kids benefit from the use of laptops et al in class. That's not saying they don't benefit from the use of technology in the learning process, but the use of individual laptops and Ipads and all that has so far been shown to be somewhat counter-productive.
Right, I was trying to show that there's precedent to ownership not confering absolute control. How about your house instead? You can't just add another floor if you feel like it. I'm just trying to say that as a society we accept that sometimes we have to surrender our options for some supposed good. If that good is worth it, or if it even exists, thats the question we tend to obsess over here.
Absolutely, but you're still not allowed to go in there and adapt the product you've bought so that you can break the law. I apologize for the awful analogy - at least it's not jerking off based - but when I buy a car I can't just rip out the seatbelts and print my personal president-killing manifesto on the body. There is an implicit social contract that dictates that my right to use an object extends only so far as that use is legal.
In this case Crippen acted so as to violate the law. On the whole that same law seems a sensible one. If the judge decides it’s not, as they are wont to do, then than important legal benchmark will be established. If not, Crippen is in for a world of trouble.
critical question is whether jailbreaking an iPhone in order to add applications to the phone constitutes a noninfringing use...
it appears fair to say that the purpose
and character of the modification of the operating system is to engage in a
private, noncommercial use intended to add functionality to a device owned by
the person making the modification, albeit beyond what Apple has determined to
be acceptable. The user is not engaging in any commercial exploitation of the
firmware, at least not when the jailbreaking is done for the user’s own
private use of the device
The Library of Congress specifically made Iphone jailbreaking permissable, for the reasons given above. As with all things legal, a specific permission isn't just instanlty transformed into general allowance to do whatever the hell you want. The Xbox was not included in the permission granted and therefore such hacking is a violation of the current statute until found otherwise in a court.
The fact that Crippen is making money from breaking the law, and in likelyhood abetting a little casual piracy, suggests he's going to get made an example of.
Slashdot Mirror
The inference was that SeaGate bought Vaidyanathan on as a little corporate theatrics, manipulating appearances while they looked for a partner organization.
He was able to sue under a Minnesota law that makes it illegal for
You know what they say about guys with huge hands....makes their dicks look really small in comparison. I guess the same goes for iphones.
- Your sausage-fingered friend
A little more digging brings us
The FTC site adds that
Seems to have been part of a broader move against Intel at the time, I admit I don't remember it very clearly, but Reuters adds
Oh and that case can be found here
Also direct links to the study are here and here(pdf). The paper is "Evidence for viable, non-clonal but fatherless Boa constrictors" by Warren Booth, Daniel H. Johnson, Sharon Moore, Coby Schal, and Edward L. Vargo.
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that the ICO deals with issues of personal data abuse by organizations that personally gathered it - like the government and tax info, or survey takers and demographics. The idea that was being discussed seems broader than that - permitting people to challenge the spread of personal info' in a wide range of areas. For instance TFA mentioned a Women's Shelter asking a website to deslist their address which had somehow been added to a database.
Thats the great thing about TFA - the minister never mentions ISPs. He uses the Internet Domain Name charity as an example of a funtioning mediation service, thats it. From then on it's all about the internet industry, which includes every single online business out there. TFA claims this is about ISPs but frankly he's going off the exact same lack of info' that I am, only I'm using a little basic common sense and not surrendering to the hysteria. It appears simply that TFA is trying to drum up a little drama.
Yeah because we're completely overwhlemed by all those historic examples of the general public abusing industry via binding arbitration. Anyway this was proposed as mediation, not arbitration. The idea of the thing is to allow your average person to benefit from the legal protections that the rich and/or corporations already have mechanisms to exploit.
I get the impression it was supposed to be a step below those options, a cheaper alternative that allows Joe sixpack the opportunity to gain the same protections online that major corporations with their huge legal departments benefit from.
. It's all there. A means by which a LEGITIMATE concern over SPECIFIC kinds of information is removed after a REGULATED PROCESS between parties. He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.
This is a good thing. Aren't we always harping on about Facebook/Google deliberatly violating our privacy? This guy is suggesting a mechanism whereby that kind of privacy violation can be limited, and everyone immediatly leaps to censorship hysteria.
So there it is, the guidelines wanted 12 weeks but that was more than doubled by the seriousness of the case and the specific fact-pattern. 8 weeks were then lopped off for making a guilty plea. Bit of math to help the geek cred.
The impression given by various articles is that this wasn't a one off thing, the guy was deliberately targeting multiple sites and submitting multiple messages designed to upset people. He was, in effect, harassing them. It's mentioned that he enjoyed making people upset, and knew the effect he was having. This isn't just a case of some guy posting an annoying comment and moving on. He deliberately went out of his way to engage with these people and caused as much distress as possible. They didn't have the option of merely not reading it, or blocking the user, it was ongoing and apparently rather severe. It would be handy if there were more information available but from what we have, this guy was harassing people.
I know it’s really easy to assume judicial nannying, especially when the UK is mentioned, but sometimes the courts make the right choices. Hell, when you strip out the media sensationalism and throw in the facts I would imagine the court gets it right most of the time.
