given the fact that an appellate decision upholding the trial court award would be -- because of its precedential weight -- vastly more damaging to Google's operations than the trial court decision itself, Google has no rational reason to appeal the decision.
Google already sunk a lot of money in the case, which they should want to recover from the plaintiff's efforts at harassing Google, and a precedential decision in Google's favor could be valuable to them
There is also the whole matter of the principal of the thing.
And discouraging copycats from suing Google over streetview privacy related to photographing their yard from the street.
The Feds should allow us to sign up for a few more lists:
I just want the...
Do not ignore or dismiss me list
Do not waste my money [on stupid stimulus] list.
Do not make empty campaign promises to me list
Do not hide any important or pertinent security, safety, financial, or other information from me [regardless of your stupid PR or sensitivity concerns] list
Do not lie to me list
Do not tax me list
Do not take away my guns list
Do not regulate me list
Do not assault me list.
Do not steal or seize my property/assets list
Do not invade my home list
Do not force me to buy things I don't want list
Do not do things to me i'm on the list to not have things done to and then claim it is somehow OK list
I seem to recall a news report about modifications being made by the manufacturer to Sudafed in order to make it useless to meth labs, so I'm not so sure that Canadian sudafed is a product those covert lab operators would be interested in.
However, yeah, I am sure there would be some international companies that want to profit by selling chemical products to people with such labs
So Google may definitely want to track features of their customers that suggest that, using their bayesian networks or whatever they have for user classification for ad interest
But Google's probably not able to accurately track the feature has_a_meth_lab at this time; instead Google can track things like searched_for_and_visited_sites_related_to_meth_labs and bought_possibly_meth_lab_related_merchandise_in_the_past_via_Google_checkout
and gmail_account_has_nonspam_messages_related_to_meth_labs
do you think Google cares if you're running a meth lab out of your basement?
Only if knowing this gives them information about more profitable ads to display.
I'm not sure what kind of advertisers would be interested in targetting ads for that audience, but I imagine there are certain products that particular audience would have a high demand for.
You misunderstood. They could already want to arrest him, even without any questioning; they could have already made that decision.
And demanding him to come back to the country for "questioning" could be a pretense, because they really have no strong desire to question him, just to arrest him.
That would justify refusing the video conference, because it wouldn't meet their goal of getting him in stripes.
When he decides it's video conference or nothing, they claim he is not cooperating as a PR move to try to shame him.
That's for his alleged crime committed in Sweden against Swedish laws, and only has a witness
You really think that his alleged crime is completely unrelated to what he has exposed on Wikileaks?
I am willing to suggest the real reason Assuange is wanted for that crime is he has angered the powers that be.
Even if what Wikileaks itself did and what Assuange did isn't against any written laws, does not mean he will not be brought to justice on another basis.
What he winds up getting charged with is ultimately just a formality
The police would (possibly) want to give away their hand, giving him a chance to run, while not knowing exactly where, or even which country, Assange is located in, why again?
In other words, they are possibly being deceitful / lying, and don't really want his cooperation in answering questions, they just need an excuse to convince him to come in, so they can cause physical harm to him, such as putting him behind bars?
The idea he won't cooperate with their investigation, because he's not willing to travel back at his expense and inconvenience -- be forced to spend however much time being interrogated they like, and risk the possibility the "request to come in for questioning" really just being a pretense to give authorities an opportunity to arrest or cause harm to him.
He already has the ability to run away, they don't have him. They can legitimately say he won't come in, because it is inconvenient, or whatever, but they can't legitimately say he won't cooperate by answering questions and providing information, when he has offered to, and they are the ones that refused to work with him to get information they need.
It is not rational for Assuange to come back if he doesn't have to -- he has no way of knowing if they really just want to interview and ask some questions, or if "wanting to question" is just a pretense for arresting him.
So he can offer other ways of cooperating with the investigation, such as video conference.
The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents. P3P user agents will allow users to be informed of site practices (in both machine- and human-readable formats) and to automate decision-making based on these practices when appropriate. Thus users need not read the privacy policies at every site they visit.
Linux and Mac are different, their authors could claim them more secure due to administrative controls being more tightly locked down by default, and fewer privileged system services running by default, that can be accessed by untrusted applications, smaller attack surface.