Not at all. If he'd used a megaphone he would have been guilty of Breach of The Peace, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, or some other equally relevent law. This is a case of the law catching up with modern technology ie. applying the same rules of conduct we have in everyday life to that which occurs online. Now you may disagree with the law and thats another situation all together, but its wrong to claim this is anything but an adaptation of current laws. Heck look at the development of the language used - the Telecommunications Act of 1984 sees alternations in the terminology used from "telecommunication system" to "electronic communications network" along with changes in what those mean. This is the evolution of law to adapt to the new challenges of online communication.
TFA mentions that his messages included references to having sex with the mentioned corpses.
I wonder if the problem isn't linked to the spread of specific remedy rather than actual understanding. We've all told confused relatives and friends to delete random messages appearing in their accounts, and to avoid clicking on links or buying products that promise some online miracle. That's possibly what those last hold-outs in TFA were reflexivly doing. In effect we're trained people to behave in a way that was understood to improve security, without providing them the context to protect themselves in any other situation. Like teaching a child not to stick their hand into the sitting-room fireplace but failing to mention that stoves, heaters, and engines all get bloody hot too. Hell that's a flawed lesson as well...they should have been taught about heat and burning as concepts. I'm not really sure how to solve the issue though. At the end of the day a large portion of the population lack the skills, time, interest, or motivation to learn about what is becoming the increasingly complicated world of computer security. I'm a proud geek and I couldn't tell you how secure firefox add-ons are, or which virus scanner does the most reliable work, or how the hell to stop random ports blah blah blah
That being said only 5 out of 20 actually ignored the advice. Of those another 1 took a little more effort but finally learned his lesson. That's not bad odds considering.
It's probably important to note that the EU Directive specifically mandates that
Silver Tails own website adds
Any of the techy people feel like explaining this to the rest of us? Am I exposing my ignorance by assuming it's basically a giant spreadsheet comparing whats happening now with what happened then?
A wrong image perhaps...but now I've got something to replace reciting baseball scores with when I next have to uh cross the finish line second.
What? Kids willingly walk miles to school every day because it's drilled into their heads that the only way off the farm, out of the slums, or whatever their particular disadvantage happens to be, is through education. There's no magical inspirational African/South American/Chinese teaching model that somehow drives these kids out of their beds before dawn and across miles with hungry bellies and an urge to learn. Hell, most of those kids are walking miles to school every day to learn arbitrary information, out of order, and by rote. Teaching kids to be critical learners, to engage with knowledge? That's a privilege that's only found in the rich western educational model, certainly not in the shanty towns.
That being said, I understand your broader point and agree somewhat. Education has to be relevant, it should be interesting, and it shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. However, if we're honest we have to admit that that kind of system is expensive, demands teaching excellence, is hard to assess, and complicated to run. The US has over 60 million students in primary and secondary schools - that's an enormous population. There are a lot of problems with education in the west - most of them related to broader social issues like violence, poverty, ignorance et al - but it’s not nearly as bad as some of us seem to feel. There is a logic to a lot of the problems you’re complaining about and while matters could possibly be dealt with in better ways it’s going too far to claim the system itself is bullshit hell.
Which is a great point - the articles mentioned that computer literacy certainly increased in the students but at the cost of other academic areas. It's a complicated question and a lot of the decline can probably be linked to unfamiliarity - teachers being unsure of how to include the systems in their lessons, poor parental involvement, a lack of guidelines for use, and inappropriate inclusion. Unfortunately there's no data to support that inference.
A research paper noted that
A further NYTimes article noted that
Professors are also banning laptops from their classes. All in all there doesn't seem to be any actual evidance that kids benefit from the use of laptops et al in class. That's not saying they don't benefit from the use of technology in the learning process, but the use of individual laptops and Ipads and all that has so far been shown to be somewhat counter-productive.
Right, I was trying to show that there's precedent to ownership not confering absolute control. How about your house instead? You can't just add another floor if you feel like it. I'm just trying to say that as a society we accept that sometimes we have to surrender our options for some supposed good. If that good is worth it, or if it even exists, thats the question we tend to obsess over here.
Absolutely, but you're still not allowed to go in there and adapt the product you've bought so that you can break the law. I apologize for the awful analogy - at least it's not jerking off based - but when I buy a car I can't just rip out the seatbelts and print my personal president-killing manifesto on the body. There is an implicit social contract that dictates that my right to use an object extends only so far as that use is legal.
In this case Crippen acted so as to violate the law. On the whole that same law seems a sensible one. If the judge decides it’s not, as they are wont to do, then than important legal benchmark will be established. If not, Crippen is in for a world of trouble.
The Library of Congress specifically made Iphone jailbreaking permissable, for the reasons given above. As with all things legal, a specific permission isn't just instanlty transformed into general allowance to do whatever the hell you want. The Xbox was not included in the permission granted and therefore such hacking is a violation of the current statute until found otherwise in a court.
The fact that Crippen is making money from breaking the law, and in likelyhood abetting a little casual piracy, suggests he's going to get made an example of.