Microsoft could claim Windows is 'more secure' because there are more users, therefore more vulnerabilities discovered.
Linux distro makers could claim Linux is more secure, because it is open source, and more people are looking at the source code, to report unpatched vulnerabilities to provide patches long before they can be exploited
User interfaces that make it easier for admins to recognize the risk when a program requests privilege elevation.
And Linux, and Mac. They are all just as insecure with a bad user behind the keyboard.
That is an outlandish claim you have given with no evidence.
You can fairly say a bad user behind a keyboard is a risk, but not that architecturally completely different OSes are exactly equal in measure of security with a bad user behind the keyboard.
What you are suggesting is equivalent to saying "OS Security doesn't matter"; and "No matter what architecture and security features an OS has, it is equally as insecure as Windows."
That is not the simplest explanation of the situation, and there is a snowball's chance in hell of that being true, so I don't buy your baseless argument of security equivalence.
Instead, for some reason it seems you are sympathetic or otherwise cognitively biased towards Windows.
Where I have shown evidence of Windows inferior security, you have shown none to back up your proposed view of the situation.
Windows has these problems because it is popular, when it is Mac, or Linux that is popular, it will shift.
I am waiting for the evidence from you that the sole reason Windows has these problems is popularity.
You have at least admitted as much that a large number of Windows installations have system compromises, unpatched remote exploitable vulnerabilities, and other security issues.
What you have not shown is any indication that these are caused solely by popularity, other than your mere speculation.
No, it's not unreasonable. They turned down doing an interview by video camera, because if the questioning should warrant an arrest, there would no way to arrest him over video conferencing. This is entirely reasonable.
In civilized societies there is a right against self-incrimination, and a right not to answer any questions that could lead to self incrimination.
If they want to question him, a video conference should be fine.
It is sufficient to question him, which he has no obligation to assist with anyways
If they want to arrest him, they should get a warrant.
They are independent actions. questioning someone is not related to arrest.
Julian Assange was on Swedish ground and had consented to be governed by Swedish law during his stay.
Yes. During his stay. Once his stay is over, however, and he is out of the country, he is no longer subject to Swedish law, including requirements to report for questioning.
Accusing someone of a crime is different from seeking to question someone about a subject they might know something about
This seems to be blatant character assassination and should be beneath an international political body.
No it's not beneath an international political body. It's not even beneath the UN.
For some international political bodies you can even delete the word character from the sentence above,
and it will still be something the political body partakes in.
Thankfully, at least officially, most international political bodies are a bit more civilized, and only kill people by sentencing them to hanging,
providing the person was accused of war crimes.
So far Julian Assange is not at much risk of being accused of war crimes, as far as we know, however.
Which treaty, exactly, says that U.S. law applies worldwide?
Aiding and abetting a criminal in another state (or through mail or interstate commerce) can be a crime, even if the person conducting the crime was not present in the country where the crime occured.
In this case, Assange can be alleged to have aided and abetted, and conspired with various people to leak documents, based on the information published about Wikileaks itself.
Each Contracting Party agrees, under the conditions and circumstances established by this Treaty, reciprocally to deliver up persons found in its territory who have been charged with or convicted of any of the offences mentioned in Article II of this Treaty committed within the territory of the other Contracting Party, or outside that territory under the conditions specified in Article IV of this Treaty.
....
18. Receiving any property, money or valuable securities knowing the same to have been unlawfully obtained. ...
(3) Extradition shall also be granted for any offence against a federal law of the United States of America of which one of the above-mentioned offences is a substantial element, even if transporting or transportation or the use of the mails or of interstate facilities is also an element of the specific offence.
(4) Extradition shall also be granted for aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring the commission of, being an accessory before or after the fact to, or attempting or conspiring to commit, any of the offences mentioned in the preceding paragraphs of this Article.
Article IV
When the offence for which extradition has been requested has been committed outside the territory of the requesting State -
(a) if the United States of America is the requested State - the executive authority of the United States of America; or
(b) if Australia is the requested State - the Attorney-General of Australia,
shall have the power to grant the extradition if the laws of the requested State provide for jurisdiction over such an offence committed in similar circumstances.
And he should go to jail because... ?because you'd like him to, right?
Personally, I would see Assange banished to Siberia. He is a threat to the future rights and protections of real whistleblowers.
He is a threat to the free flow of information on the Internet. He is a threat to the continued existence of the internet as a place relatively free from government censorship and entanglements.
Over the next 10 years there is going to be a major crackdown and massive new regulation on the internet and ISPs.
And Assange will be the primary person we have to thank for that.
Assange is taking government on the road to destroy the internet, because now they see it as a threat due to him and people like him, world governance will become mandatory.
But that is aside from the reason Assange should go to jail.
Whether I like him or not is irrelevent, his latest actions are a greater danger to society than any benefit, and are sufficient to change him from an innocent bystander into an enemy spy. Governments reserve the right to put people in jail under such circumstances; just ask some Guantanamo bay detainees, and POWs from any war.
He deserves rebuke by the community because he has brought Wikileaks away from being a real whistleblower reporting on illegal and unconscionable acts, and towards an organization that just publishes the latest illegally leaked gossip of the day and finds things merely designed to embarras individual officials and diplomats.
The moment a leaker starts leaking and spreading materials only for political interest, to satisfy a personal grudge, without a justifiable beneficial purpose, the leaker becomes just a common criminal.
It seems like Assange is on the road towards
getting himself a terrorist classification.
The reaction can be massive.
I may be missing something here but how can Microsoft be liable for damages from violating the patent if it is shown that the patent is not valid?
RIM vs. NTP. The patents were eventually declared invalid by the patent office as not meeting the criteria for patentability.
However, NTP was allowed to proceed with their case, and the argument that the patents were invalid, therefore RIM was innocent of infringement was rejected
RIM ultimately paid $600 million in settlements for patents that were known to be invalid.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a roentgenium market yet? For the savvy investor looking to diversify from gold.
I think we're already awash in options for the savvy investor looking to diversify from gold, there are of course TIPS, agriculture.. and OIL.
Which are, well, less risky and more likely to be profitable.
Unless of course Roentgenium somehow becomes 'the next investing fad'
If it can be found so reliably in Gold, however, its price could become closely tied to a particular multiple of the price of gold.
given the fact that an appellate decision upholding the trial court award would be -- because of its precedential weight -- vastly more damaging to Google's operations than the trial court decision itself, Google has no rational reason to appeal the decision.
Google already sunk a lot of money in the case, which they should want to recover from the plaintiff's efforts at harassing Google, and a precedential decision in Google's favor could be valuable to them
There is also the whole matter of the principal of the thing.
And discouraging copycats from suing Google over streetview privacy related to photographing their yard from the street.
Maybe it will be free forever? Maybe it will stop all malicious attacks?
Maybe pings will fly.
When Google appeals this case. If they should choose to do so
In the American system, a trial court decision has very little precedential weight
It could have more precedential weight, once Google appeals this case to a higher court.
Who paid the legal fees?
The Plaintiff, Google, and the American Taxpayer.
The last of the 3 paid by far the most.
I hope they enjoy their $1. If I were in charge at Google, I would go in person to deliver then an enormous $1 cheque.
Why a cheque? That would give them something to talk about.
I would rather hand them a sack of 100 pennies :)
Hm... title for a new Youtube video...
Don't track me, bro!
The Feds should allow us to sign up for a few more lists:
I just want the...
Canadian pharmacies looking to sell sudafed?
I seem to recall a news report about modifications being made by the manufacturer to Sudafed in order to make it useless to meth labs, so I'm not so sure that Canadian sudafed is a product those covert lab operators would be interested in.
However, yeah, I am sure there would be some international companies that want to profit by selling chemical products to people with such labs
So Google may definitely want to track features of their customers that suggest that, using their bayesian networks or whatever they have for user classification for ad interest
But Google's probably not able to accurately track the feature has_a_meth_lab at this time; instead Google can track things like searched_for_and_visited_sites_related_to_meth_labs and bought_possibly_meth_lab_related_merchandise_in_the_past_via_Google_checkout and gmail_account_has_nonspam_messages_related_to_meth_labs
do you think Google cares if you're running a meth lab out of your basement?
Only if knowing this gives them information about more profitable ads to display.
I'm not sure what kind of advertisers would be interested in targetting ads for that audience, but I imagine there are certain products that particular audience would have a high demand for.
Him coming back doesn't give them a pretense
You misunderstood. They could already want to arrest him, even without any questioning; they could have already made that decision.
And demanding him to come back to the country for "questioning" could be a pretense, because they really have no strong desire to question him, just to arrest him.
That would justify refusing the video conference, because it wouldn't meet their goal of getting him in stripes.
When he decides it's video conference or nothing, they claim he is not cooperating as a PR move to try to shame him.
That's for his alleged crime committed in Sweden against Swedish laws, and only has a witness
You really think that his alleged crime is completely unrelated to what he has exposed on Wikileaks?
I am willing to suggest the real reason Assuange is wanted for that crime is he has angered the powers that be.
Even if what Wikileaks itself did and what Assuange did isn't against any written laws, does not mean he will not be brought to justice on another basis.
What he winds up getting charged with is ultimately just a formality
The police would (possibly) want to give away their hand, giving him a chance to run, while not knowing exactly where, or even which country, Assange is located in, why again?
In other words, they are possibly being deceitful / lying, and don't really want his cooperation in answering questions, they just need an excuse to convince him to come in, so they can cause physical harm to him, such as putting him behind bars?
The idea he won't cooperate with their investigation, because he's not willing to travel back at his expense and inconvenience -- be forced to spend however much time being interrogated they like, and risk the possibility the "request to come in for questioning" really just being a pretense to give authorities an opportunity to arrest or cause harm to him.
He already has the ability to run away, they don't have him. They can legitimately say he won't come in, because it is inconvenient, or whatever, but they can't legitimately say he won't cooperate by answering questions and providing information, when he has offered to, and they are the ones that refused to work with him to get information they need.
It is not rational for Assuange to come back if he doesn't have to -- he has no way of knowing if they really just want to interview and ask some questions, or if "wanting to question" is just a pretense for arresting him.
So he can offer other ways of cooperating with the investigation, such as video conference.
P3P
Linux and Mac are different, their authors could claim them more secure due to administrative controls being more tightly locked down by default, and fewer privileged system services running by default, that can be accessed by untrusted applications, smaller attack surface.
Microsoft could claim Windows is 'more secure' because there are more users, therefore more vulnerabilities discovered.
Linux distro makers could claim Linux is more secure, because it is open source, and more people are looking at the source code, to report unpatched vulnerabilities to provide patches long before they can be exploited
User interfaces that make it easier for admins to recognize the risk when a program requests privilege elevation.
And Linux, and Mac. They are all just as insecure with a bad user behind the keyboard.
That is an outlandish claim you have given with no evidence. You can fairly say a bad user behind a keyboard is a risk, but not that architecturally completely different OSes are exactly equal in measure of security with a bad user behind the keyboard.
What you are suggesting is equivalent to saying "OS Security doesn't matter"; and "No matter what architecture and security features an OS has, it is equally as insecure as Windows."
That is not the simplest explanation of the situation, and there is a snowball's chance in hell of that being true, so I don't buy your baseless argument of security equivalence.
Instead, for some reason it seems you are sympathetic or otherwise cognitively biased towards Windows.
Where I have shown evidence of Windows inferior security, you have shown none to back up your proposed view of the situation.
Windows has these problems because it is popular, when it is Mac, or Linux that is popular, it will shift.
I am waiting for the evidence from you that the sole reason Windows has these problems is popularity.
You have at least admitted as much that a large number of Windows installations have system compromises, unpatched remote exploitable vulnerabilities, and other security issues.
What you have not shown is any indication that these are caused solely by popularity, other than your mere speculation.
Don't you think it's possible that what happened with Wikileaks gave him delusions of self-grandeur?
People apply double standards all the time. He could easily have rationalized away his own issues.
The charges could be legit.
Sometimes people do stupid things.
Sometimes even smart people do stupid things.
Hell... look at Obama....
Leader of the free world.... Beer summit? Need I say more?
No, it's not unreasonable. They turned down doing an interview by video camera, because if the questioning should warrant an arrest, there would no way to arrest him over video conferencing. This is entirely reasonable.
In civilized societies there is a right against self-incrimination, and a right not to answer any questions that could lead to self incrimination.
If they want to question him, a video conference should be fine. It is sufficient to question him, which he has no obligation to assist with anyways
If they want to arrest him, they should get a warrant. They are independent actions. questioning someone is not related to arrest.
Julian Assange was on Swedish ground and had consented to be governed by Swedish law during his stay.
Yes. During his stay. Once his stay is over, however, and he is out of the country, he is no longer subject to Swedish law, including requirements to report for questioning.
Accusing someone of a crime is different from seeking to question someone about a subject they might know something about
This seems to be blatant character assassination and should be beneath an international political body.
No it's not beneath an international political body. It's not even beneath the UN.
For some international political bodies you can even delete the word character from the sentence above, and it will still be something the political body partakes in.
Thankfully, at least officially, most international political bodies are a bit more civilized, and only kill people by sentencing them to hanging, providing the person was accused of war crimes.
So far Julian Assange is not at much risk of being accused of war crimes, as far as we know, however.
Unless the Australian courts claim jurisdiction over alleged crimes in Iceland and the European Union...
It won't matter if he's in the EU. It looks like a European Arrest Warrant is going out for him.
Julian is a wanted man.
Mozilla provides only one way for plug-ins to be installed by third parties, and that's the global plug-in folder.
Yes, and there's nothing forcing or encouraging third parties to just drop files there without the third party implementing a proper installer.
Which treaty, exactly, says that U.S. law applies worldwide?
Aiding and abetting a criminal in another state (or through mail or interstate commerce) can be a crime, even if the person conducting the crime was not present in the country where the crime occured. In this case, Assange can be alleged to have aided and abetted, and conspired with various people to leak documents, based on the information published about Wikileaks itself.
Australian Treaty Series 1976 No 10
:
And he should go to jail because... ? because you'd like him to, right?
Personally, I would see Assange banished to Siberia. He is a threat to the future rights and protections of real whistleblowers. He is a threat to the free flow of information on the Internet. He is a threat to the continued existence of the internet as a place relatively free from government censorship and entanglements.
Over the next 10 years there is going to be a major crackdown and massive new regulation on the internet and ISPs. And Assange will be the primary person we have to thank for that. Assange is taking government on the road to destroy the internet, because now they see it as a threat due to him and people like him, world governance will become mandatory.
But that is aside from the reason Assange should go to jail.
Whether I like him or not is irrelevent, his latest actions are a greater danger to society than any benefit, and are sufficient to change him from an innocent bystander into an enemy spy. Governments reserve the right to put people in jail under such circumstances; just ask some Guantanamo bay detainees, and POWs from any war.
He deserves rebuke by the community because he has brought Wikileaks away from being a real whistleblower reporting on illegal and unconscionable acts, and towards an organization that just publishes the latest illegally leaked gossip of the day and finds things merely designed to embarras individual officials and diplomats.
The moment a leaker starts leaking and spreading materials only for political interest, to satisfy a personal grudge, without a justifiable beneficial purpose, the leaker becomes just a common criminal.
It seems like Assange is on the road towards getting himself a terrorist classification. The reaction can be massive.
So what we just need to do is put more into infrastructure, remove all copper and replace with fiber optic..Voila no more copper thefts!
That will raise fiber prices, inspiring fiber theft.
What we need is a bunch of hidden cameras watching key infrastructure at crucial points.
Harsh punishment for even attempting to remove installed wiring / conduit in attempt to steal metal.
And traps / "bait", in the form of putting some wiring in very visible places that _looks_ like easy pickings, but is heavily guarded
I may be missing something here but how can Microsoft be liable for damages from violating the patent if it is shown that the patent is not valid?
RIM vs. NTP. The patents were eventually declared invalid by the patent office as not meeting the criteria for patentability.
However, NTP was allowed to proceed with their case, and the argument that the patents were invalid, therefore RIM was innocent of infringement was rejected
RIM ultimately paid $600 million in settlements for patents that were known to be invalid.